Employment

One of the core questions for the 2010 academic year has been: are there any jobs? APSA has closely tracked the number of openings posted for new assistant professor positions as the best single indicator of how the economic downturn has affected future prospects in the professoriate. For 2009–10, the number of listings for these positions was slightly over 60% of the number posted in past years. In the early months of the 2010–11 academic year, we are seeing a rebound, if not a recovery, in this amount, with listings through October numbering three-quarters of the listings in comparable periods in past years. Research is ongoing regarding overall placement experiences, including which jobs are being filled and what sectors graduates are entering.

Economic and Political Climate

Following on the efforts of Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma last year to defund political science research within the NSF, there are indications that similar proposals may be put forth in 2012. In any case, the new Congress is calling for significant rollbacks in the national research funding agenda in general, including all social and behavioral sciences and the humanities. APSA continues to organize to make the case for funding political science research and to link our members with members of Congress on these questions. We have remained an active member of several alliances focused on these concerns, with the foremost being the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) and the National Humanities Alliance (NHA).

APSA has also formed an ad hoc group to explore ways that the discipline can communicate most effectively with a variety of publics. As this report is being prepared, the Ad Hoc Committee on the Public Understanding of Political Science, chaired by Lynn Vavreck from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Bruce Cain from the University of California, Berkeley, is being formed to produce a set of recommendations for ways to promote the findings, scholars, and intellectual contributions of political scientists to Congress, the media, foundations, and the public at large. The methods adopted to help the public understand our contributions are designed to support academic departments, individual scholars, and the association in promoting political scientists' research and teaching.

Journals

APSA journals remain vigorous and inventive. Each publishes a full report in the April issue of PS, and I refer readers there for details on individual journals' performance. In a nutshell, however, I provide a brief overview here.

Perspectives on Politics is now settled at Indiana University under the editorship of Jeffrey Isaac, and the book reviews, articles, and other sections of the journal are managed under a unified editorial team. The advantages of these linkages will be evident in upcoming issues. As Isaac has articulated, Perspectives seeks to nurture a political science public sphere that allows scholars to move beyond their normal comfort zones and reach out broadly beyond conventional methodological and subfield divides and to the discipline as a whole.

The American Political Science Review is well anchored at UCLA and continues to use an innovative editorial team approach under the leadership of editor Ronald Rogowski. Submissions remain at near-record levels, with 770 new submissions in 2009–10.

The original editorial structure of the APSR used a campus-based team of co-editors at UCLA. While the editorial offices and center of gravity for the editorial team remain there, as individual co-editors have rotated off the board, new members have joined from other institutions, participating in the editorial process through video conferencing with great success. Current co-editors are Jeffrey Lewis, Kirstie McClure, Arthur Stein, Gregory Caldeira, Gary Cox, Jennifer Hochschild, and David Laitin.

The five-year term of Rogowski's editorship and the journal's tenure at UCLA will conclude in the summer of 2012. In the face of intense financial pressures in the UC system, UCLA has not been able to commit to supporting the editorial offices for a sixth year, but the university has made an extra effort to sustain support for this fifth year. A search committee will coordinate the search for the next editors. Chaired by Joan Tronto of the University of Minnesota, the search committee includes John Aldrich, Duke University; Charles Beitz, Princeton University; Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Ohio State University; Valerie Bunce, Cornell University; Pradeep Chhibber, University of California, Berkeley; Neta Crawford, Boston University; Gary Goertz, University of Arizona; and Gary Segura, Stanford University.

PS: Political Science and Politics also continues to thrive. Edited by Robert J-P. Hauck in the APSA office, PS is committed to covering contemporary politics, advancing professional development, contributing to political science pedagogy, and, as the journal of record, keeping members informed of all the association's programs and activities.

Table 1 Annual Meeting Registration

Table 2 TLC Registration

Wit and Humor

In August, APSA and the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) co-published a humorous collection of articles and papers about political science entitled The Wit and Humor of Political Science. The book is the serendipitous product of two senior scholars working across the world from one another and independently collecting funny and satirical articles on political science with the intent of eventually publishing them for a wider audience. Learning by chance of each other's rainy day project, lead editors Kenneth Newton (University of Southampton, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, and Hertie School of Governance, Berlin) and the late Lee Sigelman (George Washington University) joined forces with Kenneth Meier (Texas A&M University) and Bernard Grofman (University of California, Irvine) to publish this collection under the joint imprint of APSA and the ECPR. The collection includes previously published articles and essays, original pieces that were never formally published, and commissioned cartoons.

