Speaking Out for All Studies: November 12, 2025 Advocacy Update

Together with the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, ACLS awaits the outcome of the lawsuit we filed in May to redress the damage done to the National Endowment of the Humanities. The government shutdown has put a pause on the discovery ordered by the judge in the Southern District Court of New York.

While we wait for that process to resume, we are taking stock of the chilling of the research and teaching across the arts and sciences wreaked in 2025 by federal funding cuts and the executive orders targeting academic freedom, and by similar efforts on the state level in recent years, and we continue to seek additional sources of funding. Applications to our fellowship and grant programs have reached a new high, and we are committed to increasing our support for outstanding scholars.

ACLS promotes inquiry into all topics across the many fields and interdisciplinary areas represented by our member societies. The pursuit of knowledge is not partisan, and we resist all efforts to make it so. But as some areas of study have come under concerted attack, it’s important to restate our steadfast support for them and for the scholars who have dedicated their professional lives to their advancement.

The studies of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, disability, religion, and regions like the Middle East—in eponymous departments, programs, and centers, and in individual scholarly projects across fields like history, literary studies, sociology, anthropology and more—are being singled out as intrinsically “woke” or as expressions of a common misinterpretation of “DEI,” and subjected to legislative censorship and defunding. This is the latest move in the long history of attempts to silence study that advances the scholarly quest to understand the full human experience in every part of our planet.

Scholarship is one of the most profound acts of love for humanity that I know. It is a demanding, time-consuming expression of attention to human beings in all their individual and collective diversity, past and present. Expanding the scope of humanistic inquiry to include topics, people, practices, regions, languages, and ideas that scholars in the past have ignored or set aside as unworthy of attention is a key element of our maturation as a profession and as a society that believes in the dignity of all people.

Those drawing a divisive line between these fields and “traditional” ones may have forgotten that, historically speaking, a nation’s expansion of areas of study and the welcoming of all kinds of people to the labor of study go hand in hand with its extension of civil rights and economic well-being to ever-larger circles of people. Take gender and sexuality studies, a leading example of a field under attack. To study gender and sexuality today is to attend to and express care for all people: women, men, queer people, trans people, and other groups representing our evolving understanding of human identity. All the places fostering this study, including academic societies, are havens for people for whom gender or sexual identity are life-defining and sometimes life-or-death matters. Gender and sexuality studies help produce research that provides better public health, workplace protections, and a deeper understanding of social structures and the arts. The states that censor and condemn academic study in these areas are places where rates of gender violence are high and where democracy erodes the fastest.

The White House’s recent Compact on Excellence in Higher Education offers universities access to federal funding on the condition that they commit to defining and interpreting the words “male,” “female,” “masculine,” and “feminine” according to reproductive function and biological processes. This policing of gender terms flies in the face of the many different ways that people actually define gender in cultures as varied as that of Indigenous America, south Asia, and upstate New York. It intrudes on academic freedom, plain and simple. Together with new state laws regulating academic speech, it is striking fear into many scholars, since gender and sexuality are ubiquitous topics across fields.

To evade charges of infringing on academic freedom or civil rights, think tanks and officials are using a new tactic: distorting socioeconomic data to cast undergraduate majors in humanistic fields as disproportionately unemployed and toxically unemployable. The departments’ alleged failure to graduate productive workers subjects them to appropriate state regulation. This is the argument Hungarian politicians used in 2018 to justify the closure of gender studies programs across that country.

As the National Humanities Alliance and other sources have shown, the unemployability story is false: humanities graduates do well by measures of salary, happiness, and social contribution.

But it’s a difficult story to shake. In a 2023 essay, “Reversing the Woke Takeover of Higher Education,” the America First Policy Institute (whose founding chair is the current Secretary of Education) argues for tighter government control over colleges and universities. The author acknowledges that states may not mandate or ban specific books in a Sociology 101 syllabus or censure an anthropologist for publishing research on structural racism (his examples). Instead, he argues that academic administrators should question how many sociologists their college should employ or “whether to make expansion of Gender Studies programs a priority” on the grounds that they must meet the institutional goals set by their governing boards – which are increasingly driven by post-graduation job placement rates and salaries.   

Humanistic scholarship contributes to the making of a culture that welcomes all people into history, into the life of the mind, and into the world’s community. All scholars are at risk when some of us are targeted.

ACLS proudly continues to support a dazzling range of scholars. We stand together with other organizations whose missions are to promote access, affordability, and student success. We ask that all of our community members and supporters do what you can to support humanistic inquiry. Support our work and those of our member societies and institutions and fellow organizations. Stay tuned for developments in our effort to expand the circle of supporters of humanistic scholarship. We invite you to share with us your story of scholarship as an act of love.

Joy