The Irrelevance of the Disciplinary Association

A dramatic scene played out in New York in January at the American Historical Association’s annual conference. Raucous debates were held over a “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza,” which overwhelmingly passed (428-88). The passing of the resolution, which condemned the destruction of schools and universities and the killing of teachers and professors in Gaza, was met by jubilation from academics on social media. Joy quickly turned to frustration: The AHA’s executive council voted 11-4 to veto the resolution on the basis that it lay outside the scope of the organization’s work. Anne Hyde, a member of the executive council, said that she voted to veto because of the AHA’s reputation as an “unbiased historical actor” and because the war in Gaza “is not settled history, so we’re not clear what happened or who to blame or when it began even, so it isn’t something that a professional organization should be commenting on yet.”

As a historian of the global anti-apartheid movement, this struck me as familiar. In the 1970s and 1980s, students, labor unionists, clergy, and others tried to compel their various institutions into divesting from companies who did business with South Africa. In almost all cases, institutions bitterly resisted this and did so only after years of campaigning and tremendous pressure: In many cases, it meant that members had to take over leadership positions in order to advance their agenda. The more radical grassroots taking on a more conservative top tier of civil society can be found in many activist histories. The Modern Language Association’s executive council blocked a similar resolution.

Gaza is just one issue among many that disciplinary associations are confronting, and a pattern is emerging: They are unwilling or unable to respond to what their members want. At a time of crisis for the profession and broader global crisis, this is a toxic situation. Whether it’s politically led assaults on academic disciplines, the erosion of faculty rights, adjunctification, or member demands over political issues, they seem unable to respond. As a result, these organizations are drifting into irrelevance: They only speak to the concerns of a minority of their members at any given time, and that minority also happens to be the most institutionally privileged. An inability to fight for adjuncts is turning professional associations into glorified country clubs. At the same time, an unwillingness to listen to a majority of their members on political issues is tarnishing their moral claim to meaningful scholarship.

In the early months of a Trump administration that is eagerly targeting higher education with punitive measures, this is especially troubling. The problem has spread to STEM as well. The American Society for Microbiology has protested the federal shutdown in National Institutes of Health funding, understandably so because it imperils laboratory research. But members were quick to point out on social media that ASM was deleting websites that mentioned or celebrated diversity at any level, presumably to comply with the Trump administration’s feelings on diversity. Members were surprised by this sudden and troubling policy shift.

What do these societies exist for? The AHA was founded in 1884 and is today the largest professional society of historians in the world with over 10,000 members. Its function was to set the standard for how academic historians behave and work. Its annual conference has been a chance to present scholarship, and also to comment on the health and state of the field. Most of the job interviews in the field once happened at the annual conference, though this has been in decline for some time. The association also offers prizes for articles and grants to carry out research, and most of its operating funds come from member dues and donations.

But as to how members interact with the AHA, that varies wildly. I attended the conference until I left academe, but since then the organization no longer speaks to or for me. James Grossman, the executive director, has emphasized the importance of maintaining “productive relationships among historians who follow diverse career paths” in the past, but the benefits to those like me who have left the profession are unclear (beyond being able to get drinks with friends in the hotel bar). If I were an adjunct, I’d be in the same position — and too poor to be able to attend anyway.

Disciplinary associations are there for career reasons: Presenting at a conference or networking is a necessary part of professional development. But the joy of attending a conference is dead for most attendees. It’s a moment of nervous hustle in the hopes that it puts you ahead in the bleak job market. Now, even that motivation is weakening. The prestige of one’s doctoral program is the best predictor of getting a tenure-track job; whatever you do or don’t do at a conference is a marginal benefit.

For more, read “Why We Need Nonpartisan Scholarly Associations.”

For years, critics have tried to goad scholarly organizations into taking a more muscular and active stance. Six years ago Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes argued in a Chronicle essay (“A Moral Stain on the Profession”) that the AHA was training a whole generation of new historians that would never find jobs. They didn’t mince words: “Though the AHA is the major professional organization in the discipline, it has displayed a marked unwillingness — or, perhaps, inability — to rally historians against an unjust labor system.” Their suggestions of how it might change ranged from the moderate (opening up the executive council to nontenure-track historians) to the more radical (asking whether the organization could work with other disciplinary groups to launch and coordinate strikes). They ended the piece with a call to action: “Those with professional power can no longer confine themselves to promoting the latest scholarship, awarding prizes, and holding conferences. … The future of History — and, perhaps, of history — is at stake.”

