Supporting Scholarship and the Scholarly Community

One of APSA's two core activity areas for supporting scholarly work is publication of our journals. And one of the major rites of passage for any journal is the end of one editorial term and the start of another. This was the final full year of the editorship of the APSR for Lee Sigelman and the start of a term for a new team of editors at UCLA

There are major developments for the year, notably the culmination this year of a remarkable editorship of the APSR by Lee Sigelman at George Washington University,

APSR. It is hard to overstate the significance of Lee Sigelman's editorship of the Review. At a time when some in the discipline intimated that there couldn't be a single outlet that represented the many voices of political science, Sigelman found a path of invitation and breadth, and sustained APSR's impeccable quality. His relentless work habit and relentless good cheer helped bring political science back together again and his editorial commentary helped to sustain the good hearted principle that seeking excellence can also be a process for helping us all achieve it.

Now the editorial leadership of APSR moves to a distinguished team of editors at UCLA with Ronald Rogowski as lead editor. This innovative approach will call upon the active efforts of a team of senior scholars at the University to meet face to face on a regular basis to discuss the scholarship they receive.

Perspectives on Politics. Perspectives on Politics, edited by James Johnson and supported by the University of Rochester, continued to distinguish itself as an outlet for path breaking scholarship relevant to political science that advances, even breaks ground, on critical global and intellectual issues. The symposium on “25 Years at the Margins: The Global Politics of HIV/AIDS” stands out as an illustration of this. The editor, James Johnson, reported: “As Andrea Densham points out in her introduction, with a handful of prominent exceptions, political scientists largely have neglected the comparative, domestic, and international politics of HIV/AIDS. The remaining four contributions … indicate the scope and scale of the ongoing AIDS epidemic and some of its political causes and consequences across a diverse array of cases-France, South Africa, Brazil, Barbados, Malaysia, and Singapore. By implication the contributors highlight too the scope and scale of our neglect.” Perspectives reached an important milestone in its development this year—inclusion into the JSTOR archives. The journal has been in print now long enough for early issues to cross a moving wall into open-access archiving.

PS: PS this year continued its feature role in publishing symposia on topics that have a strong public presence and also continue to advance scholarship. The feature issue on political cartoons received widespread attention. PS remains as well the journal of record for the discipline.

Annual Meeting. The other core activity is production of the Annual Meeting and related promotion of scholarship and community. The annual meeting continues to grow, and to function as the single largest meeting place of political scientists in the world.

As we do every decade or so, the structure and operation of the meeting has been under a review to look at the allocation formula for distributing panels, alternative panel formats, participation rules, guidelines for siting future meetings, promoting community within the profession, incorporating new waves of thinking or methods of research, and the use of new technology. The Annual Meeting serves a wide variety of purposes in addition to the core one of presenting and advancing scholarship. It is a major meeting ground and community builder for the discipline and a forum where many organizational activities take place. The meeting also serves as a statement about the discipline and our community, and in that mode there are many additional pressures on the meeting, often in some conflict with other goals. Where we hold the meeting, the agreements we reach with major vendors, and how we manage the environmental consequences of travel and printing make a statement of the discipline as a human community and about values held by Association members. One task of the Review committee has been to provide a forum for discussing those issues and the balance we may wish to strike among the many competing claims that such statements inevitably incur. Member commentary has been not been widespread, though some groups have expressed strong claims, particular related to support of labor our meeting hotels, and with respect to siting of conferences in states.

I'm particularly pleased that the idea of the Annual Meeting Working Group (AMWG) has continued to flourish. This approach allows small groups of scholars interested in a common topic to meet, draw materials from the conference, and share their observations and interests. It shows us that real life can emulate Web 2.0, and that social networking of scholars is indeed possible. Over three years, 729 people have participated in this activity. Combined with the pre-conference Short Courses that have been a regular part of APSA meetings for many years (and which draw 400 to 500 people a year and the informal meeting of APSA's related groups, the conference represents are significant informal networking venue for political science. You can spot the AMWG participants at the meeting with their discrete but singular ribbons naming their group. We've heard there's become a demand for the ribbons even among those who didn't join the group—a sure sign of success.

Additionally the Annual Meeting serves as the meeting place for APSA's 35 organized sections, 60 related groups, and numerous other associations. The National Conference of Black Political Scientists, the International Studies Association, the American National Election Studies, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Western Political Science Association hold meetings here. The annual meeting is also the forum for meetings of political science journals, for directors and officers of other political science associations, and increasingly for leaders of national associations world wide. There is an informal network of political scientists who are academic administrators as well.

