Annual Report 2008: A Decade in Review

Lee W. Formwalt

• Figure 1: OAH Annual Revenue and Expenses FY1999 to FY2008
• 1999 OAH Membership by Category
• 2008 OAH Membership by Category
• OAH Development Revenue, 2000 to 2008

In 1998, former Executive Director Arnita Jones used her penultimate annual report to reflect on the changes in the organization over the previous decade. Now, ten years later, I take the opportunity of my last annual report to review what the OAH accomplished the last ten years. First and foremost, we are a learned society that is also a membership organization. Membership has seen some significant changes over the last decade. Perhaps most important, we have 1,300 more members in 2008 than we had in 1999. Membership in OAH had peaked in the early 1990s to over 9,100 members, but declined afterward, bottoming out at slightly over 8,000 in 1999. Since then we have increased steadily, peaking at over 9,500 in 2006. While FY2007 ended with a decline of over 600 members, we recovered close to 500 of them in FY2008, ending the year with nearly 9,400 members, our second highest year ever.

Just as interesting as the growth in numbers are changes in various membership categories. Two categories have grown noticeably larger since 1999--History Educator members (from 6 to 20 percent) and members making $80,000 and more (doubling from 5 to 10 percent). A large portion of the History Educator members are enrolled as part of the multimillion dollar Teaching American History grant program through the U.S. Department of Education. Since this is supported by federal grant money, we need to work hard to retain as many TAH members as possible in light of uncertain TAH funding levels in the future. Meanwhile, our highest membership categories are growing, providing a significant revenue impact with dues ranging from $150 to $250. This reflects the salary bracket creep that accompanies the aging of the profession and, from a fiscal perspective, it is important that the number of wealthier members is increasing.

While we have more senior members than we had ten years ago, we have fewer younger members new to the profession. Although this trend does not have as much of a budgetary impact as these categories generate less revenue per member, it is of significant concern for the future of the organization. So why are we losing members in the under $60,000 categories? First, there is the scandalous growth of part-time and adjunct employment of college professors. We are finding many younger historians simply unable to add professional dues to their already strapped budgets. Another factor is that a number of younger historians, who grew up in the age of technology, have gone to institutions that subscribed to the Journal of American History and have had electronic access to the journal both as a student and as a faculty member. If the JAH is the primary reason for joining the OAH, many of them do not feel the need to do so. These troublesome membership issues are currently being studied by the newly formed OAH Strategic Planning Committee and will no doubt play a role in the new strategic plan they will be devising this coming year.

Another noticeable feature of growth over the last decade has been the increase in the number of members at the JAH editorial and OAH executive offices and the overall size of the budget. Since 1970, OAH's international headquarters has been located in Raintree House, an 1840s brick home at the eastern edge of the Indiana University campus. For over thirty years, these wonderful historic facilities met our needs. But in the last decade, as additional staff members were hired, rooms in the house and the spacious hallways were overcrowded with desks, chairs, and computers. We brought our concerns about space to the university which owns the house across the street and now leases it to us. Once membership and several other departments moved to the annex, the work environment improved significantly as did staff morale in both houses.

As staff and operations increased in size, so did the budget. The total revenue, gains, and other support received annually by OAH has grown 67 percent from less than $2 million in 1999 to over $3 million in 2008. Expenses have grown at a similar rate. In the last ten years we have had four years when the change in net assets was negative (2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005). By far, the worst year financially was FY2005, when the executive board voted to move the annual meeting from San Francisco to San Jose over labor issues. This was a much costlier move than the 2000 move from the Adam's Mark Hotel in St. Louis to Saint Louis University over charges of racial discrimination. Although the general operating fund suffered deficits in 2006 and 2007, we ended FY2008 with over a $90,000 surplus. The overall financial health of the organization improved during the last three years due to important development efforts in 2006 and 2007.

Our development plans went hand in hand with the evolution of our current strategic plan. The origins of that plan can be found in William H. Chafe's presidency ten years ago. At its fall retreat in 1998, the executive board hammered out a new mission statement for the organization, which was revised in 2003 and is included in all OAH publications:

The Organization of American Historians promotes excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history, and encourages wide discussion of historical questions and equitable treatment of all practitioners of history.

