Hannia Arevalo ’27 was nervous when she walked into the Washington, D.C. office of Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas), her representative in Congress March 10. Arevalo was there along with other students from Cornell’s Humanities Scholars Program and Society for the Humanities to advocate on behalf of humanities programs and initiatives.
But she was glad to see that several of the staffers in the office were from her hometown of McAllen, Texas and she focused on telling her story, impressing on them the importance of humanities to her studies and encouraging De La Cruz to support funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Archives. She also encouraged the office to sign on to the Congressional Humanities Caucus.
“I know that Rep. De La Cruz is supportive of HSIs (Hispanic-Serving Institutions) and was upset about cuts to those universities, so I felt she was supportive of higher education,” said Arevalo, a government and Near Eastern studies major. “But I wasn’t so sure about her position on humanities funding.”
That ability to advocate and converse with people who may not share your views was one of the benefits of the two-day trip, said Durba Ghosh, professor of history and Taylor Family Director of the Society for the Humanities.
The four Humanities Scholars Program undergraduates and two graduate students, sponsored by the Society for the Humanities and the Graduate School, spent their first day attending the National Humanities Alliance Annual Meeting and the second day visiting with representatives and senators.
“Having these students visit D.C. helps their congresspeople to know that their constituents go to a number of universities across the country and to realize that schools in the northeast aren’t distant from their interests,” Ghosh said. “The members of Congress that we spoke to take seriously the responsibility of the executive to spend money the way that Congress has allocated.”
The group focused their advocacy on National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funding. Beyond funding humanities grants for academics and community organizations, the NEH contributes directly to state humanities councils, which support doctoral students doing public humanities work such as exhibitions, lecture series, film series. They also advocated for National Archive and Records Administration funding and Title VI, National Resource Centers and Language Resource funding. Cornell receives $1 million annually to fund less commonly taught languages, fellowships for students, and K-12 outreach, Ghosh said. Those grants were terminated even though the funds were appropriated by Congress.
Elly Conrad ’27, who comes from Arizona, said the trainings she’s had as a part of The Advocacy Project, a student organization, helped guide her during her conversations with staffers in Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly’s office.
“I talked about coming from a STEM background to now being more of a humanist,” said Conrad, a human development major in the College of Human Ecology with minors in philosophy, moral psychology and inequality studies. “We all prepared talking points and had fact sheets for our representatives and senators. We also checked the staffers’ LinkedIn profiles so we could relate to them.”
Chloe Wray, program coordinator for the Humanities Scholars Program, who also went on the trip, said she thinks it’s important to show students that advocacy is about showing up again and again. “A lot of times it takes repeated effort, perhaps making a little bit of noise,” she said.
And the Cornell group made sure to emphasize that NEH funding that comes to Cornell and other organizations trickles down into the community, as many projects involved partnerships with local school districts, museums, libraries and local non-profits.
“It’s the whole ecosystem of humanities that is funded,” Wray said.
