The Professional Division of the Association held its fall meeting on November 18. The committee recommended strongly that the useful AHA pamphlet, Careers for Students of History, edited by Professor Sally Kohlstedt, be reissued and advertised to members of the profession for use in promoting history enrollments. It also encouraged the headquarters staff to approach successful business figures who majored in history studies but now work outside of academia, to solicit articles on the uses and value of history in the business.
The committee turned its attention to the question of the rights of historians and asked for an update piece to be prepared for a future issue of Perspectives. The guidelines prepared in 1974 by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Rights of Historians will be reprinted and their relevance to recently reported episodes of infringements made clear.
The division heard reports on a number of imprisoned foreign historians, and in three specific cases authorized the preparation of protests to the governments concerned. It was recognized that it is often difficult to identify the cause of confinement to be the individual’s practice of the profession of history. In the other cases reported, the committee decided to go back to Amnesty International and other organizations to seek further details.
Finally, the committee discussed the growing number of plagiarism cases, deploring the relative ignorance among younger students of the principles involved. It encouraged the Association staff to develop material publicizing the problem and the related ethical and legal issues.
The Research Division followed up on its October meeting with a telephone conference call on November 30, which produced agreement on a revised text of a draft statement on the need for legislation on security classification. Legislation could check the liberty of executive branch unilaterally to deny access to government documents through control of security classification guidelines and standards. The statement will be coordinated with major sister organizations for joint use by historical organizations as an agreed program for reform of this sensitive and important factor affecting scholar’s access to documents. The Research Division laid plans for setting guidelines for future regional research conferences for graduate students, based on valuable experience gained in a recent pilot conference organized by Professors Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in upstate New York. The committee also discussed plans to organize a program time at the 1984 annual meeting on the AHR and its future lines of development. Finally, the committee laid plans to assist the ACLS in its fall round of applications for travel grants for next summer. As members recall, the Research Division makes recommendations to the ACLS concerning the relative priority to be accorded to the many historical conferences outside the US, which assist it in its travel grants decisions.
The 1984 Program Committee held its initial meeting in Washington, November 18-19, under the chairmanship of Professor C. Warren Hollister. A vigorous start was made on the 1984 Program, including approval of many sessions proposed, and the identification of areas in which more proposals are needed. Two members of the History of Science Society’s program committee met with the AHA committee, and a number of joint sessions were planned. The HSS and the AHA will be celebrating their respective sixtieth and one hundredth anniversaries in their joint annual meeting in Chicago 1984. The two associations are working closely to make this double event an outstanding example of close cooperation and shared interests.
We are pleased to report that exchanges with the Soviet historical profession are now back on the tracks. The negotiation of a sixth protocol between IREX and the Soviet Academy of Sciences are now being rescheduled for next spring and the fifth Colloquium of Soviet and American historians is now scheduled for mid-June.
Members may be interested in a random list of other meetings and events in which headquarters staff participated during November and early December. They present a fairly typical picture of the sort of things that occupy and preoccupy the Washington office:
We participated in the Board of Directors meeting of the Consortium of Social Science Associations, of which the AHA is a founding member. COSSA is one of the advocacy groups in which we participate in our effort to advance the interests of the historical profession at the federal government level. Since history is both a humanistic discipline as well as a social science, we are active in both the social science and the humanities group lobbying organizations, as well as being a major participant in our own profession’s National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History (see p. 4 for the regular report of the NCC ‘s director).
COSSA also held a meeting with the former French Minister of Science and Industry, Jean Pierre Chèvenement, in which we participated. M. Chèvenement was interested in COSSA’s organization and activities as a role model for his own country’s social sciences in their relations with the French parliament and executive.
On November 10 we met with the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s congressional fellows staff, together with a group of other organizations that also rely on AAAS to be “den mother” and orientation agent for their congressional fellows. As members know, the AHA, with generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, sponsors three congressional fellows for 1983-84: Dr. Lois Aroian, who is working for Congressman Mervyn Dymally; Dr. David A. Corbin, who is working for the Senate Democratic Policy Committee; and Dr. Marc V. Levine, who is with the staff of the Joint Economic Committee of the two houses.
Association staff participated in a breakfast meeting of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs in late November. This group, composed of the deans of a dozen such institutions, has developed a project to increase the history content of curricula in their schools. We learned that their project, which we have been giving advice on for some months, has now been funded.
Last, but far from least, we were busy on December 2 and 3 with two important committee meetings. The Advisory Board of the Guide to the Study of US History Outside the US, 1945-80, which is being edited by former AHA president Lewis Hanke, met to resolve certain organizational problems that had developed in recent months. Also, the joint committee of the AHA and the American Political Science Association met to discuss the progress being made by Project ’87 and to resolve current questions.
