Washington Notes, May 1985

Spring in Washington is the time for cherry blossoms and tour buses; the federal city never looks better than dur­ing this brief season. Amid the flora, the machinery of the Association’s govern­ment grinds vigorously on. March and April see the meetings of the three divisional committees: Professional, Teaching, and Research. The Commit­tee on Women Historians also holds its major annual business meeting in March, and in May the Finance Com­mittee of the Council and the Council itself convene for a two-day session. That meeting establishes the AHA’s budget and policies for the fiscal (and academic) year 1985-86.

The rigors of the calendar and print­er’s deadlines do not permit many of these important occasions to be report­ed to the membership in this last issue of the spring. We are able, however, to summarize the Professional Division’s and the CWH’s meetings.

The most important single issue of the Professional Division Committee was its consideration of the question of a code of ethics for historians. Although no single case of ethical concern is pend­ing on the committee’s agenda, the number of recent individual cases has heightened concern about ethical stan­dards for historians—their clear defini­tion and their widespread dissemina­tion. The Professional Division found that much material exists in which the duties and standards of historians have been codified and promulgated by the Association. It found that there is no single, clearly stated, current publica­tion that assembles all relevant material in one place. The principal repository for ethical criteria is the report of the 1975 Association Committee on the Rights of Historians, chaired by Shel­don Hackney, now President of the Uni­versity of Pennsylvania. That report lays down seventeen standards for historians. Although the principal thrust of the report is concerned with historians’ rights, it also deals firmly with histori­ans’ duties, that is, the ethical standards to be observed within the profession. The Professional Division is recom­mending to the Council that it be authorized to repackage this material, supple­menting it where necessary, with a view to its renewed and widened dissemina­tion.

The Professional Division also com­pleted its plans for two sessions to be held at the December annual meeting in New York City—one on the code of ethics and the other on the profession’s new collaborative movement between secondary and post-secondary faculty (the History Teaching Alliance). The Committee considered two matters of interest to the Committee on Women Historians: the Association’s “Guide­lines for Hiring Women Historians” and the question of salary equity. On the former and with the agreement of the CWH, the Association endorsed the continued publicizing of the “Guide­lines” in Perspectives.

On the question of salary equity, the two committees reviewed the salary evaluation kit developed by the Ameri­can Association of University Profes­sors. The two committees concluded that the kit is a valuable tool for univer­sities and colleges to use for self-exami­nation. A large department, or indeed a group of departments in the humanities and social sciences, can test its own re­cord of fairness in salary distribution by sound statistical means. If the institution is in good shape, it may seek legitimate kudos, such as through advertising its good standing; if it finds itself laggard, it can quietly begin measures to improve its record, perhaps before receiving crit­icism for its shortcomings.

Another matter acted on by the Pro­fessional Division was a change in the existing Association standard for con­sidering intervention on behalf of for­eign historians in trouble with their country’s authorities. The Committee has recommended to the Council a clari­fying statement to stress that, though hostile interference in the professional activities of historians is always of con­cern, the Association is equally con­cerned with the defense of their human rights as an end worthy in itself. The statement stresses the collegiality of this obligation on historians as on other dis­ciplines.

The Committee on Women Histori­ans met on March 29 and considered a substantial agenda. Many of its items were matters of continuing interest to the committee and the Association on such topics as pay equity, part-time em­ployment, open advertising of position vacancies, the National Endowment for the Humanities and women’s history, the proportion of women among the reviewers of books in the American His­torical Review, and topics for committee­ sponsored sessions at the next two annual meetings. The Committee voted to move ahead with a new edition of the Directory of Women Historians, with a target date of 1986, in order to keep  to the five-year cycle for new editions of this valuable reference work, established as a result of recommendations of the Rose Committee and first published in 1976.

