Late winter and early spring in Washington are regularly characterized for the Association headquarters by a flurry of legislative advocacy efforts. This year we have added close monitoring of two key executive branch appointments of great interest to historians. By the time this issue of Perspectives reaches our fellow members, we expect that the presidential appointments will have been announced for the vacant positions of Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and of Archivist of the United States.
Dr. Lynne Vincent Cheney, senior associate editor of Washingtonian Magazine, has been named for chair of NEH and Dr. John Agresto, currently acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is ·under consideration for Archivist. Both vacancies have existed for about a year, and the AHA is hopeful that new leaders will be in place by next summer at these two agencies, which are so important to historians and other scholars.
Early spring of this year also brought a number of hearings in the Congress relating to appropriations for such “user friendly” agencies as NEH, NARA, and the Library of Congress. This year, by bad luck, the Library of Congress has been hit by a serious funding shortfall. Its regular appropriation for the present fiscal year was trimmed last fall by over $8 million, but the operation of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction act shocked it with another $9 million slash. The combined total has been very damaging to its hours of service and to acquisition, cataloguing, and preservation. One of the supposed virtues of GRH has been that it requires no value judgments. Blindfolds in the traditional portrayals of justice serve to stress impartiality, but in the operation of government, blindness and mindlessness appear to be interchangeable!
At any rate the AHA has moved rapidly to rally to the Library in its hour of need. All three of the lobbying organizations in which we participate took a hand; the executive director appeared as a witness for the Library before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, representing both the historians’ National Coordinating Committee and the Consortium of Social Science Associations. Dr. Elizabeth Griffith, 1982 Jameson Fellow of the AHA and the Library of Congress, appeared for the National Humanities Alliance. Both sought to reinforce the eloquent and moving testimony of Daniel Boorstein, Librarian of Congress, a few days earlier.
Letters from Association members to the Representatives and Senators supporting restoration next fiscal year of the injurious funding cuts will be helpful. Chairman Fazio assured us informally after the hearing that though his subcommittee is very sympathetic to the Library’s case, this is a matter where it needs help from constituents of every member of Congress to reinforce its recommendations.
Two weeks later there were appropriation hearings on the same day in the House and Senate on the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Archives and Records Administration appropriations at which headquarters staff were present to cheer on the witnesses. Both hearings went well, notwithstanding the current penurious viewpoint of the federal government.
Closer to home, the first of the divisional committees to hold its spring meeting this year was the Professional Division’s. It met for a full and very long day of work on March 21. By far the most important work on its agenda was a major effort to organize and polish a complete draft of an updated code of ethics for the historical profession. As historians know so well, the passage of time can produce very different concerns in a society. In the early to mid-seventies, when our present code found its evolution and embodiment in the report of the Hackney Committee, the chief areas of concerns were threats from outside the profession. The rights of historians rather than the duties and obligations of historians preoccupied us then. Now, though our rights and above all academic freedom remain of paramount importance, we are concerned with internal or self-generated threats to professional integrity such as plagiarism, sexual harassment, recruiting practices, and other lapses in professional standards not only within academe but also among historians practicing outside of the teaching wing of the profession. The Committee discussed its draft in detail. It will be consulting the other two divisions of the AHA, sister associations, and the Council later this spring, with a view to completing final revisions before the end of this calendar year.
The Professional Division Committee also spent some time considering the AHA’s financial obligations to the NCC, guidelines for contributors and editors of scholarly journals, and with specific cases of apparent plagiarism, tenure review, and professional controversy. It also considered the cases of historians reported to be in difficulties with the governments of Afghanistan and Yugoslavia and decided on a feasible series of actions.
Finally, a number of proposals from the Committee on Women Historians were acted on by recommending action to the Council.
The same weekend the Professional Division Committee met, the Program Committee for the 1986 program convened for two long and arduous days of program making, which resulted in an almost-completed draft. As members know, our annual meeting programs are the sole responsibility of the Program Committee. Winnowing out well over a hundred high-quality panels with several hundred participants, battling the impossible task of scheduling them so that no member will ever suffer annual meeting schizophrenia while choosing between two (or even three or four) sessions is a prodigious and often thankless enterprise for the Committee members. The headquarters staff never ceases to marvel at the dedication, skill, and enthusiasm of these hardworking volunteers.
Headquarters staff have also been working to complete arrangements for the 1987 annual meeting, which will take place in Washington. As members recall, unlike other Associations that plan their meeting sites as much as a decade in advance, the AHA deliberately waits until the relative last minute. That practice, combined with the fact of our end-of-December meeting date increases our negotiating leverage to obtain favorable rates for members’ room charges. Since we may book up to 1,600 rooms, a hotel of that size with no other convention scheduled is desperate for our trade and willing to strike deals that would otherwise not be available. Both the Sheraton/Shoreham complex and the Washington Hilton are vying for our custom for ’87. By the time this issue 1s m your hands, we will have contracted with the more favorable and eager.
One final and gratifying note on another topic of continuing interest to us all. We received very heartening news from a colleague who has recently been in Poland and has seen and chatted with historian Bronislaw Geremek, on whose behalf we have made repeated intercession with the present government of Poland. We are happy to learn he is currently out of prison and that he spoke generously of the support he received from the efforts of the Association.
