Scholarly Groups’ Choices Yield Diverging Fortunes

Will disciplinary societies become the bowling leagues of academe?

Declining participation in those leagues symbolized the larger generational decline of social participation in Bowling Alone, the 2000 best seller by Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist. Similarly, scholarly groups have long served as hubs of academic life and the embodiments of their disciplines, but they face uncertain and divergent futures.

Some disciplinary associations are struggling to remain relevant and financially viable as demographic and technological changes threaten their traditional sources of revenue. The core of their membership—tenured and, especially, tenure-track faculty—is shrinking and, in many cases, aging, with adjunct instructors now making up about two-thirds of the professoriate. Attendance at annual meetings is getting squeezed as the job market weakens, travel grows costlier, and colleges cut back on their support for professional development. Meanwhile, demands for open access through the Web are eating into revenue from scholarly journals.

Audio

Listen: Dan Berrett explains why some disciplinary societies are paying for decades-old decisions. (12:20) | Link

Data

Read: Which scholarly groups are prospering—and which face uncertain futures? | Link

And yet, the fates of disciplinary societies do not hinge solely on those changes. Nor does a group’s financial health depend on the prestige of the discipline in academe, or, in some cases, even on whether its membership is growing or shrinking.

Instead, the societies with comparatively robust revenues benefit from having a common source of income: an online scholarly database or bibliography. Such digital platforms for scholarly information evolved from projects that were hatched decades earlier, often sparked by the peculiarities of history or the obsessions of individual scholars. They have grown in importance over time and have come to serve as the intellectual nerve center of the discipline.

Today the fortunate societies that own such databases earn millions, and sometimes tens of millions, of dollars in licensing fees and subscriptions annually. In some cases those revenues amount to half of a group’s annual earnings. Among the more unlikely members of this group are the American Mathematical Society, representing a field whose graduates account for less than 1 percent of degrees conferred annually, and the Modern Language Association, whose disciplines face pointed questions about their future as departments across the country fight to stave off elimination.

“When new executive-committee members come on, I say, ‘Let me explain the finances of the association,’” says John J. Siegfried, secretary-treasurer of the American Economic Association. “We have two products that subsidize everything else.”

Most of that subsidy comes from the association’s online database, EconLit; the other source is the association’s jobs listings, which employers pay to post and which appear chiefly online. “It radically changes our business model,” Mr. Siegfried says of EconLit, “though that’s flattering it.”

His breezy description of the association’s economic model acknowledges how the quirks of history and personality can produce long-term consequences. Indeed, the economists’ group owes much of its present fiscal strength to choices made decades ago. When asked how his scholarly association went about developing EconLit, Mr. Siegfried answered simply, “You have Mark Perlman.”

Mr. Perlman, who died in 2006, was hailed for his encyclopedic knowledge of the discipline’s philosophy, history, and institutions. He was an economist at the University of Pittsburgh in 1969, when the Journal of Economic Literature, which he founded, started publishing articles, book reviews, and a bibliography of scholarship in economics.

For several years, Mr. Perlman and association staff collected journals and manuscripts, piling them in eight-foot-high stacks in the narrow corridors of a dark, cramped space next to a beauty parlor on Forbes Avenue, near Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University.

“An earthquake in Pittsburgh would likely have led to our employees being crushed under economics journals,” Mr. Siegfried wrote earlier this year in toasting the retirement of Dru Ekwurzel, who served as the association’s director of publications.

In the early 1980s, Ms. Ekwurzel was instrumental in transferring tapes of journal citations, abstracts, and bibliographic material to an online information-retrieval service. Scholars would gain access to this database through a terminal and dial-up service at a subscribing library. In 1984 that database, named EconLit, made its debut at the association’s annual meeting.

By the time the World Wide Web was born, the association was well positioned. In 2010, EconLit generated nearly $3.9-million in revenue from subscribing libraries and universities, or more than 40 percent of the association’s budget.

The group’s seven journals, available in print and online, are agenda setters for the field, but they also cost far more to produce than the income they generate. The group’s annual meeting breaks even.

With a surplus of more than $1.2-million and income from EconLit and the job listings, the association chose recently to slash by more than half, to as little as $20, its fees for membership, in hopes of stemming a 13-percent decline in members since 2003.

“We have a strange situation of not hanging on by our fingernails,” Mr. Siegfried says, “and I know others are.”

A few other associations reap spoils from their databases. The American Psychological Association last year earned 44 percent of its $114-million in revenue from databases of scholarship like PsycINFO, which contains 3.2 million abstracts dating back more than 125 years.