Another important development resulting from the fall 1998 retreat was a constitutional change that allowed pairing in nominating and executive board elections. The motive for pairing elections was to ensure that underrepresented members in the profession had a voice at the table. As a result, sitting on the executive board in the last decade have been precollegiate teachers, community college professors, and public historians.

Once an institution develops a mission statement, it usually crafts a strategic plan. Two events, however, delayed the strategic planning process for OAH. First, Executive Director Arnita Jones resigned in May 1999 and I did not begin my term until the following October. This five-month hiatus was followed three months later by the Adam's Mark crisis. The Adam's Mark difficulties lasted for two years (the hotel finally dropped its lawsuit against OAH in December 2001). For a history of the Adam's Mark crisis, see <http://www.oah.org/meetings/2000/adamsmark-history.html>.

In the meantime, the OAH auditor recommended that the executive office look seriously at development as a way to insure the organization's financial security. The Adam's Mark crisis demonstrated that OAH members were willing to make contributions to the organization above and beyond their membership dues. At the same time, we looked ahead to the OAH centennial some six years down the road and thought the OAH's one-hundredth birthday would provide an excellent opportunity for serious fundraising.

Conducting a major campaign, however, required expertise that no one in the OAH executive office or on the executive board had. We turned to Campbell & Company, a consulting firm, to assist us in our fundraising efforts. They advised that one of OAH's challenges was it lacked a culture of philanthropy. At the time, OAH members did not think of OAH as a place to make charitable contributions. But OAH could change that situation by hiring a development director, engaging in a spring and fall annual giving campaign, cultivating both its own members and those outside the organization who had a real passion for American history, and developing a strategic plan.

We learned from Campbell & Company that most donors do not make large gifts for an organization's general operations. Rather, they prefer to give to a specific project or operation that they find attractive and that may not be accomplished without additional help. So, from the start, our strategic planning effort was intimately tied to our development efforts. In November 2002, the OAH Executive Board held a strategic planning retreat out of which came the current OAH strategic plan. The plan consists of four main goals--reaching a broader audience; impacting history education at all levels; improving and energizing the annual meeting; and ensuring the financial future of the organization.

In the meantime, we hired a development director and began a serious annual giving effort. Before then, the OAH president usually wrote a letter to members at the end of his or her term in the spring recounting the year's accomplishments and asking for a donation. The letter was sent to those in the higher salary membership categories and generated about $6,000 a year. Since then we have implemented a fall and spring campaign directed to all members, requested contributions for carrying out specific projects in the strategic plan, and encouraged members to make a pledge over five years. This past year, annual giving yielded over $112,000. Development, including major gifts, now accounts for 10 percent of revenue in the annual budget.

A strategic plan is a flexible instrument to guide the organization's growth over several years. It should be revisited on a regular basis and revised as conditions warrant. The executive board is now reviewing our current plan and preparing a new plan that will take us into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Two of the many current strategic plan projects that we have focused on in the last decade are the improvement and expansion of the OAH Magazine of History and the creation of a series of regional community college workshops. In FY 2006, I boarded fifty-two airplanes and met with one hundred OAH members, half of whom pledged a total of $300,000 for the community college workshop project. The Ford Foundation provided an additional $100,000. Between 2007 and 2011, OAH will have presented workshops in nearly every part of the country. Last year our pilot workshop took place at El Camino College in California. This past May and June our second and third workshops were offered in Bloomington, Indiana, and Dallas, Texas. Next summer we will be in Tampa, Florida, and Warwick, Rhode Island. These workshops have been a huge success in reaching out and connecting to the historians who teach more college level American history students than all other professors combined (see Juli Jones's article on page 1).

