The 2011 meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies took place in Washington DC on the 5th to 7th of May.The general tone of this year’s meeting was more optimistic than previous years, both with respect to the financial foundations of the ACLS itself, its ability to support its fellowship programs, and interesting assessments of the value of American liberal arts education from the point of view of foreign countries.

§ Fellowships Programs (Nicole A. Stahlmann)

To begin with the information of most immediate interest to MAA members, medievalists were awarded a total of 14 ACLS fellowships: 4 of the major fellowship program, and 10 others from various programs, including 1 of the New Faculty Fellows trial program which places new Ph.D.s in post-doctoral teaching appointments in colleges and universities, one of the Digital Innovation awards, and 2 in Collaborative Research competition. Medievalists won awards in nearly all of the relevant competitions, and my general impression continues to be that, in all the all-fields programs, good projects in medieval studies (and antiquity) are welcomed and appreciated by ACLS juries.

The ACLS has added a new program in each of the last six years (for a total of 15 programs), and has expanded the number of awards given in established programs. The New Faculty Fellows experimental program, which has now completed its two-year trial, placed 65 fellows in various of the 96 participating schools, and its methods and outcome are judged quite successful.

The Public Fellows Program, introduced in April 2011, teams the ACLS with a number of non-profit and governmental agencies to place new Ph.D.s in temporary but fairly paid positions outside of academe. The goal of the program is to demonstrate different career paths open to humanities Ph.D.s, and the value and adaptiveness of advanced humanities training. I find this an extraordinarily valuable and well-focused program, especially in the current climate of denigration of humanities education.

It was pointed out that the entire ACLS fellowship program is administered by six staff members with the assistance of over 400 academic peer reviewers. I think we should also note that the ACLS continues to support individual research projects with generous but realistic amounts of money, amounts that are sufficient for excellent scholarship but look miniscule in comparison with grants for science and even social science projects. The high quality and originality of ACLS funded research by individual scholars supported with modest sums of money demonstrates the viability of this humanities tradition at a time when funding is disappearing and yet humanities scholars are being pushed to imitate costly, high-expense models of scientific team research.

§ Financial Report (Nancy J. Vickers)

This was a far more buoyant report than last year’s, since the ACLS endowment recovered with a 20% return on investments, compared with last year’s 7%. The near universal rise in equities of all classes accounts for much of this, and the continuing complications of global economies makes the ACLS take relatively conservative approach to investing. It should be noted that the Mellon Foundation has continued its strong support of ACLS with a large grant directed to administration of the organization.

§ President’s Report (Pauline Yu)

Pauline Yu repeated and underscored a theme from last year’s meeting – namely, that the extreme vulnerability of the humanities (such as the proposed 13% cut in the National Endowment for the Humanities budget), in all areas of research, teaching, and dissemination of information that need support rests on great public misunderstanding of what people like ourselves do. The humanities are not understood as an area of research which produces new knowledge, not just the teaching and recirculation of completed traditions. She praised the central fellowship program of the ACLS as its "lodestar:” open to individuals, of all ranks, all fields, all institutions or none.

§ Global Perspectives on U.S. Higher Education

This was an exceptionally interesting session. Moderated by Thomas Bender (New York University), the speakers were Lisa Anderson (President of American University in Cairo), Peter Lange (Provost of Duke University) and John Sexton (President of New York University). All the speakers are directly involved in creating or running campuses of U.S. universities abroad, all in the Middle East and all committed to creating modern universities around a core of the liberal arts, in clear distinction to technical or professional credentialing schools. The session topic was the paradoxical phenomenon of global admiration of U.S. universities at a time of low valuation of traditional education at home. All the speakers agree that the critical and analytical skills developed through liberal arts education are emphatically needed in our era of vast, instantaneous, but unorganized and chaotic information, and that this is recognized in countries embarking on rapid modernization. Liberal Arts education also is the core formation for democratic citizenship. Lisa Anderson pointed out that AUC, the only liberal arts school in Egypt, was disproportionately represented in the Tahrir Square revolution, both students and adults. American universities remain a talent magnet for talented undergraduates from many countries, and developing universities on an American model of teaching and research culture is felt as a pressing need in many countries, especially China.

§ Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture

The Haskins Prize lecture was delivered by Henry Glassie, Professor Emeritus of Folklore from Indiana University. Henry Glassie demonstrated that the traditional location of folklore in ballads and tales is entirely inadequate to his extraordinary conception of the discipline which, in his hands, has become an interpretive ethnography of non-elite culture, encompassing all of material culture and history, often incorporating living practitioners in close collaboration with this extraordinary scholar.

Respectfully submitted,

Nancy Partner