When Drew Gilpin Faust joined the leadership of the American Historical Association in late 1992, she was startled by the irate mail she began to receive.
As head of its professional division, Ms. Faust helped review ethical violations by historians. Letters charging the AHA with cowardice in handling such cases vied with those accusing it of political correctness. A few scholars sent her condolences.
Today the din is even louder. At issue: the role that a scholarly association should play in policing professional ethics.
Some historians are pushing the AHA to take on not just complaints traditionally deemed central to scholarly work, such as plagiarism, but newer issues such as allegations of sexual harassment, racial and age discrimination, and unfair hiring and promotion practices.
Others claim that in doing so, the association is meddling in affairs that have little to do with its central mission of promoting scholarship.
“Clearly, we’re facing a crisis,” says Ms. Faust, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania who still heads the professional division. “No one is happy with how we’re handling ethics violations.”
Hoping to resolve the conflict, the association’s governing council has asked the professional division to report in the fall on ways to reform its procedures for reviewing ethical complaints.
The current debate is also a sign of deeper frictions. As associations come to terms with increasingly diverse memberships, they are asking what changes should be made to accommodate the women, gays and lesbians, and members of minority groups who are entering their professions. How should they respond to pressures from some of the new constituencies to take stands on social and political issues?
In the AHA, such questions pit some of its most distinguished older members -- including a few past presidents -- against younger historians who are now rising to positions of authority.
Disputes have cropped up repeatedly in the last two years. One erupted in 1992 over a recommendation that all panels at the AHA’s annual meetings be “gender balanced” to include men and women. Another has involved how much multiculturalism to include in history standards that the AHA is helping to write for elementary and secondary schools. In January, tempers flared over a decision to move the annual meeting from Cincinnati to protest a city referendum on a measure that eliminated sexual orientation as the basis for protection against discrimination.
Some of the most intense debates are over ethics -- how to define them for the profession and how to handle violations.
Like many other scholarly associations, the AHA issued its first ethics statement in the 1970’s. That document dealt mainly with faculty rights and contained only a brief reference to the need to maintain “integrity in scholarship.”
Since then, the AHA has revised its ethics code several times. In 1987, it agreed to review complaints of ethical lapses made by one historian against another. It also broadened the categories of proscribed abuses to include issues like harassment and discrimination. But the AHA declined to carry out its own investigations of those matters or to impose sanctions on violators. Complaints are submitted to the professional division, an elected panel of historians.
In its reviews, the association looks only at materials submitted to it; it doesn’t gather additional evidence. Its findings are provided to the accused and the accusers but are not publicized.
Last year, the AHA revised a section of its ethics code, the statement on plagiarism. It amended the statement to cover both outright copying of another person’s work and “misuse” of another’s ideas and interpretations. Some scholars protested that the AHA ought to do more and publish the names of plagiarists. Others objected that the definition of misuse was too open-ended.
“In many ways plagiarism is the least difficult issue we face,” says James B. Gardner, the AHA’s acting executive director.
Ms. Faust agrees: “With plagiarism, there’s a paper trail that we can review, and it’s an area in which we have some professional expertise. We’re having more trouble with issues like sexual harassment, where it may be important to investigate intent.”
Just how much trouble is illustrated by a case at the Johns Hopkins University involving a former graduate student and three senior faculty members, Philip D. Curtin, John Russell-Wood, and Franklin Knight. A year and a half ago, an Indian student from South Africa charged in a letter to the AHA that the professors had discriminated against him by delaying the defense of his dissertation and by not giving him adequate financial aid. The university is still trying to resolve the dispute.
In a letter to the three faculty members, the AHA’s professional division noted that it had “found no evidence of ethnic discrimination.” But, it added, “the division hopes that some accommodation can be worked out.”
It is that last part that angers Mr. Curtin, a past president of the AHA. He notes that he and his colleagues are unlikely discriminators, since they are known for their work on race relations and for helping minority students. (He himself is widely respected as one of the leaders in the United States of the field of African history.)
What really irks him, he says, is “the AHA’s attempt to intervene in the internal affairs of a university. Given the student’s demands, you can only read the call for accommodation as a suggestion that we lower our academic standards or change the way we provide financial aid.”
He adds: “A lot of people with good intentions seem to be trying to improve the world -- rather than to improve the profession.”
He demanded an apology. Both the chairman of the university’s history department and its assistant general counsel wrote the AHA to support Mr. Curtin’s position.
The professional division responded that the call for accommodation was not part of the official finding. It was just “intended as an expression of our human sympathy and an appeal to yours,” an AHA letter to Mr. Curtin said.
AHA officials declined to be interviewed about the specific case, as is their policy. But they say that they are often caught in the middle. “There’s a sense of damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” says Mr. Gardner.
