Storm Warning: Public Funds and Scholarly Societies

Unburying the lede: This post is about efforts to sever the financial, and therefore mutual aid, links presently connecting scholarly societies and universities (etc.). It is thus about an existential threat to both scholarly societies and those institutions and publics that they serve.

I grew up on the coasts of Florida which means I grew up with hurricanes. When a hurricane has made landfall in your coastal city, it is too late to bother with raising the warning flags.

To sustain the scholars and practitioners, and broader publics, that they serve, scholarly societies in the humanities and the social sciences have no choice but to focus on emerging storms on, and beyond, the horizon as well as to take account of changing weather and climate patterns that might be making storms more frequent, more powerful, and potentially more destructive. While ensuring that things go well on a day-to-day basis, during sunny and partly cloudy days, scholarly society leaders need to also focus on identifying and preparing for the storms that are likely to come. Societies that are aware of, and that have been prepared for them, are better positioned to weather what comes. If we set aside the weather metaphor, in some cases, societies may be able to mobilize and prevent, and not just prepare for, the threats they face.

In dialogue with colleagues, I have been trying to enumerate some of the challenges that seem to threaten scholarly societies based in the United States. While the American Folklore Society (AFS) is foremost on my mind in this context, I am a presently a board member of the Council for Museum Anthropology, a constituent section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and thus I have AAA on my mind also.

Scholarly societies, such as those that (like AFS and AAA) are members of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), are in close relationship with college and universities, as well as with other institutional settings in which academics, public humanists, and applied social scientists work. These other settings include museums, archives, public folklore agencies, federal, state, and local government agencies, NGOs, and other kinds of public-interest organizations. Most obviously, scholarly societies provide manifold opportunities to their members and these opportunities benefit those individuals who work in these organizations. They thus benefit the organizations in which we work and those we serve. Some obvious examples include providing venues for research exchange, professional development activities, disciplinary and interdisciplinary networking, scholarly publication venues, and basic infrastructure for healthy disciplinary work. I am capturing just a fraction of the benefits that scholarly societies provide to their members and to the fields and workplaces in which they serve. I know any readers that I find here know these things.

Scholarly societies rely upon their members in manifold ways, of course, but they also depend on the organizations that those members work in, and serve. Here, I will identify just a four of the most obvious points of reliance and connectivity.

1. Scholarly societies are publishers and key purchasers of those publications are the libraries maintained by universities and other institutions. Institutional funds thus support publications while publications in turn support students, faculty, curators, etc. within these institutions. This relationship has long been central to the work of scholarly communications. Societies need library subscribers and libraries serve their constituents through these subscriptions (or through institutional participation in open access alternatives).
2. In numerous but (I know, I know) not all contexts, institutions subsidize staff or student participation in scholarly society conferences. This can take various forms, including such things as internal student travel grants for graduate students or full or partial travel funds allotted to university faculty members or institutional staff members (as at museums). The bottom line is that some attendees at an AFS meeting have been partially or perhaps fully supported in their attendance. Usually, such subsidies are tied to the individual presenting new research at the meeting or participating actively in some other fashion on the program of the meeting. Such individuals often need to report on their participation to their colleagues afterwards to help further spread the benefits of this investment.
3. In some settings, those employed by in-field institutions will have their scholarly society membership paid for with research funds or other funding made available to the faculty member or other relevant staff members. I am well-aware of the variation existing on this point and I know that a society such as AFS has numerous members who lack access to such support, but as a matter of fact, such support exists. It is valuable both to those who receive it and to the society as a whole. Just as journal subscriptions help support journal publication and meeting subsidies support the production of a successful scholarly meeting (for everyone), dues subsidies contribute to the very existence of a scholarly society and make it possible for that organization to serve its membership, its field, and its publics. Whether paid for by employers or by members themselves, dues make scholarly infrastructure and scholarly connectivity possible.
4. Finally, scholarly societies are frequently hosted by specific institutions. This is not always so, but for smaller societies, this local hosting is often crucial. It can take two forms, both of which are relevant to AFS (and one of which [i.e. 4B] is quite relevant to AAA). (4A) A scholarly society’s home office can be based at a university or other institution. For instance, the AFS office is based at Indiana University Bloomington where it is affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences and partnered with the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Such relationships are ideally durable across extended periods. To exist and endure, they always involve mutual benefit, with society resources advancing host institutional goals and, reciprocally, university (etc.) resources helping advance society ones. (4B) Shorter-term are instances when institutions host journal editorial offices. In this mode, one (perhaps more than one) institution agrees to assist the work of one or more of its faculty members in “taking on” the work of editing or co-editing a society journal, usually for a handful of years. In this mode, for instance, George Mason University has contributed in important ways to “hosting” the editorial office for the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), the primary peer-reviewed publication of the AFS. The JAF editorial team is comprised of George Mason University and the university leadership there has seen the value in helping the local faculty succeed in their editorial work. (More generally, institutions can allow for, and encourage students, faculty, and staff to take on other service roles within scholarly societies.)

