Interchange: Professional Organizations and Political Engagements
Leaders of learned societies are often confronted with demands that the organizations for which they have fiduciary responsibility be used as instruments in the advancement of a cause that lies outside the mission of the organization. In many cases, the officers and board members of these societies are themselves, as individuals, committed to these causes and can become divided over how best to fulfill their institutional responsibilities while being true to the personal commitments that attract them to a given cause. Labor disputes in hotels are a classic example. The OAH itself has experienced this, especially in 2005 when the Annual Meeting was moved from San Francisco to San Jose in response to labor issues in San Francisco hotels. Five years earlier, in 2000, the OAH moved its Annual Meeting from the Adam’s Mark Hotel in St. Louis to the campus of Saint Louis University in response to concerns about racially unfair personnel practices at the hotel.
On the assumption that issues of this sort will arise again, the OAH Executive Board decided at its November 2010 meeting to convene a public conversation on the relationship between professional organizations and political engagements. The Executive Board asked OAH Executive Editor Edward Linenthal to facilitate this discussion in the mode of the “Interchanges” that appear periodically in the online pages of the Journal of American History. Several officers and leading figures in the OAH began that conversation last October.
We invite you to read their comments and to contribute your own thoughts on the question of how the OAH should think about the relationship between professional responsibility and personal or political commitment. Your comments will serve as an introduction to the plenary discussion at the 2012 OAH/NCPH Annual Meeting in Milwaukee, “Professional Organization and Political Engagements,” Friday, April 20, 4:30 p.m. in the Ballroom of the Frontier Airlines Center.
The OAH is indebted to all of the participants for their willingness to enter into the online conversation:
JON BUTLER is a professor of history, American studies, and religious studies at Yale University who has specialized in American religious history and early American history. He is an elected member of the OAH Executive Board, and has previously served on the Nominating Board and a Program Committee. At Yale, he has chaired both the American Studies Program and the Department of History, served as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and for seven months in 2010—2011 as Acting University Librarian. He taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at California State University, Bakersfield.
ALBERT M. CAMARILLO is a professor of American history at Stanford University. He has published seven books and dozens of scholarly articles on Mexican American history, particularly the experience of Mexican Americans and other immigrant groups in U.S. cities. He is president-elect of the OAH and has also served on the Nominating Board and a Program Committee.
WILLIAM CHAFE is a professor of history at Duke University and former president of the OAH. His areas of specialization are women’s history, civil rights history, and modern political history, with a special focus on the relationship of personality to politics.
WILLIAM CRONON is a professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison who studies and writes about North American environmental history. He has served on the Executive Board of the OAH and American Historical Association (AHA), was vice president of the AHA’s Professional Division when it undertook a major revision of the AHA Statement on Standards, and is the president of the AHA.
JIM GROSSMAN is the executive director of the AHA and a former member of the OAH Executive Board. His books, articles, and short essays have focused on African American history, American urban history, and issues in higher education and the role of history in public culture.
DAVID HOLLINGER is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and immediate past president of the OAH. He has served as chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors and has been active in academic governance issues throughout his career. He specializes in intellectual and ethnoracial histories of the United States.
ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS is a professor of history and a professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. She is a labor historian by training and has written about the history of wage-earning women for years. She has just finished a book on playwright and political activist Lillian Hellman. She currently serves as president of the OAH.
NANCY MACLEAN is a professor of history at Duke University and a specialist in post-1945 U.S. history, with particular attention to social movements, including labor, and issues of political economy, class, gender, race, and region. She is the co-chair of the 2012 OAH Program Committee.
VICKI L. RUIZ is dean of the School of Humanities and a professor of history specializing in Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include Cannery Women, Cannery Lives (1987) and From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (1998). She is a past president of the OAH.
JAH EDITOR ED LINENTHAL: Are there some core principles by which those with fiduciary responsibility for an organization such as the OAH can be guided when they, or a substantial segment of their membership, believe that a particular cause is worthy of support? Are there any issues that an organization could or should support even if such support carries some financial cost?