In the editors' words:

Conferences

The 106th APSA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, had a record attendance of 7,311 participants. The theme of “The Politics of Hard Times: Citizens, Nations, and the International System under Economic Stress” addressed the current economic and political world climate and asked participants to consider what political science has to say about the impact of hard times on governments and examine the contribution of political science to policy development. The meeting was well organized by program chairs Andrea Campbell, MIT, and Lisa Martin, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Along with President Henry Brady's speech on “Political Cleavages, Spatial Metaphors and Models, and Political Dynamics in the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union,” which will appear soon in Perspectives on Politics, other addresses included Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom's speech on “Addressing the Theory of Collective Action from a Multiple Methods Perspective”; the John Gaus Lecture, delivered by Steven Kelman; David Harvey's Foundations of Political Theory Plenary Address; Gary Rhoades's New Political Science Plenary Address on “A National Campaign for Academic Labor: Reframing the Politics of Scarcity in Higher Education”; and Kristen Monroe's Ithiel de Sola Pool Lecture.

At the Washington, DC, meeting, the APSA Council reviewed the status of a protracted labor issue confronting our 2011 meeting site in San Francisco and determined that it would be inadvisable for the association to meet there. APSA notified the host hotels in San Francisco of these concerns and subsequently reached a withdrawal agreement to relocate. We plan to return to San Francisco soon. In light of these events, APSA has relocated the 2011 meeting to Seattle.

Earlier in the year, the 2010 Teaching and Learning Conference convened in Philadelphia from February 5–7. This meeting, organized around the theme of “Advancing Excellence in Teaching Political Science,” drew 250 attendees, who participated in 12 working group tracks. Three meeting plenary sessions—including a roundtable facilitated by APSA President Henry Brady—were made available to the general public through live remote participation. Recordings of these events, as well as the complete schedule of events, the online conference program, and links to presentations and papers, are available on the APSA website at http//:www.apsanet.org/teachingconference. Summaries of all track discussions will be featured in the July issue of PS: Political Science and Politics.

Figure 1 Annual Meeting Registration, 1973–2010

Departmental Programs

APSA moved forward in a number of areas supporting political science departments and department chairs during the year, hosting multiple events for chairs and graduate directors at the Annual Meeting and other conferences. Data-gathering initiatives on departmental characteristics, use of adjuncts, enrollments, and graduate placement have also progressed. However, the association did not carry out a planned conference for department chairs in 2010 because of low early registration numbers. Key factors in this decision were limits on chairs' travel budgets and time. APSA will reassess how best to help chairs to network in the future.

Centennial Center

Since the Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs opened in 2003, graduate students and faculty from across the globe have benefited from a stay at the facility or a grant from one of the 11 Centennial Center funds. In all, some 175 scholars from all fields of study have been supported by the Center.

Congressional Fellowship Program

This fall, APSA welcomed 32 new fellows to the Congressional Fellowship Program. Nearly 2,300 program alumni work today in an array of fields that help shape knowledge of Congress, including medicine, journalism, law, politics, and political science. One highlight of the CFP's past year concerns the negotiations of the Department of State's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico to enlarge the Canada–U.S. Parliamentary Exchange to include a fuller expression of NAFTA and Mexico's role in this agreement. The State Department agreed to fund a Washington, DC, visit of Canadian Parliamentary Interns and three Mexican parliamentary staff for both the DC and Ottawa portions of the exchange. The CFP-organized DC orientation for this exchange included a conversation with Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, a behind-the-scenes visit to the White House (arranged by a current Fellow on assignment with First Lady Michelle Obama to work on her childhood obesity initiative), and a briefing by the Mexican ambassador to Washington, DC.

For the first time, the CFP included a number of Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellows and Health and Aging Policy Fellows, who were placed in the executive branch, particularly with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These Fellows will assist in the implementation of the recently passed Congressional health reform legislation.

APSA Connect

In the past year, we developed and launched a professional networking website for political science called APSA Connect. This platform supports online communication among individual APSA groups such as the Council and enables online communication across all APSA programs and activities. APSA Connect works at multiple levels. It is tightly integrated with our membership database and web services to allow members to update their own professional profiles, as well as to reflect specific APSA status designations such as governance, committee, and organized section memberships. More broadly, APSA Connect will allow members to locate each other and define and interact with groups of members with common interests.

