Created: 25 January 1999
Updated: 02 April 1999 (errors corrected and some small additions)
Disclaimer: Everything contained herein is associated with me
personally, and has no connection with my employer [NOAA/ERL/NSSL] or
with the AMS. That is, these are my personal observations, opinions,
and recommendations and have no official standing or sanction. If you
are offended or bothered by any part of this, take it up with
me, not with either my organization or the AMS.
The AMS photographer catches me in the middle of some sort of rant, in a characteristic pose, during the January 1999 AMS Council meeting. Rick Rosen is to my right, Roger Wakimoto and Louis Uccellini to my left. Jeff Kimpel is on the extreme right of the image.
If you have not seen them before, I have other writings concerning the AMS at this Website. Please consult my campaign statement for some of this, and you can find my first report from the council meetings here, my second report here, and my third report here.
The Council consists of (see Article VII.1 of the Constitution):
New councilors (becoming voting members at the end of the 1999 Annual Meeting):
____________________________________________________
* Council Members not in attendance at this meeting.
$ Council members who have finished their terms (at the conclusion of the 1999 Annual Meeting).
# Dr. McPherson's appointment to the position of AMS Executive Director has taken effect.
% Dr. Kimpel is the new president-elect and so is no longer on the Council, as of the conclusion of the January 1999 Council meeting. The Council approved the Executive committee's recommendation to name John Spengler as Dr. Kimpel's replacement on the Council. [Yes, he is related to Ken ... his son.]
+ Attended the 15 December 1998 meeting (via teleconference) of the Executive Committee
____________________________________________________
The January 1999 AMS Council meeting participants. Using the key on the right, the participants are: 1. Ron McPherson, 2. Ken Spengler, 3. Mike Fritsch, 4, Dennis McCarthy, 5. Susan Avery, 6. Lou Uccellini, 7. Charlie Hosler, 8. Paul MacCready, 9. Paul Try, 10. Chuck Doswell, 11. Brad Colman, 12. Jack Hayes, 13. Eric Wood, 14. Mike Wallace, 15. Kerry Emanuel, 16. John Spengler, 17. Susan Zevin, 18. Tom Potter, 19. Rick Rosen, 20. George McVehil, 21. John Snow, 22. Ray Ban, 23. Roger Wakimoto, 24. Wayne Schubert, 25. Otis Brown, 26. Judy Curry, 27. George Frederick, 28. Gene Rasmusson, 29. Jeff Kimpel, 30. Ants Leetmaa. [thanks to Joyce Annese for helping with this!]
Thus, there are 21 members on the Council (four AMS officers, two past presidents, and 15 Councilors). The Executive Director and the Secretary-Treasurer are appointed by the Council (Article IX of the Constitution), not elected by the membership as a whole; they are ex officio members of the Council, not eligible to vote. Therefore, there are 19 voting members, and so a two-thirds majority is 13 members if all voting members are present at a meeting. A quorum is a simple majority (10) of the voting members.
The Executive Committee (see Article VIII of the Constitution) consists of the Officers of the AMS, plus two selected Council members ... [I wasn't selected ... what a surprise!] ... the constitution states that there should be two Council members, but apparently, at the 15 December meeting of the Executive Committee (ExCom), three Council members were present. This may have some simple explanation, but I am unaware of it at this time ...
Note added 02 April 1999: I am told that Judy Curry replaced Ron McPherson on the ExCom when Ron became the Executive Director. The norm on the ExCom is still 2 Council Members. Otis Brown was the newly elected Councilor on the ExCom, following the Council Meeting on which I'm reporting. I'm told that there will only be 18 voting Council members this year ... for reasons yet to be explained.
the organization issue of the Bulletin claims the two Councilor members of the ExCom are Drs. Avery and Colman.
Attendance at this one-day Council meeting (held in conjunction with the AMS Annual Meeting on 10 January 1999), was excellent (only one no-show), making a quorum easily attainable. As is standard practice, also attending (for the purpose of making presentations to the Council, but not eligible to vote) were various Commissioners (in this case, the newly-reappointed STAC Commissioner [Rick Rosen], the Publications Commissioner [Wayne Schubert], the Planning Commissioner [Charlie Hosler], the Professional Affairs Commissioner [Ray Ban], and the ougoing Commissioner of Education and Human Resources [John Snow]). The minutes, dutifully recorded by Werner Baum, will appear in a future issue (likely in June 1999; the minutes of the September 1997 meeting were finally published in December 1998) of the Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc, suitably sterilized for publication. I actually recommend that you read these minutes. There is information in them, but you can be sure that some of the entries are not so brief as they appear in the minutes! I will state right now that there will be aspects of some of the discussions that (rightfully) will not be in the minutes and will not appear here, either.