Teaching and Learning Conference. APSA's Teaching and Learning Conference continues to have a strong following. We have started to move the venue around the country—with last meeting in Charlotte, N.C. and the upcoming meeting on the West Coast in San Jose. This conference, capped at 300 participants annually, works explicitly on a working model, modeled on the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and NISPAcee association working group conferences. Attendance was made up of political scientists, graduate students, librarians, international scholars, and high school teachers, and it operates with growing partnerships with the Canadian Political Science Association and the European Political Science Network (epsNet). Recent themed tracks have included Graduate Education, General Education/Core Curriculum, Program Assessment, Internationalizing the Curriculum, Civic Engagement, Simulations and Role Play, Diversity and Inequality, and Teaching Research Methods.

Conference for Chairs. Finally we have continued to move forward with establishing an annual conference for department chairs, to allow chairs an opportunity both to address common management issues, to collaborate on addressing policy and program issues in the discipline, and to get some training. We're exploring the possible economies of scale of holding this conference in conjunction with the Teaching and Learning Conference, and will evaluate that option after a couple of years experience. We continue a workshop for chairs at the Annual Meeting as well.

Voice for Individual Scholars. Based on a long-standing principle articulated in its Constitution, APSA does not take positions on public policy matters unless they are concerned with our direct purpose to “encourage the study of political science” or in support of academic freedom. In this latter spirit we do seek to speak out and to help frame the discussion for the discipline as a whole. The APSA Statement on Professional Ethics, Rights and Responsibilities is a common reference for the discipline as a whole, certainly for American political scientists.

This year the Association responded to developments affecting the discipline in several ways. The Council signed on to a community wide statement on Academic Freedom framed by a wide community of concerned parties, including the American Council on Education, the AAUP, and other higher education organizations. Following this community statement, the APSA Ethics Committee drafted and the Council adopted a specific statement speaking to particular concerns affecting political science faculty, given our centrality in scholarship about many conflict-laden topics. This latter statement provides APSA with a clear-cut message with which to respond when scholars come under attack that in particular emphasizes the obligation of universities to protect scholars in the wake of such attacks until due process processes can run their course.

We also discovered hateful language within the political science community, from anonymous posts within privately created blogs tracking political science job openings and job candidate experiences. President Axelrod wrote a blanket letter to department chairs to alert them to this, and encouraging them, as leaders of the discipline, to emphasize the importance of civil and collegial behavior among scholars in their graduate school training, and to stay attentive to any concrete instances of incivility.

APSA also plays a strong role with COSSA, NHA, CIE, and other organizations in social science and humanities research funding issues. This year, as well, President Axelrod wrote on behalf of APSA in support of legislation to protect scholars access to presidential records—a theme that the Association has been involved with for many years.

Building Community. APSA also works to open doors to the discipline, and in particular to be sure that we reach audiences of students whose backgrounds are underrepresented in the field. The focus has been on increasing numbers of African American, Latino/a, and Asian Pacific American political scientists, entering and continuing in the discipline, on advancing women in the profession, and on assuring an equitable climate for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered scholars. This community has provided momentum for the APSA's Mentoring Initiative as well, though the service is for everyone.

APSA joined the Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) program this year on a trial basis. PPIA is the legacy of earlier Ford and Woodrow Wilson programs to support minority students exploring public policy careers. Major policy schools have sponsored summer workshops for students on their own campuses for a number of years, as a feeder program for Masters of Public Policy degrees. PPIA is now managed by a non-profit consortium of the Association of Public Policy and Management (APPAM) and the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA). APSA has joined in a partnership for three years to explore adding attention to doctoral education to the PPIA mission, and we'll report on this activity in later issues.

Awards. Awards for scholarship, dissertations, and career achievement serve many purposes. They of course do what they say and acknowledge excellence. They also model good work for others to emulate. And they signal community sentiment about what the standards are in the discipline. Awards send their message not just by the selection of the recipients but by the name the award itself, as a signal of what is though excellent and was is thought important. APSA awards are some of the most sought after in the discipline.

Public Presence. The way in which scholarship reaches the public and policy makers is complex. When the APSA Council met recently in Washington, and spent some time with political scientists in policy positions in Congress and executive branch, a common observation was “they” don't read what we read. We know well that political science scholarship reaches policy makes through many indirect routes, one of course being through the students we train who take on public roles.

Still if we don't takes steps to convey both the direct relevance and the indirect significance of our work, we can't expect the public support we need to continue. APSA has approached this on two tracks. One is the series of Task Forces we have undertaken to bring political scientists together to articulate what the discipline knows on a topic of public importance. The other is to issue press releases on at least one article from each of our journals quarterly, with the recommendation of the editors, and to broaden press access in other ways. We are posting more press releases and increasing outreach to the media in other ways. In turn we are seeing more press usage of APSA materials—from the journals, web site, and meeting. Down the road we'll try to step back to gauge what results there have been.