VICKI L. RUIZ: In an ideal world, these principles would have been thoroughly considered and in place before any crisis arises. Unfortunately, organizations and their members can find themselves in reaction mode. For instance, the 2005 OAH annual meeting was scheduled for San Francisco, but because of a labor dispute there, the OAH staff took an informal survey of program participants about whether or not they would cross picket lines to attend the conference. The majority opinion the office received seemed clear—no, they would not cross the lines. Therefore, for me, as the president at the time, it became not a question of choosing between the good of the organization and the cause of organized labor, as it seemed that the OAH would face serious financial consequences if we did not make alternative plans. (We moved the annual meeting location to San José.) Having a previously agreed-upon set of core principles and a more reliable gauge of the future consequences of different scenarios could only help a professional organization navigate these types of unexpected developments.
ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS: Vicki plunges us into a conversation that has been on all our minds: the decision as to how we protect the well-being (financial and otherwise) of an organization is not always easy. That is, it is not always clear, as it was not in the San Francisco case, which actions are in the best interests of an organization. Regardless of principles, how do we judge whether a particular action will benefit or hurt the organization?
But I would like to step back a bit from this question to follow up on the core of the issue that Ed poses. Vicki says her decision would have been easier had there been some core principles to follow. But what are those principles? Any principle might constitute too rigid a rule if, in following it, we protect the narrow economic interest of the OAH while sacrificing the larger attractiveness and well-being of the organization. I would love to know whether someone can articulate principles on which we might agree and which might work.
DAVID HOLLINGER: Among the principles that should guide those with fiduciary responsibility is an informed conviction that a given action will significantly advance the relevant cause. What is needed is a reasonable and carefully considered calculation that taking a given action will produce genuine traction. It is not enough, in light of this principle, to do something because it will make us feel good: we have “taken a stand” and are proud of it. But surely it is important to assess just what, beyond obtaining this feeling, we want to accomplish. What constituency or constituencies are we trying to influence, and exactly how? What are the chances of being able to have a significant effect? To be sure, assessing probable effects is not always easy, but it is important to perform an honest assessment based on as much information as one can obtain and then to be forthright about the assessment.
Another salient principle is respect for the division of labor between learned societies and other institutions and associations. Professional organizations such as the OAH have quite sharply defined missions, and it will not do to pretend that these organizations are instruments available for use on behalf of even the most worthy of other causes. Part of the job of those with fiduciary responsibility for such organizations is to be cognizant of this division of labor and to be prepared to collegially remind others of it when necessary. Even when a cause has to do with the welfare of academics in this society, we need to be aware of the availability of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as an instrument designed to address issues in that domain. When the interests of historians in particular is at issue, but not those especially in the field of American history, it makes sense for the American Historical Association (AHA) rather than the Organization of American historians to be in the lead. For issues of a generality beyond the academic profession there exist a multitude of political advocacy organizations. According to the principle of respect for the division of labor, then, a field-specific professional association such as the OAH (smaller than a discipline-wide association), has good reason to attend to issues that affect specialists in the study, teaching, and public interpretation of American history.
A third principle is the magnitude of a threat to the very social order served by the institutions party to the division of labor invoked above, as judged by the bulk of the membership reliably measured. I believe it is fair to say that the only threat of that magnitude as judged by professional historians in recent memory was the Vietnam War, but even then the objections made against the antiwar resolutions adopted by many learned societies were not easily dismissed. This third principle is case specific and should not be reduced to general terms such as imperialism, racism, sexism, labor exploitation, environmental despoilment, or any other evil a given instance of which may or may not rise to the level that invites a violation of the division of labor. There may indeed arise evils so horrendous as to justify risk to the welfare of the Organization of American Historians, even its continued existence. But persons with fiduciary responsibility have the obligation to make sure that such risks are carefully considered and that the pertinent considerations are publicly debated.
ALBERT M. CAMARILLO: There is no doubt that the OAH leadership will, in the future, contend with controversial and divisive issues, some that will call for resolutions of support brought before the organization by members or affiliates, and others that will have implications for the stability, financial and otherwise, of the association. Principles of the kind noted above by David must help guide the OAH in dealing with prickly social and politically sensitive issues, but equally important are the ways the leadership handles deliberation of issues and the ways it communicates its thoughts and actions to the membership. The OAH is, after all, a membership-based organization, and the vetting of any issue of great importance requires us to reach out to our members to gauge opinion, though this is a difficult, time-consuming effort for any organization. As a learned society, we have an obligation to serve as a vehicle for informed discussion and debate on issues that affect our membership, our discipline, and our profession, and when such issues are not time-sensitive, the OAH has ably facilitated discussion (a good example is the upcoming Milwaukee conference that will include sessions, open to the public, dealing with the political issues in Wisconsin over the collective bargaining rights of public employees). But there will be times when issues arise that call for quick action and when the OAH leadership can’t conceivably query its membership in a timely fashion. In those cases, the OAH Executive Board must be prepared to respond quickly when it determines that an issue of fundamental importance placed before the organization requires action. There is a line that must be drawn, however. If that action, regardless of its importance, threatens the financial stability of the organization and has potential to lead to its demise, the leadership has the ultimate responsibility to maintain the integrity of the OAH for future generations of historians.
