2003 CSAS Annual Report

Annual Report For CSAS 2003

Submitted by: E. Paul Durrenberger

1) Accomplishments

Membership numbers have hovered around 250 for the past three years; Dec 2002, 273; Oct 2003 (last numbers from AAA), 241. [Please explain why you ask for this information when all we can do is tell you what you tell us and your data is more up-to-date than ours.]

Factors affecting membership numbers

* Faculty membership hovers around 200 (+/- 10)
* Students drop out each year as they graduate or move out of region, so this number fluctuates greatly within a 12 month period
* Annual meetings bring in new memberships to get lower registration fees
* At end of 2003 we see a small increase in faculty memberships
* Jan 2003 increase in dues did not affect student or faculty memberships

Financial balance [Please explain why you ask for this information when all we can do is tell you what you tell us and your data is more up-to-date than ours.]

Financial balances from 2002 to 2003
* Can only compare Dec 2002 to Oct 2003 as have no more recent 2003 data from AAA
* Dec 2002 $1560 result of bad annual meeting in East Lansing, MI
* Oct 2003 $2917 see below

Factors affecting 2003 financial health
* 2003 annual meeting broke even & had higher attendance
* better financial management of 2003 annual meeting
* increase in dues
* more efficient distribution by AAA of Bulletin lowered costs
* White Award was taken from White Scholarship fund not general fund
* Only one student paper competition award was given instead of two

AAA meeting activities
* one invited session, two co-sponsored invited sessions, reviewed one session, held a board meeting

2003 spring meeting activities
* 35 sessions with 173 papers
* Distinguished Lecturer
* Special photo exhibit
* Musical guest Andy Cohen - subscription event *

Communications Section news in AN column and Bulletin - online at:
-- http://mypage.iu.edu/~jlucke/PDF%20files/Fall%202003%20Bulletin.pdf -- Developed website and linked to AAA -- http://mypage.iu.edu/~jlucke/? -- Many discussions on meetings, policies, and relations w/ AAA on officer listserve and member listserve.

Changes in bylaws
* None in 2003

2) Future plans
* 2004 annual meeting in Milwaukee, WI
o Distinguished Lecturer: Andrew Strathern (Univ of Pittsburgh)
* student paper competition - undergraduate and graduate student divisions
* award Leslie A. White and Beth Dillingham scholarships
* review Bylaws
* update Officers Handbook
* monitor expenses of Anthrosource involvement
* continue discussion of withdrawal from AAA

Collaboration with other sections, Society for Anthropological Sciences organized a session and round table at our 2003 meeting.

3) Other items
Recommendations to Long Range Planning Committee
* Improve the AAA annual meeting process. There are too many mistakes. Look into working with a meeting planner instead of staff who have no knowledge of the meeting industry.
* Get the AAA involved in the national Preparing Future Faculty initiative as the majority of other discipline based professional societies are. There is little that AAA does at annual meetings or as an organization to socialize future members in areas beyond research which is only one dimension of a faculty member's citizenship at an institution.
* Revise the procedures for selecting and nominating members of the nominations committee-there is too much control by a small group with attendant nepotism, lack of transparency, and misrepresentation of committee processes. *

Questions we'd like Executive Board to consider
* Review AAA policy on boycotting states with sodomy laws in light of Supreme Court ruling
* Remove Illinois from the list of banned states. We may not agree with the choice of mascot of the University of Illinois, but we should not therefore punish ourselves and our sections. Or be equitable and balanced and put the District of Columbia on the banned list because of the Washington mascot and review all mascots for all professional and university sports teams and subject them all to the same process. It is neither reasonable nor fair to single out one institution among many for such treatment.
* Adopt a policy of not meeting in municipalities that have not passed a living wage ordinance. [for rationales see last year's CSAS report].
* Adopt a policy of not meeting in non-union hotels. [for rationales, see last year's CSAS report]
* Improve the AAA annual meeting process [see recommendations to LRPC above].
* Improve efficiency and quality of services to sections. We pay too much for the services we receive.
* Make some response to these reports. We have no information to suggest that anything we have reported has reached the EB or LRPC or that they have acted on it.
* Either re-vitalize the section assembly by giving it a role in policy making rather than simply being advisory, or disband it and create some meaningful way for sections to influence policy.

What should AAA be? Be a professional organization that represents anthropologists and anthropology and advocates for us.

What should AAA do?
* Support the Policy Institute. The Committee on Public Policy has discussed this for a number of years, has developed a plan, and the AAA should now act on that plan.
* The AAA should take steps to have ethnographic work exempted, as ethnohistorical work has been, from IRB requirements as suggested in the recent AN article by E. Bruner [of the infamous University of Illinois].
* The AAA should adhere to its rhetoric of diversity and democracy by opening the nominations process and revising the means of selection of the nominations committee so that it does not continue to reproduce itself.. A small coterie of members continues to have undue influence.
* AAA should be honest and open with members. AAA lost much credibility with membership with the patently false 'explanation' of the nomination process.
* Poll financial officers and communications officers of sections to determine whether they feel they are receiving adequate services. *

Among officers of CSAS the opinion is widely held that the costs of association with the AAA outweigh the benefits. Among the costs are the prices we pay for services, the refusal to allow us to meet in more than half of the venues we would like to meet in, unresponsiveness to our suggestions, and lack of representation of our point of view in AAA matters since the Section Assembly has no influence on AAA policy. We noted that at the Chicago meeting more than half of section presidents did not even bother to attend and that the meeting was lackluster and trivial-because it has no real function.

For a list of officers and contact information, please go to:
http://www.aaanet.org/csas/officers.htm

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