The Modern Language Association reports that half of its more than $16-million in annual revenue comes from the MLA International Bibliography, which houses 2.4 million records dating to 1926 and provides access to print and electronic books, articles, and Web sites relating to modern languages, literatures, film, folklore, and linguistics.

An ‘Untenable Position’

Not all disciplinary societies are so fortunate. The American Philosophical Association has seen a 2-percent drop in membership, much smaller than the economists’ decline, but its financial status is far more precarious.

The group ran a deficit of $70,000 last year, according to its most-recent federal-tax filing. More than half of its $1.3-million in annual revenue came from membership dues.

The group’s health is so vexed that Peter J. Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and a member of the association’s fund-raising committee, asked on the popular philosophers’ blog Leiter Reports whether the association should be dissolved.

He said he broached the question not because he wanted to end the 112-year-old society but because he thought the notion needed to be seriously entertained. “Once you put the most extreme option on the table, it invites everyone to put other things on the table,” he said in an interview.

The chief purposes of the association, Mr. Ludlow wrote in his blog post, are to support the job market by bringing together interviewers and job candidates and to organize three meetings for philosophers, in different regions of the United States. Departments could just as easily winnow their job candidates to two or three by interviewing them via Skype instead of in a crowded hotel, he argued. And most philosophers who attend the annual meetings tend to go to a narrow range of talks that relate to their specialties, which sometimes hold meetings of their own. For those seeking breadth, he noted, the World Congress of Philosophy puts on a conference every five years.

“Maybe it is time to pull the plug on an organization that is dysfunctional, no longer serves a useful purpose, and is in an untenable position financially,” he wrote.

David Schrader, executive director of the association, notes that the comments that followed Mr. Ludlow’s blog post reflect a larger line of criticism of professional associations, one that sees them as deliverers of private goods.

“They ask whether individual members receive discrete benefits commensurate with their dues expenses,” he says. But the association serves a larger good to the philosophical public, he says, such as when it came to the defense of threatened philosophy departments, including those at Howard University, at institutions in Nevada, and in Britain.

The tension between the personal benefits and public purposes of such groups was echoed elsewhere. James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, likens scholarly associations to National Public Radio.

“You don’t get a hell of a lot individually from the tote bag,” he says. People support enterprises like public radio or disciplinary societies, he says, because they do something for civic culture. “Part of it is a civic appeal, there’s no doubt,” Mr. Grossman says. “It’s the nature and value of citizenship.”

Many members look to to their organizations to advocate on behalf of their discipline, but such efforts can be invisible to members.

“What we’ve learned from marketing surveys,” Mr. Grossman says, “is that people think we should do what it turns out we already do.”

But the cost of advocacy can be a problem, too, since membership dues and other traditional revenue streams do not cover the expense.

The College Art Association has pursued advocacy at the urging of its members, says Linda A. Downs, the association’s executive director. It has pushed for government spending for the visual arts and for protections of free speech. It has also fought censorship in art museums and is weighing in on the issue of fair use on behalf of its membership, which includes both artists and art historians, who tend to hold opposite positions on the matter.

Such work does not come without cost. “We’ve always been an altruistic organization,” Ms. Downs says, “but there are limits.”

Future Instability

A disciplinary association cannot do all that its members want if it does not have enough money, or if it does not put resources to the right purposes. Traditionally, the business model of the disciplinary society has been the “tripod,” says Pauline Yu, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, an association of 71 disciplinary groups. Each leg of this tripod represents a revenue stream: annual meetings, journal publications, and membership dues.

For now, the tripod appears viable, as some organizations that depend on it have seen their revenues grow. The likelihood that each of the tripod’s legs will continue to be strong in the future, however, is shaky.

“There are uncertainties about all of them,” Ms. Yu says. “I think nobody would say any one of these is stable going forward.”

Many groups report that their annual meetings are growing more popular and diverse, with people who are interested in the field but who do not work in academe constituting an increasing portion of attendees.

Anthropology, for example, has seen roughly half of its Ph.D.'s leave academe for applied and practical jobs in government, public policy, and private business, where the work tends to be interdisciplinary. Those anthropologists may still attend the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, and they are sometimes accompanied by their coworkers from outside the discipline, says William E. Davis, the association’s executive director. Some of these nonanthropologist colleagues have even joined the association.

For the members of many groups, the annual meeting remains the most visible and palpable thing an association does. The members of the MLA, for example, see the opportunity to present research at their group’s meeting as the top reason to join, says Rosemary G. Feal, the association’s executive director.

But such meetings often break even at best. The MLA’s annual meeting, which typically attracts 8,500 people, makes up just 7 percent of its annual revenue.