The other major project that has benefitted from the generosity of OAH members and others is the OAH Magazine of History. The MOH began with Rockefeller Foundation funding back in the 1980s and evolved into a regular quarterly for American history teachers. Originally designed for junior and senior high school teachers, it is now aimed towards those who teach the U.S. history survey in grades eleven through fourteen (high school juniors and seniors and college freshmen and sophomores). Ten years ago, each issue was edited by a guest editor (a specialist in that issue's theme), the OAH director of publications, and an Indiana University graduate student who served as an assistant editor. In an effort to improve both its appearance and its intellectual quality, we sought funding to add color and enhance the quality of paper, as well as hire an in-house editor who had experience teaching U.S. history. The improved quality of the MOH is immediately recognizable and we are quite proud of this important resource for history teachers in high schools, community colleges, and universities. Themes for MOH issues have ranged from the traditional (e.g., World War II Homefront, Lincoln and the Constitution, and Reinterpreting the 1920s) to some of the more recent and cutting-edge (e.g., Sexuality, Black Power and the forthcoming Disability History) to those that connect directly to today (e.g., American Religion, Conservatism, and U.S. and the Middle East). History Educator members receive the MOH as their primary publication, while over eleven hundred regular OAH members subscribe to the MOH in addition to the Journal of American History.

The last decade has also seen significant change in our other publications. Perhaps most significant was the decision nine years ago to publish an online version of the Journal of American History. Together with the American Historical Association, the University of Illinois Press, and the National Academies Press, OAH created the History Cooperative so that AHA and OAH could control their online journals rather than turn those operations over to an outside press. The AHA and NAP have since been replaced by JSTOR; twenty-two historical journals have been added; and the Cooperative continues to grow as an important source for online historical journals. Under the leadership of editors David Thelen, Joanne Meyerowitz, and Edward T. Linenthal in the last decade, the JAH has taken advantage of new technology to make scholarship and its teaching ever more accessible to OAH members. Teaching the JAH and Recent Scholarship Online are marvelous examples of harnessing technology for the benefit of the humanities. The future looks even brighter as we invest more in the JAH's technology efforts.

The new technology also made possible the electronic publication of the OAH Newsletter, the OAH Magazine of History, and the Annual Meeting Program. This has been especially useful for our overseas members who were used to reading the Newsletter a month or two after our U.S. readers, and getting the Annual Meeting Program too close to the meeting time to make a decision on whether to attend. Both of these publications are available to anyone through the internet. The electronic MOH is available to all members and back issues will soon be available electronically through JSTOR.

The last three years have also seen the publication of four new OAH books. In 2003, we began discussions with Palgrave Macmillan about a collaborative effort to publish an annual volume of the Best American History Essays. This project would help us meet our strategic plan goal of reaching a wider audience by selecting and publishing the ten best essays that appeared in various scholarly journals the previous year. By "best" we mean excellent scholarship and accessible writing. A panel of OAH scholars would select the ten essays and a distinguished OAH historian would edit the volume. Our first three volumes were edited by Joyce Appleby (2006), Jacqueline Jones (2007) and David Roediger (2008). In conjunction with the Lincoln Bicentennial next year, Sean Wilentz has edited a Best American History Essays on Lincoln which will appear in February 2009. We have also worked with the University of Illinois Press to publish America on the World Stage: A Global Approach to U.S. History (2008). The result of a collaborative effort by OAH and A.P. U.S. History, the book is a compilation of fourteen essays (originally published in the OAH Magazine of History) on teaching various aspects of American history in a global context, along with fourteen teaching strategies.

The most important program of the executive office is the Annual Meeting. Ten years ago, the OAH annual meeting in Indianapolis had 130 sessions and featured a "Focus on Teaching Day." Evening events included a plenary session, the presidential address, and a $50 per person event at the Indiana Roof Ballroom.

Since then, the Program Committees, Local Resource Committees, and OAH executive office staff have transformed the meeting into a more welcoming event for all members of the profession, in all fields and workplaces. Teaching sessions are no longer limited to one day or to precollegiate teachers. Program Committee members now are committed to presenting sessions of interest to secondary school teachers, public historians (there were no public history sessions in 1998), community college professors, and a broad range of fields of study. In 2008, the meeting welcomed high school and elementary school students and teachers with a public school exhibition room, which celebrated innovative American history projects from New York area schools.

While scholarly sessions are central to the annual meeting, OAH recognizes and has enhanced the social dimensions of the convention, facilitating the meeting of friends and colleagues from around the world. With the addition of regional receptions, a large number of hosted luncheons, graduate student breakfasts, and other social events, the annual meeting has become a place for American historians to meet others with similar scholarly interests. The connections attendees make at these social events often provide the seeds for sessions at future annual meetings.

