Blog: Help Support the ACLS

On May 1, the organization I run, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), filed suit to redress the damage done in April to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), with the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association serving as co-plaintiffs. Most readers of this blog will already know the devastation DOGE wrought: roughly 65% of the NEH staff were laid off, and most grants made under the Biden administration were cancelled, including projects whose work was already underway. Post-inauguration calls for proposals include the Garden of Heroes, despite the fact that funding for the creative arts is the domain of the National Endowment for the Arts, not of the NEH.

Our suit argues that DOGE acted unconstitutionally, and that the new management of the NEH is acting capriciously and without sufficient attention to the will of the United States Congress. Litigation is expensive: we are grateful for any and all support.

You may not know that ACLS played a crucial role in founding the NEH. In the early 1960s, my predecessor as ACLS President, Frederick Burkhardt, worked with the leaders of the Council of Graduate Schools and Phi Beta Kappa to convince Congress to establish federal support for the arts and humanities. Burkhardt testified before Congress in 1965 using arguments familiar to us today. Citing ancient Rome as a precedent, he declared: “So too any civilization will be a living force in the world of the future to the extent that it values and nurtures the creative forces of art and the humanities, of philosophy and science.” Congress agreed, and despite occasional attempts to cut its funding or close the agency, the NEH was distributing over $100 million to support research and scholarship each year, with the other half of its funding going to state humanities councils.

I received my PhD in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. The faculty who taught and mentored me have done great service to the SCS, including president-elect Ralph Rosen and past presidents Bridget Murnaghan and Joe Farrell. They brought me up, so to speak, to think of academic professional societies as key to the flourishing of scholarly inquiry and to effective advocacy for our fields. My recent experience organizing our litigation is real-life testimony to this truth. Where universities have large general counsel offices that tend to be risk-averse (that’s their job, after all), societies are nimbler, and they speak for diverse communities of scholars, including those working inside and outside academia. Many societies quickly stepped up to sign declarations of harm, providing vitally necessary support for our suit.

Wondering if NEH has invested in SCS fields? You can find a comprehensive list on the NEH website, but let me share some highlights. Over the past 10 years, the NEH has sponsored long-term research fellowships at the Getty, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the American School of Classical Studies. Its grants have supported archaeological excavations and analysis at Phaleron and other sites, research on aerial thermal imaging, and scholarship on demagoguery and popular culture in Greece, Roman memory, and other topics.

The administration’s attack on federal funding is doing enormous harm, material and symbolic, with ripple effects far into the future. The argument I made in the Village Voice back in 2017 still stands. We need the NEH. Its work supports the production of knowledge that is a necessity, not a luxury, for citizens of a democracy – the material and habits we need to make rational decisions, to grasp the workings of the mind, memory, and soul, and to engage in meaningful arguments across ideological and cultural lines: history, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, art history, music, cinema, and more. Violence, cruelty, ignorance, polarization, and desperation seem to burden American life more and more each year. Knowledge of the arts and humanities are an irreplaceable part of the work of repair and reparation that lies before us.

How can you help? Support our lawsuit. Write your Congressional representatives, even if they’re passive now; evidence of protest today will make a difference to the midterm elections next year. If you know anyone who supports this administration, tell them about the good the NEH does (together with the NEA and the Institute of Museum and Library Services) in public libraries, K-12 classrooms, history centers, archives, and other cultural and educational centers and sites. You can look up grants state by state – you may be surprised, as I was, by the extent and creativity of its support!