Economic factors may also threaten the annual meeting, says Ms. Yu of the Council of Learned Societies. Fuel prices continue to escalate, and Web-based conferencing grows more attractive. “It could be that in 10 years the annual meeting will be a thing of the past,” she says.

Publications, another leg of the tripod, face their own challenges. They are costly to print and distribute, and the growing movement to make scholarship free online puts associations’ finances at risk, say several of the groups’ directors.

“Publishing is changing, the way scientists communicate is changing, the career path is changing,” says Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which derives about half of its income from subscriptions, advertising, and other activities related to its journal, Science.

The journal remains one of the most prestigious in the world, he says, and the association’s finances are strong, which gives Mr. Leshner confidence that the association will continue to thrive, even if the road ahead is not entirely clear. “I think we’ll evolve what we do for our members,” he says.

The third leg, membership, can account for as much as half of an association’s revenue, though many try to find other sources of income to make up for the ebbs and flows of participation.

While some disciplinary societies have seen increases in membership over the past decade, many have been stagnant or declined. Some groups, like the American Sociological Association, have sought new members by more aggressively recruiting faculty at community colleges, and even high schools. Membership has increased by 7 percent over the past decade, and trended younger.

Still, even those societies with growing membership have not kept pace with the overall increase in college faculty, whose ranks rose by more than one quarter, to more than 1.4 million, between 2001 and 2009, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Education statistics.

This discrepancy persists despite research suggesting that faculty members identify much more strongly with their discipline than with their institution or department. And scholarly groups are often the closest things to the embodiment of a discipline.

“It helps provide centrality and clarity about what the discipline means,” says Michael A. Brintnall, executive director of the American Political Science Association. Becoming a member of such groups is often a statement of belonging. “In that sense, it’s showing a solidarity.”

Several leaders ascribed the mismatch between the growth in faculty and their membership trends to phenomena described in Bowling Alone, saying that the sense of rootlessness in wider society is also being felt in higher education. The expectation that a new faculty member will simply join his or her disciplinary society as a matter of course has weakened.

“There’s no longer the sense that, if you’re in this profession, then you should be a member because that’s what you do,” says J. Michael Pearson, executive director of the Mathematical Association of America, which has experienced a 10-percent decline in membership over the past five years. “It’s no longer seen as having the same value.”

Mr. Pearson suspects that colleges’ growing reliance on adjuncts has taken a toll on his group’s membership. And he does not blame the adjuncts. They are not paid as well as tenured faculty and are less able to afford membership dues. They also do not receive money for professional development to use for travel to conferences. “If you feel like your work is being treated more and more like a commodity,” he says, “you’re probably feeling less like you should invest in this enterprise of community.”

A Tale of 2 Societies

All of these trends, in membership, meetings, and publishing, lead Mr. Pearson, who took over the math association in January, to see a rapidly changing, and troubling, landscape.

“We’ve sat around and talked about it and sort of banged our head on the table,” he says.

And he is acutely aware that his association faces an uncertain future, especially compared with its sister organization, the American Mathematical Society (which tends to focus more on research while the association focuses more on teaching).

The root of these groups’ differing fortunes lies in the late 1930s, when a group of American mathematicians feared for the future of their discipline. Racial laws in Germany had cast out several prominent Jewish mathematicians who edited the influential reviewing journal Zentralblatt für Mathematik und Ihre Grenzgebiete.

Several of them came to the United States and helped create a new abstracting journal, Mathematical Reviews, in 1940. Financed with $60,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the journal was kept afloat with annual support, including $500 from the Mathematical Association of America and $1,000 from the math society.

Five years later, the math association reduced its subsidy. Though the details have been lost to history, this much is known: By the early 1950s, the math association decided it could not afford to keep supporting the journal, important as it was.

The math society, on the other hand, maintained it. Mathematical Reviews eventually changed formats, while still keeping track of the latest mathematics research. It is now known as MathSciNet, an online database staffed by 75 people in Ann Arbor, Mich. Fifteen of them are mathematicians with Ph.D.'s.

MathSciNet offers expert reviews of over two million pieces of mathematical scholarship from 450 journals, including links to original articles and retrodigitized bibliographic data dating to the early 1800s. Users can track the history and influence of math research.

In 2010, subscriptions to MathSciNet accounted for more than $10-million of the math society’s income, more than one-third of its annual revenue, helping to create a $1.8-million surplus for the organization.

The math association, on the other hand, finished the same year with $8.3-million in total revenue and a deficit of $750,000.

“You live with history, right?” says Mr. Pearson of the math association. “We all live with history.”

Scholarly Groups at a Glance