On page 1 of this issue, members will find the slate of candidates for elective office in the Association, which was assembled by the elected nominating committee in accordance with our constitution. That task is one of the most difficult and responsible duties related to our governance, and the nominating committee has done a superb job. The committee’s first concern must always be the quality of candidates, and a quick glance at the “ticket” attests to their fulfillment of this criterion. There after, though, it must consider geographic, gender, field of specialty and other sophisticated balances, all without sacrifice of quality. Members will all share in appreciation of the dedicated and hard-working committee’s success- labors on February 7, 8, and 9.
We reported in last month’s Perspectives (p. 1) on the History Teaching Alliance being organized by the Organization of American Historians, the National Council for the Social Studies, and the AHA. This important initiative, we believe, holds great promise of stimulating a marked improvement in the quality of teaching at the post-secondary and earlier levels by interaction and mutual stimulation among all teachers of history. Your headquarters staff has been deeply involved in late February and early March in the process of selecting a full-time staff director to coordinate the organizing and launching of these collaboratives. A large number of attractive and highly qualified candidates have been interviewed and we expect to be “in business” this spring, with the first collaborative institutes this summer.
Historians are not the only group interested in rallying all teaching members of their discipline into an alliance. Headquarters staff have long been interested in the important experiments conducted at such institutions as Yale, University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Stanford in secondary–post-secondary school cooperation. The Clio Project at UC Berkeley has also attracted a good deal of national attention.
In this regard, during late February, we were represented at a fruitful conference assembled at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Princeton at which interested teachers from modern languages, history, English, physics, and other disciplines explored the experiences of foreign languages teachers in organizing successful alliances. We will keep our members informed on the progress of this cooperative endeavor.
Another newsworthy conference in which your staff participated, was the meeting in February of the Association of American Colleges. The February meeting of the AAC, whose president is historian Mark Curtis, served as the occasion for unveiling the association’s final report on the Baccalaureate Degree Project. The hard-hitting report, entitled Integrity in the College Curriculum, has been widely noted in the press and sets the stage for what, no doubt, will be further discussion in higher education about the undergraduate curriculum. Perspectives will carry a full story on the report in its next issue. The report expresses concern about the “decline and devaluation of the undergraduate degree” and makes several recommendations for the restoration of “coherence” and “integrity” in the undergraduate curriculum.
On January 7, then chairman William Bennett issued a memorandum on agency reorganization and program changes at NEH. John Agresto has become the Deputy Chairman, succeeding Geoffrey Marshall who has departed the Endowment. With Bennett’s appointment as Secretary of Education, Agresto has become acting chairman until a new chairman can be confirmed and installed. In addition to some staff changes, the memo announced the creation of a new Office of Preservation that will address the “problem of the physical deterioration of humanities resources” and will undertake “significant preservation activities.” The Endowment is requesting for FY 1986 an appropriation of $5 million for the new Office. The director of the program is Harold Cannon, formerly head of the Research Division, who has been succeeded by Richard Ekman.