Why have I spent over 1000 words laying this out? Because the things that that I have just described, which have never been in rock solid shape or universally observed, are now fundamentally in question. I am not speaking of familiar “budget challenges” but of an newer and more fundamentally existential matter.

To understand that which to I refer, I direct readers the American Enterprise Institute’s report “Scholarly Associations Gone Wild: Stop Publicly Funding Scholarly Groups that Trade Academics for Advocacy” (Greene and Hess 2024a, 2024b). There has been surprising little coverage of this report in higher education circles but it is starting to be talked about and those presently leading scholarly societies in and beyond the humanities and social sciences have no choice, I think, but to consider it and related initiatives that will begin as think tank reports and that will likely manifest as state-level legislation.

Responding will not be so simple as, for instance, just stopping issuing statements that others deem political. It does not really work that way under present conditions. It may or may not be a good idea for scholarly societies to issue statements deemed political by their members or by others, but every scholarly society ultimately has a domain of expertise, whether that is Icelandic poetry, southern barbecue, or nuclear arms control. Every area of expertise is subject to being framed as political and yet every scholarly society has a fundamental obligation to leverage and share the expertise of its members for the public good. This emerging storm is riddled with lose-lose dynamics. To change metaphors from storms to software, these dynamics are a feature and not a bug. They are part of a larger contest for the future that is well underway. And they are connected closely to still wider problems that scholarly societies, and other nodes in our networks all face. These are old problems taking new and more vexing forms:  questions of free speech and civic discourse; questions of purpose in both universities and public service organizations; the nature of facts, knowledge, and expertise. They unfold in a degraded, and degrading social, and also literal, environment—locally, nationally, and globally and the co-occur with other unprecedented problems from those being raised by artificial intelligence (LLMs have already been built on the writings of members of ACLS societies) to climate change (which is not only impacting members of ACLS societies but is also impacting the basic, collective work of all scholarly societies).

Scholarly society leaders now cannot lose sight of the need to cultivate joy in their members, to boost morale, and to celebrate the good work that those members, and their societies, do, day in and day out. But the work is getting harder and those charged to lead scholarly societies, both as staff and as elected leaders, really have to choice by to make sense of, and try to adapt to, a very complex and unhealthy institutional environment. The AFS, the AAA, and any other ACLS society would be diminished in massive ways if even some U.S. states adopted no-funds-for-scholarly-societies legislation.

Greene, Jay P., and Frederick M. Hess. 2024a. “Scholarly Associations Gone Wild: Stop Publicly Funding Scholarly Groups That Trade Academics for Advocacy.” AIE-American Enterprise Institute (blog). September 26, 2024. https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/scholarly-associations-gone-wild-stop-publicly-funding-scholarly-groups-that-trade-academics-for-advocacy/.

Greene, Jay P., and Frederick M. Hess. 2024b. “Scholarly Associations Gone Wild: Stop Publicly Funding Scholarly Groups That Trade Academics for Advocacy.” Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Scholarly-Associations-Gone-Wild-Stop-Publicly-Funding-Scholarly-Groups-That-Trade-Academics-for-Advocacy.pdf