Furthermore, the CWH heard an en­couraging report on the progress to­ ward an exhibit and conference on Women in the Progressive Era, which CWH is developing in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution for two years hence. The Committee reviewed with concern the lack of responsiveness of the International Committee of His­torical Sciences to developments in women’s history in its planning of the program for the Stuttgart 16th World Congress of Historians next August. It noted that early development of pro­gram suggestions will be necessary in the next cycle, since the short time frame between the ICHS call for papers and its dissemination through national historical associations’ newsletters makes reaction far less effective than advance planning.

The Committee discussed with ap­proval the child-care facilities the AHA has operated at every annual meeting for the past decade, even though the cost of the facilities exceeds payments for care by five-fold. The Committee commended the Association for its maintenance of this facility, making sev­eral suggestions to alleviate the fiscal burden by publicizing the facility and encouraging greater use of it.

Finally, the CWH is in the developing stages of the idea of holding a state-of­ the-art conference on women’s history, its achievements and areas of further development.

The Research Division will meet on April 12, after this Perspectives has gone to press. Its agenda will include the selection of Beveridge Fund recipients of small research grants and recommen­dations to the ACLS on relative prior­ities among the many international his­torical meetings in the summer of 1985. These recommendations will assist that body in selecting recipients for its travel grants. A large number of other matters concerning archival and access matters will also occupy the Division’s time.

The Teaching Division Committee meets on April 13 to consider, among many other items, its own long-term agenda. It will review progress on the new pamphlet series, the early action of  the OAH-NCSS-AHA History Teaching Alliance,. and discussions with the Society for History Education for a clos­er cooperation between that organiza­tion and the AHA.

Project ’87 has been very active dur­ing March and April, as have a number of other organizations interested in the bicentennial of the Constitution. As our American historian members will readi­ly recall, the road to Philadelphia began with the convening at Mount Vernon in late March 1785 of Maryland and Vir­ginia representatives to discuss commer­cial problems and the navigation of the Potomac. On March 28, 1985, the Secre­tary of the Army, John O. Marsh, Jr., and the Regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, Mrs. Thomas Dunaway Anderson, staged a spectacu­lar 200th anniversary observation of the signing of this agreement, with the par­ticipation of the Army’s “Old Guard” fife and drum corps and three platoons of continental soldiers in appropriate buff and blue costume. The Secretary, the Regent, and other dignitaries plant­ed a hemlock sapling on the very spot where General Washington did the same exactly 200 years earlier.

Three days later Project ’87 put on a conference to mark the same event. It began with a splendid dinner hosted by the Chief Justice in the Supreme Court Building on April 1. The following day over a hundred scholars, government leaders, and business figures met in the conference center at Mount Vernon, close to the mansion, in whose dining room Maryland and Virginia had reached agreement. One of their deci­sions was to convoke a larger meeting of additional states in 1786 at Annapolis to discuss wider commercial and financial problems. The keynote address of our conference was by the Secretary of Commerce, the Honorable Malcolm Baldridge, and it appropriately remind­ed attendees that commerce then as now was one of the chief engines of govern­ment. He was followed by leading schol­ars reminding all present of the close interconnection between these ele­ments, and by knowlegable leaders in the field of fund-raising and grant-mak­ing, who advised us on how to obtain the resources for the continued work of Project ’87. One problem we face is the continued absence of a federal commis­sion on the bicentennial. Even though statutory authority for a commission has existed since September 1983, no ap­pointments to it have yet been made.

The following day the co-chairs of Project ’87 for the American Political Science Association and the AHA, together with key members of the head­quarters staffs of the two organizations, met with the Secretary of the Smithson­ian Institution and key assistants to dis­cuss various bicentennial plans and to ensure continued close collaboration.

Another matter of vital concern to the membership is nearing final action, namely the selection and appointment of a new editor of the American Historical Review. The new editor will take the helm on September 1, in this the nin­etieth year of the Review. The new editor will succeed a long line of distinguished editors starting with J. Franklin Jame­son and culminating in Otto Pflanze, the present editor. The joint selection com­mittee of the AHA and Indiana Univer­sity has reviewed and interviewed a strong list of candidates, and negotia­tions are now under way with the com­mittee’s first choice.