Speak Out

2. Heighten awareness of the achievements of member societies and our community of scholars to academic leadership, policy makers, media, and other influential networks

• ACLS highlighted the achievements of our communities and shared stories about fellows and grantees to illustrate the impact of their research in our newsletters. See our latest here: “How First Generation Scholars Thrive Through Community.”

3. Work with our own constituencies and other organizations to create or expand coalitions that advocate inside and outside academia on behalf of humanistic fields and the liberal arts more broadly

• ACLS continued to pursue a diverse learned society membership that represents the full range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas across the humanities and social sciences.
  
  
• We supported the scholarly publishing ecosystem by advising JSTOR on its Path to Open pilot for open access books and by participating in the University-Based Publishing Futures initiative, which stands up for the value and contributions of publishers working within the academy.
  
  
• We began tracking the efforts of peer organizations to better understand the advocacy landscape.
  
  

In October 2025, ACLS welcomed the the multilingual, interdisciplinary Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) as its 81st learned society member.

ACLS continued to lead JSTOR’s Path to Open Community Advisory Committee. In January 2026, the first 100 Path to Open titles flipped to open access, and we anticipate 900 more to come in the next three years.

In our December 2025 Advocacy Update, Social Impact Fellow Kim Akano broke down research on how nonprofits are defining advocacy for the humanities and liberal arts during this particularly challenging moment in higher education.

4. Intensify collaborative efforts with colleges and universities to strengthen research, teaching, and leadership in the humanities and social sciences

• In summer 2025, ACLS announced the launch of Doctoral Futures, an initiative connecting learned societies, colleges, and universities to assess and reimagine humanities graduate education to better prepare the next generation of knowledge producers. That fall, ACLS conducted a series of graduate education workshops with six faculty teams from Consortium schools—Brown University, Columbia University, Northwestern University, Rice University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia—to experiment with introducing changes at their universities. A new cohort of eight Consortium schools will undertake these workshops in spring 2026. Watch the Doctoral Futures space for more information on resources developed out of their and others’ learnings.