The new online service is a valuable resource to APSA members and the discipline, particularly as travel budgets are tightening and reliance on online interaction is increasing. The system supports private discussion lists, document sharing, and flexible mini-web-hosting tools for private, semi-private, and public groups. APSA Connect also functions as an online directory with capacities for robust searching and connecting with other scholars with shared interests.

Professional Development: Mentoring

An important means for supporting the professional development of scholars and strengthening the quality of life in the profession has been the emergence of professional mentoring programs. APSA has developed a program that allows members to mentor in general or specialized areas and any member, junior or senior, to seek advice through the program. Over the past year, APSA has seen a marked growth in the number of mentors. This growth is due in part to increased marketing, follow-up, and program recruitment efforts such as systematic reminders and newsletter pieces. Currently, there are 317 faculty mentors in the APSA database—an increase from our March 2009 total of 239 mentors and the 2007–08 count of 220. Mentors volunteer and are given the option of mentoring one or two mentees. From July 2009– July 2010, 141 mentor–mentee matches were made. In the prior year, between July 2008 and July 2009, 171 mentor matches were made.

APSA has also been exploring ways to incorporate mentoring activities into the Annual Meeting. Since 2008, the APSA Mentoring Initiative has hosted a mentoring and networking reception at the Annual Meeting. This event, which allows students and faculty to network on such topics as research and career path, has been well-received, and a future reception has been planned for the 2011 meeting.

2010 Constitution Day Collaboration

The APSA Committee on Civic Education and Engagement has been invited to join the University of Pennsylvania's Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics, part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, to provide civic education talks for high school students to commemorate Constitution Day. Federal law requires that all high schools, colleges, and universities receiving federal funds educate students about the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day, held annually on September 17. Between September 17 and October 15, 2010, APSA members were able to participate in Constitution Day civics programs by visiting a login-only webpage and filling out a short enrollment form. High school teachers across the nation will be able to view the names of and contact those members in their area who expressed interest in the project. Annenberg will then follow up with APSA members to inform them that a high school in their area would like them to speak on civics and the Constitution.

This effort is part of the Sunnylands Constitution Day Project, funded by the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, and includes a collection of classroom-ready digital resources offered for secondary schools for Constitution Day activities. The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands was established in 2001 by the Annenberg Foundation to advance public understanding of and appreciation for democracy and to address serious issues facing the country and the world. APSA Council member Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the director of the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, which houses the Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics and the Annenberg Classroom.

Diversity Programs

Minority Fellowship Program (MFP). The MFP, which was established in 1969 as the Black Graduate Fellowship, was created in an effort to increase the number of African American Ph.D.s in political science. To date, the MFP has designated more than 500 Fellows and has contributed to the successful completion of doctoral political science programs for over 100 individuals. This year, the MFP selection committee awarded the 2010–11 Fellowship to 12 students. Each Fellow receives a $4,000 award. MFP biographies are available on the APSA website at http://www.apsanet.org/diversity/.

Ralph Bunche Summer Institute (RBSI). The RBSI, created in 1986, is an intensive five-week academic and professional development program designed to assist in preparing students for graduate work in political science. The program provides academic credit, mentoring, and training in statistical analysis and the substantive area of race and ethnicity in political science. Under the leadership of Paula McClain and with funding from the NSF, Duke University, and APSA, this program has helped to simulate the graduate experience. Since 1986, over 400 students have attended the RBSI, a number of whom have gone on to attend graduate school in political science, receive Ph.D.s, and enter the professoriate. Since the 2007 meeting, APSA has coordinated a joint networking coffee hour at the Annual Meeting for RBSI scholars and Minority Fellows. As occurs annually, 10 RBSI scholars were selected on the basis of their excellent final research projects to present poster sessions at the 2010 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

Minority Student Recruitment Program (MSRP). APSA established the MSRP (formerly the MID) as part of its efforts to advance the benefits of diversity within the political science profession. In collaboration with undergraduate and graduate political science departments, the program seeks to identify talented undergraduate minority students who are interested in being recruited to doctoral programs and provides these students with information about political science graduate programs. Students interested in political science graduate school can submit their names to APSA to be actively recruited by member departments. Two hundred twenty-three undergraduate students were listed in the spring 2009 database and 243 students in the spring 2010 database. Thirty-three political science graduate departments participated in the 2009–10 MSRP (up from 28 the previous year).

