On a Code of Ethics

Dear Editor:

Does anybody out there remember that the AHA has adopted a code of ethics for historians? Or has anybody noticed that it did so twice, in 1974 and 1987? In the 1970s, as Perspectives (May/June, 1987) put it, “the chief areas of concern were threats from the outside the profession” and the first statement emphasized those. Later, concern grew over “inter­nal or self-generated threats to profes­sional integrity such as plagiarism, sexual harassment, recruitment prac­tices, and other lapses in professional standards.”

Having participated during recent tenure on the Council and Professional Division in developing the 1987 Statement on Standards of Professional Con­duct, I am troubled that it seems to be slipping already into that Orwellian memory hole down whlch the statement of 1974 vanished.

It is not as if the AHA officers or staff tried to keep it secret. From early 1985, when the Professional Division began drafting a  new statement in response to calls from members, Perspectives carried repeated progress reports for more than two years. Drafts circulated to the Research and Teaching Divisions and to Council. In December 1986, Perspectives published a draft and invited comments and at the Chicago meeting that month about forty or so people turned out for a session to discuss the draft. In 1987, the Council unanimously adopted the final version, which Perspectives published in September 1987.

The statement speaks to standard integrity and to the rights of historians in scholarship, teaching, and public service in ways that mostly affirm the obvious. For example, it enjoins fair practice in recruitment, including among other things truth in advertising. Job criteria, it states, “should not be altered without reopening the search.” Supplementing the statement are an addendum that speaks more fully to the issue of plagiarism and an “Addendum Policies and Procedures” (Perspectives, March 1988) which outlines the process by which the Professional Division receives and investigates complaints of violations.

Ignorance of the statement, whether willful or negligent, may lead to careless and harmful acts. Broader knowledge should encourage more careful procedures and better morale among those who wax cynical over the unprofessional conduct of a few.

The recent reminder at the beginning of the Employment Information Section of the newsletter strikes me as too inconspicuous to draw much notice. I hope, therefore, that the present officers and staff of the AHA will consider more concerted efforts to educate and remind all members and not just advertisers in the EIB that we do indeed have an ethics code. It would help also to republish it in the American Historical Review, where it would become more permanently a accessible and in any other historical journals you can persuade to reprint it.