To the Membership of SCMS,
We are aware that calls to boycott the SCMS 2026 conference have emerged in response to concerns that stem from misunderstandings about the Society’s positions and decisions. Since its inception in 1959, our organization has welcomed a wide range of scholarly perspectives. Even when disagreements have arisen about our scholarly priorities and directions, we have fostered an open environment for dialogue among our members. Many of us hold deep convictions about current global events and their impact on our scholarly community, and recent conversations have proven both difficult and, at times, divisive.
Presently, in the U.S., to say that universities are in a critical moment of precarity would be an understatement. We have all read and witnessed the extensive coverage of how federal policies are reshaping higher education. Less visible, but equally significant, is the extent to which these same policies affect scholarly organizations and societies. As your elected Board, we must navigate this environment while ensuring the Society remains able to fulfill its mission.
Our responsibility is to facilitate spaces that advance scholarly debate, mentor emerging scholars, and sustain an infrastructure for research exchange, all while protecting SCMS’s long-term viability. As a nonprofit scholarly association, our status enables us to collect dues, apply for grants, and provide travel assistance and membership waivers that improve meeting accessibility. That same status also places firm limits on what we, as an organization, can do. While we, as individuals, hold personal convictions about global conflicts, our collective duty is to safeguard SCMS’s financial and legal capacity to serve the field.
This reality has guided our decisions. We have taken a risk-reduction approach by choosing paths that minimize the greatest harm to the Society while still preserving avenues for members to express their commitments through scholarship, caucuses, and SIGs. In today’s precarious climate, these decisions are not simply matters of governance; they are essential to ensuring that SCMS remains a space where the full breadth of scholarly inquiry can flourish despite external pressures.
We recognize this strategy may seem inadequate or insufficient. Our position is that SCMS should not just exist, it should thrive. However, it cannot do either if we lose our non-profit status. The choices we make today are not about avoiding conflict; they are about protecting SCMS so that it can continue to fund awards for our field, support graduate students, and host conferences where diverse work is shared and celebrated.
The SCMS Board—composed of academics who volunteer their time in service to the organization—has had to make difficult choices in an increasingly challenging period for scholarly life and institutions. Like all good humanists, we approach such decisions through critical reflection, informed debate, and evidence-based reasoning. We recognize that our choices may not always be perfect or universally agreed upon, but they are always made with the best intentions of sustaining the Society’s long-term health. Yet we must also ask, respectfully, whether continued infighting truly serves any of us. When our energy turns toward attacking the Society itself, we risk weakening it at precisely the moment when standing together matters most.
We appreciate members who reach out through the website contact form or email when they have questions or concerns and we encourage you to continue connecting with us. We invite all members to continue engaging through SIGs, caucuses, committees, Board office hours, the annual members’ business meeting, and the upcoming conference. SCMS is strongest in these spaces of collective scholarship, mentorship, and dialogue. We also urge members to join us in person for the 2026 conference. Time and again, members have told us how much they cherish the in-person gathering as a vital third space to share research, reflect on the politics of our departments and universities, and reconnect with colleagues in a welcoming, collegial community. Sustaining that community—while continuing to evolve and expand inclusivity—remains our goal.
With respect and commitment,
The SCMS Board of Directors
About this FAQ
In recent weeks, questions have circulated about the actions and decisions of the SCMS Board. Some of these concerns stem from misunderstandings or mischaracterizations. As your elected colleagues, we want to provide clear information so that all members can make their own judgments based on facts. The following questions and answers are meant to clarify what the Board has done and why, always with the long-term health of the Society and its members in mind. As always, if you have specific questions or concerns, please reach out to us via the contact form on the SCMS website or email. We also invite you to join us for our annual members’ business meeting during the Virtual Symposium this December as well as our Board office hours held throughout the year.
Why hasn’t SCMS issued a political statement on Palestine?
SCMS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which means we are legally limited in the kinds of political statements we can make. We are bound by nonprofit law and by our fiduciary duty to protect SCMS’s mission and to safeguard both its immediate operations and long-term sustainability. Our nonprofit status requires us to make decisions that may feel inadequate but that are meant to keep the Society solvent and able to support scholars for years to come; these decisions are aimed at reducing risk to the Society. Many of us on the Board, like many of you, hold strong personal views about this crisis—as well as other crises happening in the U.S. and around the world. When we serve on the Board, however, the position we hold is distinct from our work as individual scholars.
Within our 501(c)(3) limits, we are committed to doing what we can by waiving membership and conference registration fees for international scholars directly affected, by encouraging book publishers to promote scholars’ work in the field that addresses the many domestic and global conflicts we are witnessing, as well as by creating space for scholarship and dialogue. We know this will not satisfy all members but we promise to keep listening and working with members to find meaningful ways to support one another while preserving SCMS’s future.
