Last month’s issue reported on the Research Division Committee, the first of the three major divisions of the Association to assemble for its autumn session of business. Meetings of the Professional and Teaching Division Committees followed.
Like the Research Division, the Professional Division also had one major item of business, which occupied the lion’s share of its business day. The Professional Division concentrated on its draft Statement of Standards of Professional Conduct, which is carried in full on page 3 of this issue. Readers will recall that the Division has spent over a year on consultations, discussions, and drafting, and that one part of its work, a statement on plagiarism, has already been approved by the Council and was carried in full in the October Perspectives (p. 7).
The present draft Statement on other professional standards was hammered out by the Committee during a full morning of debate and redrafting. Unlike the work of almost all other committees in AHA recorded history, the Professional Division Committee’s drafting efforts resulted in a shorter and sharper product than it started with!
The Committee then focussed on two specific cases of apparent, serious plagiarism of the work of Association mem bers and decided to further pursue its inquiry into one case and to protest again to the publisher in the other. The Committee considered the continuing problem of too many gender-segregated sessions at AHA annual meetings and decided to reinforce the language in the Association guidelines for program committees, designed to further reduce the problem.
It also approved a policy statement (see page 5) on the operation of the Job Register at annual meetings. The policy is designed to improve the efficiency, dignity, and the fairness of this ancient tool of our profession. The Committee decided to refer to the AAUP the problem of goals-oriented job contracts, which seem to be popping up in some academic institutions. It reviewed the status of foreign historians in four foreign countries whose rights appear to have been violated by their governments and directed the executive director to communicate the Association’s concern to the governments.
The Teaching Division Committee met in its turn on October 31. The Division had several major projects to consider in various stages of development. It completed action on a very interesting proposal from the University of Florida to assume major responsibility for the core support of the History Teaching Alliance, recommending its acceptance to the Council.
The Alliance, with its innovative program of building local associations of secondary and post-secondary teachers, has proved to be a major success for its sponsors, the National Council for the Social Studies, the Organization of American Historians, and the AHA. Funding organizations have registered their strong approval of its successes so far, and we hope for continued success and a permanent base from which to build on the strong beginnings of the Alliance’s first year and a half.
The Division further developed a proposal to establish an award for distinguished teaching to be given annually to a teacher who has stimulated, inspired, and launched the career of an important research historian. This proposal will be taken to the Council for consideration. A proposal for developing a conference to increase the number of history graduate students from the minorities was discussed, and further action planned, as were a number of other grant proposal ideas that had come to the Division for suggestions.
Finally, the Division reviewed with enthusiasm the Association’s project for the development of a twenty-pamphlet series to aid teachers working in survey courses outside the field of American history.
Headquarters staff represented the Association at a highly successful conference commemorating the centenary of the death of Leopold von Ranke, which was organized under the auspices of Syracuse University and held October 16-18. The Association is pleased to have been a cosponsor of the conference, Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, and adds its thanks to those of the University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, which together with the University made the conference possible.
Earlier in October the executive director spoke on behalf of both the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History and the National Humanities Alliance to a special meeting of the Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA) to discuss the art or perhaps craft of lobbying as it affects learned societies. The MLA has long been a generous and effective supporter of causes important to the humanities. Its work was crucial to preventing the confirmation in the Senate last year of an inadequately qualified nominee to be chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Two other lobbying entities were also represented at the meeting.
In late October the Consortium of Social Science Associations organized a luncheon for the new president of the Social Science Research Council, Frederic Wakeman, who previously served as a member of the Council of the AHA. The Association was also represented at a meeting of a new nonprofit body, the Association for Diplomatic Studies, one of whose objectives is to improve the collection and preservation of records relating to US professional diplomacy. Finally, the AHA’s special assistant for women’s and minorities’ affairs organized a meeting in New York of representatives of the Committee on Women Historians with the Ford Foundation to discuss possible conference topics in the field of women’s history, on which the Association hopes to be a prime mover.
