The 121st annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held here on January 4-7, drew 4,730 historians, students, and exhibitors to panels, meetings, and job interviews.
The number of attendees was down from the record 5,664 at last year’s meeting in Philadelphia, but outpaced the fewer than 4,000 historians who attended the 2005 annual meeting in Seattle.
The association’s executive director, Arnita A. Jones, told the 100 or so historians who attended the group’s business meeting that job activity at the meeting was higher than it had been in many years, but she quipped that history programs should not raise their enrollments just yet. “A glut of jobs rather than a glut of historians is a good thing,” she said.
The historians who attended the meeting found a full agenda, including the passage of a resolution at the association’s business meeting that strongly attacked the Bush administration for “practices inimical to the values of the historical profession” in its conduct of “the war in Iraq and the so-called war on terror.”
In a nod to the host city and the rich history of civil-rights activity here, the association council’s choice for this year’s Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award was U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat whose district encompasses the City of Atlanta.
As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Mr. Lewis was a key figure in the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s. The association also cited his support as a legislator for the history programs of the National Park Service and his key role in winning passage of a bill in 2003 authorizing the National Museum of African American History and Culture, on the National Mall in Washington.
Free-Speech Fracas
The association’s business meeting featured spirited debate on two resolutions brought by members regarding campus speech codes and the Iraq war.
When opponents of campus speech codes sought but failed to yoke that issue to an ultimately successful resolution opposing legislative efforts known as academic and student bills of rights at last year’s meeting, they vowed to bring their own resolution in 2007. Led by David T. Beito, an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and Ralph E. Luker, an independent scholar who blogs at the History News Network’s Cliopatria blog, the new resolution called on the AHA to “oppose the use of speech codes to restrict academic freedom.”
As evidence, Mr. Beito circulated three recent news articles that he said demonstrated how universities have used “free-speech zones” to restrict student speech, including one about a December 2005 incident in which two students at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro faced “disciplinary action for staging a protest about the campus ‘free-speech zones’ outside the free-speech zones.”
Opponents of the resolution attacked it as overly broad and unclear. Among them was Pamela H. Smith, a professor of history at Columbia University, who argued that it “takes for granted what we mean by speech codes” and “negates the complexity” of how to balance the rights of free speech with the responsibilities that accompany free speech.
An amendment to the resolution limiting its opposition specifically to “free speech zones” was offered by Warren Goldstein, a professor of history at the University of Hartford. Though Mr. Beito attacked that amendment as “wimping out by the AHA,” the amendment succeeded and was subsequently passed unanimously by a voice vote.
Scholars Under Fire
The speech-code debate was rivaled in intensity by discussion of a resolution brought by Historians Against the War, a committee of historians formed at the 2003 annual meeting.
The resolution strongly attacked the Bush-administration policies on visas, classification, habeas corpus, and torture. It called on the association to publish the resolution in its newsletter, Perspectives, and to urge its members to “take a public stand as citizens on behalf of the values necessary to the practice of our profession” and “to do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion.”
Though members showed little disagreement concerning the particulars of the resolution’s attack on the Bush administration, opponents wondered whether it was the place of the historical association to expand its focus past issues of scholarship, access to records, and free inquiry.
James J. Sheehan, a professor of history at Stanford University and the 2005 president of the association, said his objections stemmed “from using the moral capital of the AHA on what is clearly a partisan issue.” But Mr. Goldstein, of Hartford University, who supported the resolution, countered that “we are being urged to see professional identity as divorced from our identity as citizens. ... When will it be OK for the AHA to decide that divide ... needs to be breached ... or that there is no divide?”
After an amendment to strike the portion of the resolution calling on historians to take an active role in bringing the war to a speedy conclusion was rejected, the resolution was passed as written by an overwhelming voice vote.
New Vote on War Resolution
Resolutions passed at the business meeting are referred to the association’s governing council, which has the final say on them before they are adopted as association policy. In a meeting on Sunday morning, the council accepted the “free-speech zone” resolution but decided to submit the Iraq-war resolution to an e-mail ballot of the association’s membership.
In an interview, Ms. Jones, the group’s executive director, said the council had formally accepted the resolution on the war. But because the measure had been drafted and submitted after the deadline for publication in the December 2006 issue of Perspectives, and also because of what the council called the resolution’s “intrinsic importance,” she said the council had decided, in its words, that the resolution’s “acceptance should be ratified by a majority of those voting in an e-mail ballot of the membership.” Details of how and when that vote will be held are not yet available.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 53, Issue 20, Page A12