January 14, 2026 Advocacy Update
As the new year begins, ACLS continues to speak out for the humanities and the social sciences, for academic freedom, for the value of our fields, and the importance of investing in them.
The censorship of Plato at Texas A&M and the new federal rules tying education to earnings are signs that last year’s threats to academic freedom and to access to liberal education are growing. To expand and strengthen our community, ACLS is rolling out a new initiative this winter: Defending the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, or DASSH. We are assembling a group of volunteers to work with Lizabeth Cohen, Howard Mumford Jones Research Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History, a past Dean of the Radcliffe Institute, and a 1993 ACLS Fellow.
The idea for DASSH emerged through our realization that advocates for humanistic knowledge (and for the liberal arts) are most frequently academics talking to academics. Scholars certainly need to talk with one another: we need to share histories of struggle and narratives of change to keep up morale and momentum. But building alliances with people adjacent to and outside the academy is crucially important to long-term support for humanistic knowledge. We aim to better inform a larger group not only about the challenges around us, but about the work scholars are doing to meet them.
In the coming months, we will hold a series of online and in-person DASSH events, expanding the circle of supporters. Since ACLS is not a school, we don’t have alumni in the typical sense, but we have a brilliant and diverse community of fellows, grantees, reviewers, institutional leaders, member societies, past and present board members, and supporters inside and outside academia. Many have asked us how they can help. We intend to mobilize the community we have today, inviting you to invite others to join us in the work of improving public understanding of and investment in humanistic knowledge.
We hope to see you in California for DASSH’s inaugural events, which we’ll hold there in March. Join us at San Francisco State University on March 30 (4-6 PM) and UCLA on March 31 (4-6pm). Stay tuned to the ACLS monthly newsletter for updates on other events.
In the meantime, our relationships with college and university leaders remain a key point of focus for ACLS, so that we stay attuned to the pressures facing presidents today and help energize them to support our fields. Last month, co-organizers Blair Kelley, the president of the National Humanities Center, Joanna Brooks, past NHC visiting scholar-in-residence and associate vice president of faculty advancement and student success at San Diego State University, and I convened 22 present and past university presidents/chancellors and leading voices for humanistic knowledge at the Center in Durham, North Carolina. This institutionally diverse, two-day convening, which included leaders from Duke, CUNY, Howard, American, and Swarthmore, was many months in the making, and the results will inform our next steps.
In addition, this spring we will convene for the fourth time (this time, hosted by the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago) past and present funders of humanistic knowledge to share strategies of philanthropic support.
As outlined in the Strategic Framework released last spring, we will continue to move forward with creativity, energy, and purpose.
Pat Okker, past president of New College of Florida, told us last year that the work before us is to get up and tell the story, and then do it again, and then do it again. She’s right. Humanistic expertise helps strengthen individual and collective goods in countless ways. To “do the humanities and social sciences” is to learn how humans exceed constraints through creative brilliance, eloquence, and dogged persistence. Humanistic scholarship insists on the need to learn from past experience and helps us think and write more clearly, unclouded by nostalgia or myth.
The story of the value of humanistic knowledge and habits of thought is being told in many ways by many people. Our own communications staff, the National Humanities Alliance, the Center for Humanities Communication, Humanities Works, research centers and libraries, and of course the field-specific resources in text and video supplied by many member societies from anthropology and folklore to numismatics and political science (and this is just a sampling) offer accessible, dynamic accounts of humanistic work, including positive employment statistics for majors in our fields and scholarly contributions to robust, well-informed democratic participation. If you’re seeking inspiration today, look no further.
Amidst bleak headlines, we can share some good news: our litigation seeking redress for the cuts made to the National Endowment for the Humanities in April is advancing. On December 18, the federal judge on our case overruled the Trump Administration’s objections to her earlier orders to share documentation about the DOGE process for eliminating grants and NEH staff and rebuked government officials for failing to comply. (DOGE was effectively disbanded last November, having offered no public accounting of its activities.)
One final note: I’ll continue writing this feature as our work unfolds. If you don’t see it in a given month, rest assured we’re hard at work and will have more to report in the next ACLS community newsletter.
Forward into the new year!
Joy