Technology also radically changed the annual meeting. Session proposals and registrations are gathered online. More than half of annual meeting sessions use some form of digital technology, including multimedia presentations with film, music, and photographs. With the addition of "Screening History" in 2003, more than two dozen documentary films have been presented and discussed, often with the filmmakers in attendance.

While some attendees complain there are too many choices for each time slot, this plethora of options suggests the increasing richness of our programs. At the same time, recognizing the importance of the evening for socializing with friends and colleagues, we have moved the presidential address to the afternoon and plenary sessions to daytime slots. Change is a constant in annual meeting planning as OAH staff continually adjust to our members' needs from year to year.

While the annual meeting is largely for our members, OAH engages in a number of outreach activities that bring top quality American history to wider audiences beyond the membership. The OAH Distinguished Lectureship program, established as a fundraiser by OAH President Gerda Lerner in 1981, consisted of a little more than one hundred lecturers who gave a total of thirty lectures generating $30,000 ten years ago. Today we have more than tripled the number of lecturers, quadrupled the number of lectures, and nearly quintupled the revenue. OAH Distinguished Lecturers present at colleges, Teaching American History projects, historical societies, museums, and libraries all over the country, including Alaska and Puerto Rico.

If hundreds of American audiences have enjoyed the expertise of OAH Distinguished Lecturers, millions of visitors to national parks have benefitted from the OAH expertise rendered through the OAH National Park Service cooperative agreement. Over a million dollars worth of advice, research, site reviews, and published work have been produced by OAH historians for the National Parks Service and many of its parks over the last fifteen years. The success of the NPS agreement led us to enter into a similar public history arrangement with the Desert Southwest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units (CESU). We will be offering cultural resource work, performed by our members, to various federal agencies in the Southwest.

Finally, OAH has modernized its internal operations in a number of important ways. Back in the 1980s, Executive Secretary Joan Hoff spoke of the "Mom and Pop" operation at OAH national headquarters. While much had improved over the years, the business and membership departments were still suffering from the Mom and Pop syndrome ten years ago. The accounting system was still on the cash basis despite requests from the auditor to change to the accrual method. We had no professional accountant in the office, on the Finance Committee, or on the executive board. In fall 1999, we made some significant changes starting with monthly reporting on both membership and finances. The regular monthly membership reports have helped keep better track of membership fluctuations and to determine the success of various initiatives to secure new members and reclaim those who have lapsed. In 2004, we modernized our central computer information system and expanded our membership staff. The result has been a larger membership and a modern system to better control the data and make better use of it.

In the business office, and through prodding by our auditors, we moved from a cash to accrual accounting system and hired a new business manager. The shift to accrual accounting was a long and sometimes painful process. We needed an accountant on staff, and the board's annual budget approval process was made more difficult since it was presented on a cash rather than accrual basis. Monthly statements were presented in both cash and accrual systems. Meanwhile the budget continued to grow and it became clear we needed professional accounting expertise to effectively manage what had become a complicated $3 million operation. When the business manager resigned last summer, we hired a part-time chief financial officer, a CPA who installed new accounting software, established a new chart of accounts, and helped hire an accountant as the new business manager. The improvements in the accounting department have enhanced efficiencies in all aspects of the executive office. And with some relief, I can report that Mom and Pop have passed away.

As a learned society, OAH has long been noted for its excellent scholarship. We are now disseminating that superior scholarship to more members and more people outside the organization than ever before and we do so more attractively and in more accessible ways. We have much to be proud of, but we have much to do. In the next ten years we will have to expand our revenue to continue to meet our members' needs. We must embrace new technologies and work to attract younger professional historians who are often reluctant to join large professional organizations. We also need to remind newer American historians of their professional responsibility to support the learned societies in the discipline. These are the organizations that exist to advocate for them on a national level. I certainly hope that OAH will be there for them throughout their careers as it has been for me. I know I am a better American historian because of that and I certainly want that for all my colleagues in the field of U.S. history.