As a Council veteran, I am now seeing the fumblings of new Councilors in a new light. We really need to have some sort of way to allow incoming Councilors to learn more about the workings of the Council more quickly. It takes at least two Council meetings for the newly-elected to feel they can contribute much. I had the benefit of coaching from Bob Maddox.
I came away from this meeting feeling a bit more frustrated with this Council meeting than the Fall meeting. I will detail some of the reasons for this in what follows. We spent a lot of our precious time in what I saw as mostly pointless arguments and trivial wordsmithing. I'll have more on this later. As before, I am providing an assortment of impressions and informational tidbits, again in no particular order.
Apparently, my desire to see campaign statements added to the mail ballot, in addition to the normal boring old vitae, has led to the approval of an experiment. In the next election, the candidates for President will be asked to contribute a statement about what they see as the important issues facing the Society and how they would act to deal with them (or words to that effect). The ballot also will contain a check box asking the members to say whether or not they found the statements useful in making their choice of candidate. This is important! If the majority of members find these statements useful in this experiment, campaign statements will be required of the Councilor candidates, as well, in the future. Thus, I hope that the members will respond positively to the inquiry. The Council approved this experiment, although the final wording of the question asked of the candidates was subject to some discussion. I don't recall the specific wording but the intent will be more or less as I have described it.
As noted in previous reports, the procedures by which awards of the AMS are administered has been undergoing a hard review. The details will no doubt be forthcoming, probably in the Bulletin ... but the main points (in my opinion) are:
The STAC report is an interesting one and the newly-reappointed Commissioner, Rick Rosen, has done a good job with the daunting task that confronts him ... overseeing the activities of 30 STAC Committees. It is via the STAC Committees that most members have direct contact with the AMS. A number of issues were mentioned during Rick's report and I certainly will not want to go through them all. Rather, I prefer to highlight a limited number of them.
QUALIFICATIONS AND CONDITIONS
From Constitution, Article III.5: "Honorary Members shall be persons of acknowledged preeminence in the atmospheric or related oceanic or hydrologic sciences, either through their own contributions to the sciences or their application or through furtherance of the advance of those sciences in some other way. They shall be exempt from all dues and assessments."
The report of the Commissioner arrived at the Council at about the same time as the Commissioner Wayne Schubert gave his report. There wasn't a whole lot in that report I want to highlight. Instead, I want to present some thoughts of mine regarding the publications process:
Much of the content of this report is not of much interest to
me, so I'll not be discussing it. The Commissioner is
Ray Ban. What I did find
fascinating was a report by Councilor Brad Colman, who had been
charged with a follow-up study on an effort led by Councilor
George McVehil, seeking to gauge the reaction of operational
forecaster reactions to the AMS Certification program. Note: in
the 1998 Organization Issue of the Bulletin (August), it is
stated (see pp. 1652 ff.):
PURPOSE OF CERTIFICATION
The CCM program is a service for the general public by the AMS. The Society has established high standards of technical competence, character, and experience for certified consultants who provide advice in meteorology to the public. The CCM program was established to ensure that certain individuals have been tested and found to meet or exceed those standards. The certification enables users of meteorological services to select consultants or employees with greater confidence in the quality and reliability of the products or services they will receive. It is also a formal recognition on the part of his or her colleagues, acting through the Society, that an applicant is considered well qualified to carry on the work of a consulting meteorologist. The purpose of certification in the CCM program is fourfold:
1) To foster the establishment and maintenance of a high level of professional competency and mature and ethical counsel in the field of consulting meteorology;
2) To provide a basis on which a client seeking assistance on problems of a meteorological nature may be assured of mature, competent, and ethical professional counsel;
3) To provide incentive for the continued professional growth of the meteorologist after completion of his or her academic training;
4) To enhance the prestige, authority, success, and emoluments of consulting meteorology specifically, and of professional meteorology generally, by ensuring such a consistently high order of professional activity that unqualified practitioners will either labor to achieve this recognition or retire from the field.
