The American Economic Association has never taken a position on any public-policy issue. The American Anthropology Association has taken plenty. The American Political Science Association is thinking about becoming more active. And some members of the American Studies Association are wishing their organization were less so.
In academe, where every argument quickly finds a counterargument, the role of the disciplinary association in matters of public advocacy is a curious one. Recent, heated debates within the American Studies Association and Modern Language Association over Israel and academic freedom highlighted the risks that academics take when they weigh in on issues that go beyond their immediate concerns.
But when, exactly, should academic groups speak up on matters of national, or international, concern? Science associations regularly speak out on public-policy issues that they deem relevant, like climate science and the teaching of evolution. In the humanities and social sciences, by contrast, the answer seems to vary by discipline.
For economists, the tradition of keeping mum—at least as a national organization—is long and proud. “The association as such will take no partisan attitude, nor will it commit its members to any position on practical economic questions,” the economic association states on its website. Those policies, says its president, William D. Nordhaus, a professor at Yale University, by email, “have served it well through hot and cold wars.”
Not only do economists vary widely in their opinions of economic policy, he notes, but many have participated in helping shape such policies. Putting forth statements on political issues would be “unnecessary, polarizing, controversy-stoking, and a distraction from the real and important work of economic research and education,” he says. (Mr. Nordhaus was, of course, speaking for himself and not the association.)
Not that members haven’t tried. There was an attempt after the violent demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968 to cross Chicago off the list of future annual-meeting sites, but it failed.
“We have our hands full running seven world-class journals as well as an annual meeting that attracts more than 10,000 economists, including students,” Mr. Nordhaus writes. “I can’t imagine why we would feel the need to get involved in political pronouncements.”
Anthropologists apparently think quite differently. “Most members of our association feel comfortable with a certain level of advocacy, speaking truth to power, giving voice to disadvantage,” says Edward Liebow, executive director of the American Anthropological Association. “That’s part of what draws people to the field.”
The group has weighed in on, among other things, potential U.S. military action against Iran, the treatment of workers abroad by Coca-Cola, a Supreme Court decision to strike down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, and the war in Iraq. (It was critical of all of those.)
Mr. Liebow says an activist approach makes sense given that anthropologists have a front-row seat on how “lofty geopolitical stratagems” can harm the communities in which they do fieldwork. So the resolution warning against a U.S. strike against Iran, passed in 2007, noted both a lack of evidence that Iran was developing nuclear weapons and a concern that an attack would harm civilians and “make it more difficult and dangerous for U.S. anthropologists to conduct future research in the Middle East region.”
‘How Advocacy Fits’
Other disciplines have debated how activist they should be.
The American Political Science Association has stayed away from policy debates except when they directly concern members, such as the recent Congressional efforts to limit the kind of political-science research financed by the National Science Foundation.
But there’s a movement afoot to change that hands-off attitude, says Steven Rathgeb Smith, the group’s executive director. Trends in higher education “may mean we need to be more proactive in certain issues,” such as open-source publishing, federal funding for Pell Grants—even the arrests of political scientists in Egypt, he says. “Many of our members are very passionate around academic-freedom issues.”
Conference participation and organizational membership are less important to career advancement than they used to be, Mr. Smith notes. “As associations think about how to deliver value, they have to think about how advocacy fits into this,” he says.
The Organization of American Historians, prompted in part by its expensive decision in 2005 to acknowledge a labor dispute at a hotel in San Francisco by moving its annual meeting to San Jose, held an online debate in 2010 on political engagement.
David Hollinger, a history professor at University of California at Berkeley and a past president of the association, favored a limited role, in part, he wrote, because group activism could give some members a false sense that they “gave at the office” and had fulfilled their civic obligations. Nancy MacLean, a history professor at Duke University, held a more expansive view of the organization’s role, arguing that, for example, it could do more to support unions.
Hovering over such discussions is another question: What impact could an academic association possibly have? “It’s a very good question: Are you hurling manifestoes?” says James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. Yet if an issue is relevant to an organization’s mission, he adds, “Saying, ‘Well, we shouldn’t say anything because nobody will listen’ doesn’t make any sense.”
The AHA has come up with a series of “guiding principles” to help figure out when it should take a public stance. They focus on such issues as the preservation of historical sources, censorship of teaching of history, and freedom of scholarly expression and movement.
Those principles have occasionally moved the organization into the area of foreign policy. In 2006 and 2007, as the war in Iraq dragged on, the group passed resolutions addressing, among other things, the reclassification of formerly unclassified documents, the denial of visas to some foreign scholars invited to teach in the United States, and even the government’s use of harsh interrogation techniques at the Guantánamo Bay military prison.
Historians, the organization noted, “share the special responsibility of identifying and condemning actions that violate the elementary standards of human decency … that represent the common heritage of all human kind.”
Military conflict has often led to heated calls for action within academic associations. The Vietnam War is a frequent reference point. Many academics felt strongly about opposing the war because it hit so close to home: Students were being drafted to fight, and antiwar protests were disrupting campuses.
Even today, says Mr. Grossman, people use Vietnam as a “framing device” to talk about whether a national policy issue is also relevant to disciplinary concerns.
A Different Kind of War
Stanley N. Katz, president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, says he began thinking about the political role of academic associations during a different kind of conflict: the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. He was president of the ACLS from 1986 to 1997.
In 1991, he recalls, the Modern Language Association kicked up a furor when it opposed the appointment of Carol A. Iannone, a lecturer in the Gallatin Division of New York University, to the advisory council of the National Endowment of the Humanities. The MLA argued that her scholarly record was not distinguished enough to merit an appointment. Her defenders, including Lynn V. Cheney, then chairman of the endowment, said that what her opponents really disliked was her conservative ideology.
Still, Mr. Katz thinks that most scholarly associations are fairly conservative themselves when it comes to taking public positions. Anger the wrong people, he says, and your funding from the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities could be at risk.
Resolutions are often most notable for the lack of interest they inspire among members, with the percentage choosing to vote sometimes registering in the single digits.
Even the American Studies Association’s highly contentious, and highly publicized, resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions prompted fewer than half of its members to vote.
Michael Bérubé, a past president of the Modern Language Association, finds this problematic. “It’s not only a question of which associations read their charters broadly, it’s also a question of which are set up constitutionally so that a really small handful of people can make a decision that affects an entire association,” says Mr. Bérubé, a literature professor at Pennsylvania State University.
Within the MLA, “it had gotten to the point where the same five people wrote resolutions and 95 percent of people ignored them,” he says. “So you’d have 3 percent in favor and 2 against.”
To fix that, in 2011 he supported a change in MLA rules so that resolutions must now secure at least 10 percent of member votes to pass.
While 10 percent is hardly a ringing endorsement, some associations require no more than that—and sometimes less—to make public pronouncements, particularly if they feel they need to act quickly. The leadership of the MLA and the ASA, for example, issued statements condemning the use of violence against student protestors in 2011, including the use of pepper spray at the University of California at Davis.
Over the years, different associations have debated raising the bar for either introducing or passing a resolution. But in the end, they have deferred to the argument that it’s better to have more debate rather than less, and that people can vote if they want to.
Still, Cary Nelson, a former president of the American Association of University Professors, warns against issuing controversial statements without the backing of a strong majority. “Otherwise you divide the association,” says Mr. Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “To take the consequences without understanding where your membership really stands doesn’t look smart to me.”
