February 11, 2026 Advocacy Update

For generations, colleges and universities in the United States have made enormous contributions to ensuring a better life for increasing numbers of Americans. Raj Chetty’s research on the long-term impact of a college degree on socioeconomic status is clear proof of how education opens up opportunity and pushes back against inequality. At the same time, by welcoming scholars from around the world, our system of higher education has been a force for mutual understanding and peace – precisely the values on which ACLS was founded in 1919, as part of the UAI, an international network of humanistic scholars.

Attacks on individual institutions, fields, and faculty obscure the role of higher education in strengthening the nation and undermine the public’s confidence in its value. Three such attacks carry special weight for humanists and social scientists today: the announcement of the end of tenure in most of Oklahoma’s public colleges and universities, censorship of course materials and the closure of the women’s and gender studies program at Texas A&M University, and the strengthening of barriers to the free exchange of people and knowledge across US borders.

On February 5, the governor of Oklahoma, J. Kevin Stitt, signed an executive order phasing out tenure in 19 of the state’s colleges and ordering post-tenure review at its two R-1 institutions, the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University.

In 2021, I wrote a public letter to the senators and governor of Iowa urging them to support tenure in the face of the House of Representatives’ vote to ban it. Today, in response to the situation in Oklahoma, I repeat that knowledge is crucial to an educated citizenry, and it needs strong defenses. Removing tenure undermines research and teaching and makes it difficult for institutions to recruit the best faculty and by extension, the best students.

We decry what is happening in Oklahoma because it deepens cleavages between faculty inside and outside R-1 institutions and it perpetuates the misconception that faculty outside R-1s are not researchers. The awardees of the Mellon/ACLS Community College Fellowship program (2019 to 2022) are living proof that faculty in every type of institution do outstanding research and deserve support for it. They shared some of the challenges and rewards as researchers at two-year colleges in our latest publication, The Promise of the Humanities at Community Colleges. In an era where students are encouraged to spy on faculty, in some cases gaining mass media attention for it, it is precisely those faculty who focus on teaching who most need the protection of tenure.

In addition to conditions for faculty and scholars to conduct research, we must also speak out on what can be taught and who can teach and contribute to vital knowledge production.

Under the new policy, no Texas A&M course “may advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” The women’s and gender studies program was determined to be too difficult to bring into compliance. ACLS stands with PEN America and others speaking out for the legitimacy of these fields and against the censorship of faculty like Melissa McCoul, a lecturer without tenure who was fired after a student reported her for discussing issues related to sexuality in a children’s literature course.

The $100,000 fee for H1-B visas and the ever-stricter limits on visas for talented faculty and researchers are also threatening the vitality of humanistic inquiry. The creation of this unnecessary financial strain is especially harmful to smaller and state-funded schools already struggling for resources in directly limiting their research capacity and ability to compete in the academic landscape. We stand with the American Council on Education (ACE) and others taking action against this policy and upholding the principle that international scholarly exchange is a crucial tool in mutual understanding and peace.

“We can’t boil the ocean,” as one of my colleagues likes to say, but we are assertively expanding our community of allies through our new initiative, DASSH (Defending the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities). We continue to work with our member societies and peer organizations to strengthen academic infrastructure and to secure more funding for scholars and scholarship.

If you’re interested in participating in DASSH, please email us at [email protected]. We hope we will see those of you in California at our upcoming gatherings on March 30 in San Francisco and on March 31 in Los Angeles.

Joy