Reports - Report of the Delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies

The annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies took place on 6-8 May 2010 in Philadelphia at the Sheraton Society Hill Hotel. As in previous years, the general theme was maintaining the vitality of humanities scholarship in a time of economic recession and public ignorance of the role of the humanities in an informed democratic society.

This year I want to preface the customary report of meeting events with a few remarks about my realization of the importance of the ACLS, and of organizations like it. The annual report of the ACLS delegate has always held a note of mystery for me, even when I was giving the report. While having the Medieval Academy be a member of a society of learned societies seemed a generically "good thing," reporting that your delegate went to a hotel to listen to a number of lectures and discussions by other academics and eat a number of free meals with them does seem fairly marginal to our real concerns. And in fact, reporting on the annual meeting does not begin to describe the importance of the ACLS for us. In the March issue of Perspectives, the newsletter of the American Historical Association, there is an article by James Vernon, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley-an expat Brit from Manchester who teaches modern British history. Vernon relates the depressing prospects for history, and other humanities disciplines, in England under the new market-driven regime in which the British government will entirely cease to fund the teaching of arts, humanities, and social sciences in English universities as of 2012. Medieval Academy members probably already know about this, and this is not the place to rehearse the details. But looking for reasons that contributed to the speed and ease with which the assault on the humanities succeeded, Vernon points to the lack of any "coherent professional voice" for British historians like the AHA. British historians belong to a "patchwork" of speciality organizations, with no single representative body, no annual conference comparable to the AHA, and he commends the AHA as "a powerful model" for historians in the U.K. Reading Vernon's article, I easily extrapolated to the powerful model of the ACLS, whose exceptionally astute and distinguished permanent staff and elected officers work to focus, clarify, and amplify the voices of humanities scholars from organizations as small as the American Dialect Society and the American Antiquarian Society to the large Modern Language Association and ourselves. I think we get tremendous value from our membership in it.

The National Humanities Alliance: Report by Jessica Jones Irons, Executive Director
The NHA is an umbrella coalition of more than a hundred organizations committed to humanities education and research. Its chief function is to lobby Congress on behalf of the National Endowment for the Humanities and other programs like the Fulbright and to try to get humanities funding included in appropriate bills directed to job creation. Ms. Irons's report was, unsurprisingly, rather discouraging. Efforts of the Obama administration to cut the deficit work against us in a general way, but the humanities are hampered more specifically because their supporters are not ready with the kind of quantifiable data needed for self-promotion in this era of results-oriented assessment based in science models.

Meeting of the Delegates
I was elected to the Executive Committee of the Delegates: this is a committee of seven people who meet a couple times a year to organize the next annual meeting program, and they review nominations for the Haskins Prize Lecture (also elected: Peter Trooboff, American Society of International Law).

Report on the ACLS Fellowship Programs: Nicole Stahlmann
This was a more cheering report in several respects: the ACLS again increased the number of fellowships awarded by adding a major new fellowship program. Both numbers of fellowships and total dollar value of the awards are significantly higher than the previous year because the ACLS benefits from the strong support of philanthropic foundations augmenting its own endowment income.

Medievalists were awarded a total of nineteen fellowships, ranging from five of the major ACLS fellowships to eleven dissertation completion awards, with two research fellowships and one digital innovation award.

The brand new New Faculty Fellows Program, jointly created by the ACLS and the Mellon Foundation, allows fifty recent Ph.D.s to take up two-year teaching positions in ninety-six participating colleges and universities. This is an important program, but the information about the awards did not let me see if, or how many, medievalists were included among them.

Report of the President: Pauline Yu
The ACLS has done fairly well during the recession. The treasurer's report noted that the endowment, after last year's decline of 30 percent from 90 to 60 million dollars, had returned to $83 million and performed well against its benchmarks. But the ACLS is not entirely dependent on its central endowment and receives contributions from outside foundations and individuals to support its programs.

Pauline Yu noted that the traditional humanities fellowship is quite unusual in its emphasis on the individual and that it does not require the large teams of researchers, equipment, and infrastructure typical of all other fields of research. It is very efficient and productive, a very democratic means of supporting and increasing knowledge. These are values we should not discard lightly under the pressure of science-based models (that is my opinion).

Ms. Yu's comments are related to the ongoing larger discussion of how to assess the current state and prospects for the academic humanities-an assessment that has to acknowledge economic and political, as well as cultural, forces. Ms. Yu stressed that the research dimension of the humanities has to be made known to the public, that humanities scholars produce new knowledge; they do not only teach old knowledge. (This idea seems absurd to us, but apparently it is true of perceptions outside academe.) She feels that the idea of "new knowledge" resulting from research is a better selling point, and one not known by the general public or even scientists in university departments.

The Google Book Settlement: Implications for Scholarship
This was an exceptionally interesting panel, not least because the Engineering Director of Google Book Search, Daniel Clancy, was on it. Mr. Clancy defended the value and propriety of having full text availability to the "book search" command-full searchability is the major advance in finding information as it enhances discovery and use of otherwise unknown, and thus unused, books. He stressed the pervasive interest of scholarly authors in having people read their work, and Google shares that interest. He defended the settlement's protection of copyright and the interests of rights holders, incorporated in Google's concept of "fair use" of copyrighted materials. Another speaker, James Grimmelmann, associate professor of law at New York Law School, has become an expert in this area and in the Google Book Settlement; he is exceptionally well informed and crisply lucid on the legal issues and the history of copyright law, a printing-press law code trying to negotiate computer-generated conflicts. Those interested in this case and its implications should note that Professor Grimmelmann maintains a blog devoted to the Google Book project and its ongoing legal controversy. Another speaker, James O'Donnell, provost of Georgetown University, reminded us that Google is doing what Congress left open to do by neglecting to lead in digitizing the Library of Congress; therefore, Google is doing it because it can and wants to.

[As of writing this report in April 2011, I have to note the recent judicial finding that Google's settlement does not sustain antitrust scrutiny and has to be abandoned or significantly changed.]

The Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture
The Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture was given by Nancy Siraisi, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center and Emerita Fellow of the Medieval Academy. Well known to us for her foundational work in the history of medieval and early-modern medicine in the Italian universities and the development of natural science, Nancy Siraisi delivered a lecture that was brilliant, both personal and intellectual, plainspoken and erudite. The large and attentive audience loved it-of course.

Respectfully submitted,
NANCY PARTNER