March 12, 2025 Advocacy Update
We bring you several recent developments affecting the humanities and social sciences and our thinking about constructive responses. We are aware of and deeply concerned by the mass lay offs at the Department of Education, and will keep you apprised on their impact and responses by us and other organizations.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other federal agencies, continues to operate. (NSF and other review panels that were postponed last month are being rescheduled.) On social media, suggestions have circulated to boycott panels and other activities as a protest against agencies sending letters implementing the Executive Orders on DEI and other matters.
We strongly urge readers to continue supporting the work of the NEH and other agencies, particularly as it relates to grantmaking. Withdrawing from panels and the like does direct damage to scholars and scientists, not to mention the dedicated agency employees who are trying to get allocated dollars out the door. Litigation and lobbying are actively underway to halt the implementation of the Executive Orders. It’s common for Congress to consider bills to eliminate the NEH (and the NEA) and efforts already underway to do so this year will require strong resistance. Anyone wishing to respond is encouraged to consider the following:
- Contact your elected representatives.
- Reach out to students, friends, and/or voters in your community to ensure that they understand the importance of what the NEH does: it funds local museums, book festivals, History Days, and many other public projects as well as scholarship and research.
Starting last week, high-profile universities began to pause faculty and staff hiring and some rescinded fellowship offers to incoming graduate students across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, on the grounds that the new 15% indirect rate on NIH grants (along with the threatened endowment tax and other proposals) posed extraordinary budgetary risk. Early analysis suggests that along with the direct hit to American research output that the cut would incur, local and national economies would lose $6 billion in GDP and nearly 50,000 jobs. On March 5 a preliminary injunction stayed the implementation of the order, and a powerful coalition of universities and organizations has filed suit to halt the cut.
Last Friday, the administration announced the cancellation of $400 million in grants to Columbia University. PEN America Program Director Kristen Shahverdian calls this “overreach designed to intimidate” the institution. The bulk of the grants are funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Center for Disease Control, and the Health Resources and Services Administration, but several million dollars of Department of Education grants for teaching south Asian, Middle Eastern, and east Asian languages also appear to be on the chopping block. The government has announced the formation of an anti-Semitism task force that will investigate 60 college campuses.
We’re deeply concerned by the Texas bill HB 2339 which would prohibit public colleges and universities in the state from “offering programs or courses in LGBTQ or DEI studies.” Telling faculty what they can or cannot teach treads directly on academic freedom. Even if (as most experts predict) the legislation is unlikely to pass, these state bills help the federal government determine how far it can go. ACLS stands for the freedom to teach and study; in partnership with our member societies, we now help PEN America’s action alerts reach a broader audience.
It’s impossible not to be anxious about the administration’s actions and unknown endgame. In these messages, we aim to highlight the activity that 1) directly impacts humanistic knowledge producers and those who support them, and 2) we judge ACLS is best positioned to take action on, including making recommendations to readers as I have done above. But we are very well aware that people inside and outside academia are affected far beyond what we are able to comment on here. We hope that all members of the academic community will extend justice, support, and compassion to everyone who fears being fired, losing funding, now even arrested – and to students, faculty, and community members whose intellectual and emotional homes are in women’s studies, queer studies, environmental studies, or ethnic studies departments or centers, who are facing cuts or closure; DACA students and students with undocumented family members who are avoiding campus for fear of drawing attention to themselves; everyone shaken by the storm of activity and seeking how to navigate the best path, standing up for freedom in whatever ways each is able without increasing the risk to the most vulnerable.
At ACLS, we try to resist letting anxiety and uncertainty eat up our time and energy. We believe it is all the more important that we stay the course and focus on our mission to promote scholars and scholarship, to advocate for the value and importance of our fields, to support the efforts of other organizations equipped to lobby and litigate, and to speak out on behalf of academic freedom.
Joy