This topic has arisen in previous Council meetings and has involved a considerable input from the AMS counsel (lawyer) about the problems with certification of professionals when incomes ride on having certification. Interestingly, most of this discussion has been focused on what I have called "imaginary problems" ... namely, the fear of litigation. It's been mentioned that those who lose their certification (or are not granted it in the first place) could sue the AMS. Thus, the fear of this litigation is a serious disincentive to the development of tough standards. Someone during the meeting described those lawsuits as "hypothetical" and was told by someone else [I don't recall who made either statement ... I'm not protecting anyone by not naming names.] that those lawsuits were not hypothetical. I asked "Has the AMS ever been sued for that reason?" and was told that it had not. Therefore, a description of those lawsuits as "hypothetical" seems logically correct to me. It's this imaginary problem that has been most responsible for preventing the AMS from creating a certification program with some "teeth" in it; that is, one where candidates fail the certification process with considerable regularity, where the certification has difficult standards, and equally rigorous re-certification is an inherent part of the program encouraging continued professional growth. Done properly, in my opinion, a rigorous certification process should be able to withstand court challenges. It's simply a matter of whether there is any need for a change within the AMS. What do you think?
The report of the Commissioner arrived at the Council at about the same time as the Commissioner gave his report. I expressed some concern that we were being called to vote on action items in the report without being afforded any time to look at and think about the items. Past President Paul Try reinforced my concern over this rush to reach conclusions without being given adequate time to consider the items.
Professor Snow is stepping down as Commissioner, to be replaced by Dr. Avery, who is rotating off the Council.
The Council is authorized to approve and disseminate Statements on scientific matters and on matters pertaining to public policy.
Furthermore, the Council has established a Committee on Public Policy (COMPUP), which is responsible for preparing Statements, subject to approval by the Council. This Committee consists of the President, who is Chairperson, the President-Elect, the three most recent Past Presidents willing to serve, and the Chairperson of the Scientific and Technological Activities Commission (STAC). In most instances, recent practice has been for the Chairperson of STAC to delegate the assignment of the drafting of the Statement to an appropriate technical committee of STAC.
In matters of urgency, and when the Council is not in session, the Executive Committee is authorized to issue Statements based on not less than a two-thirds vote.
Where the Society wishes to address specific recommendations to a particular agency or individual, a different procedure will be followed. Namely, the President, with the approval of the Council or COMPUP, will write a letter expressing the views of the Society.
A. Assessing the scientific or technological state of the art and/or comments on weather-related hazards: generally addressed to the public at large.
B. Urging action on policy matters of concern to the science or the profession: generally addressed to the Congress and/or the executive branch of the federal government.
C. Calling attention to urgent scientific or professional matters: generally addressed to the membership of the Society.
There was spirited discussion centered around the statement associated with the requirements for a B.S. degree in the Atmospheric Sciences. The frame of reference for this statement was to provide guidelines for the B.S. degree, whereas much of the discussion swirled around post-graduate education. Werner Baum forcibly reminded the Council of this fact, and things finally settled down. As I recall, this statement was approved, with some minor wordsmithing. The statement on Radio Frequency Allocation was also approved, as I recall, again with some wordsmithing recommendations. There was also considerable discussion about the initial thoughts regarding a statement on Global Warming, as one might expect. This was quite interesting and it was felt that the AMS should not be saying the same things that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is saying. Some progress was made toward clarifying the intent of the statement. With Dennis McCarthy's able assistance, I was able to circulate a draft outline of the statement on Tornado Preparedness and Safety ... as of this writing, I've heard no comments on this draft outline. The Flash Flood Hazards and Mitigation statement is still being drafted, but I can say that considerable progress has been made and it's likely this might be done by the time of the next Council meeting. Mike Fritsch, Susan Zevin, and I were heartily in favor of a statement on Probability Forecasting ... since Mike is rotating off the Council, Susan and I were left to act as Council facilitators (see above).
As noted in my last Council report, having adopted the 10-Year Vision, the Council now must move toward implementation. The ExCom is suggesting that there are three places where the themes of the Vision (multidisciplinarity, inclusiveness, outreach, and new technology) comes together:
and has established ad hoc committees to consider these areas in the context of the 10-Year Vision. I've been assigned to the ad hoc committee on Meetings, chaired by Roger Wakimoto. Rick Rosen has prepared a very nice statement of our charge:
There is some feeling that meetings conducted by the AMS no longer serve the community or the science the way they did some years ago. There has been much talk of how meetings can change to better meet the needs of the community. Before discussing specific ideas for new meeting formats or structures, it is worth looking at what meetings accomplished in the past and what sort of goals should be expected now.