Additionally, unlike some larger scholarly associations, SCMS does not have an endowment. Because we work to keep membership and conference costs as low as possible and subsidize those costs significantly, our reserves are smaller than what nonprofit guidelines generally recommend for an organization of our size. We believe members value this accessibility, but it does shape what we can and cannot risk as an organization. Larger societies with more financial security may be able to take more explicitly political positions because they can absorb the legal and financial exposure. While some members have pointed to other societies as examples, the circumstances are not the same. Organizations differ in their structures, resources, and legal frameworks. Smaller associations in other countries may be organized under very different systems of nonprofit law, and some societies have more narrowly defined memberships or activist missions that make political statements less complicated than they are for SCMS, which is international and committed to serving a wide range of scholars. These differences should not be overlooked when making comparisons.
Once again, we know that some may view restraint as weakness. From our perspective, restraint in this context is not a lack of courage but a recognition of the real legal and financial limits we face. Our responsibility is to act with foresight so the Society can remain a home for scholarship and collegial exchange for years to come.
How does SCMS respond when behavior at the conference violates community standards?
The Board takes immediate action whenever behavior at the annual conference compromises community safety or violates our Code of Conduct. We cannot comment about incidents as doing so could create legal risks as well as compromise member privacy. We can say that protecting the safety and well-being of our members so that everyone can thrive in a professional and respectful environment is our top priority.
Did the Board disable Caucus and SIG communications?
During the conference, the Board made the decision to temporarily disable the old messaging system because some messages were so broadly circulated that recipients mistook them for official communications, while others were frustrated that they had no way to opt out of receiving said messages. The change was not only driven by concerns about confusion and misuse, but also because the previous system exposed the Society to potential liability risks. Updating the system was necessary to protect both our members, the organization, and to preserve reliable channels for communication about Caucus/SIG business. We have already received positive feedback from members who have found the updated platform to be a clear improvement. Messages now arrive directly in inboxes in a consistent format, and SIG and Caucus leaders retain the ability to communicate with their groups. By moving to a system that clearly identifies senders and routes messages directly from elected leaders to group members, we hope to have strengthened and streamlined members’ ability to connect and build community.
Why did the Board change the nomination process?
The Board, at the request of the Nominating Committee who wanted a list of members interested in Board leadership to streamline their discussions, began exploring revisions to the nomination process in Fall 2023, with the goal of making it more inclusive and accessible. While we had hoped to introduce the change earlier, we are pleased that it is in place for the current election cycle.
Previously, our bylaws included a “petition rule” stating that members could gather 50 signatures to put a candidate forward. This “petition rule” raised long-standing questions of interpretation. Some understood it to mean that gathering 50 signatures guaranteed a spot on the ballot, while others viewed it as only qualifying a candidate for consideration by the Nominating Committee. The ambiguity, combined with the fact that automatic ballot placement risks inflating the ballot to an impractical size, created the possibility of unfair advantages for candidates with large, organized networks. This could have led to slates that reflected popularity rather than qualifications or service and undermined SCMS’s commitment to broad representation and balanced governance.
After consultation with the Society’s counsel, the Board voted to remove the petition requirement to make the process more inclusive. Members can now nominate themselves directly through the SCMS website. As always, nominations are reviewed by the Nominating Committee, which is tasked with assembling a balanced and representative slate. In doing so, the Committee considers many factors—the current makeup of the Board; the nominee’s disclosed race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, geography, discipline, research focus, institutional background, degree history, career stage, and professional experience, among others. Similar considerations guide appointments to the Nominating Committee itself.
The Nominating Committee is composed of volunteer members whose names are publicly listed on our website. With logistical support from the office, they prepare a slate of candidates for Board review. The Board then finalizes the ballot, which is confirmed once nominees accept or decline the invitation to stand for election. As with all personnel matters, deliberations remain confidential, but the process itself is designed to protect fairness and transparency.
In short, these changes have made it easier for members to nominate themselves while preserving a structure that reflects the diversity and breadth of our field. Our goal is to make the process more democratic and inclusive.
Why doesn’t SCMS hold a hybrid conference?
Hybrid would mean running a full in-person meeting and a simultaneous virtual version. Our annual in-person conference already costs about $400,000 to organize and run, nearly half of our yearly budget. Hybrid formats would add substantial costs we cannot sustain without risking insolvency or dramatically increasing conference registration costs by hundreds of dollars per member. We are exploring options for supplemental virtual events, but we cannot replace the in-person meeting or add a full hybrid model at this time. For more information and answers to questions about virtual and hybrid models, please see the General Conference Guidelines and Procedures section of our website.
What is the Board doing to support international and trans members?
We recognize that travel, especially for our international members and our trans community, can be difficult, uncertain, and in many cases unsafe. While we cannot undo those barriers, we are committed to doing what we can to support members who face them. Here’s what we’ve done so far:
We know these measures cannot resolve every barrier our members face. These efforts are not the end of the conversation. We will continue to work creatively with our members to find ways to make participation possible for as many as we can.