Advocacy, Advocacy In Action

August 13, 2025 Advocacy Update

A Message from ACLS President Joy Connolly
Published: August 13, 2025

Yesterday, August 12, news broke of a notification sent by the White House to Lonnie Bunch, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, that administration staff will conduct an immediate review of eight of the Smithsonian’s 21 institutions to ensure “alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions” as expressed in the Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. “Museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials.”

We are learning more about this breaking news. Today, we emphasize four points:

  • Forcing museums to eliminate material that does not suit the beliefs of a particular presidential administration is an assault on historical truth.
  • Speaking out makes a difference. Earlier this year, the administration engineered the removal of images and stories featuring women and people of color from government and armed forces websites and museum exhibits. Some (though not all) were replaced after wide media coverage and public outcry.
  • Comments in the media suggest that some observers see the administration’s action as a defensible correction of “woke” culture. Such a reaction is nearly as worrying as the letter itself. It ignores the fact that the review, by superseding the professional oversight of scholars, represents unprecedented government intrusion into the Smithsonian’s operations.
  • The letter’s warning that the museums must tell “uplifting” stories about America that are also “inclusive” and in alignment with American ideals is nonsense. History is not a Hallmark card. The way to tell the true American story is to provide as many broad and diverse and expertly researched stories as we can. What is truly uplifting about the Smithsonian is not the material in its exhibits. What uplifts us is its existence as a collective of experts committed to the advancement of the public’s understanding, maintained by taxpayers, because we believe in investing in the advancement of knowledge. What uplifts us is our hope in our capacity to confront the truth and learn from it together.

This is unfolding against the ongoing assault on the nation’s most prestigious research universities.

The current administration and some members of Congress seem to think that because the federal government funds research at universities, it has the right to establish and enforce policies at those institutions regarding hiring faculty on the basis of their political beliefs, restricting how and where students are permitted to protest, and so forth. This opinion lies at the heart of the hearings on antisemitism held by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce since December 2023, as well as many comments about higher education made this year by the president and his most vocal supporters.

As a nation, we seem to have forgotten that American universities’ role as energetic hosts of political controversy is older than the United States itself. Scholars of rhetoric and history remind us of that truth. In the decades leading up to the War of Independence, public arguments were held on campuses over the issues that were beginning to split the colonies top to bottom. In the 1750s and 1760s, Harvard commencement exercises featured debates on topics including: Is an absolute monarchy rational? How can men be “faithful subjects” while evading taxes they consider unjust? In September 1769, two undergraduates at the new College of Rhode Island (later renamed Brown University) debated “whether British America can under her present circumstances consistent with good policy, affect to become an independent state.”

ACLS is standing up for the value of humanistic scholarship and a college education that prepares students to live in and navigate a polarized world in ways that are true to the spirit of each community of thought.

The eighteenth century college commencement was a place for arguing over differences that would lead many students and their friends and families to loyalist exile or death in battle. Contrast the agreement Columbia University made in late July, which hints at the pressure the administration brought to bear on the university to shut down political activism. It prohibits protest in “places where academic activities take place”—a definition that (as Columbia’s own Knight First Amendment Institute points out) can be applied to most buildings in the university.

Early American administrators, trustees, and faculty did not simply permit political argument on explosively divisive topics; they made it a central part of university life. True, debates overseen by the university president are not the same as today’s student protests or encampments; they were official events where views were aired in formal opposition according to rules that allotted speakers equal time. But at a time of intense civil dissension, they were bold institutional expressions of the notion that the college or university campus is a place to confront the most controversial issues of the day.

There are clear legal grounds on which federally funded universities are answerable to the government. So far, however, the government has provided no evidence to support its charges that the universities it is bullying into “deals” have fostered antisemitism or engaged in discriminatory practices in admissions or hiring.

We believe our responsibility to speak out publicly about the damage to research across the arts and sciences in the United States is all the more urgent at a moment when many institutions have been silenced by the current administration’s “divide and conquer” approach. We are sympathetic to the individuals and institutions feeling the immediate pressure of cancelled grants in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars and the bleak future of scant public funding for research and the circulation of knowledge. Independent organizations like ours are better placed to call out the false grounds on which the administration is attacking higher education and the harm it is doing.

Together with our member societies, other national organizations, and the new informal networks that have arisen in the course of this year, ACLS is standing up for the value of humanistic scholarship and a college education that prepares students to live in and navigate a polarized world in ways that are true to the spirit of each community of thought. This fall, our meetings of the Conference of Executive Officers and the Research University Consortium will confront the fact that this is not business as usual. Now, more than ever, we have to be ready for anything and must plan in advance about how to mitigate the impact of major cuts that may be implemented this academic year. ACLS is piloting workshops and preparing materials to help colleagues around the country navigate whatever comes. 

We also continue to pursue our lawsuit, American Council of Learned Societies v. McDonald, filed on May 1, 2025, in response to the slashing cuts to the staff of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and termination of NEH grants. Together with our co-plaintiffs, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association, on July 31 we appealed the judge’s denial of our motion for a preliminary injunction, and we are simultaneously advancing our claims that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) acted illegally in terminating open grants. We’re pleased about the judge’s favorable ruling in the Authors Guild’s suit, which bars the reallocation of terminated NEH grant funds while its case is ongoing.

As the new academic year begins, guided by our strategic commitment to speaking out, we are working with a small cadre of volunteers who will help us to engage a broader audience in our advocacy efforts for higher education, and especially, humanistic scholarship.  As always, we welcome your input. Email me at [email protected] to share your thoughts.

Joy

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