Thirty years ago, our community and our science were very different. Subdisciplines within meteorology were able to carry out productive research in near isolation from other subdisciplines. For example, researchers in NWP had little reason to interact with radar meteorologists or researchers in satellite meteorology. The total number of researchers in each subdiscipline, as represented by the STAC structure, was small compared to today. It was easier for a four or five day scientific conference accomplished many goals. Among the goals met by these earlier meetings, either in part or in whole, were:
2. All participants had adequate opportunity for formal presentation time in which to tell the rest of the group about their current research efforts.
3. Significant controversial issues could be debated in an open forum.
4. Informal interaction, often leading to collaboration, was easily accomplished during breaks or evenings.
5. Provocative ideas could be presented in aufficient depth to allow substantive discussion and debate.
6. A sense of community within the subdiscipline could be strengthened through social interactions (such as the mandatory "songfest" at cloud physics meetings or the storm chaser presentations at severe storms meetings).
7. Young researchers had an opportunity to interact with more established ones and were drawn into that interaction actively by the established researchers (often by joining groups for dinner in the evenings).
8. Graduate students could present work in progress as part of formal sessions to receive feedback that could strengthen their thesis.
9. Scientists, both young and old, could "network" to improve job opportunities.
No one had to set out to have these goals be outcomes of the meeting, they happened naturally as a result of the relative small size of the meeting and the somewhat isolated nature of the community in the subdiscipline served by the meeting.
Things are different now. Our science has matured, as well as grown significantly. There are now many researchers working in each of the "traditional" subdisciplines and those subdisciplines can no longer make sign)ficant advances in near isolation with respect to others. Research in NWP, for example, now requires interaction with researchers in hydrology, cloud physics, satellite meteorology, etc. General subdiscipline meetings, as normally conducted through the STAC structure, are much larger than they were three decades ago and much more interdisciplinary. Thus, it is completely unrealistic to expect any single meeting to accomplish more than a few of the goals outlined above regardless of its format or structure.
Therefore, rather than discuss changes that will "fix" meetings in general, the approach must be quite different. The community needs to look at what specific goals a particular meeting hopes to achieve and then look at meeting formats and structures that will allow this &emdash; clear in the knowledge that they may only be able to achieve a couple to perhaps a half dozen goals of the above list.
Our mature science now provides some additional goals that can be added to the list, as well, including those related to societal impacts. Some additional goals that might be sought include:
11. Provide a means for Policy issues related to the atmospheric sciences to be openly debated to help establish scientific consensus that can serve policy makers.
12. Provide fertile venue for incipient subdisciplines (such as operational coastal ocean forecasting) to draw on the broader community so that growth in the subdiscipline can be swift.
13. Provide mechanism for the researchers and users to interact productively (this includes "users" of products who are themselves outside of the scientific community, such as those in weather sensitive industries).
14. Provide a means for those who cannot physically attend the meeting to benefit from it in ways that go beyond getting the material from the preprint volume.
The 14 goals listed here provide a framework for evaluating the current meeting format as well as a number of suggestions for new meeting formats. Each of the formats discussed below can be (and should be) evaluated with respect to each of the potential goals. In some cases, a format will lend itself quite naturally to a few of the goals while being unable to meet several others. In other cases, the format will allow for some of the goals to be met only if the meeting planners consciously decide to pursue those goals (especially with respect to goals 10-13).
This usually takes the form of a number of oral sessions (typically including a small number of invited talks but dominated by contributed papers), often with parallel sessions, plus several poster sessions. Oral talks usually allow 15 minutes for the talk and discussion. The meeting often has on the order of 200 presenters with some meetings approaching 400.
Here, in order to provide for fewer or no parallel sessions, many presenters are part.or poster sessions. In some cases, poster presenters are provide 2 minutes each for a brief description of their poster.
Here, significant time is provided for invited speakers by having all contributed papers delivered as part of poster sessions (perhaps with the 2 minute descriptions for each).
A mix of invited and contributed papers, but on a narrowly defined topic so that the meeting is much smaller in scope than the traditional meeting. (These are often referred to as "Chapman-type" meetings.)
All invited speakers, usually focussing on a fairly narrowly defined topic. (An example is the president's symposium at an annual meeting.)
Focused on a topic specific to a region, and held in that region, to draw mostly from the community in that region and hence have a smaller meeting that may provide a better opportunity for the private sector and students to attend.