RUIZ: David, you bring up three critical points for discussion and debate. Another issue closely tied to division of labor is the mission of the organization. The OAH is vastly different from the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, with a much more expansive mission that includes history education at all levels from K–12 and community college. The OAH partnerships forged over the last decade or so represent civic engagement, not necessarily political engagement. But these partnerships do come with financial consequences that should be considered well before new innovative programs are launched. What I did not understand when I served on the OAH Executive Board as president-elect, but am now painfully aware of as a dean of humanities in the University of California system, is that every great idea and worthwhile venture comes with financial obligations, and at times the institution may not have the capacity to sustain them. However, such partnerships are vital to the future vitality of the OAH and to U.S. history education in general. So how do board members ensure that the mission of a professional organization and the organization’s financial capacity are in sync?
And I agree that when a crisis arises, the risks must be carefully considered and publicly debated. Creating a venue for such exchange is critical, as well as developing a reliable instrument for measuring member opinions. With perhaps the exception of hurricanes, ill winds rarely give advance warning, so having a forum of this nature can provide a foundation for future planning.
KESSLER-HARRIS: I find myself troubled by the principles so far set before us, and I am in substantial agreement with only one of them.
I take it we now have four such “principles,” or questions an organization should consider before taking an action, which I summarize as follows:
- whether a given action will significantly advance a relevant cause;
- whether the action respects an appropriate division of labor among our sister professional associations;
- whether the threat on which the organization acts is of sufficient magnitude to engage the interests of the bulk of its members; and
- whether the action so threatens the financial stability of the organization as to potentially lead to its demise.
The last of these principles seems to me to be unarguable, so I set it aside, in full agreement that nothing we do should impose such a risk on the OAH—that our first duty is to maintain the financial health of the organization.
On the other three principles there may be fundamental differences. In my view, these arise from the failure to acknowledge that the OAH, like many professional organizations, has moral and ethical purposes that accompany its efforts to enhance and protect scholars and scholarship. These are clearly embodied in the OAH mission statement: “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.” Our organization would lose both credibility and legitimacy if it did not speak out on behalf of issues that affect the public understanding of history. Because politicians, journalists, lawyers, and others typically root their arguments in historical precedent, the OAH must feel free to articulate its concerns whenever the bulk of its members (as assessed by a majority of Executive Board members at the time) feel it necessary to do so. How the organization responds should be a matter for debate at the time, and it is surely the function of the Executive Board to engage in such debate. We might hope that every board could conceive of creative, cost-effective, and inclusionary ways of addressing meaningful issues, but we cannot write that into principle.
Under these circumstances, the magnitude of particular issues will influence the manner of the organization’s response. I agree that the kind of action we take can and should be tailored to “advance the relevant cause” as David puts it. But this seems unwisely to be embodied as a “principle.” We are a small organization, and our actions and statements can’t be expected necessarily to achieve anything tangible. But in putting ourselves on record and joining with other organizations that do so, we might well have some undetermined influence beyond our size. Yet we need to make judgments about what we do and say as a group, not on the basis of what others do and say, but on the basis of what we think is right for us.
For this reason, I am profoundly uncomfortable with adopting, as a principle, the notion that we adhere to some appropriate division of labor. While I completely agree that it is absolutely necessary for smaller, non-discipline-wide associations such as ours to acknowledge, respect, and work cooperatively with more comprehensive groups such as the AAUP or the American Council of Learned Societies, I can imagine many circumstances in which our take on a situation will differ in detail from that of sister organizations, or in which multiple public statements or responses would be more effective than even strong singular ones. Too, as David points out, the dividing line between the interests of discipline-wide associations and those that affect specialists in American history are often so blurred as to be undefinable. Over the years our shared interest in gender equality, diversification of the profession, and freedom of information have each led us to act separately as well as together to make social and political statements—to the benefit, I would argue, of the profession as a whole.