The AHA, MLA, and ASM, however, are not labor unions. The AHA is a 501(c)(3). MLA members are free to join labor unions, but the MLA itself is not leading unionization campaigns. These professional organizations are prohibited from even becoming involved in political campaigns — a major limitation since one of the drivers of adjunctification, for example, is funding cuts to higher-education budgets. They don’t have the resources, the training, or the funding structure to embrace wholesale labor organizing. Instead, the AHA and MLA have focused on alternative academic careers, or alt-ac, as a solution. It wasn’t a particularly good one: Asking departments to make changes to graduate curricula was unpopular and difficult, so the “alt-ac pivot” was just a lot of messaging about being able to do anything with a Ph.D. But it was, presumably, what the organizations felt they could contribute.

Conjoined with the structural limitations of these associations is a cultural one. They exist in the realm of something like faculty governance: They co-exist politely with other power structures and generally do not rock the boat. While they might gently protest via petition when a state government decides to restrict the teaching of a subject at the K-12 level, they’re not going to directly confront administrators on a campus, many of whom they see as their peers. A friend and mentor once told me that one of the chief limitations in academe is that all faculty members need to pretend that they can have a friendly lunch with the dean or provost at any time. That holds true here.

Anne Hyde’s comments about her AHA executive council veto vote say a lot about the underlying culture in these organizations. If historians only discussed “settled history,” why would we even have conferences? What would there be to discuss? And in any event, the mere facts of October 7 or what has happened since are broadly known. Likewise, just about every historian agrees that there is bias in all scholarly activity: True, perfect objectivity is a mirage.

Comments like Hyde’s suggest that groups like the AHA do not want to wade into topics they feel are unsafe or politically charged. That fear of politicization is in many ways warranted: The AHA has a bad habit of only winding up in the news cycle over culture-war issues, such as James Sweet’s essay about presentism that caused, in the words of the Atlantic staff writer David Frum, “an outrage volcano.” If you’re a climate scientist or a historian of slavery or a criminologist, your subject has already been politicized. The list of research areas considered politically fraught is only expanding under the Trump administration: familiar Trump targets like migration, LGBT issues, and DEI, certainly, but also work on infectious diseases and even seaweed research in Maine. Where will cautious professional organizations draw the line in our new political atmosphere?

It’s time to build something better. Disciplinary associations have always had a fundamentally conservative outlook because they’ve been wedded to existing hierarchies. In his 1949 AHA presidential address, Conyers Read warned that historians could not be “free agents” when it comes to speech and would have to “accept and endorse such controls as are essential for the preservation of our way of life.” That attitude segued neatly into McCarthyism.

If you want to build more activist scholarly networks, there are plenty of models. In 1970, the African Heritage Studies Association held its first annual conference at Howard University. It was organized because the African Studies Association often ignored complaints from scholars of African descent that it was too timid in addressing racism in the United States or taking a stand on apartheid. Another organization, the Association of Concerned African Scholars was founded in 1977 specifically to elevate African issues. Another group, Historians for Peace and Democracy, was founded in 2003 as Historians Against the War, responding to the U.S. war in Iraq.

Scholars in those organizations have shown real moral and public force, and have not shied away from fights that actually affect the public. If our more mainstream disciplinary organizations like the AHA and MLA are so fragmented that they cannot effectively coalesce around the most pressing issues of the day, perhaps it’s time to embrace that fragmentation. Regional conferences would be more affordable for members to attend. Breaking down associations into subdisciplines makes them more immediately relevant to their members.

But even this can only take us so far. To tackle the political problems that impinge on scholars’ freedoms and job opportunities, it’s time to unionize. There’s no other way for academics to flex any meaningful political muscle. Events at West Virginia University and elsewhere have shown that faculty governance and the polite fiction of tenure are not going to halt adjunctification and austerity. The only way to protect vulnerable departments and colleagues is collective action, which must stretch across departments and include contingent scholars and grad students. This will be very uncomfortable, precisely because of the academic chumminess that pervades mainstream disciplinary organizations. Unionization will attract anger from conservatives. But the fight is brewing anyway, and the alternative is surrender.