Oral History. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, interviews were conducted with 17 senior African American political scientists as part of a project to record an oral history of the discipline and their contributions to the discipline. The project was supported by Pi Sigma Alpha and APSA and later transferred to the University of Kentucky. This research was part of a larger APSA oral history project organized by Malcolm Jewell of the University of Kentucky, APSA, and Pi Sigma Alpha, which is described in detail in a 1990 PS article entitled “The Political Science Oral History Program.”

These oral histories now reside at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. Prompted by the continuing editorial oversight of Jewel L. Prestage of Prairie View A&M University and Dr. William J. Daniels of the Rochester Institute of Technology, APSA has renewed its ties with the Nunn Center at the University of Kentucky to help publish the African American Political Scientists Oral History collection online.

The online collection will be a part of the Nunn Center's existing online oral history collection. APSA will have a corresponding web page linking to the online collection. Having already received the approval of the APSA Publications Committee, APSA also plans to publish a print version of the oral history transcripts. Currently, the association is aiding the Oral History Center with the costs associated with preparation of the transcripts and audio files for web publication during the fall of 2010.

The interviewees included in the African American Political Scientists Oral History Project are

• • Thomas R. Solomon, University of Michigan (1939)

• • Vincent J. Browne, Harvard University (1946)

• • Earl M. Lewis, University of Chicago (1951)

• • Lucius J. Barker, University of Illinois (1954)

• • Samuel Du Bois Cook, Ohio State University (1954)

• • Jewel L. Prestage, University of Iowa (1954)

• • Emmett W. Bashful, University of Illinois (1955)

• • Twiley W. Barker, Jr., University of Illinois (1955)

• • David Hazel, University of Michigan (1956)

• • Charles W. Harris, University of Wisconsin (1960)

• • Matthew Holden, Jr., Northwestern University (1961)

• • Charles V. Hamilton, University of Chicago (1964)

• • Lois B. Moreland, American University (1968)

• • Mack H. Jones, University of Illinois (1968)

• • Mae C. King, University of Idaho (1968)

• • Shelby F. Lewis, Louisiana State University (1973)

• • Adolph Reed, Sr., New York University (1950)

Disabled. The APSA Council has asked for an assessment of the situations faced by students and scholars in political science with disabilities, and for the creation of accommodations for people with disabilities. For the first time, the APSA departmental survey has addressed this issue as well. Of 307 departments responding, one-quarter (62) reported that a faculty or staff member had requested some disability-related accommodation. Of the requests for accommodation, 92% of departments reported providing complete accommodation, and another 5% reported providing partial accommodation.

Faculty are evidently accustomed to requests for accommodation from students—90% of departments said they had received such requests, and 89% of those faculty said they had had no difficulty in fulfilling the requests.

These findings are consistent with those in other fields. The American Sociological Association (on whose work APSA mirrored its questions) reported in 2005 that about one-third of department chairs surveyed had received some request for accommodation from at least one faculty member in their department, with the most common requests being a changed classroom or office location and specialized equipment. Departments fully satisfied requests 80% of the time and at least partially responded another 15% of the time.

Both the APSA and the sociology data suggest that while requests for accommodation are not rare, they are also largely being met by the departments that receive them.

Within the association, APSA has a review underway of accommodation provided for APSA activities such as the Annual Meeting. All APSA contracts with hotels and other vendors call for full compliance with ADA and local legal requirements and set high standards for hotels' and other vendors' performance.

The APSA building in Washington, DC, is handicap-accessible, with a ramp at the back of the building for access to the first floor and elevator access to other floors. Bathrooms have recently been renovated and are ADA compliant.

The APSA website has been evaluated for its relative accessibility to visually impaired people, and we are not aware of difficulties in accessing it. The site references disability insurance at http://www.apsanet.org/content_5587.cfm and provides accessibility guidelines for departmental websites at http://www.apsanet.org/content_9877.cfm. We can do more to provide access to the supports offered to individual scholars with disabilities at our meetings, and we are working now to improve the information about and access to these resources.

The APSA Mentoring Program includes disabled individuals as a group for which prospective mentees can receive mentoring. The Mentoring Program currently has 14 mentors who have indicated an interest in mentoring individuals with disabilities.

Between September 1, 2009, and August 2, 2010, one mentee requested a mentor who could mentor individuals with disabilities on issues relating to disability, constituting just under 1% of the 105 requests for mentors in that period.