There are additional ways to expand the public presence of the discipline that we might work on more. One is to express the importance of political science to policy-makers, to students (and their parents), and to the public. This won't as a general rule be done through reporting our advanced scholarship; it may call for a different voice—an expression of why engagement with the questions we do study is important, and a means of listening to policy-makers and publics about what inquiry will be valuable to them.

Strengthen Infrastructure of the Discipline

Political science, as any scholarship, is more than the sum of the individual and group scholarship conducted within it. In fact, it can be argued, in a slightly provocative way, that political science is not what political scientists do. The political science discipline emerges instead from the network of institutions and relationships that provide intellectual integration, a trust relations among scholars, and a program of peer review and other mechanisms that gauge authenticity and validity of knowledge gathering and that can answer contested claims and assuring the independence of knowledge. The discipline depends on a complex infrastructure, without which claims for intellectual autonomy or academic freedom would have no underpinning.

This disciplinary structure is located in part in academic departments, partly with journals and academic presses, partly in foundations and funding agencies, and substantially in the scholarly society. An important role for APSA is maintaining and enhancing these structures. Many services seen at first as support for the individual scholar in fact have a more important in dimension in enriching the infrastructure of the discipline itself—such as the peer review process of journal publishing.

Organized Sections. A core structure within the structure for APSA are the 35 organized sections. Total Organized Section memberships continue to grow, and total over 20,600. This year a new organized has been approved titled Sexuality and Politics. Sections are increasingly engaged with journals and offering their members discounted journal subscriptions.

Committees and Coverage of Major Areas of Activity. APSA also plays a major role in organizing political scientists to the discipline—primarily through active standing and ad hoc committees. APSA has committees on Civic Engagement, Teaching and Learning, Departmental Services, and in support of various communities within the discipline—women, African Americans, et al. These groups take on projects to enrich resources in the discipline in their areas, advise the APSA Council on positions, and channel scholars into other leadership roles. Last year 222 APSA members served on some APSA standing committee or Task Force, and another 68 served on Award Committees.

International. There is a geography of science, as unexpected as that might first seem to be. Connecting scholars globally takes action and structure. APSA has made a basic and clear commitment to expand engagement with scholars globally. A first step has been a significantly reduced membership rate for scholars outside of high income countries—of $40US—that has increased membership from scholars in such countries significantly.

Institutional networks are different in different parts of the world. In some places they are strong, but insular. In others there are much weaker. In order to engage most effectively with international scholars APSA has developed several different arrangements, the APSA International Committee is reviewing all of these now to see which are still apt and which need revision. In recent years we developed a strong relationship with the UK Political Studies Association and the Japanese Political Science Association, including exchanging panelists and presenters at annual meetings. The ECPR is also a regular participant at the APSA Annual Meeting.

Recently our focus has turned in slightly different directions, as we have obtained resources for partnerships and projects in countries for which the ties less well developed. The Mac Arthur Foundation has supported a small project to collaborate with scholars from India on a study of Tocquevillian perspectives on democracy, cross-nationally. This work follows from several years of visits and exchange by APSA presidents, initially encouraged by Ashutush Varshney as chair of the International Committee. Past president Ira Katznelson then pulled this project together and obtained the foundation funding.

On a much larger level, APSA has funding from the Mellon Foundation to begin a series of scholarly workshops in Africa with African political scientists focused on basic research topics. The goal is to contribute to, and draw from, core capacities and understanding within the political science community in sub-Saharan Africa. Ira Katznelson made this initiative a central part of his APSA presidency, and he continues to play a leadership role in the project. We'll report more about this activity as it develops this fall.

Also, in partnership with Macalaster College, APSA has received funds from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission to support women political scientists from Japan in a series of workshops in the U.S. including panels at the APSA conference.

Liaison Activity. In addition to organizing activity of political scientists within the Association, APSA also plays a strong role in linking organizations across the discipline. We are active partners with a wide array of other political science associations—IPSA internationally; many others nationally; and all within the U.S. And we have organized a number of community projects—particularly the Political Science Online (PROl) project that is placing most conference papers online for open access at www.politicalscience.org. Locally, we coordinate activities of the National Capital Area Political Science Association as well.

APSA is also actively involved with ACLS and with AAAS representing political science in those key humanities and science communities. We collaborate both with designation of member liaisons, and with active staff involvement. The ACLS coordinates an invaluable Administrators Group that serves as a meeting ground and training session for association executive officers.

Advocacy Activity for Discipline. Closely related to liaison activity that helps to network the institutions important to the discipline, APSA also works closely with several organizations committed to advocacy in support of the discipline. The two most important of these are the Consortium for Social Science Associations (COSSA) and the National Humanities Alliance (NHA). Each is a legally designated lobbying organization. COSSA focuses on research support for NSF and NIH; and NHA focuses on the National Endowment for the Humanities; and each also looks more broadly as need be. COSSA has just gone through a self-study and review that has responded quite favorably to the role it plays given its limited resource base. Each can show favorable outcomes for core funding for social science and humanities in their target agencies, in a very difficult budget climate.

