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

On occasion an institution will signal its future intentions through its quest for enhanced funding. That is the case for the American Council of Learned Societies.

Over the past decade ACLS has received generous funding from thirty-one research-oriented universities and colleges. Recently ACLS augmented this substantial sum with a campaign for individual giving. In 1997 individual giving to ACLS stood at zero. In the last fiscal year individual giving reached $1,391,416. Moreover the endowment is growing: rather than an anticipated decline in assets of $3 million, investment return amounted to 12-13 percent over the fiscal year, and thanks largely to increased grant income for 2006, assets increased $3.1 million. In May 2006 a further $2.7 million growth in assets was anticipated. You may rightly assume that plans are afoot to spend the wealth.

The Medieval Academy felt the impact of this pursuit of riches in a substantial rise in our assessed dues, indeed a doubling of our current assessment. The Board of Directors, under the leadership of a member of the Medieval Academy, introduced a nondebated motion onto the floor of the Delegates meeting to raise dues in six yearly steps to over 100 percent of where they stand today. Member societies may elect to pay increased dues in either two or three steps, according to prepared schedules. After 2012 annual inflation adjustments will be made to the schedule of dues on a regular basis. Committee reports like that on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences appear now in glossy three-color format rather than the drab old format.

It is incumbent upon us to seek ways to profit from the higher bill we pay, so we might well ask what does ACLS do for medievalists and the Medieval Academy?

ACLS fellowships of $60,000 will be increased from twenty to twenty-five at the professorial level in future years. Twenty fellowships at the associate and twenty at the assistant level remain the same. A new program for year-long doctoral dissertation completion will commence next year with further support from the Mellon Foundation. Sixty-five awards will be made with a stipend and benefits up to a total of $33,000 each. A second element of this Mellon/ACLS collaboration will provide fellowships for recent doctoral recipients. Fewer in number, twenty-five, these awards provide new recipients of the doctorate with a stipend to support a year of research within the context of an academic position (as new hires), in affiliation with a humanities research center, or as independent scholars. Applicants will be selected from a pool that includes fellows in the first part of the program and other highly ranked applicants from earlier competitions and winners of other awards such as the Whiting Fellowships. On questionnaires, fellows responded indicating that forty-eight of our sixty-eight constituent societies had received grants. The Medieval Academy of America ranked fifth among these.

This past year medievalists fared better than in the previous two years in securing ACLS funding. Six medievalists won ACLS Fellowships. Two medievalists won Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowships. Jay Rubenstein won a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars. F. Jamil Ragep won an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship for the Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative Database Project, which, I presume, includes medieval manuscripts. While this is a better showing than in years past, it is vital to urge graduate students and young colleagues to apply for available grants. Members of the Medieval Academy should make a more concerted effort to apply as well.

At the May meeting some interesting statistics emerged. With over a hundred grants made, the ratio of applicants to rewards was fifteen to one. For the Digital Innovation Fellowship the ratio was twenty-three to one, and only five grants were awarded. The advice from ACLS is to reapply early and often because review committees regard the applicant pool as competitive. The new Mellon/ACLS early career competition is designed to become a large program. How else to get our money's worth but for medievalists to apply for funding?

The centerpiece of the May meeting was an ACLS/AAU humanities convocation on reinvigorating the humanities. Edward Hundert, then president of Case Western Reserve University, urged us to counter anti-intellectualism, overcome the model of the nineteenth-century German university with new structures, and be sensitive to different audiences. He spoke of his concern with the culture wars where we should combat the label of elitism and think of ourselves as the world's think tanks, with reading and knowing in the age of information our tools. The president of ACLS, Pauline Yu, noted we do four things well: ask good questions, teach well, talk to others around the globe, and seek knowledge. She gave us three exhortations: more collaboration, encounter and conquer numbers in the digital humanities, and thirdly, communicate better with the public at large. Humanities centers may help develop better public humanities.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, of Princeton University, argued that humanists should develop new models of global scholarly cooperation. We need to become more cosmopolitan and less local in our thinking, and he urged an understanding of ourselves as fallible in our encounters around the world. It might be useful for us to question ourselves as medievalists: do we take into account the falliblism of the West-his chosen, if awkward, term-and how well do we do so? In keeping with the concerns of the 2005 ACLS meeting, freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry still bode large because they remain under attack. The ACLS wishes to respond to critics of our learned societies who dictate agenda and curricula to institutions of higher learning. Spirited defenses of our freedoms, while they began somewhat belatedly, continue to be a central concern of the ACLS in its new, more activist role.

Respectfully submitted,
SUSAN MOSHER STUARD