Change

Lee W. Formwalt

December and January are generally not the busiest months of the year here at Raintree House, home of the OAH executive offices in Bloomington. End of the year donations and renewals increase the mail flow somewhat and in January we begin to gear up for the annual meeting in the spring, but traditionally the pace is fairly measured. This year, however, we have witnessed change both here in Bloomington and elsewhere that has kept the staff hopping since this past fall.

At the end of December, we said goodbye to OAH Business Manager Jeanette Chafin, longest-serving OAH staff member. Jeanette had been working five years at Indiana University, when in 1970, OAH Executive Secretary Thomas D. Clark asked her to join the newly established OAH executive office at IU. Serving under executive secretaries Clark (1970-1973), Richard Kirkendall (1973-1981), Joan Hoff-Wilson (1981-1989), Arnita A. Jones (1990-1999), and myself, Jeanette has been invaluable to both the organization's management team and its institutional memory during her more than thirty years of service. Although now retired, Jeanette, we hope, will join us in Los Angeles in April for the annual meeting where longtime members will have the opportunity to say goodbye. Veteran convention manager Sheri Sherrill has assumed Jeanette's duties of business manager, and preregistration and special projects coordinator Amy Stark will now direct annual meeting operations. This past fall assistant executive director John Dichtl, who has worked at OAH for nine years, completed and successfully defended his dissertation at Indiana University. Dichtl's new duties have been broadened as he moves into the position of deputy executive director.

Other events outside Bloomington have kept us busy as well. This year's closely contested presidential election raised the historical interest of Americans--and despite the inevitable comparisons to 1800, 1824, 1876 and 1888, there's never been an election quite like that of 2000. Responding to members' concerns, I wrote Florida Secretary of State Kathryn Harris encouraging her and her staff to insure that the 2000 presidential election ballots be safely preserved for historians to examine. In the meantime NCC executive director Bruce Craig has been working in Washington to get the ballots "federalized" and thus eventually deposited in the National Archives. Historians interested in this matter should contact their representatives and senators to encourage the preservation and archiving of these valuable documents at the national level.

In the meantime, Congress included in its budget for the Education Department, passed in December, $50 million to improve the quality of American history teaching in our nation's precollegiate classrooms. It is certainly a change for Congress to be so interested in promoting history, and officers of OAH, AHA, and NCC have been meeting to discuss effective ways to help meet the goals established for this important program. This is an excellent opportunity to offer suggestions to the new Bush administration and to incoming Secretary of Education Roderick R. Paige on how to wisely and effectively improve American history teaching.

Historians across the country have long been engaged in one of the most important efforts to revitalize the teaching of history at the precollegiate level, National History Day. Each year hundreds of middle and high school finalists descend on the national competition at the University of Maryland and demonstrate that history is not only alive and well in many parts of the nation, but that these enthusiastic students are its bright future. After discussions with NHD executive director Cathy Gorn, we decided to give OAH members a taste of this enthusiasm and the excellent quality of historical work at the annual meeting in Los Angeles. Join us for a short NHD presentation there at the opening night plenary session with Bill Ferris.

While we become more interested than ever in the practice of American history at the precollegiate level, historians are also concerned about the employment opportunities for the newest members of the profession--new and recent Ph.D.s. The corporatization of the university and the growing reliance of administrators from major research universities as well as community colleges on part-time and adjunct faculty and graduate students has reached scandalous proportions. Last year AHA president Eric Foner and OAH president David Montgomery made this issue an important theme for their terms. The AHA established a part-time and adjunct faculty committee to address the crisis. Rather than duplicate these efforts, the OAH executive board voted in St. Louis to request formation of a joint committee with the AHA and thus pool the resources of the two major national history organizations. The joint committee met for the first time at the AHA annual meeting in Boston last month and decided that the committee needed to convene more frequently. So a second meeting has been scheduled at the OAH annual meeting this April in Los Angeles. The committee is already examining the results of the national survey on part-time and adjunct faculty concluded last year by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (led by MLA, AHA, and OAH among others). The survey, reported on in the Chronicle of Higher Education, AHA Perspectives, and OAH Newsletter (see November 2000 issue), indicates just how pervasive the reliance on part-time faculty and graduate students has become. OAH and AHA will examine the possible ways they can stop and hopefully reverse this trend and look closely at what the Modern Language Association is doing. At its recent annual meeting, MLA voted to publish the names of four- and two-year institutions where tenured and tenure-track faculty teach half or more of the credits offered in English and modern languages.

In our last issue of the Newsletter, I indicated a number of changes we will be implementing at the OAH annual meeting in Los Angeles in April, including regional receptions on opening night and Sunday morning chat rooms. We have also redesigned the Annual Meeting Program to make it more user friendly. You should be receiving your new program in the mail shortly. Please let us know how we can continue to improve our program and all of our services. Our goal at Raintree House continues to be the improvement of service to our members and the promotion of the practice of American history everywhere.