ACLS Community Message for September 2026

Welcome to the fall, which for many in the ACLS community means the beginning of the academic year 2025-26. Along with more turbulence in higher education and around the world, I anticipate seeing more fruit of the new alliances strengthening higher education and particularly humanistic inquiry and the liberal arts. We forge on!

Among summertime developments affecting humanistic study, let me focus here on three. First, in early August, Education Secretary Linda McMahon issued an open letter echoing her 2025 call for a “compact” with American colleges and universities. To support her criticism of the politicization of humanistic inquiry, the Secretary cited the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” commissioned by the presidents of Vanderbilt and Washington University and released in June. Our statement protesting her letter was cited in a New York Times op-ed by two Penn law professors last week. We are working on a fuller response to the report; please stay tuned. 

Second: faculty, administrators, lobbyists, and advocates have been working through the summer to support international students, particularly those newly enrolled. Having torn down the long-standing rule allowing students to stay in the United States for the duration of their status, next week the Department of Homeland Security will begin to enforce a fixed four-year admission period and introduce a new extension process for students who need more time to complete their degrees. Thanks to this rule, PhD students enrolled in five-year programs will be subject to extra hardship and anxiety, and their universities will also bear more cost. The federal government has provided neither evidence to back up its claim that this rule strengthens US national security nor assurance that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services can handle the enormous additional workload that the rule creates. ACLS joined ACE in its opposition to the rule and we continue to support its advocacy efforts.

Finally: this summer, several ACLS member associations experienced intense criticism from what felt like all sides: scholars passionately committed to speaking out on behalf of Palestinians and against atrocities in Gaza; critics of the so-called politicization and “woke” takeover of academia; new PhDs asking what societies have to offer them in a crumbling academic job market. The range of public commentary across the political spectrum is a reminder of how challenging it is for associations to respond in ways that satisfy all their members.

I am concerned that with the intense attention given to conflict in our polarized moment, the value of associations risks being forgotten. Even writing to you, our ACLS community, many of whom belong to one or more societies, it feels urgently important to remind ourselves of their distinctive value and the dedication their staffs bring to their work – and if you don’t need this reminder yourself, please pass it on to someone who does.

Where individual colleges and universities face hard limits on their scope of action, academic associations have a wider scope and a stronger platform on which to organize responses to current conditions and to work toward a better future for our fields.    

Weaken our associations and our fields become easier to pick off and destroy. This is precisely the goal of the powerful enemies of knowledge who continue to cut funding, threaten institutions of higher learning, bully museums and libraries, prevent international exchange of people and ideas, ban topics, and cast the humanities and social sciences at best as luxuries or illegitimate areas of study, rather than the robust intellectual foundation for democracy, self-knowledge, and well-being that they are.

Challenges to academic freedom—the legislative gagging of scholars of gender and race, the inspection of syllabuses, and putting faculty and students in a state of fear and paralyzing confusion—are greater than we have seen in our lifetimes. The idea that a college education is a form of basic workforce preparation, rather than preparation for life as a human being and as a citizen, has taken hold across American society. Knowledge of human behavior, the ability to communicate and to interpret, understanding of cultural difference, appreciation of the creative arts that give life meaning—wide access to all these things are threatened by political and economic forces that demand concerted, coordinated response.

Associations are on the front lines of fighting these destructive forces. When the federal government or state legislatures come after a field or a curriculum, an association is often the only voice that speaks out on behalf of scholars and students who cannot afford the risk of speaking out themselves.

Readers of this newsletter will remember that when the federal government terminated National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) research grants in April 2025, ACLS joined with the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) to sue the NEH. We were able to bring that suit because our organizations possess the legal standing to do so, together with the staff and infrastructural capacity to manage the litigation and raise the funds to pay for it.

No individual scholar whose grant was cancelled had a realistic path into the courtroom; only collective groups did; in this case, academic associations that are publicly recognized as the formal representatives of scholars, with the resources to compose the strongest amicus briefs and comments on federal rulemaking, provide compelling testimony to Congress and other decisionmakers, and speak out about the value of our fields and academic freedom. We achieved our goal, and millions of dollars in NEH grants are being reinstated as I write.      

Along with advocacy, academic associations do work that is crucial to the health of the academic ecosystem and by extension, to the social fabric that is knitted together by humanistic knowledge. Associations sustain top scholarly journals, organizing peer review, the editing process, and contracts with publishers. They design professional standards on everything from tenure evaluation and academic integrity to mentoring and harassment. They award fellowships and travel grants to scholars with limited or no access to funding; collect essential data on hiring and placement; and run committees on graduate education, public outreach, and countless other general and field-specific themes.

Associations are where the evolution of fields and methods proceeds, where reform is designed, and where visions of the future unfold. One example is Doctoral Futures, our reinstated challenge grant from the NEH also funded by the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, AHA, MLA, and the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL). This initiative has engaged hundreds of faculty and students in the work of redesigning doctoral education from application and recruitment to job placement. Such work is, as political scholar Max Weber described politics, the slow boring of hard boards: building alliances, creating consensus, engaging with critics. It is made urgently necessary by cuts to doctoral cohorts and the growing impact of AI.

Associations help people maintain their professional identities, which is a key benefit for those employed in work other than research and teaching and for scholars between appointments who might otherwise become invisible to the field.

Perhaps most importantly, academic associations are connectors of people across different types of institution, place of employment, and career stage. At their annual meetings and other activities and events, high school teachers, faculty in all kinds of colleges and universities, independent scholars, graduate students, and members of the public can build the relationships that are necessary for carrying out the best possible work and expand its reach.

Rapid technological innovation, rising income inequality, the hardening of national borders: these and other factors are exerting profound change in the ways Americans view higher education, the path to it, and its role in our individual lives, in the economy, and in a strong democracy. The radical nature of the changes in the ways people are accessing knowledge—and what they define as knowledge worth seeking—places them beyond the capacity of any individual college or university to address with new degree programs or changes in pedagogy. The changes are affecting the entire system of higher education. System-wide associations and organizations, these human collectives that function through compromise and consensus, will play key roles in the evolution of the system and I hope, ensuring that it remains a human system – this year and in the future.

Thank you for reading. As always, I welcome your feedback and questions at [email protected].

On behalf of all my colleagues, I send you best wishes for the fall. 

Joy