June 10, 2026 Advocacy Update

In May, we celebrated a federal judge’s ruling in our favor in our lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for its unlawful termination of grants in April 2025. We are monitoring communications from the NEH regarding the payment of those grants, and we encourage all awardees to keep a sharp eye on their email inboxes.
 
Meanwhile, attacks on the federal and state levels on humanistic knowledge continue. In Florida, the state legislature approved a change in state law that gives the power of amendment of general education requirements to the State Board of Education and the State University System Board of Governors. Previously, those bodies only had the ability to approve or reject requirements; now political appointees will have the ability to impose their own thinking on academic matters. The state has already blocked introductory sociology courses from counting toward general education, a highly unusual move to marginalize an entire field of study. Texas, Indiana, Georgia, and other states are requiring faculty to post syllabuses for courses, which the states describe as helping students choose courses and many faculty view as enabling hostile oversight and an intrusion on academic freedom. ACLS supports the efforts of the new Alliance for Higher Education and PEN America in tracking and coordinating responses to these tactics.
 
On May 29, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a 400-page proposal that represents a major overhaul of the federal government’s process for awarding research funding. If the new rules are adopted, international scientific collaboration will be frozen and grant funds will not be permitted to pay for journal publication, which will hit the sciences especially hard. All applicants will have to pass a political litmus test: projects must “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.” Professional peer review will become strictly advisory. Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities have long been subject to the final approval of the NEH Chair, a political appointee. But for the scientific agencies, the new rules give political appointees the final say on all awards. And in a change for the NEH as well as for the scientific agencies, the new rules give political appointees (including the NEH Chair) permission to terminate any grant for any reason.
 
While this proposal presents itself as part of an attempt to eliminate waste and fraud (echoing the DOGE employees who terminated the NEH grants last year), we consider it a direct attack on the production and circulation of knowledge. We have issued a statement protesting the new rules and are adding our comments to the public record. We encourage readers of this message to do the same (comments are open until July 13), as well as to voice their support on the Stand Up for Science website.
 
In other news, the leaders of Vanderbilt University and Washington University established a commission on humanistic scholarship chaired by NYU philosopher Paul Boghossian, who gathered three NYU colleagues and six scholars from five other institutions to write a “report” on the topic. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s coverage garnered the document a good deal of attention – and much debate – on social media this past weekend. 
 
I’m glad that the authors articulate the value and irreplaceability of the humanities and social sciences and that they speak up against pressure from right-wing censors. They also acknowledge the familiarity of their arguments, which recall the reactions by many analytic philosophers to the work of Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida in the 1980s and 1990s, and the slender evidentiary basis for their “provisional” conclusions.
 
But I regret, as I noted in a Chronicle of Higher Education Letter to the Editor, that the authors appear not to have consulted the societies whose fields they criticize most sharply. Together with their anecdotal approach, this omission shows that the document should be understood not as a “report” but as a philosophical essay.
 
We’ve seen this pattern of culture-war exchanges since the 1990s. One group of scholars criticizes another; the criticized group expresses outrage; no attempt is made to figure out how to establish sustained conversation. No one wins except those who exploit our internal disagreements – the people who have no value for liberal education or humanistic scholarship.  
 
What would have this document looked like if it were a dialogue? The group writes: “The academic study of social movements is not in service to any particular social movement…Put most broadly, the goal [to which the scholarly enterprise has been subordinated] might be characterized as turning the humanities into vehicles for social justice, or the elimination of pernicious social hierarchies.” Most scholars working in women’s studies, queer studies, Black history, disability studies, and other fields that have been silenced and belittled, in some cases for generations, would heartily disagree. The fight for the scholarly legitimacy of these areas cannot be meaningfully separated from the fight for rights and equality. We have seen that one of the most effective ways to control academic inquiry is to marginalize new questions as ‘political’ and therefore illegitimate. As noted in the University of Washington’s overview for their Disability Studies Program, “Disability is a fact of the human experience, not the exception.”
 
The group continues its critique: “When the American Sociological Association announced that its annual meeting would be devoted to ‘Intersectional Solidarity: Building Communities of Hope, Justice and Joy,’ the organizers clarified that “the 2024 theme emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort not only to understand structural inequalities but to intervene in socio-political struggles.” Scholars of American education might reply that the nation has a long history of treating education as preparation for a life of action advancing liberation for all. The earliest colleges imbued all their students, not just future ministers, in Christian beliefs and commitments. The mission statements of HBCUs like Spelman College embrace ‘commitment to positive social change.’” 
 
I’m not persuaded that Americans have lost trust in higher education because of scholar-activism or relativistic thinking. Public investment in the system has shrunk massively since the 1980s; tuition is prohibitively expensive; at research universities in particular, other institutional priorities crowd out teaching and learning. Public discourse is filled with loud voices dismissing the value of learning that is not directly tied to workforce preparation, and of humanistic inquiry more generally.
 
This is the fight we are advancing through our work to ensure deeper and more meaningful relations among scholars and members of the public, through public scholarship, accessible writing, and alliances like DASSH. Strengthening the infrastructure for humanistic inquiry, expanding scholars’ reach, and improving teaching and research is collective work, done in public view, accountable, evidence-based, and action-oriented. 
 
This October, we will hold a public event featuring President Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton University speaking about his recent book on academic freedom. We are also advancing efforts that we believe can meet the needs of our time with the Doctoral Futures initiative, which will soon provide recommendations for tested solutions on how to better reward public engagement in the academy, expand the audience of scholarly work, and center undergraduate teaching in doctoral training. We advocate for these activities among our Research University Consortium, fellowship programs like the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, and through our newsletter, Building Blocks for a New Academy.
 
Finally: we made a special appeal to members of our community to support the costs of our NEH litigation. We are enormously grateful to those who were able to give, and we thank you. Every gift helps.

Joy