I fully support your priorities, re: shorter work weeks and pastries.
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“The real issue with the humanities’ national leadership isn’t that they politicize scholarship, but that they don’t fight openly and systematically to fund a great deal more of it.” @cnewf.bsky.social on the recent Atlantic piece on Mellon utotherescue.blogspot.com/2026/02/line...
Yes, I agree, Scott. Hannah is one of the best colleagues I’ve ever had.
Our careers at the National Endowment for the Humanities weren't boring - they were inspiring and fulfilling, in service to America.
And after months of uncertainty and unemployment, most of us certainly aren't working in better jobs for more pay.
You destroyed so much, and for what? #NEH
"Where humanistic angles were allowed in, science tended to improve not by becoming less rigorous, but by becoming more self-aware: clearer about its concepts, its subjects, its incentives and its downstream effects." bit.ly/3MZ3V18
Ramón Saldívar
We're delighted to announce that Ramón Saldívar will receive the 11th MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. A renowned scholar of Chicano and Chicana studies and narrative form, Saldívar will accept the award at the #MLA26 Awards Ceremony in Toronto.
news.mla.hcommons.org/2025/10/14/r...
Reread this short guide to responding to fascism in higher ed this morning.
I have very mixed feelings about how increasingly resonant it is proving to be, but also I hope it will prove helpful and maybe comforting as we watch current events unfold.
halperta.com/shalperta%20...
"It turns out that some very exciting things are happening for people who followed the humanities path, and where they landed might surprise you." bit.ly/3IboUMj
@historians.org The National Humanities Center welcomes applications for 2026–27 residential fellowships. The deadline to apply is October 2, 2025. Please help us spread the word about this opportunity.
Line graph titled, "Annual appropriations to the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1966-2024." The x-axis shows fiscal years from 1966 to 2024. The y-axis shows appropriation dollars in millions, from $0 to over $600. There are two lines, one solid showing nominal dollar appropriations to NEH. The other is dashed and shows the inflation-adjusted values, adjusted to real 2024 dollars. The adjusted line is always higher until meeting the nominal line in 2024. It is almost 6 times higher, over $600 million in real dollars, in the 1970s before dropping in the 1980s and 1990s. Two text boxes say: (1) "Adjusted for inflation, annual appropriations to the National Endowment for the Humanities were highest in the late 1970s, reaching over $600 million in 2024 dollars in 1979." (2) "In real terms, NEH appropriations have been relatively flat for the past three decades."
Here are NEH appropriations adjusted for inflation. In real dollars, the agency's highest funding levels were over $600 million (2024 dollars) in the late 1970s and have been flat for the past 30 years. NEH staff have been excellent stewards of public funds, doing so much with increasingly less.
A lot of this country’s problems boil down to straight white men who see themselves as some sort of default “normal” but any variation on that as “an identity” that is “political”
Seeing lots of folks retiring from our beloved cultural agency. What a tremendous loss for us all. And what an amazing legacy of generosity, stewardship, and care they leave behind. Let's hope we can restore it.
Headshots of 2025 ACLS Leading Edge Fellows
We are excited to announce 16 new ACLS Leading Edge Fellows! These early-career #humanities and social sciences PhDs will join nonprofit organizations in communities across the country: bit.ly/4dEcyrn
Program for the Modern Language Association Summer Seminar for Humanities Leaders
Picture of the opening plenary for the Modern Language Association advocacy boot camp hosted at New York University
Opening this year’s @modernlanguage.bsky.social Summer Seminar w/ the “Advocating for the Humanities”Boot Camp for Leaders. Excited to welcome 130+ humanities leaders over the next few days.
Today, ACLS announced the finalists for the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards: bit.ly/3Fr4PA3
These $50,000 prizes recognize and reward the authors and publishers of exceptional, innovative, and open access humanities books published from 2018 to 2023.
people need to internalize, very quickly, that federal research grants are a hypercompetitive contracting process not charity, and that what Uncle Sam gets in return for that money is American dominance in the future
"State-specific humanities councils are important because they understand the unique cultural and historical context of our heritage ...They are particularly important in Florida, where recent state funding cuts have left us at the bottom of the list for cultural funding." bit.ly/4k1TOo2
The Federation of State Humanities Councils & Oregon Humanities have filed a lawsuit against the termination of NEH grants to the state councils.
www.statehumanities.org/federation-o...
"As they blatantly target academic programs in the “humanities,” what these legislators tend to leave out of their discussions of Return on Investment, is that humanities graduates generally fare about as well as other college graduates in terms of employment" bit.ly/42U14fB
"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging."
Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council.
I wrote about my decision in TIME.
time.com/7285045/resi...