The AHA has signed on to a statement from the American Council of Learned Societies (ALCS) in response to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s “National Call to Action” addressing a decline in Americans’ trust in higher education.
“The Secretary’s letter conveniently omits that her own administration has done its best to undermine public trust by habitually painting academia as the enemy,” the ACLS statement reads, highlighting Secretary McMahon’s targeted criticism of the humanities. “For as long as the United States has been a nation, Americans have viewed the study of history, literature, philosophy, religion, languages, politics, society, and the arts as key to the common good. . . . Like their sibling fields in the sciences, the humanities and humanistic social science enable us to live our best lives as free people, individually and in common, in peace and prosperity.”
With our mission to promote the importance of historical thinking in public life, the AHA has long been a proponent of the value of history and the humanities, advocating for robust, fact-based history education, funding for the humanities, and the academic freedom of historians and college and university faculty to pursue research, teaching, and learning with professional integrity and without political interference.