May 14, 2025 Advocacy Update

On May 1, ACLS filed suit in federal district court in New York to repair the damages done in April to the National Endowment for the Humanities by employees of the Department of Government Efficiency. Our co-plaintiffs are the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association: all three organizations are represented on the Executive Committee of the Board of the National Humanities Alliance (NHA). I’m grateful to Stephen Kidd, executive director of the NHA, and Fred Lawrence, president of Phi Beta Kappa and also an NHA Executive Committee member, who guided us in our search for legal representation and continue to guide us as we provide documentation to support the suit. This week, we will file for a preliminary injunction to reverse the cancellation of grants and the firing of NEH staff.

We’re glad to see other suits underway, including a First Amendment suit brought by ACLS member the Middle Eastern Studies Association together with the AAUP, and a second NEH suit by the Authors Guild. The abrupt termination of grants made by the National Institutes of Health are also being fought in the courts.

In this moment, the impulse to pull our heads in and protect what we can is strong. But together with nearly 650 presidents of colleges, universities, and national organizations supporting higher education in the United States, in an April 22 statement led by Lynn Pasquerella of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Laurie Patton of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we believe it is time to fight.

To equip us for the longer term, ACLS is happy to have been admitted to the Washington Higher Education Secretariat, an arm of the American Council of Education, based in Washington, a long-time leading advocate for higher education. We are hiring additional support for our Communications office and planning our fall meetings with current conditions in mind. We continue to plan competitions and support for scholars and societies as well as our other programming, bearing in mind that forging on is another valuable mode of resistance.

At our annual meeting in Cambridge a few weeks ago, the executive directors of our member societies spent nearly two hours with an experienced, eloquent attorney who specializes in advising nonprofits. The usefulness of our discussion of the recent presidential Executive Orders and other topics has encouraged us to invest in similar events in the upcoming academic year.

This month, we are meeting with half a dozen funders in the humanities to discuss possible modes of cooperation or collaboration. We’re inspired by the Press Forward initiative organized by the Knight Foundation as well as the generosity of the Mellon Foundation, which is devoting $15 million in emergency funding to state humanities councils suffering from the gutting of the NEH.

How can you help? You can encourage your colleagues and friends to join our mailing list, donate to support our lawsuit, or draw on the NHA’s resources to spread the word about the NEH to a friendly skeptic you know.

If you are a faculty member able to consider taking on a new project, you might explore ways to advance the NEH’s work during this crisis. I thought I knew the NEH well, but our recent research has illuminated the breadth and ambition of its grant-making, which belies its relatively small budget. The NEH awards database is a lesson in public humanities, with something for everyone, regardless of field or special interest. If it’s not feasible to design something new, integrating a new skill or method into current teaching or campus service may be within reach now or in the near future: open-access textual criticism and digital annotation projects, collaborating with librarians or museum curators to turn a class topic into an exhibit (on paper, online, or IRL), curriculum development, departmental discussions on the impact of AI on learning, and much more.

Stay tuned!

Joy