Press Release
Contact: |
Arnita
Jones, Executive Director |
Date: |
May 5, 2003 |
Subject: |
AHA Announces Changes in Efforts Relating to Professional Misconduct |
For Immediate Release
At its semi-annual meeting on May 3–4, 2003, in Washington, D. C., the Council of the American Historical Association (AHA) voted unanimously to develop a series of initiatives aimed at addressing concerns relating to professional misconduct in the practice of history. Instead of adjudicating a small number of confidential cases, the AHA will mount a sustained effort to educate historians, their students, and the public about appropriate standards for research and writing as well as employment practices.
The AHA has ended fifteen years of adjudication because it has proven to be ineffective for responding to misconduct in the historical profession. In place of adjudication, the Association will mount a more visible campaign of public education, explaining why the historical profession cares about plagiarism, falsification of evidence, and other violations of scholarly integrity. As part of this effort, the Professional Division will:
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Promote the Statement on Standards on Professional Conduct as a document other institutions should use when addressing charges of professional misconduct among historians, and revise the Statement to cover a wider range of institutional settings.
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Encourage wider discussion within the historical profession and among members of the public about questions of professional misconduct.
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Develop curricular resources to train students from high school through graduate school about the dangers of plagiarism and how to avoid it.
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Publish a wide range of advisory documents to educate historians and members of the public about why historians care so much about professional integrity, how misconduct undermines the entire historical enterprise, how to prevent it, and how to respond to it when it occurs.
With this action, the AHA Council formally terminates a process of inviting and adjudicating formal complaints that began in the late 1980s. The Council does not believe that the modest benefits to the profession justify the time, energy, and effort that have gone into the process. Moreover, the AHA’s adjudication and due process procedures had several paradoxical and unanticipated consequences:
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Because AHA adjudication was confidential, it had virtually no public impact on the profession. For the most part, only those who complained or were complained against knew the outcome of complaints. Adjudication has not promoted a wide public and professional understanding of what historians mean by scholarly integrity.
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Because the Professional Division only considered formal complaints, this complicated and time-consuming process failed to address many cases of obvious plagiarism and professional misconduct.
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Because the AHA had virtually no sanctions for misconduct, it was difficult to demonstrate that adjudication had serious consequences even for individuals clearly guilty of egregious professional misconduct.
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Because of its wholly appropriate effort to maintain neutrality, the Association felt constrained from commenting publicly about professional misconduct that might come before the Professional Division as complaints. The procedures of the Association rendered it ineffective—indeed, almost silent—in criticizing such behavior.
For all these reasons, the Professional Division spent much of 2002 discussing how it could more effectively combat misconduct in the practice of history. In January, the AHA Council voted unanimously to request that the Professional Division develop a formal process for moving away from adjudication, during which a moratorium on new cases was put in place. The Council has now confirmed its January decision to end adjudication.
The American Historical Association is the oldest and largest professional historical organization in the United States, bringing together nearly 5,000 institutions and more than 14,000 individuals, including college and university faculty, public historians, independent scholars, archivists, librarians, and secondary school teachers. The Association was organized in 1884 and chartered by the United States Congress in 1889; its establishment coincided with the professionalization of history as a discipline in the United States. Over the years, the Association has changed as the discipline and profession have changed, but its central mission has remained unaltered: the advancement of historical knowledge.
To meet and address the varied needs of its members, the Association publishes the American Historical Review, the major journal of record for the historical profession in the United States, and Perspectives, the major national news monthly of the profession. The Association's annual meeting, which is held during the first week of January, is the largest annual gathering of historians in the United States.
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Last Updated: July 18, 2007