Broadcast sessions held at main meeting location via satellite or Internet to "virtual attendees" that might be at their office or at one of several remote regional "mini-meetings" in which groups come together to view the broadcast and engage in local discussion.
Full two-way interactive broadcast sessions between the main meeting and remote locations.
Electronic conference in which papers are posted online in a forum setting and discussion occurs asynchronously among registrants of the online conference. No direct physical meeting occurs.
All papers are posted online in forum setting prior to physical meeting with discussion occurring online among registrants. Then, a physical meeting takes place that is dominated by group discussion and debate based on issues that arise during the online forum discussion.
Presenters deliver dynamic presentations online (that might include live video of the presenter) at specific times to registrants via the Internet, with each presentation followed by a live chat-room style interactive session for questions and answers. Session is archived as part of a forum allowing follow-up asynchronous discussion after the presentation. No physical meeting occurs.
Additional issues that impact the effectiveness of AMS meetings
Current practice in our community, and de facto policy among the funding agencies, is that most scientists can only attend a conference if they are a presenter. This is not true in other disciplines, where conference attendance is viewed as a means of professional growth and continuing education and attendance for nonpresenters is widely supported. The AMS may want to pursue trying to foster a change in the way scientific meetings in our field are viewed within the funding agencies so that researchers will feel able to attend and contribute to the discussion and debate even if they are not a formal presenter.
The current STAC structure is not as reflective of the subdisciplines in our science as it could be, but the meetings still follow the STAC structure with few exceptions (one notable exception is the Integrated Observations Symposium now a regular part of the annual meeting). It is worth noting that prior to twenty years ago, STAC reorganized on a regular basis to reflect changes in the field, but the current structure has gained some level of inertia that has made it hard to change. This is at least partly a result of the longer lead time required to plan meetings now that they are larger and more complex. A change in the STAC structure at a given instant could "strand" in midstream any program committee under a STAC committee that was changed in the restructuring.
The venue and costs for meetings, both annual and specialty, requires continuing scrutiny for all types of meeting structures that are considered. It is important that the AMS meetings provide an opportunity for participation from all sectors served by the Society, including students and those whose work schedule is more rigid than typical members of the research community.
Short courses have become common at both annual and specialty meetings, but are currently structured as completely separate from the meeting - normally happening the day before the regular meeting starts and having an independent registration process. Some Societies have integrated short course and other continuing education opportunities into the overall meeting structure so that they occur coincident with the meeting and are woven into the meeting program. It is not clear that this is necessarily better than the current structure, but it should be examined to see if there are situations in which it would accommodate interactions that might not otherwise take place.
The annual meeting presents its own issues related to serving the community that are quite independent of specialty meetings held over the course of the year. For example, the annual meeting provides opportunities for interdisciplinary interaction among scientists that are unlikely to occur in other venues. It probably makes sense to specifically guide conference planning for the annual meeting to exploit this opportunity &emdash; not through the occasional joint session as is suggested now, but rather by planning "joint symposiums" that focus quite specifically on interdisciplinary topics and do not "compete" with the regular conference that might be planned by the STAC committee. This could significantly alter the approach currently taken of trying to get all STAC committees to have a conference at the annual meeting about once out of every three conferences. It could also lead to annual meetings that were not so overwhelming in scope and complexity since individual sessions would, by their planned nature, draw on several communities rather than having independent parallel sessions for each of those communities.
The annual meeting also provides an excellent forum of significant debates on public policy issues in the atmospheric and related sciences. As the Society moves toward more involvement in policy issues, such debates could become a cornerstone of the annual meeting, replacing the concept of a keynote address.
Important Society needs are met during the annual meeting that must be accounted for, as well. This is often the only opportunity for the various boards and committees of the Society to meet in person and a very significant fraction of the Society's business is accomplished in the week of the annual meeting.
The role played by the exhibits programs at the annual and some specialty meetings should not be ignored here. Not only do these exhibits programs generate revenue for the Society that helps keep registration fees lower, but it also provides a means for a broad spectrum of the community to interact with an array of vendors from the private sector. There is also the potential benefit to the private sector companies that through their exhibit participation some number of employees can attend the meeting and take advantage of scientific sessions there. There has been some effort in the past few years for the annual meeting, at least, to include a job fair and exhibitor companies can play a major role in having this be successful, as well.
