Reconsidering Priorities: Some Responses

From the OAH President
Nell Irvin Painter

Painter

In my last message to you I asked for your feedback regarding OAH priorities. I asked in August: "Do you see the OAH as a professional organization, one whose dues mainly support an annual meeting and the publication of a scholarly journal, a newsletter, and a magazine for teachers of U.S. history? To what parts of the Strategic Plan do you give higher priority than to others? How broadly do you interpret the OAH's mission, in terms of activities and in terms of fundraising?" Perhaps due to the timing of the column—August isn't the best time to find teachers of history focused on their profession—the responses were few, but very, very valuable.

One of the responses expressed skepticism regarding my statement that expenses related to twice moving the meetings had been covered and were no longer an issue. For this valued member, "endowments, as surely you know, are not supposed to be used for bailouts of this sort. . . . I will be reluctant to give generously in the future if the endowment is treated this way." As I said in August, I would not support the moving of any future meeting, for I believe that the OAH must choose between the professional interests of its members, i.e., in an orderly and well-organized annual meeting, and the values (almost no matter how completely I share them) of some, even most, of our members.

What I was trying to express in August was the tension between what we want to do and what we can afford to do—as these choices relate not only to where we hold meetings, but also to how we rank the importance of our activities. Other comments addressed the latter of these matters.

One correspondent touched on issues that the OAH Executive Board has also recently revisited: contingent and part-time faculty. This comment reminded me that more than half of today's history faculty are contingent and/or part-time employees whose working conditions are unfavorable in comparison with those of the favored minority of tenure-track, full-time faculty members. This crucial issue had spurred the creation of a joint AHA-OAH committee, but lately this committee had run out of steam. Agreeing with the correspondent, the OAH is revitalizing this joint committee and urging its members to address the working conditions of adjunct historians. President-elect Pete Daniel intends to make sure this issue once again receives the focused attention it deserves.

Several comments urged the OAH to take more seriously the interests of K-12 teachers of history. In part we are already trying to deal with faculty diversity, through reinvigorating the Committee on Teaching and bringing its work into closer touch with the Magazine of History and through bringing K-12 teachers into the mainstream of the 2008 annual meeting in New York City. However the larger question remains of the place of K-12 teachers within the organization, one I alone cannot answer. Much depends upon the energy K-12 teachers invest in the OAH as full-fledged members. Nonetheless, we need always to keep in mind that K-12 teachers seldom have access to funding support along the line of collegiate faculty. Their time and their resources are severely circumscribed, limiting their ability to participate fully in OAH activities, especially in the meetings of committees. In 2006 I was disappointed to learn that members who would have been happy to serve on OAH committees had to decline my invitation because the costs associated with attending committee meetings could not be met. Obviously travel expenses prevent full participation of members at many different kinds of institutions, but I suspect that K-12 and community college historians are particularly vulnerable to the imposition of travel expenses.

The actual fact of lack of funding for participation in OAH activities—from attendance at annual meetings to taking part in committees—brings me back to the basic fact I sought to highlight: the OAH's financial inability to fund all the activities it should in order to serve the needs of a diverse membership. One member of the Executive Board read my column as a statement of opposition to activities that would bring K-12 and community college historians into closer touch. This was not at all my intent.

My concern is how to reach that goal in a climate of financial stringency: should we be holding conferences or should we be supporting these historians' participation in OAH annual meetings, committees, and publications? I would like to be able to fund the travel to annual and committee meetings of K-12 and community college faculty whose institutions do not support this kind of professional activity. Currently this is not possible financially. But is it the sort of spending our membership considers important? I don't think anyone opposes making the OAH more inclusive. The question is how, when we have been running chronic deficits and must continually cut back our activities, that ideal is to be realized.