The Evolving Annual Meeting

John Dichtl

With the Washington conference four months past and Memphis upon us in only eight, the OAH office is undertaking a new effort to assess annual meetings. In addition to ensuring a fair representation of subfields in American history and involvement by historians inside and outside the academy, we hope to make the annual conference more affordable for more members. Our goal is to ensure that the annual meeting is as inclusive of and useful to as many historians as possible.

During the past few decades, the OAH Annual Meeting has grown rapidly in size and complexity as it has accommodated an increasingly diverse membership. Since the early 1970s—as the profession opened up to new demographic groups, new subfields emerged, and history grew beyond the walls of the university—the overall number of events on the annual meeting program expanded by 236 percent. (Our Washington meeting was especially large because it was held in conjunction with the National Council on Public History, but upcoming meetings in Memphis and beyond are likely to be just as large.) Meanwhile the total number of members has remained about the same.

Is the evolving conference fulfilling the expectations of OAH members? Conference attendees this spring received a brief email survey upon their return home from Washington, designed to explore that question. A few thousand other OAH members who had not come to Washington got a revised email questionnaire in June. More than 550 individuals in all responded.

When asked about the factors affecting their decision to attend an annual meeting, most members chose “topics of sessions and quality of scholarship presented” as the key influence. For those who had been to the Washington meeting, the “appeal of the meeting site city” ranked next, followed by their desire to see “friends and colleagues.” The “overall cost of the meeting” was a remote fourth. Respondents who had not attended and were referring to OAH annual meetings in general ranked both the “overall cost” involved and the “appeal of the meeting site city” second, with “time of year the meeting is held” and “friends and colleagues” tied for a somewhat distant third. The major difference between the two pools of responses was that for those who had gone to the 2002 meeting in Washington—who had already proven themselves able and willing to pay the expenses involved—the presence of “friends and colleagues” was a stronger factor in their decision to attend. For those who had not been to Washington, “cost” was more significant. For both groups the “appeal of the meeting site city” was one of the more important reasons to attend.

For both groups the usefulness of the specific sessions and papers—the overall scholarly quality of the conference—was the key factor in their choice to come to the annual meeting. Nearly three-quarters of those who had been to the 2002 Washington meeting rated the “general quality of sessions” as “good” to “very good,” 9 percent said it was “fair,” and a surprising 15 percent told us they had not attended any sessions. More than half of those responding to the post-Washington questionnaire were kind enough to provide written comments. These ranged widely, but slight patterns emerged. Eleven percent of the respondents elaborated their thoughts on the positive (6 percent) and negative (5 percent) aspects of sessions. The few detailed criticisms offered were concerned with the lack of “prominent historians” and “political history” or “foreign policy” on the program.

Program committees and the OAH office hear these complaints about lack of representation each year and have attempted various remedies. We will continue to build these parts of the annual meeting program, but the truth is that too few paper or session proposals in these areas are ever submitted. Looking through our recent session and paper proposals records, I can only find four on foreign relations in 2001, two in 2002, and three in 2003. In the prolific field of colonial history there were only two session or paper proposals in 2001, five in 2002, and two in 2003. Program committees have worked hard to solicit and otherwise create sessions in these and other under represented subfields, but the surest remedy is to receive more proposals.

It might be startling for some to hear that we could use more session and paper proposals—of all kinds. Program committees begin with the raw pool of responses to the Call for Papers, which, on average, brings in about 75-100 complete session proposals and 60-80 individual, often wildly divergent, papers. These numbers have held steady for the past decade. About 85 percent of sessions submitted are accepted. The percentage of single papers accepted is much lower and varies according to the committee’s capacity to match papers and build sessions.

Of course, to make the meeting program more inclusive, the cost of attending must be kept down. Survey respondents confirmed that “overall cost” was an important consideration in their deciding whether or not to attend. For at least twenty-five years we have relied on larger convention hotels, both to keep the conference sessions in one locale and because only big hotels have sufficient space for the book exhibits. Along with the use of large convention hotels comes a price for the use of their vast meeting spaces. OAH members pay this price by filling up the block of sleeping rooms that OAH guarantees the hotel it will fill. Meeting space in convention centers can be even more expensive, but smaller cities like Memphis are willing to negotiate to bring a meeting like OAH’s to town. OAH Convention Manager Amy Stark is working to keep the cost of guest rooms down, and, for example, we switched plans for San Diego in 2005 to San Francisco just last month after negotiating a contract with the San Francisco Hilton that beat their southern competitor’s room price by $30. Also, we have reserved a block of rooms for graduate students at a 40 percent discount. We are negotiating a multi-year contract that may secure rooms for the very reasonable price of $185 in New York City—in 2008.

Both of the surveys we sent out queried respondents about other ways to keep the overall annual meeting costs down. Asked if they would prefer to see OAH meetings in smaller, less expensive cities, two-thirds told us to “alternate between” “larger” (Chicago, New York, Washington) and “smaller” (Memphis, Providence, Richmond) cities. One-quarter said to go with “smaller cities.” Asked if they would attend the conference during a different, less expensive time of year, about half said they would and half preferred not to change. We will continue to explore the options.

Annual meetings serve many purposes, and members choose to attend for a variety of reasons, but in general we all want the same thing. Historians need to come together periodically to discover fresh scholarship and teaching ideas, expand their networks, and be inspired by the example and ideas of their colleagues. The challenge will be to expand the annual meeting to fit the needs of a diverse membership while maintaining a communal feel, at a reasonable price.