On Monday, July 6, just one day before the deadline, the government filed an appeal to the May 5 ruling by a federal judge that DOGE’s termination of NEH grants last year was unconstitutional and unlawful. We’re disappointed but not surprised: the government has appealed most such rulings.
To all those eligible to initiate reinstatement of their terminated NEH grants:keep going! The government must still comply with the May 5 ruling while the appeal proceeds. So please file your reinstatement documentation on the NEH website before the July 13 deadline. If you need advice, consult your society’s Executive Director, your institution’s office of institutional advancement or office of sponsored research, or write to us directly at [email protected].
We will continue to pursue the fight in the courts as long as it takes, together with our co-plaintiffs, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association.
Summer is the time for (among other things) planning the coming year’s events, including our next Annual Meeting, which will be held in Cambridge on April 24, 2027. This year, a common theme of all our events and convenings is strategizing how to tell the story of the value of humanistic inquiry, with the goal of empowering our members to engage in effective advocacy, on any and every scale.
I’ve learned a few lessons about advocacy in the last few years. First, we humanistic scholars and administrators tend to talk mainly to other academics, and being the critical thinkers we are, we spend a lot of time disagreeing over our arguments. One debate frequently aired in the higher ed press: should we advocate for humanistic majors on the grounds that they prepare students for successful careers? Or should we argue for their intrinsic value, or some mixture of the two? Second, we tend to tell our stories from the inside out – starting with our fields and projects and explaining why they are valuable to society at large, instead of framing our work in the context of society’s most urgent issues, challenges, and needs. Third, most of us don’t need to ask ourselves “What’s our story?” We have plenty of material and data about the value of humanistic study, how it contributes to human thriving at the level of the individual student and society. The challenge is not “what” or “why” but how and to whom we communicate the value of the humanities and social sciences.
With our new initiative, DASSH (Defending the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities), we are approaching advocacy from the following starting principles:
Identify the audiences we can reach and talk not about what we know, but about what they know and care about.
There is no single best argument for the value and impact of humanistic inquiry. Humanistic inquiry encompasses all of humanity and human experience: it has both intrinsic and instrumental value. Embrace the plural!
Celebrate the link between knowledge and advancing the public good on the level of individuals, groups, and society at large.
Who are our audiences? While I write op-eds and send letters to the higher education press and mainstream press several times a year, we are focusing our energy on making the case for humanistic research and teaching to audiences whose ears we know we have. We are finding better ways to reach those who are already in the room with us but who see the challenges of higher education through different lenses: senior academic administrators (especially those unfamiliar with humanistic fields), philanthropic foundations who don’t currently fund the humanities and qualitative social sciences, and national organizations in higher education whose concentration on solving problems of affordability and access can crowd out the threats facing humanistic study. We are also committed to connecting with audiences adjacent to and outside academia, including college and university boards and supporters of initiatives promoting a robust and well-informed democratic citizenry, including in the now complex and highly politicized domain of civic education.
The events we will hold this coming year online and in person are a symbol of our belief that at a time when political and economic forces are pressuring us to turn inward, we must redouble our efforts to project our voices outward, with intention, to the audiences within our reach — with the goal of expanding that circle over time. We seek to help more people understand the importance of the humanities and social sciences in sustaining what they value in their lives – and the fragility of the academic infrastructure that supports our fields.
The 250th anniversary of our nation is an ideal occasion for telling our story from the outside in.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Declaration of Independence was composed by men with a thorough grasp of what words mean and how to put them together in a persuasive way. Its language is shot through with the authors’ awareness of history, particularly Europe’s experience of religious wars and aristocratic oppression. From their letters and speeches, we know that Jefferson and his peers saw humanistic knowledge as crucially important for citizens who want to live peacefully in a self-governing, free state. This is why George Washington advised Congress in 1790 to promote and fund both “science and literature.” Literature, which he would have understood as philosophy and history as well as fiction, is not a luxury but a necessity for democracy, equal to science in value.
To live up to the demands of the Declaration of Independence and Washington’s first State of the Union, humanistic knowledge is essential. As we use the occasion of the nation’s 250th birthday to rededicate ourselves to the work of making the United States live up to its ideals, I encourage us all to view our community of scholars, societies, academic administrators, and supporters as a united movement, amplifying the efforts of other advocates, and working together in hitherto unexplored ways.
More to come about our advocacy in future months – stay tuned!
