Meeting the Demands of Our Members

Lee W. Formwalt

OAH is not only a learned society and professional organization, but it is also a membership association. I thought I would examine briefly what that means and how our membership has changed over the last decade. As we often remind each other here at Raintree House, we can never take our membership for granted. The prosperity of the organization depends on maintaining a viable membership which finds real value in belonging to the leading national association that promotes excellence in the practice, scholarship, and teaching of American history.

In our efforts to meet our members' needs, we take very seriously the feedback we get from individual historians who call or email us, talk to us personally at the annual meeting or elsewhere, or write comments on their renewal forms. Needless to say, with close to nine thousand members, we have heard concerns expressed all across the spectrum, so our challenge is to address those that affect many of our members and that are in line with our mission.

For example, we initiated the regional receptions on the opening night of our annual meeting, beginning in 2001, to address the concern of a number of younger members, graduate students, and those coming to the meeting for the first time that the bigness of the convention made it less than welcoming. First-timers referred to a feeling of isolation as they moved among thousands of historians without seeing a familiar face. So we created the regional receptions to provide a more downsized opportunity for historians to meet colleagues from their region right at the start of the convention. The receptions have been wildly successful--I guess we should have known intuitively that putting together historians and free beer, wine, and food would be a hit.

Another complaint that we hear is that the OAH annual meeting focuses too much on race, class, and gender and not enough on the more traditional fields of military, diplomatic, and economic history. This is a difficult one to deal with since the sessions selected for the annual meeting program reflect the diversity of the proposals submitted. The program committee does not privilege gender over military history--there are very few military history proposals submitted. So we have proactively solicited sessions in areas which have drawn few proposals. For example, when we were weak on military and early American history, we turned for help to the Society for Military History and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. In selecting themes for future issues of the OAH Magazine of History, we recently decided to publish issues on military and diplomatic history and turned to military historians and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for suggestions of guest editors.

We are the large umbrella organization for American historians; practitioners of more established fields as well as those on the post-postmodernist cutting edge of the discipline should feel at home in OAH. As with all families, we will have our squabbles--indeed this is what keeps our field so alive and exciting--but we hope that our respect for our colleagues and for the profession will keep us connected. And when American historians are attacked for "revisionism," all of us should see this as an attack on the profession, on the very heart of what American historians have been trained for generations to do. When the executive board meets this month in Boston, we will be discussing this very issue--how do we respond to the growing number of charges in the media that American historians are too revisionist and are teaching their students to hate their country. I think we have to educate our fellow citizens about what historians actually do. Our goal is not to compile facts about the past--but to make sense of the facts, to interpret them, and give meaning to the past. We are not antiquarians, we are historians and in each generation we will continue our struggle to make sense of the past.

In the meantime, the health of our organization is one indication that, despite significant difficulties (like the corporatization of the university and the attendant increase in the excessive use of part-time faculty, to say nothing of the economic hits that many of our state institutions of higher education as well as state museum and historical societies are taking), OAH is flourishing. Membership figures are at their highest since 1994 (see graph:[ small | large ]). The fastest growing segment is our precollegiate teachers who now comprise 11 percent of the membership (click each pie charts for larger version), up from only six percent ten years ago. This reflects the increasing amount of federal money, especially in the form of Teaching American History grants, being spent on improving the quality of precollegiate American history teaching. Once American history teachers recognize themselves as professional historians, they see the value of joining a professional organization like OAH.

The aging of the profession can be seen in the increase in the percentage of emeritus or retired members and the slight decrease in the number of student members over the past decade. Another important change has been the steady decline in the number of lower income members and the increase in the number of higher income members. While on the positive side this generates more dues revenue, it is a cause for concern as the number of part-time and adjunct faculty grows. Despite the fact that we now have the highest number of part-time faculty members in a decade (523), we know that for many part-time professors, keeping body and soul together as they race from one campus to another is their major priority--not membership in OAH and other professional associations. (See page 17 for OAH's and AHA's most recent efforts to deal with this problem).

Another category of membership that has changed over the last ten years is that of the contributing member. Members in this category pay $150 dues, a portion of which is a tax deductible contribution to OAH. This year we have 112 Contributing Members, about the same number we had ten years ago. But in between those years the number sank to a low of 23 in 1998. So why over 100 in 1993 and a rebound in 2003? I suspect this has to do with our efforts to build a culture of philanthropy in OAH. In 1993, we were winding up our first major fundraising effort which resulted in the Fund for American History, an endowment that supports new initiatives in the field. As that campaign closed in the mid-1990s, members thought of OAH less in terms of an object of philanthropy and more as a membership organization to which one paid only one's dues. In the last year and a half, we have once again drawn members' attention to OAH's increased potential when the organization can rely on contributions as well as dues for its revenue. As members endorse this new culture of philanthropy, they are looking for ways to assist OAH and a contributing membership is one of those ways. Increased annual giving is another indication that more OAH members than ever before see the value of an annual gift as well as their annual dues in helping the organization meet its goals outlined in the Strategic Plan recently adopted by the executive board.

While change has certainly characterized our membership over the last decade, there have also been important continuities. The 95 percent of the membership that reside in the U.S. still come from the different regions of the country in the same proportion as they did ten years ago--about a third live in the Northeast (including the Mid-Atlantic north of Virginia); about a fourth are from the Midwest, the original heartland that spawned the Mississippi Valley Historical Association; one-fifth call the South their home; and a sixth live in the West. Another important continuity has been the promotion of good, solid scholarship that is at the core of our organization and that is manifested quarterly in the Journal of American History and annually in our convention. As we prepare for the next convention in Boston in March and our second regional conference next summer in Atlanta, OAH has much to be proud of. But we also have much to do.