News Briefs, May 1985

College Administrators Challenge AAUP Guidelines on Layoffs: The con­ditions under which faculty may be laid off has been an issue of controversy in recent years in light of the financial troubles besetting many colleges. Now, the American Association of State Col­leges and Universities has gone on re­cord as favoring a new guideline for layoffs. Under the AASCU policy, an institution may lay off faculty to avert any impairment of its “ability to provide high educational quality and individual opportunity” because of “financial exi­gency.” The AAUP’s Recommended Insti­tutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure also identifies “financial exi­gency” as an acceptable condition for laying off tenured faculty, but unlike the AASCU policy an institution must be in the midst of a financial crisis in which its survival is at stake and “which cannot be alleviated by less drastic means.”

The AASCU policy, then, lowers the threshold for the removal of tenured faculty. The Chronicle of Higher Education (Feb. 27, 1985) quotes Paul Strohm, chair of the AAUP’s committee on col­lege and university governance, as say­ing that the new policy statement “would appear to allow programs to be changed without the financial necessity of those changes.”

Jonathan Knight, associate general secretary of the AAUP, stated that “such an approach to governance denies the collegial principle of shared responsibil­ity and is predicated on a hierarchical arrangement of authority that was wide­ly discarded decades ago.”

National Archives Publishes Twenty Year Preservation Plan for the preser­vation of the records in its custody. The plan, which would involve the care of more than three billion pages as well as millions of feet of motion pictures, pho­tographs, maps, and computer tapes, would cost $209 million by the year 2025 if implemented.

Dr. Robert M. Warner, former Archi­vist of the United States, called the pub­lished results of a three-year study “a milestone.” Warner said “the preserva­tion plan is predicated on the necessities of preserving documents with limited resources while serving researchers from the public and the federal govern­ment.

“Our efforts have received timely sup­port from this Administration. The President’s budget request to Congress contains an additional $3 million to launch this program in fiscal year 1986. This brings our total allocation for pres­ervation next year to $9.3 million.”

Dr. Norbert Baer, Chairman of the National Archives’ Preservation Adviso­ry Council and professor at the Conser­vation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, said the plan would “identify new approaches  and challenges and, if implemented, would assure the continued preserva­tion of our nation’s history.”

The plan is the result of several stud­ies conducted jointly by the National Archives and the National Bureau of Standards’ Center for Applied Mathe­matics, which began in 1981. Following a statistically valid survey of the paper records at the National Archives, a com­prehensive preservation plan was devel­oped. Among the recommendations were improved environmental controls, including the redesign of the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning in the National Archives building; storage en­hancement of archival material to slow down deterioration, such as shrink­ packaging, reboxing, refoldering; and reproduction of 97-million pages of fre­quently used documents.

According to Warner, early action is required to prevent the loss of impor­tant information on stencil Mimeo­graph, Thermofax, and Verifax repro­ductions produced during the 1940s and 1950s. The cost of copying these pages will be $13.7 million over the next 20 years.

In addition to the more routine mea­sures, Warner said an estimated 216,000 documents of great historical significance, such as international and Indian treaties and the Papers of the Continental Congress, require intensive laboratory conservation over the next 20 years, at a cost of $6.5 million. An additional $1.3 million is being spent on a state-of-the-art digital monitoring sys­tem currently being developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. This system would measure the most minute deterioration of the Declaration of Independence, the Con­stitution, and the Bill of Rights, which have been on display at the National Archives since I952.

Copies of the report, entitled National Archives and Records Service (NARS) Twenty Year Preservation Plan, are avail­able from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), Springfield, VA 22161. The cost is $10 and the Publica­tion number is NBSIR 85-2999.

The Association internationale d’his­toire contemporaine de l’Europe, an affiliate of the International Committee of the Historical Sciences, was founded in 1968 in Strasbourg by a group of historians who wanted to encourage scholarly communication among histori­ans from the various countries of Europe on themes in contemporary history (nineteenth and twentieth centuries). The regulations governing the Associa­tion are intended to achieve purely scholarly ends.

From 1971 to 1984, a series of collo­quia and conferences have been held in a variety of European cities addressing broad as well as focused issues. For example, the 1978 meeting in Mayence focused on the Congress of Berlin in 1878 while the 1980 meeting in Bucha­rest dealt with European ideas and on war and peace at the opening of the twentieth century.

The Association plans to hold its 1985 meeting in Stuttgart, in conjunction with the International Congress of His­torical Sciences on the theme of govern­mental and private initiatives on behalf of peace from the mid-nineteenth cen­tury to the years of the Kellogg-Briand pact. In 1987 it will convene in Moscow and Leningrad on the theme of the October revolution, 1917-1924 and its impact on European countries. The 1989 meeting planned for Strasbourg will focus on the French Revolution, its impact from 1889 to 1989.

Besides the organization of interna­tional conferences, the Association also supports small study groups working on diverse themes. It very much wants to include scholars working on European problems from outside Europe.

