President’s Message: The Humanities and the Work of Attention

In recent months, I have found myself returning to a conviction I have voiced often: the humanities are more important now than ever. The humanities are more durable than the oft-used phrase “crisis in the humanities” implies, but the urgency feels different today as the freedom and support to pursue humanistic inquiry are increasingly threatened. Though The Huntington is a private institution, it has not been immune to the headwinds. 

In April, the reduction of several National Endowment for the Humanities grants lowered external support at The Huntington by about $350,000—funding that would have sustained multiple fellowships over three years. We were very fortunate that members of our community stepped in to offer support so that we did not need to rescind fellowship offers, as many of our sister institutions reluctantly did.  

Across the country, higher education and cultural institutions alike are facing pressure to limit or censor the very work of the humanities: to explore and interpret human cultures, ideas, and experiences through historical, literary, aesthetic, and linguistic lenses. Through this work, the humanities cultivate not only empathy but attention: the sustained, disciplined act of looking closely. That practice of attention is alive at The Huntington, as our story “A Haven for the Humanities” reminds us. Every day, scholars engage our three collections to understand how ideas travel—and how knowledge itself is shaped, challenged, and refined—using archival materials that range from early maps to personal stories. Their work affirms that the humanities are not a refuge from the world but a way of engaging it. 

In the coming weeks, I will travel to the University of California, Irvine, to speak at a memorial service for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a remarkable writer and colleague whose work changed how we think about language and power. As dean of UC Irvine’s School of Humanities, I was honored to help found the International Center for Writing and Translation, with Ngũgĩ as its first faculty director. Novelist, playwright, and dissident, Ngugi made a lifelong commitment to what he called “enabling the genius of each language to be made visible.” 

At The Huntington, I see that same spirit of intellectual freedom and commitment in our scholars, artists, and visitors. They turn to the archives, the art collections, and the gardens not simply to preserve knowledge but to participate in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human. The humanities ask us to slow down, to see complexity, and to imagine otherwise. Our new exhibition, “the eight directions of the wind: Edmund de Waal at The Huntington,” quite literally asks us to take a seat—and provides the benches to do so. 

This act of attention is essential.