Washington Notes, February 1984

As always, the concluding days or the old year were devoted to the annual meeting, our 98th (we had no annual meeting in 1892), which was held in San Francisco in the Hyatt Embarcadero and Sheraton Palace hotels. Happily the meeting proved to be a very good one. San Francisco is always a popular site for our meetings, and our fourth ap­pearance in that charming city (preced­ed by meetings in 1965, 1973, and 1978), judging by many comments over­heard, was a great success. The Program Committee had put together a very large but very good  program. Its size forced us into the expedient of “happy-hour time” sessions, but the at­tendance at almost all sessions was large. We are deeply indebted to the Program Committee, chaired by Bert Wyatt-Brown of the University of Florida, and to the Local Arrangements Committee, chaired by Tom Wendel of San Jose State. Registration totaled 2,241, well up to our historic pattern in San Francisco and only 10 percent below 1982’s Wash­ington meeting. Since members have copies of the Program, we will not at­tempt to provide a summary of its rich variety. We do note, however, that the Program Committee’s effort to strengthen Association ties with our af­filiated societies by organizing jointly sponsored events with thirty-two of them was extremely successful.

The Council of the Association met twice in San Francisco, at the beginning and at the end of the annual meeting, Some of its many activities are reported elsewhere in this issue, but we will sum­marize its manifold agenda here.

Perhaps the most important of the Council’s actions was its approval of a proposal to invest substantially in labor-saving computer equipment for the American Historical Review. To illustrate that point, let us note that when mem­bers receive their February issue of the Review, the presidential address of Philip D. Curtin contained in it will be a historic first. Curtin’s address was elec­tronically typeset by his own hands. He prepared it on his personal-computer word-processor; it was edited from his disc in Bloomington on rented computer equipment and transmitted to the Byrd Press mainframe computer in Richmond via the AHR‘s modem. Thus the electronic typesetting originated in Curtin’s study and was performed by his hands. That was made possible by the experience the Review‘s editor and staff have gained over the last year and a half with a rented personal computer and printer. They proved that preparing only the articles sections of the Review, which was all that the small computer’s capacity would permit, saved just under $7,000 for the first year of such opera­tions. We believe that by adequately equipping the Review to handle the full issue, including the book reviews, index, and other sections, we can recover the cost of the equipment in three years. Electronic printing is clearly the wave of the future, although most learned jour­nals are just beginning to experiment with it; the AHR is therefore in the forefront of technology, just as it is in content.

The second large issue taken up by the Council concerns the whole compli­cated issue of access to documents by scholars, particularly the present feder­al government attempts to restrict such access by a variety of means. You will find the full text of the Council’s resolu­tions on the problem of classification of government papers and on the perpetual “gag” rule proposed for government officials and former officials with access to highly classified material elsewhere in this issue (pp. 3-4). The Council also voted to join the Organization of Ameri­can Historians and other groups partici­pating in the lawsuit being brought against the National Security Agency for its 1982 “raid” on the George C. Marshall Library in Lexington . Virgin­ia, by the Center for National Security Studies. That raid sequestered and im­posed classifications on personal docu­ments in a private collection donated some years ago to the library for the express purpose of making them available to scholars.

The governing Council also focused on several matters relating to our next two annual meetings. The 1984 centennial meeting will be in Chicago. The Council confirmed its earlier approval of the idea of holding a special, centen­nial dinner party for those wishing to celebrate the event in this fashion, but also decided that the regular general meeting, which is the occasion for the presidential address, and which includes the prize awards, should be con­tinued in its present format. The Council was motivated by its desire to avoid any appearance of reverting to the pre-1960 system of having these events as part of the Association annual dinner, which used to be the central ceremony of the annual meeting. They became steadily smaller as a growing number of members could not afford the steadily mounting cost of such wining and din­ing. The Council also approved the idea of testing in Chicago the idea of a reception for attending graduate students, so that  they might meet informally the “lions and tigers” of the profession. Council members remembered their own early annual meetings at which they regularly sought to see, hear, and talk to the giants of those days. Finally, regarding the 1985 annual meeting, the Council agreed to consider a site in New York City or other mid-Atlantic or New England city, for which attractive terms could be negotiated.

Among other matters the Council approved were the work of the Committee on Committees and the establishment of two other committees. The elected Committee on Committees, under the Constitution, annually nominates mem­bers to the Council to fill vacancies on the large number of standing and spe­cial committees of the Association, and the numerous book prize committees. other than those filled by the Associa­tion’s annual electoral process. Since not all of the nominees have yet accepted, the full report on approved committee structure membership for 1984 will appear in the next issue of Perspectives. The two new committees approved by the Council are a reorganized and enlarged committee on the popular magazine of history that we are seeking to launch, and a small committee on the Columbus quincentennial, which is al­ready showing signs of becoming the next major celebratory event after the bicentennial of the Constitution and the Federal Government.

The Council approved the recom­mendation of the Committee on Affili­ated Societies that the Charles Homer Haskins Society of medievalists special­izing in Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and Angevin history from the ninth to thirteenth centuries be granted affiliated status. It also directed the Teaching Division to conduct a review of the Association’s pamphlet series with a view to its modernization and revital­ization. And finally, the Council responded to an enquiry from the chair of the Nominating Committee concerning the balance between fields in that com­mittee’s structure, endorsing his desire to continue the committee’s having four Americanist members, three European­ists, and two from other areas.

The annual business meeting of the Association was markedly less animated than that of the previous year. No resolutions had been inscribed for discussion. Following the reports of the officers of the Association, the only subject raised from the floor concerned and strongly supported a matter on the Council’s agenda, namely, the decision to oppose the implementation of National Security Decision Directive 84.

The business meeting also approved the appointments of two new trustees, George von Hassel and Roger Liddell, to fill vacancies on the Board of Trust­ees, and supported by acclamation a resolution of thanks to the program committee and to the local arrange­ments committee. It might be noted here that Finance Committee members had their annual session with the trust­ees in early December and were deeply impressed by the expertise and dedication evinccd by that board to the care of our modest portfolio.

An innovation at the San Francisco meeting was a pilot assembly of departmental chairs attending the annual meeting. Chaired by then president-elect Link, it proved to be a lively and informative session for the fifteen par­ticipants. The shared interests of the chairs were, as might be expected, large­ly managerial: how to assemble data on salary and other benefit levels at com­parable institutions, comparative tenure and promotion evaluation practices, and information the Association might collect and supply for their use. The sense of the meeting was that the gathering should be repeated annually; certainly your headquarters staff found it most useful in pointing to new ways the Association could help departments’ leadership in their work.

Finally, it may be worth a separate paragraph to note the results of the Association’s annual analysis of mem­bership statistics. The good news is that the long and steady decline in our mem­bership numbers has been halted over the last two years, after a “free fall” of nearly 30 percent in twelve years. While total membership has held virtually level for two years, there has been a signifi­cant decline in the number of members in the junior ranks over the past three years. The two lowest categories of dues payers in fact pay less in dues than the net cost of the services and publications they receive, their membership being partly subsidized from the general funds of the Association. Nevertheless, we cannot fail to be concerned for the future at a diminution in their numbers: the Council asked the Professional Divi­sion to consider ways in which this trend could he reversed. At the same  time, over the past three years, the top two dues levels of membership have increased numerically by 39 percent, a strong sign of growing support at the associate professor and professor levels and their equivalent outside of aca­deme.