Anyone with an interest in humanities studies in the US will have heard of the current struggles over funding and the National Endowment of the Humanities. Joy Connolly, a successful classics scholar, author of two books and over 50 articles on Roman politics and rhetoric, in 2019 moved from teaching and writing to be president of the American Council of Learned Societies, and found herself in the front line defending the whole practice of humanities.
ACLS, for those not familiar, is a highly influential funder and advocate for humanities and social science research – similar in some ways to a national academy, It was set up in 1919, and today has an endowment of over $200m to distribute for humanities research. In a recent interview on ATGThePodcast, she gives a powerful justification for the teaching and learning of humanities and social sciences. As well as funding areas that are less well-resourced, such as African studies, and raising the profile of Black American scholars researching the transmission of African traditions to the US, the ACLS was heavily involved in setting up the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 1963. The NEH has sponsored such well-known projects as the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, and the Treasures of Tutankhamen exhibition, as well as the digitisation of over 63 million pages of early US newspapers. So it was quite a shock when in April 2025 the Department of Government Efficiency ordered the NEH to reduce its staffing by 80% and to cancel over 1,000 grants already awarded. ACLS was one of three associations who filed for an injunction “to prevent the dismantling of the National Endowment of the Humanities”. In July, a court ordered the NEH-awarded grants should not be cancelled. This was a small, but significant, victory.
ACLS raises much of the funds it distributes from members. The core is 45 US institutions that fund most of the humanities and social science PhDs, but there is a wider network of some 250 institutions, who provide feedback and insight into humanities scholarship. In return, the ACLS also supports the network of 56 humanities councils in every state of the US.
One ACLS initiative is supporting Open Books in the humanities. The ACLS Open Books Prize provides funds to the author ($20,000) and in turn, Arcadia awards the publisher of the book $30,000, with the goal of encouraging Open Access for books. Connolly’s research was about Greek and Roman writers and how they communicated with, and persuaded, their readers – a very relevant topic for today. Support for the humanities is clearly something that Connolly believes in. In her description of her teaching, she reveals a new word for me: I had no idea there is a term for the opposite of schadenfreude, that is, pleasure in other’s misfortune. The opposite is a Sanskrit term, “mudita”: a Buddhist concept for the pleasure one takes in watching others’ success and their satisfaction and fulfilment. She recalls experiencing such a sensation in her seminars and tutorials, discussing with, and learning from, her students. Having heard her enthusiasm and advocacy for the classics, I for one would have loved to have participated in one of her seminars.
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