Interdisciplinarity Activity. This year, Robert Axelrod, APSA president, has added a new dimension to APSA's support for infrastructure in the discipline, by initiating a study of interdisciplinarity. Chaired by John Aldrich, the study is taking a practical look at how political scientists can work outside of disciplinary borders without impeding career progress that is so often defined by the discipline itself. In the meantime the Annual Theme for 2007 has concentrated an Political Science and Beyond and has included some of the richest multi-disciplinary discussions in theme panels that we have experienced at the Annual Meeting.

Data Gathering. Another role for the association is to document the discipline and gather information about numbers of scholars, degree production, and work conditions in the field. Here we have perhaps made the least progress in recent years, in spite of strong plans to move ahead. Building a vigorous departmental survey with emphasis on enrollment trends and job placement is a high priority.

Labor Market, eJobs. One of the strongest pieces of glue that holds the discipline together is the labor market—a cycle of job seeking, candidate review, and assessment of colleagues. In my view one of APSA's most important responsibilities. is to maintain a job market for political science positions that is open, transparent, and consolidated—a one-stop shop for all scholars and institutions. We've largely achieved this with the long tradition of the Personnel Service Newsletter, and now its online equivalent—eJobs.

The Department of Labor has thrown us a curve ball, with a regulation requiring that academic positions must be listed in a print journal to qualify for hiring foreign scholars. Online listings along are not adequate, even if backed by a PDF downloads. This forces departments to list positions outside APSA's online service—an unnecessary expense for them and a potential threat to the centrality of the APSA eJobs system. We are looking into ways to circulate a print listing of job listings as a component of PS to continue to make APSA's eJobs system a one-stop shop for institutions and scholars posting and searching jobs.

Add to the stock of opportunity and capacity in the discipline

While the main part of APSA's activities are to support individual scholars and to maintain and coordinate institutions important to the functioning of the discipline, there are a few instances in which APSA explicitly contributes institutional capacity to the discipline. Three such areas are our operation of the Congressional Fellowship Program, the work of the Centennial Center, and our funding of Small Research Grants.

CFP. The Congressional Fellowship Program places political scientists, journalists, and a number of others in one-year internships on Capitol Hill with members of Congress. It is simply the best program of its type—and operates with impeccable credentials and with glowing evaluations. By self-reports the caliber of teaching and reporting on the Congress is significantly higher because of this APSA initiative.

Centennial Center. APSA's Centennial Center is both a physical space and network of programs to support scholars. In each case the idea is to create opportunities for the next generation based on the generosity of gifts from scholars who have benefited from activities of the last. Twenty-one scholars used the physical space in the building last year—with about half receiving research funding awards or subsidy from APSA Centennial Center programs.

Small Research Grants. APSA also funds individual scholars from BA and MA departments, and other non-Ph.D. settings, with modest, but much valued, research grants. Grants cover access to materials, travel to research sites, and other research needs.

Excellence in Nonprofit Management

Finally, APSA prides itself on performing at a high level as a nonprofit corporation. We tend to become so absorbed in the functions that the Association and its National Office perform for the discipline that we sometimes lose sight of what the entity itself IS. We strive for excellence in non-profit management. While always this excellence ultimately reflects itself in services to members and the discipline, many of its intermediate measures are more explicit—clean audits, efficient funds management, a responsive and complex web site, timely information transfer to members, and so forth.

Communication, eNewsletters, etc. Web development has been extensive in the last several years and a large share of our revenue is now managed through the web site instead of on paper. The web site is the second featured hit in a Google search for the topic “political science,” behind only Wikipedia, which in turn cites us.

eNewsletters are now sent on a regular basis to all members, along with specialized newsletters to section officers, department chairs, and graduate students. We have virtually no opt-outs; and while we know information overload dulls everyone's wits, there is strong anecdotal evidence this has made members far more aware of APSA activity and its broader disciplinary context. The next step of course is to supplant anecdotal information with more thorough survey data, and we'll focus on that next. The web is now far more than a communication tool for us. APSA currently processes $2.5 million in funds through the web site as well.

Financial Management and Accountability. The APSA Council has also taken new steps to oversee APSA financial operations, in the light of auditing and other community expectations for oversight by boards of directors. A new Audit Committee has been established to commission and receive the audit, and steps are under consideration to establish a Council finance committee to which to devolve some of the work of Administrative Committee. We have also formalized conflict of interest policies and a whistleblower policy by which staff and officers can put forward questions or complaints about any financial practice to an independent interlocutor. As noted above, these steps are occurring at a point in which finances are strong, no financial issues are on the table, and the last audit was “clean” and without any management letter—so it allows us to put protections in place without the contortions of any immediate problem solving.