Finally, on the question of risk, I cannot imagine us, in advance, adopting any meaningful statement that can measure the risk either to the social order in which the OAH thrives, or to the OAH itself. There are those who would (and did) disagree that even the Vietnam War posed such a risk. There are those who believe that late 1960s civil disorder (including disturbances among women, young people, African Americans, and the poor) constituted a risk that the OAH had to be prepared to address internally as well as externally. I would argue then, that it would be a mistake to lock the organization into “core principles” that would be utilized to govern particular situations. Except perhaps for that of ensuring the financial survival of the organization itself, I doubt that we could agree on such principles. We might, however, want to articulate some of the concerns that have led us into this discussion, and we might adopt guidelines that would help Executive Board members assess whether intervention in specific instances is appropriate.
JIM GROSSMAN: I would like to suggest that the issue of establishing basic principles lies, in part, in the nature and obligation of nonprofit governance. A board of directors for a nonprofit—and a scholarly society is, of course, a particular genre of nonprofit—is charged with establishing policy (as opposed to managing) and maintaining financial oversight.
So, first the issue of “establishing policy.” A board must at least articulate some policy framework that ventures beyond a case-by-case basis for major decisions relating to “supporting particular causes.” Even the seemingly minimal scaffolding of establishing a process for making decisions implies a set of principles, beginning with what sorts of issues qualify within the arena of “supporting particular causes.” More important, for members to have confidence that their organization is applying consistent criteria, is treating everyone fairly, and is operating with some measure of predictability, the association must make decisions according to transparent and clearly articulated principles that apply to everyone. To establish criteria on a case-by-case basis is almost to guarantee a sense of unfairness among members who disagree with a particular decision.
Second is the issue of financial oversight. Fiduciary responsibility applies far more broadly than “whether the action so threatens the financial stability of the organization as to potentially lead to its demise.” If that is the bar for fiduciary responsibility, the association is likely to get into big trouble. A board needs to decide, for example, whether a particular direction, policy, or specific action is likely to have financial consequences that will seriously inhibit its ability to carry out its primary mission. Demise is an end point; there are many places in between here and there that are also perilous.
A board that is fulfilling its legal and ethical responsibilities to the membership must be able to articulate the mission of the organization and the goals that must be set to fulfill that mission. If a “particular cause” relates to that mission or to those goals then it is entirely appropriate for an association to expend considerable resources, perhaps even to take risks, in the interest of that cause. If not, such actions are simply irresponsible.
I have very purposely here stayed at the level of abstraction, which is where I think this conversation needs to begin. To move to the particular case of the OAH, we must put on the table a central question: what is the purpose of the OAH? What is the organization’s mission? What does the organization need to accomplish to fulfill that mission? That is a question the board needs to ask and to answer.
I also would like to address Vicki’s reference to a forum. I think this lies at the center of the solution to the issues on the table. As a profession and a community of scholars, we should be committed not only to the principle of open discussion and debate but also to the efficacy of such conversation. Our associations should consider themselves forums for debate, rather than advocates for particular positions that are not related to their missions. Our goal when considering issues that do not directly affect our work as historians (in the case of OAH, historians of the United States if we were to accept David’s logic) should be to encourage and nourish debate that respects historical context and methods, as well as the values of historians as articulated in the following excerpts from the AHA’s Statement of Standards of Professional Conduct:
- “Historians strive constantly to improve our collective understanding of the past through a complex process of critical dialogue—with each other, with the wider public, and with the historical record—in which we explore former lives and worlds in search of answers to the most compelling questions of our own time and place. . . . Historians celebrate intellectual communities governed by mutual respect and constructive criticism. The preeminent value of such communities is reasoned discourse—the continuous colloquy among historians holding diverse points of view who learn from each other as they pursue topics of mutual interest. A commitment to such discourse—balancing fair and honest criticism with tolerance and openness to different ideas—makes possible the fruitful exchange of views, opinions, and knowledge.” (The full statement is available online at http://www.historians.org/pubs/free/ProfessionalStandards.cfm.)
The OAH, AHA, and similar associations need to decide when taking a position is less appropriate than creating a space for debate.
WILLIAM CRONON: I want to take as my starting point Alice’s comment that if a proposed “action so threatens the financial stability of the organization as to potentially lead to its demise,” clearly we should avoid taking such an action (as supplemented by Jim’s helpful addition that there are many consequences short of “demise” that would be so deleterious to an organization’s financial health and sustainability that we should be very cautious about taking them). Having now served on the boards of both the OAH and the AHA, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the different fiduciary burdens that the organizations themselves are under as opposed to their own members, making the perceived price of particular symbolic actions very different depending on where one is sitting.
