OAH Constitution

Proposed Revisions to OAH Constitution

In 2003, the OAH Executive Board created an ad hoc committee on the OAH Constitution to consider revisions of the constitution to be approved by the membership and put in place during the OAH centennial year. The committee (Gale Peterson, chair 2003-2006, Fred Hoxie, chair 2006-2007, Linda Shopes, and Jonathan Lurie) consulted with the executive office and made a preliminary report to the executive board in March 2004. After a long hiatus, discussions resumed in 2006 and a final draft of recommended changes was submitted in July 2006. This draft was discussed and revised by the executive board at its spring 2007 meeting in Minneapolis.

The most significant changes recommended by the committee and approved unanimously by the executive board are:

1. Add the office of vice president. The OAH Nominating Board would select this candidate. The vice president would automatically become president-elect and then president. S/he would then serve two (instead of the current three) years after the presidential year. Basically this would move the president’s last year to the front of his/her service. The president would have two years before presiding and two years after presiding. Currently the president has one year before presiding and three years after presiding. The rationale for this revision is that it gives the president another year of experience before presiding. It also eliminates the third year of service after presiding.
2. Give the executive board the power to change bylaws. Currently bylaw changes must be approved by the board and members voting at the annual business meeting. The rationale for this revision is that it streamlines and speeds up the bylaw change process. Now, a bylaw cannot be changed before the next business meeting. Should the board wish to change a bylaw in late spring, it has to wait nearly a year before it can be officially approved. It is standard practice for the boards of not for profit organizations and learned societies to create and alter bylaws without the additional step of securing membership approval.
3. Remove the vote from the executive director and JAH editor as members of the executive board. This would end the peculiar situation of an appointed officer and staff person being accountable to a board on which s/he serves as a voting member. This is an unusual arrangement and is not found in most learned societies. The revised constitution also provides for institutionalizing annual reviews of the executive director, biennial reviews of the JAH editor and five-year reviews of the treasurer.
4. The operation of the business meeting—including the appointment of a parliamentarian—and the use of Robert’s Rules of Order, is now written into the revised constitution, along with a deadline for proposing resolutions to the business meeting.

The committee also recommended and the executive board unanimously approved a number of minor changes to the OAH Constitution. All changes—major and minor—can be found in the revised document below—the full text of the constitution with all the recommended changes. The committee also recommended and the executive board unanimously agreed that the revision history in the footnotes be deleted as part of the constitution. The revision history will be maintained in the OAH archives.

The committee and the executive board recommend that since there are numerous changes, many of them minor, the proposed constitutional changes should be approved in one vote on the entire set of revisions. A ballot and instructions for the ratification of the proposed changes can be found on the back page. We strongly recommend, however, that members vote electronically for or against ratification.  Alternatively, you may use the ballot found on the back page of this issue. All ballots, electronic and paper, must be sent to the Executive Office, P.O. Box 5457, Bloomington, IN 47407-5457, by September 1, 2007. Results will be announced in the November issue of the OAH Newsletter.

View the complete compendium of changes to the OAH Constitution recommended by the ad hoc constitution committee and approved unanimously by the OAH executive board on March 28, 2007. (A copy of the current constitution can be viewed at <http://www.oah.org/about/constitution.html>.)

According to the constitution, clarifying information—and pro and con arguments for changes—must be sent to voters. That information may be found after each section, numbered, set in different type, and with proposed changes.