These fields are at the very center of the liberal arts. Fellowships for extensive research on really significant topics help our professors become stronger scholars and therefore more confident and more effective teachers. The plans announced today will balance that partnership and send strongly positive signals to Humanists on all campuses. I hope other donors and institutions will join the campaign to support these fellowships. ACLS Fellows are chosen through an intensive and rigorous process of review by scholarly peers, in which some seventy-five scholars, recruited from colleges and universities across the country, serve each year as screeners and as members of selection panels.
Fellowships symbolize a national conscious-ness and community in scholarship.
The Humanities are the least abstract of all academic fields of study, and so scholarly interpretations are necessarily more personal. Our scholarly associations, individual scholars, and the leaders of colleges and universities all welcome a reinvigoration of the fellowships program, for which ACLS has been known and respected for more than 60 years. Like any other organization, we need to be clear about what we do best, and try to do it even better. We have a long and distinguished tradition of promoting international academic work even under the most difficult political circumstances. During the Cold War, ACLS and its affiliates were the principal official contacts with Soviet academia.