Americans and Canadians interested should write to M. Antoine Fleury, Sec­retary General, Association Internation­ale d’histoire contemporaine de l’Eur­ope, IUEHI, 132 rue de Lausanne, Case postale 36, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland. Individual membership is SF 30; group membership is SF 60, which includes an informative newsletter and membership list.

NEH Grant Awards of Interest to His­torians: The Newberry Library, Chica­go, IL, received $250,000 to conduct a series of summer institutes and regional conferences for secondary school and reservation college teachers designed to bridge the gap between scholars and teachers and to strengthen the teaching of American history in general and na­tive American history in particular.

The University of Florida, Gaines­ville, received $108,843 to conduct a six­ week institute for forty secondary school teachers to be drawn from eight Southeastern states to study African his­tory in the context of world history, American history and geography.

The University of Illinois, Urbana, received $109,766 to conduct a series of workshops on Russian and Soviet cul­ture for specialists in the humanities teaching in colleges and universities throughout the country.

California State University Founda­tion, Los Angeles, received $79,700 to conduct a twenty-day summer institute for fifty Los Angeles social studies teachers on the history of the Consitu­tion.

The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, received $280,000 from NEH to continue cataloging the Soci­ety’s newspapers through a shared com­puter network as part of the NEH­ sponsored United States Newspapers Program.

Teacher of the Year: The 1985 National Teacher of the Year Award was pre­sented to Therese Knecht Dozier, a his­tory teacher at Irmo High School in Columbia, SC on April 17.

Mrs. Dozier was born in Saigon to a Vietnamese woman and a former colo­nel in the German Army  who was sent to Indochina after WWII as a member of the French Foreign Legion.

Mrs. Dozier and her brother were later turned over to an orphanage where they were then adopted and brought to America by an American Army adviser and his wife.

Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc., Atlanta has received a $50,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to help support its project to publish the Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. The edition will focus on King’s speeches and sermons from his theology school essays to his last speech in Memphis. Very little of the material in the planned twelve-volume edition has even been published before.

Mellon Fellows in the Humanities 1985: One hundred nineteen college seniors and recent graduates have been chosen to be the 1985 Mellon Fellows in the Humanities. The Mellon awards seek to insure that the next generation of teachers and scholars in the human­ities in North America’s universities and colleges will include people possessing exceptional critical and creative abilities. The winners of the third annual compe­tition were selected from among 1,425 candidates nominated as showing un­usual promise by faculty members. The new Mellon Fellows include sixty-one men and fifty-eight women intending to pursue advanced study in the human­ities. Thirty-six of the finalists are in­ volved in historical studies.

These winners are: Janet Ann Avgi­kos, Georgia State University ’85, art history; David Stepanek Barnes, Yale University ’84, history; Francine Bar­ron, Princeton University ’85, history; David Avrom Bell, Harvard University ’83, history; Sandra Claire Blankenberg, University of New Mexico ’85, Russian history; Linda Bregstein, Cornell Uni­versity ’85, ancient history; Katharine G. Bristol, Princeton University ’84, history of architecture; Ian Adnan Burney, Brown University ’84, history; Jacob Ithran Corre, University of Chicago ’81, history; Catherine Frances Coyle, Duke University ’85, history; Marc M. Ep­stein, Oberlin College ’85, history (Jew­ish); Leslie Frane, Yale University ’83, history; Richard Alan Heinemann, Brown University ’84, history/interdisci­plinary; Stephen Marc Juarez, Univ. California, Riverside ’85, history; Robin Earle Kelsey, Yale University ’84, art history; David Scott Kushner, Univ. North Carolina ’85, history of science; Norman Kutcher, Wesleyan University ’82, history; Pier Martin Larson, Univ. of Minnesota ’85, history; Nancy Eliza­beth Locke, Univ. of Missouri, Colum­bia ’84, art history; Rene Sue Marion, University of Iowa ’84, history (medie­val); Lisa Norling, Cornell University ’85, history; Karen Perkins, Smith Col­lege ’85, American studies; Amy Good­rich Remensnyder, Harvard University ’83, history; Maria Nicole Riasanovsky, Yale University ’85, history; Martha Richler, Harvard University ’85, art his­tory; Candler Rogers, Emory University ’85, medieval studies; Kirk Eugene Sav­age, Yale University ’81, art history; Michael Benjamin Schwarz, Hampshire College ’84, history; Kenneth Paul Ser­bin, Yale University ’82, history; Nancy Beth Sinkoff, Harvard University ’82, American history;    Helmut Walser Smith, Cornell University ’84, history; John Anthony Svetlick, Arizona State University ’85, history of philosophy of science; Jennifer Ann Taylor, Univ. California, Berkeley ’84, art history; Ann Trautman, Cornell University ’84, art history; Laura Ellen Walvoord, Lawrence University ’85, history; and Ankeney Weitz, Cornell University ’85, art history.