Advocacy in Action: April 9, 2025

Over the past two weeks, the national landscape for humanistic knowledge has been savaged by slashes in federal support to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Department of Education. The Smithsonian, a consortium of 21 of the world’s greatest institutions of history, art, and science, was attacked by the president in an Executive Order that called telling the historical truth “divisive” and “corrosive.”  

The administration’s assault on the wealthiest and most prestigious American institutions of higher education continued with Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Harvard, Brown, and Penn among those receiving massive cuts or threats of cuts to federal funding. While the cuts are mainly aimed at six and seven-figure grants made by the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation, they stand to damage humanistic research and teaching as well, as institutions redirect budgets to meet pressing needs in labs and science departments, where graduate students are typically supported by external grants.

Terrifying arrests of students on the grounds of their political views have led many students and faculty working here who are not American citizens, including green card holders, to consider leaving the country permanently and in the short term, to limit their travel and their speech to protect themselves and their families. Faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in Middle Eastern studies, race and ethnicity studies, and gender studies, are absorbing multiple shocks from the administration, from its banning of “gender ideology” to its successful intrusion into faculty governance of the Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian studies department at Columbia. 

The administration has expertise of all kinds in its sights. But its attacks hit us as humanistic scholars especially hard. We study history, culture, politics, and identity; museums and libraries are crucially important elements of our intellectual lives. For decades, we have worked to expand the material we study and to transform our assumptions and methods, seeking to encompass the human experiences and endeavors that old scholarly models ignored or obscured. To see this progress interrupted and misrepresented is cause for intense emotion.

As I wrote in an op-ed in the Chronicle last Friday, it is time to stand up together. 

Many ACLS member societies and affiliated organizations are boldly speaking out with public statements, teach-ins, webinars, and other activities. We encourage all readers to consult their societies’ websites to learn what is happening and how you can contribute. We are working with PEN America and our member societies to boost the flow of information around threats to academic freedom at the federal and state levels.

At ACLS, our responses fall in three categories: direct advocacy, reviewing and in some cases reshaping current and near-future commitments, and long-term reform.

Direct advocacy, such as op-eds and statements, tells an alternative story to the smears peddled by the administration, circulates ideas, and helps express our collective voice. We are adding a staff member to our two-member Communications department who will help us reach our goals: increasing our reach to a larger community inside and outside academia and strengthening the voices of our member societies and institutions. Believing the collaborative approach is best, ACLS issued a statement protesting the cuts at the NEH together with Phi Beta Kappa and the Council for Graduate Schools. We are reaching out to colleagues in the sciences and the law. We’re working with the National Humanities Alliance, on whose board I sit, to explore all options that might restore funds to the scholars and state humanities councils affected by the NEH cuts.

For the middle term, we are taking a close look at our regular, planned activity for the coming year and asking ourselves and our constituents if and how we can best turn it to meet present needs. Sometimes, say with programs like the Leading Edge Fellowship or the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies, the answer is “forge on,” with special care for the people suffering the most from the stress we can feel throughout the system. Other programs will benefit from adjustments that keep them relevant in this crisis, such as the Leadership Institute for a New Academy. Convenings held for member groups such as the Conference of Executive Officers and the Research University Consortium, and the regional events we’ve begun to plan for the coming academic year, will be designed with a view to helping people connect, learn, and take action. At our Annual Meeting in a few weeks, among other timely offerings, attorney Dorothy Deng will speak to the executive directors of our member societies about responding to the DEI bans.

Long term, I’m convinced that we urgently need to build alliances outside academia so that our fields have a greater base of support. This means greater attention to attracting and retaining undergraduate students, creating meaningful relationships with interested people in public libraries, high schools, and other local contexts, and making the creation and circulation of knowledge more inclusive and dynamic on all fronts. With support from the NEH in 2022 we were able to spotlight some of the best of these community-centered collaborations through our Sustaining Public Engagement Grants, which helped reinvigorate public humanities programs disrupted by the pandemic. At the most research-intensive and resource-rich institutions, there are few incentives and many barriers to efforts of this kind, but they are key to solving the problem I see in these terms: we have become, many of us, strangers to the people we seek to serve. I’ve hired Stacy Hartman, who has consulted for ACLS for over two years, as a program officer to support the middle-term and long-term work. Stacy will also help me and our colleagues at the MLA, AHA, and SBL revise our plans for what was to be a historic collaborative agreement with the NEH on graduate education in the humanities. We are confident the project will continue, but it needs to take a new form.

In these times of trouble, I am constantly buoyed by others. I want to thank my ACLS colleagues and my colleagues in the societies, national organizations, universities, colleges, and scholarly presses. We’re in this together, and we will continue to keep this community informed. Please send questions or matters of concern to [email protected].

Joy