ACLS Community Message for May 2025

I write in gratitude for the ACLS community at a time when we take strength from collective action based on the values and beliefs that bind us: the central importance of the humanities and social sciences, academic freedom, a diverse global professoriate, the freedom to participate in political debate and to travel across borders without fear of reprisal.

Our collective strength is crucial as we continue the fight to defend these values. It’s equally necessary for the long haul: the work of growth and transformation that we need to make the humanities and social sciences the core of what we often call at ACLS by the shorthand of a “new academy” – colleges and universities that reward ingenuity, quality, and brilliance in teaching and scholarship; that are accessible, diverse, and welcoming; that encourage intellectual relationships across siloes and campus walls; that prioritize free inquiry and scholarly habits of attention.

Our community gave us the confidence to develop over the past year our new strategic framework for 2025-2030, Bold Action for Strength and Growth, with four objectives: Speak Out, Promote, Transform, and – my favorite – Be Ready for Anything.

We are committed to speaking out with the goal of re-centering humanistic knowledge in academia and in society at large as a force for mutual understanding, the enrichment of individual lives, democratic participation, and better stewardship of our planet. We will continue to promote scholars and the societies to which scholars belong, and we will redouble our efforts to support scholarship across all fields by sustaining and growing our grant and fellowship competitions. We will support activity that transforms academic culture and policy with the goal of rebuilding trust in our expertise, across campus and outside campus.

We scholars have become, many of us, strangers to the people we seek to serve. But we can close the gap if we turn our energy to translating our scholarship to a broader audience and to making ourselves key partners in the work of civic dialogue that this country urgently needs. The ACLS community has the experts we need: political scientists, scholars of rhetoric, communication, language, and poetics, anthropologists, sociologists, and more. We are well positioned to help put this talent to work in building relationships outside our familiar communities.

I’m not talking about trying to convince the hard skeptics, the people who want to turn higher education into an amalgam of workforce training sessions – at least not in the first instance. Our audience is closer to home: scientists and engineers, journalists and architects; faculty in law schools and business schools; those people who majored in the humanities and social sciences but who are nervously telling their kids that they should probably major in business or computer science because they’ll get a better job; the high school teachers and librarians and local clergy who see no obvious place to fit on a college campus.

These people understand our value. Unfortunately, academic standards at R1 and R2 institutions don’t consistently recognize and reward the work of connecting and working with them. I hear too often from scholars at all career stages about the “secret CV” – the work on community outreach, born-digital scholarship, translations, podcasts, and other labor that scholars are afraid to share with colleagues lest they appear unserious or unscholarly. Even developing curricula with faculty in schools of medicine and law to support programs such as medical humanities and justice studies doesn’t “count” for much, leaving energetic and idea-filled faculty stymied in their efforts to attract the next generation of undergraduates.

We believe that working with learned societies, members of our Consortium and Associate institutions, and national groups like the Council for Graduate Schools, we can change our culture and policy so that this work is rewarded at all kinds of institutions. This evolution is essential to rebuilding public trust in academic institutions. Talk to faculty at community colleges and regional comprehensive universities, and you’ll learn more about the rewards of appearing on local radio shows, speaking each year at local high schools, writing textbooks, and other ways to bring scholarship to larger audiences.   

I want to end by sharing a poem I read at our Annual Meeting in Cambridge last month, an excerpt from Asphodel: That Greeny Flower, by William Carlos Williams:

                       It is difficult
to get the news from poems
           yet men die miserably every day
                       for lack
of what is found there.

The work scholars do is an act of love for humanity in the care it lavishes on our human endeavors and capacities, the small and great marks we leave on the world. Scholarship is also an act of love in its insistence on drawing our attention to the things that the news lacks. If we want to address authoritarianism and hate, we need humanistic habits of love and attention. We need the infrastructure that supports those habits. We need to speak out, to promote, to transform, and to be ready for anything.

We at ACLS look forward to the work, and we are grateful for your community.

Joy