Organizations that hold annual meetings involving thousands of attendees necessarily must sign contracts with hotels and other vendors years before the meetings are held, usually long before anyone has a clue whether some political event will arise in the interim—a threatened strike, a discriminatory piece of legislation, some action by the hotel corporation that at least some members find objectionable—that will raise questions and concerns about whether the meeting should still be held. Although organizations can and should be careful to negotiate contractual clauses that permit the cancellation of a meeting in the event of eventualities of this kind that can reasonably be anticipated, such clauses, in fact, provide far less financial protection than one might imagine. This is partly because alternative venues for meetings are often either unavailable or highly unattractive when they must be renegotiated on very short notice. The liabilities involved in canceling or moving a meeting can easily run to hundreds of thousands of dollars. For organizations whose annual budgets (and endowments and contingency funds) are only in the low millions of dollars, unbudgeted charges of this kind are little short of disastrous.
Although the leadership of a group such as OAH may be acutely aware of the impact on the organization of moving or canceling a meeting, individual members usually are not. They, in any event, generally focus only on the particular action that they personally find important or offensive: crossing a picket line, say, or staying at a hotel whose policies they find objectionable. For individual members, it’s relatively easy to decide not to attend a conference or to lodge somewhere other than in the conference hotel. The personal cost of doing so is slight, and may even be financially advantageous. And yet the contractual obligations for the organization (to guarantee a certain number of occupied hotel rooms, for instance, or a certain number of people paying for meals) remain legally binding, even if not a single member winds up attending the meeting.
This disconnect between individual and organizational perceptions of the problems we’re discussing is what makes them so excruciating for association leaders. It is why the seemingly abstract matters of principle we’re trying to articulate have such enormous practical consequences. Decisions made years ago by the OAH to move its conference—for the best of principles—had the consequence of seriously damaging the long-term financial health of the organization. It still has not recovered from and its institutional sustainability is still at risk because of those decisions. Were we to repeat such actions with any frequency, there’s not much doubt that the organization would go bankrupt and disappear. This fact is rarely visible in the heat of debates about whether a particular hotel should be boycotted or whether an individual member will or will not cross a picket line.
For all these reasons, my own preference, like that of several of my colleagues in this forum, is to try to engage local political issues by providing a forum for our members and for the public to be educated, to debate, and, if they’re so inclined, to protest policies and institutions they find objectionable. Wherever possible, it’s crucial to accommodate individual members whose conscience would be compromised by actions of the organization to which that individual belongs. But we also need to educate members about the very real consequences of such actions. Moving an entire conference is an extremely blunt instrument that can ironically have the effect of doing immense damage to the organization making the move while having relatively little impact on hotels whose income is already guaranteed by contract. In most cases, I think scholarly associations such as OAH can have the greatest impact (with the least ancillary damage to their own sustainability) when they hew close to their mission—of promoting the practice of good history—even as they vigorously demonstrate and enact the relevance of historical inquiry to contemporary political debates and protests.
RUIZ: The questions always remain—how do we get from the abstraction to the concrete and from the individual to the body as a whole? As Alice insightfully notes: “We might hope that every board could conceive of creative, cost-effective, and inclusionary ways of addressing meaningful issues, but we cannot write that into principle.” But can we have a mechanism for a forum to emerge that would be meaningful for members?
Bill Cronon, the move of the conference to San José was not the sole cause for the OAH’s financial woes; rather, it exposed structural weaknesses. As I alluded to earlier, every great idea and worthwhile venture comes with financial obligations, and at times the institution may not have the capacity to sustain them. Anticipating the costs of any activity whether it’s moving a conference or launching an exciting initiative always involves an element of risk. Measuring and preparing for such risk calls for guidelines or policy rather than core principles.
I agree with Alice that we should be engaged with the public interpretation of history, but I imagine our impact varies with the situation. For example, do we have more of an impact when the organization takes a position over state history standards? Yet I am concerned that the core principles might restrict the OAH’s ability to respond proactively and substantively to concerns raised by the majority of its members. A forum, such as this interchange and the scheduled meeting in Milwaukee, perhaps offers clarity, if not consensus, to our mission as educators.
