October 8, 2025 Advocacy Update

Censoring or barring access to humanistic study is a known characteristic of authoritarian states. Behind the Iron Curtain and in like regimes, governments have banned classes in philosophy, literature, history, and social theory in the hope of suppressing criticism and stamping out resistance. They understand the power of humanistic study to broaden minds and encourage critical and creative thinking, and the demoralizing impact of shutting it down. 

Today American politicians dress up attacks on humanistic study as being irrelevant to the demands of the job market, a dangerous source of antisemitism, or too “woke” to be worth saving. Under these pretexts, this administration has cut research funding; gutted the NEH; eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion practices that impact how and what subjects are taught on campuses; denied or charged high fees for visas to international students and scholars; eliminated Title VI centers and other federal programs designed to foster the study of languages other than English and cultures outside the US; slashed funding for public libraries including civics education and college readiness programs; and last week, proposed government oversight of hiring, research, and teaching and the elimination of “institutional units” that “belittle” state-sanctioned thought.

The White House “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” would essentially transform American academia into an arm of the federal government. We hope that the chorus of voices speaking up against the letter convince decisionmakers on campus and in state capitals of the serious danger it represents, from Joseph Fishkin’s Balkinization blogpost and Siva Vaidhyanathan’s essay in the New Republic to the Wall Street Journal editorial page. As The New York Times reporting has shown, while the White House is presenting this compact as open to “feedback” from campuses, its billionaire author has already been circulating it in close to final form for months. Asking for feedback is itself a tactic designed to distract and divide institutions against one another.
 

It’s been a frequent argument in the higher education press and general media that colleges and universities should publicly acknowledge their flaws and promise better behavior, particularly with regard to fostering vigorous ideological debate among faculty and students. Were we dealing with good-faith critics, this counsel might sound more compelling. Speaking out about the real-life dangers of policing academic activity and publicizing the value and impact of humanistic work, including the inconvenient truths we must tell for the public good, are stronger, clearer paths to changing popular opinion.

Knowledge is not partisan. As Heather McGhee has said, when the drinking water in an American town is contaminated, Black residents are more likely to live closer to the source of the toxin, but the whole town is in danger. Fighting for clean water in the form of humanistic knowledge means fighting to tell the full story of every part of our national town, to achieve the healthy self-knowledge democracy demands.  

This argument extends beyond national borders. Last month, together with several member societies, ACLS signed a letter written by the Coalition for International Education urging the Department of Education to reinstate the FY 2025 funding of over $85 million as approved by Congress, which the Administration cut on the grounds that they “are inconsistent with Administration priorities and do not advance American interests or values.” No Star Trek-esque universal translator can gain the trust and confidence that fluent human speakers command. We need deep public investment in teaching languages and cultures – to increase mutual understanding across cultural and linguistic difference, to advance peace and security inside and across borders, to prepare students for life in a globalized world, and to grasp the mind-expanding wonders of human linguistic diversity. We encourage you to write to their congressional representatives in support of reinstating these programs.

Beyond the public front, each of us is capable of strengthening humanistic inquiry through individual and small-group action. At a moment when the news can feel overwhelming, the priority is to act in the area we know best.  

For faculty, particularly those with tenure at research-intensive institutions, one path of action is coordinating a strategy among faculty or chairs to convey the value of humanistic fields to the campus community, including students, presidents, and boards, as Dean of Humanities Jeffrey Cohen has done at Arizona State University. The outstanding resources collected by the National Humanities Alliance and many of our member societies, which I’ve mentioned before, are of great help in this effort. The economic data on the value of colleges and universities gathered by the American Council of Education (ACE) is also immensely useful. PEN America’s Champions of Higher Education provides inspired testimonials and editorials.

One final much-needed course of action. One of the most persistent barriers to public understanding of humanistic inquiry is academia’s resistance to rewarding scholarship that appears in forms other than the peer-reviewed book and article. Recognizing excellence in “non-PDF-ables,” as I once heard a publisher call multimodal scholars like some of our ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award winners, is still the exception rather than the rule in R-1 and R-2 institutions. Work that combines text with film or music, work published using the digital resources of open access platforms like Omeka or Scalar, community-engaged work, theatrical productions, museum exhibits, and books, articles, and lectures and other engagements designed for non-academic audiences communicate knowledge in ways that speak to twenty-first century audiences. They are the fruits of rigorous research, and should be treated as such by committees overseeing doctoral dissertations and faculty hiring, contract renewal, tenure, and promotion.

Accepting non-PDF-ables represents an expansion of what counts: it doesn’t mean giving up on books or articles. Detailed guidelines for evaluating them have been published by the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, other learned societies, and the visionary faculty guiding Humetrics and Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership at Michigan State University. Embedding them in regular academic practice may seem hopelessly distant from the headlines, but this work matters: it promotes and protects humanistic inquiry for the long term.

Last in the news but not least: our litigation on behalf of the NEH continues in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Stay tuned.   

Joy