Dear SEM: The Current Crisis and the Future of Ethnomusicology
Matt Sakakeeny
Associate Professor of Music, EthnomusicologyTulane Universitymattsak@tulane.edu
How have threats to universities and granting institutions narrowed opportunities in education, research, and employment for ethnomusicologists? This was the organizing question for the Board-sponsored Roundtable “The Current Crisis and the Future of Ethnomusicology” at the 2025 SEM conference in Atlanta. While focusing on attacks on higher education and cultural institutions in the U.S. since the re-election of Donald Trump, the five participants each contextualized the current crisis within a longer history of struggle for those without employment, contingent faculty, underfunded students, and foreign nationals crossing borders for research and education. With initial support from SEM 1st Vice-President León F. García Corona and Member-at-Large Liz Przybylski, I organized and moderated this urgent discussion with participants Alan Burdette, Shannon Garland, Amelia López López, Alejandrina M. Medina, Gabriel Solis, and myself.
As funding cuts to scientific research have made headlines and shaken-up university administrations in 2025, the arts and humanities have experienced serious downstream effects. Smaller schools like Jacksonville University in Florida made severe cuts to their music department, while elite schools like Harvard and University of Chicago reduced graduate admissions by half or paused applications altogether. These announcements intensified an already concerning pattern of university administrators questioning the value of an arts and humanities education. Without rehearsing the counterarguments to such shortsighted calculations, every indicator points to a future with fewer jobs and fewer opportunities for graduate students entering their chosen fields.
Funding has been halted and staff reduced to anemic levels at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and other federal agencies that provide support for scholars, students, and artists. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) discourse and practice has been prohibited, rights and protections for women and LGBTQ folks have been rolled back, and climate change denial is now official policy. Many universities have responded by asserting their commitments to academic freedom while simultaneously sunsetting their DEI initiatives and negotiating with the government to comply with demands in order to restore funding. We cannot yet estimate the trickle-down effects for research on structural inequality.
SEM Executive Director Alan Burdette and Gabriel Solis, Divisional Dean of the Arts at the University of Washington, related the impact of the current crisis on academic institutions. These senior scholars attested to the unprecedented severity of the tumult in higher education and the need for flexibility and openness to new institutional formations in adapting for the future. Graduate students Amelia López López (Indiana) and Alejandrina M. Medina (UCSD) also underscored the need for new actions and directions but with lessons drawn from historical conditions that predate the current crisis.
In 2019 López formed the International Student Network with a collective of graduate students to sustain “a space for gathering, community, support, scholarship, and joy.” Students with “alien” status were already experiencing acute challenges in navigating the visa process, funding limitations, travel restrictions for fieldwork, and emotional alienation. Highlighting the collaborative care and organizing within ISN, López asks if “un-disciplining our minds, our bodies, and our field is the answer?”
Medina started with a different question – “whom does crisis serve” – to query our attachments to SEM and related institutions. Drawing upon relations of solidarity and fugitivity among trans women in Latin America, Medina aligns with López in a call for care and collaboration in light of institutional histories of injury and exclusion. For Medina, the “fear of losing ethnomusicology as our future” is not universal, and any path forward should begin by asking what is “the purpose of its reform, improvement, and futurity?”
Ethnomusicology is largely aligned with liberal modes of governance that have promised equal access to political representation and capital markets for all people. Around the world, as this center position is under attack from the far right (and the far left), we need to ask what were always the shortcomings of recognition politics and an abiding faith that “inclusion” in political and economic spheres would counter structural inequality. Remember: the arts and humanities were already under the scalpel at many bastions of U.S. higher education. López and Medina remind us that the liberal order was not a safe haven for the communities they collaborate with.
Similarly, as we witness universities abandoning their DEI programs without the slightest hint of pushback, we would do well to remember that those initiatives were subject to a myriad of criticisms, including by the very people who were their intended beneficiaries. Garland related how during the Biden administration and within a “blue state” (California), DEI served as a shield for administrators to gut academic support for historically underserved students, interfere in academic freedom, and lay-off contingent faculty. When investment in students was deemed too “costly,” DEI served as an institutional cover-up. These were issues ethnomusicologists in the U.S. faced before the return of Trump and they point to a crisis that transcends the partisan divides of American politics as well as the current political moment. Where do we go from here?
Along with Garland’s contribution, my own opening remarks pointed to the need for organizing, not only in terms of fugitivity but in terms of political participation in struggles that necessarily require confrontation and compromise. 2025 was also the year that SEM brought a resolution on Palestine solidarity to the membership, an example of political organizing within our institution. Ethnomusicologists who research music and politics have focused on mobilizing protest, voicing resistance, proclaiming refusal, bearing witness, or sensing healing and belonging for aggrieved peoples. We have less to say about organizing, about the backstage labor of coalition building or the unsung mundanities of outreach, recruitment, education, and negotiation. But the problems we face can only be effectively countered with organized responses that leverage power to make political demands on the institutions that govern and employ us. Every struggle requires sacrifice but the price of inaction is always much higher.