I note that it would be useful to have as complete a history of who has served on STAC Committees and Conference Program Committees as possible. In principle, this information would be available from Preprints and the AMS Bulletin. If you want to help to develop this historical information for your own subdiscipline, please contact the appropriate STAC Committee Chair in your subdiscipline (see the link provided, above)
Just some brief highlights: the question of Member Services is an interesting one, if the membership becomes more diversified. I'd like to suggest that the whole spectrum of member services get a hard look, not just new ones that might arise from increasing diversity within the AMS. That is, I don't want the old services to traditional AMS members to escape consideration as we focus on providing new services to new members. I also want to remind everyone that this is the American Meteorological Society ... if the membership is diversified to include hydrologists and oceanographers (for example), I don't necessarily want these non-meteorologists to exercise undue influence on our Society.
It was under the topic of Outreach that a lengthy discussion developed: namely, did the AMS want to approve the use of its name and prestige in helping UCAR develop political support for the U.S. Weather Research Program [USWRP]? The discussions suggested that some Councilors were fearful that UCAR might end up saying or doing things to support the USWRP outside of the control of the AMS. There also was debate about whether the AMS should lend its support and prestige to a specific scientific program, thereby (by implication) failing to endorse other worthy scientific programs. The former strikes me as another example of an "imaginary problem" ... if UCAR chose to do something outrageous in the name of the AMS, I see no reason we couldn't go ahead and disavow such a statement/action. As for other worthy programs, if they want the support of the AMS, let them seek to win approval of that support ... approving this in no way closes a door on other programs seeking such statements of support. After much entropy generation, the motion to permit the AMS Executive Director to work with UCAR to support the USWRP passed with a lone dissenting (pro forma) vote (not mine, this time).
Also, with respect to the Bulletin, I haven't been asked, but I sure would like to see the Bulletin format change to look something more like EOS, as put out by the AGU. I think the science articles in the Bulletin should go somewhere else, perhaps to something like Earth Interactions, since they often don't fit very well in any of the current journals. The very costly, high-quality heavy paper format of the Bulletin could be changed to a more newspaper-like format (limited to, say, 8 pages of content before advertising is added), with relatively inexpensive paper and more "newsy" science articles, as well as information for the membership. The Bulletin is a major money-loser and the science articles in it make it sort of ambiguous as to its purpose. As it stands, material of any sort in the Bulletin is often buried and hard to find.
One of my favorite topics: in our Fall meeting, we had approved the funds to support a number of special initiatives:
|
K-12 Education |
$35K |
|
Glossary (final year) |
$60K |
|
Earth Interactions |
$25K |
|
Development Campaign |
$50K |
|
Public Information |
$85K |
|
Enhanced Local Chapter Support |
$30K |
|
Program Chair/Student Support |
$70K |
|
Update Conference Procedures |
$25K |
|
Enhanced Web Activities |
$40K |
|
Science NOW/NextWave |
$5K |
|
Sigma Xi lecturer |
$2K |
|
Journals online production |
$90K |
|
Total |
$517K |
The way this works is that at the Fall meeting, we approve a conservative estimate of the income available to support special initiatives. Then, at the January meeting, we have a much better idea of the actual numbers, albeit still not finalized. The following suggestions had been made (and are discussed in the package of materials issued to the Council) as possible additional special initiatives that should be considered, with someone's best estimates on the cost range of implementing them:
|
Additional Suggestions |
Estimated Cost |
|
|
Faculty travel grant |
$20K |
|
|
Continuing the student travel grant program |
$20K |
|
|
AMS Graduate Fellowship in the History of Science |
$15K |
|
|
Implementing the Atmospheric Policy Program |
$100K |
|
|
Congressional Fellow |
$45K |
|
As I've noted before in my Council reports, the suggestions for these initiatives apparently come mostly from the ExCom. In the second table, the rankings were the final ones approved by the Council. Although it appears that all of these could be funded with the resources available, there was considerable debate on whether or not we should be funding support for travel by "teaching university" faculty. A question was raised that if we do this, what prevents us from funding other requests from needy people for travel support? Where might the requests stop? What's so special about teaching faculty members? No one questioned the desirability of supporting student travel to conferences. We approved the four items with rankings, in that order of priority, and tabled the question of supporting faculty travel to meetings, pending further debate in the future.
I observe that if the membership has some project they believe worthy of funding, there is no formal procedure for bringing it to the Council's attention, other than getting the ear of someone on either the ExCom or the Council. I'd like to see a more formal procedure implemented to get member input about how to spend what is, after all, income derived from member contributions. What do you think? As usual, send your thoughts and comments to someone! I've provided all sorts of links ... go to it!