Some historians, for example, believe the AHA does far too little to combat ethical abuses like job discrimination. Jan Vansina, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says that all sorts of discrimination are increasing. Some departments, he says, are seeking specifically to hire white men, while others want only women or members of minority groups.
The situation is especially troubling in his own field of African history, he says, where many universities want to hire only African or African-American professors.
Mr. Vansina would like the AHA to monitor the job advertisements in its newsletter and to publish the names of departments that discriminate. He is resigning from the association, he says, because its refusal to do so “amounts to silent acquiescence” to discrimination.
The professional division itself has been divided on many of these issues. Nell Irvin Painter, a professor of history at Princeton University, completed her term with the division in January. “If we are going to have diverse members,” she says, “we will have to deal with issues like sexual harassment and racial discrimination that involve their professional lives.”
While she says that the AHA does not have the money to carry out its own investigations or to impose sanctions, she believes it should not back down from actively reviewing a broad range of complaints. “In my three years, I saw how just issuing a finding of misconduct could make a difference. When we pointed out, for example, that it was inappropriate to interview job candidates in hotel bedrooms, people responded: `Oh, I never thought of that’,” she says.
Ms. Faust has more reservations. She is concerned that the AHA does not have the internal structures -- committees, staff members, legal expertise -- to review many of the cases it takes on.
In its call for reforms of association procedures, the AHA’s governing council has asked the professional division to consider such questions as, Should the association carry out its own investigations? Should it hold hearings, try to mediate disputes, or publish the names of offenders? Should the person bringing a complaint, or the person charged, be required to be a member of the association? Should the division decline to entertain certain complaints, if for example, redress is available through other institutions like the courts?
While the debate over such questions seems most contentious among historians, several other scholarly groups say they too are beginning to grapple with the same matters. For example:
* The American Political Science Association, which currently investigates and offers to “mediate” disputes, is considering whether it should take further action when it finds wrongdoing.
* The Modern Language Association does not tackle individual complaints. But it has brought together scholarly groups to sponsor a conference, set for next June, on the ethics of advocating political positions in the classroom.
* The American Association for the Advancement of Science is polling its member groups on how they handle issues like sexual harassment, in preparation for writing its own statement on the topic.
* The American Association of University Professors is trying to reconcile its statement on sexual harassment with its statement on academic freedom.
Two factors have stimulated the discussions. First, the women and members of minority groups who are entering the professions are bringing with them new types of complaints. Observers note that younger scholars often come out of the activism of the women’s or the civil-rights movements.
“Some of the tension is generational,” says the AHA’s Mr. Gardner. “The people coming into leadership now tend to be more activist. You’re seeing that activism play out in the association.”
The second factor is the dismal job market. It is exacerbating tensions over hiring and promotion.
“With the talk turning to problems like downsizing institutions and increasing faculty workloads, there is a threat of a major change in the structure of higher education,” says Stanley N. Katz, president of the American Council of Learned Societies. “When that happens in the context of big demographic changes in the professions, it’s a package that is bound to stir up emotion.”
Princeton’s Ms. Painter found the response to an article she wrote on the job market in the AHA’s newsletter instructive. She had deplored the fact that many historians could not find jobs but had also urged the jobless -- many of them white males -- not to blame their plight on affirmative action.
Both Ms. Painter and the AHA received numerous angry letters, many from out-of-work historians who felt she was insensitive to their needs.
“People tend not to look at what state legislators are doing to university budgets,” she says. “They see only that women and minorities are taking their jobs. That’s racism and sexism.”
Other scholars think the problem is political correctness and that it is showing up in ethics cases as well as in other AHA actions. Alonzo L. Hamby, a professor of history at Ohio University, wrote an opinion piece for The Chronicle (February 16, 1994) suggesting that the association’s decision to move its annual meeting from Cincinnati was the latest in a series of attempts to meddle in public-policy issues. He linked the trend to the AHA’s neglect, at annual meetings and in its publications, of traditional political history, which often focuses on famous white male leaders, in favor of work on race and gender.
Since he published his piece, Mr. Hamby has been overwhelmed by the response. “A lot of historians wrote to say they are being frozen out of the association,” he says.
William E. Leuchtenburg, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sees some merit in the accusation. “During my time at the AHA, both as president in 1991 and during my three years on the council, I felt that it was heavy with political correctness,” he says.
But he insists the issue is not multiculturalism, civil rights, or gender equity. “I have spent my career fighting for those goals. But I don’t think the association should be politicized to pursue them.”
“My fear today is that more and more people are uncomfortable with the direction the AHA is taking,” he says.
“And they are just silently walking away.”