Why We Need Nonpartisan Scholarly Associations

In mid-January, roughly two weeks after the American Historical Association met in New York, the organization’s executive council voted 11 to 4 to veto a contentious resolution that had passed at the meeting. The measure asked the AHA to condemn “the Israeli violence in Gaza” that undermines teaching and learning, call for a ceasefire, and “form a committee to assist in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.”

It was a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Pro-Palestinian resolutions have failed repeatedly at the AHA. A group within the organization, Historians for Peace and Democracy, learned from past defeats and tailored this resolution to condemn what they called “scholasticide”: Israel’s devastating attacks on libraries, archives, and other educational infrastructure since October 2023. They then rallied an overflow crowd to support it; members voted 428 to 88 (there were more than 3,500 additional registrants at the four-day event who did not vote at the business meeting, and there are around 10,000 members in the AHA.)

Despite the relatively small number of supporters, the council’s veto prompted angry posts on social media that characterized the AHA as elitist and out of touch. “Disgraceful,” one historian wrote. “There’s no real reason to renew memberships unless you are a historian looking for a late-career sinecure.” A scholar who helped pass a 2013 BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) resolution in another academic association condemned the council for not putting the resolution to a vote of the full membership. Instead, he wrote, the AHA “chose to disillusion a generation of their most active members. Drawbridges raised once again to protect the shrinking kingdom.”

That the American Studies Association, several smaller academic associations, and graduate-student unions have passed pro-Palestinian resolutions without having had any appreciable effect on Israel’s policies or the flow of United States weapons to the region is, I know, beside the point. That these resolutions can pass with far fewer than half of the membership participating in the vote may be as well.

Partisanship, as my colleague Julian E. Zelizer has argued, is a foundational element of a healthy democracy. But scholarly associations are not built for partisanship, nor is it elitist for them to refuse it. This is not to argue for institutional neutrality: Organizations like the AHA cannot shy away from controversy, but they must use their limited political muscle to carry out the mission they are built for — enhancing and defending the right to produce knowledge.

And in the months since the Gaza-resolution veto, the AHA’s mission, which “encompasses professional standards and ethics, innovative scholarship and teaching, academic freedom, and international collaboration” has become more urgent than ever.

Complaints that the AHA is elitist, out of touch, and ignores its most-pressing issue (the lack of tenure-track jobs) are not new. “The AHA, traditionally a ‘community of investigators’ dominated by an old elite,” The New York Times reported in 1971, “is facing open discontent in its ranks because of the recession, academic-budget trimming, and an oversupply of trained historians.” And like other scholarly associations, most notably the Modern Language Association, there were deep fissures in the organization over American foreign policy, women’s liberation, and the fight for racial justice.

For more, read “The Irrelevance of the Disciplinary Association.”

Yet today’s anti-institutionalism is driven not just by new wars but by new struggles: student loans, stagnant salaries, expanded contingent employment, and now, a ruthless Trump administration determined to eviscerate an already-fragile higher-education ecosystem.

“Where will cautious professional organizations draw the line in our new political atmosphere?” the historian and software engineer Zeb Larson asks in a recent essay in this publication. In a broad critique, Larson argues for the transformation of organizations like the AHA into partisan entities that spearhead collective action, pressure colleges to revive tenure-track employment, and make professional opportunities cheaper and more accessible. Scholarly associations, he asserts, “are unwilling or unable to respond to what their members want.”

Instead, professional organizations like the AHA are “glorified country clubs” that meet the needs of a privileged few. “At the same time,” states Larson, their “unwillingness to listen to a majority of their members on political issues is tarnishing their moral claim to meaningful scholarship.” Not surprisingly, Larson is no longer active within the AHA, which may explain why he does not know that many of the things he wants the organization to do — combat political assaults on academic disciplines, the “erosion of faculty rights,” and the loss of jobs — are an active part of its mission.

But should the AHA respond to “member demands over political issues”? No, they should not. The function of an academic association is to stand up for the profession, in all its demographic and political diversity. Its task is not telling its members what to think, write, or teach — but being willing to put itself on the line for our right to do that with integrity, and to do so with intellectual standards that are updated and established through consensus-building.

Larson and others who supported the resolution are correct that the war in Gaza is a catastrophe. It must end, and the process of reparations to civilians must begin. Larson is also correct that an academic infrastructure dominated by the contingently employed is a fragile and impoverished one, made even more so by the Trump administration’s wholesale effort to deport scholars and students, destroy academic freedom, financially gut higher education, and eliminate the freedom of public and private institutions to govern themselves.

Yet the failure to support the political demands of a single constituency within a membership is not a failure to serve the membership at large. Nor is solving large, structural problems with an executive director, a 22-person staff, and an annual budget of around $5 million a sign that the AHA is preoccupied with the profession’s elite. And even if labor organizing were part of its remit, the AHA would have to grow exponentially to do the job. The United Auto Workers, a major union and the principle organizer of graduate-student and contingent academic employees in the United States, coordinates union chapters on just over 45 campuses. There are over 4,000 institutions of higher education in the United States.

Critics of professional associations believe that these lean organizations can and should simultaneously do the job they were built for and do everyone else’s job too. That’s just not possible. The AHA’s hardworking staff runs the annual meeting; produces and edits many publications; staffs the AHA’s committees; maintains the membership; tracks the status of the profession across all types of institutions, academic and nonacademic; monitors threats to historical research such as we face now; secures the organization’s data; and does the research that allows the AHA to advocate for the profession in all 50 states and the United States Congress. Those of us who have cycled through AHA committees over the years know that the organization is no country club.

“It’s time to build something better,” Larson argues. “Disciplinary associations have always had a fundamentally conservative outlook because they’ve been wedded to existing hierarchies.” But the work the AHA does is neither conservative nor progressive. It nurtures the practice of history over time and space, and it brings people who do history very differently, in very different institutional and educational settings, together in one place to debate among us who we are as historians.

What is the purpose of the professional organization at a moment when colleges are under siege from anti-elitism, disinvestment, and an absence of political support? What is the alternative to partisanship when our culture demands that every group becomes a place for the airing of grievances and fights over our deepest differences?

In a political culture that is more polarized than it has been since the 1960s, there is a sore need for nonpartisan spaces and organizations that connect intellectuals across lines of status, field, types of institutions, and geography.

Professional associations can’t, and shouldn’t, be all things to all scholars. Rather, they will be all things to some people; some things to all people; and peripherally useful to those who do not invest or take an interest in them — for whatever reason. They exist not just to support the discipline but to create consensus about what the discipline is, and to persuade politicians and the public to support those goals. They exist to serve a geographically, professionally, politically, and demographically diverse membership united around one thing: the practice of good, truthful scholarship, whether that is on a campus, in a museum, or at your local public library.

Institutions like the AHA can function productively regardless of who dominates Congress or occupies the White House precisely because they are devoted to preserving and promoting knowledge, and to preserving the health of the diverse institutional networks and institutions that support the integrity of intellectual work for everyone.