Statement on Research Funding in the Humanities
In December 2022, the Executive Council approved the following statement.
The Executive Council of the Modern Language Association has reviewed data on the national research funding available to MLA disciplines and related humanities fields (HIP, NSF, NEH, Mellon, among others). While the public data are incomplete, we note in particular the low level of federal support for humanities research that scholars can seek through the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In fiscal year (FY) 2020, the federal government spent $46.1 billion on research and development (R&D) in higher education institutions (Table 21). Were federal agencies to spend one percent of this R&D budget on all humanities disciplines, these disciplines would receive $461 million per year. The NEH, however, spent approximately $32.6 million on research across all disciplines in FY 2019 (page 3). This comes to well under one-tenth of one percent of federal R&D funding. It appears to us that US humanities scholars operate under funding constraints that unduly impair their scholarly output and limit the humanities’ public benefits.
We also observe that this level of public funding puts the United States significantly behind other countries. For the sake of comparability, we can combine the total agency budgets of both the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts: this brings the total federal budget for all programming for US arts and humanities—not just research—to approximately $400 million, or just short of 0.9 percent of the federal R&D total. In 2019–20, the United Kingdom allocated 3.4 percent of UK Research and Innovation funding to its Arts and Humanities Research Council. In that same year, Canada allocated 13.1 percent of national research funding to the arts, humanities, and social sciences in its Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (page 55); the US equivalent, adding in federal funding for the social sciences, is 1.7 percent. Mexico allocated 15 percent of federal research funding to humanities and related researchers (2016 data). In brief, the United States funds arts and humanities programming at less than one-third the level of the UK’s funding for those fields, and at a still smaller fraction of the level in Canada and Mexico.
The MLA Executive Council invites focused discussions among humanities agencies, foundations, associations, and learned societies to determine how, with the following questions in mind, we might best respond to the structural issues faced by humanities scholarship:
- How should we orchestrate or conduct a comprehensive assessment of the levels of research funding currently available to humanities scholars?
- How do we assess and identify the funding levels that would better support humanities research needs and opportunities?
- How can we increase the participation of humanities scholars in the creation and implementation of legislation that expands humanities research and enhances national competitiveness?
- How must we to advocate, in conjunction with university leadership, for specific levels of federal funding for humanities research to be reached over a set period of years?
We believe that a cooperative effort among learned societies can build a humanities research infrastructure that will increase the volume of essential scholarship while increasing its benefits to humanity.
(Explanations of the calculations are available upon request from Chris Newfield cnewf@ucsb.edu.)