There has been no systematic survey of the degree of research in political science on disability politics or policy. However, while the topic is well recognized within the discipline, there is little evidence of extensive work on such an issue. In a quick title search of the estimated 18,000 papers presented at the APSA Annual Meetings since 2001, the word disability or disabilities appeared in the titles of just 23 papers.

The ASA has noted that the study of disability has been a part of the field of sociology for a long time, but it, too, finds that “scholarship about disability within sociology and by sociologists appears to have been seldom recognized by publication” in the field.

International Initiatives

Africa Project. Since 2008, APSA has sponsored an annual summer workshop for 20 African political scientists from Anglophone and Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This year, the Mellon Foundation awarded APSA a continuation grant for the workshop program in the amount of $898,000, which will support four additional residential workshops beginning in 2012.

The 2010 Africa workshop, hosted by the Gender Centre of the University of Dar es Salaam, focused on the theme of “Global Perspectives on Politics and Gender.” The American workshop leaders—Aili Mari Tripp of the University of Wisconsin and Gretchen Bauer of the University of Delaware—and their African counterparts—Fenella Mukangara of the Gender Centre, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Shireen Abdool Aziz Hassin of the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa—offered 18 sessions over a three-week period from July 19 through August 6 on issues such as women and citizenship, engendering institutions, women's collective mobilization, gender and conflict, and gender and identity. As with previous workshops in Senegal and Ghana, African participants were selected from applications from scholars from across sub-Saharan and central Africa.

The 2010 workshop was originally conceived as a project hosted by Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; however, the proposal of anti-LGBT laws in Uganda that would constrain academic freedom and foster an inhospitable environment for participants led to a relocation of the workshop to Tanzania.

Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission. APSA coordinated the Sixth Japanese American Women's Symposium (JAWS) in fall 2010 to examine the status of women and politics in Japan and the United States. As in the past, the project was supported by a grant from the Japan–United States Friendship Commission (JUSFC) and was hosted by APSA's Centennial Center and Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Melissa Deckman, the Louis L. Gold Associate Professor of Political Science at Washington College, served as the local organizer. The workshop's 17 participants considered the impacts of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the 2010 U.S. congressional elections, and the 2009 Japanese Diet elections. First held in 2000, the JAWS workshops have been an important ongoing resource for collaborative global scholarship and professional development.

Task Forces

Policy. In an effort to bring political science research to bear on important issues within society and the profession, APSA has supported annual task forces over the last seven years to further the contributions of political science to understanding and responding to key global issues. Task forces are named by the APSA president-elect with the advice and consent of the Council and are intended as, ideally, two-year projects to demonstrate the public relevance of political science research. These groups generate a variety of products, including succinct, public-oriented documents, longer monographs, teaching resources, websites, and press releases.

The newest APSA Task Force, named by president Carole Pateman and headed by Michael Goodhart of the University of Pittsburgh, is the Task Force for Democracy, Economic Security and Social Justice in a Volatile World. This group seeks to rethink some of the familiar assumptions about democracy, economic security, and social justice in the face of the global economic crisis, faltering progress with foreign aid and development programs, and challenges to the notion that democratic regimes are the only pathway to sustained growth and poverty reduction, such as that posed by China's apparent success. In particular, the task force will assess recent policy innovations in three broad but related areas: basic income, participatory budgeting and planning, and rights-based models of welfare and development.

Several other task forces are also underway, including the Task Force on Political Science in the 21st Century, co-chaired by Dr. Luis Fraga and Dr. Terri Givens and organized by former APSA President Dianne Pinderhughes, which has received an NSF EAGER grant to continue its work; and the Task Force on Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators, named by former APSA President Henry Brady and chaired by Michael Coppedge of the University of Notre Dame, which has complemented its work with a recent conference on press indicators.

Other task forces have fully or nearly completed work and are listed on the APSA website. Topics include:

• • Task Force on Religion and Democracy in the United States

• • Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism

• • Task Force on Difference and Inequality in the Developing World

• • Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy

• • Task Force on Interdisciplinarity

• • Task Force on U.S. Standing in World Affairs

Engagement

APSA participates in a number of partnerships and consortia designed to meet common goals of advancing scholarship and research opportunities. These partnerships both provide efficiencies in staffing and expand ongoing efforts.

National Humanities Alliance (NHA). The NHA is a coalition supported by nearly 100 national, state, and local member organizations and institutions including scholarly and professional associations; higher education associations; organizations of museums, libraries, historical societies, and state humanities councils; university-based and independent humanities research centers; and colleges and universities. The Alliance compiles and distributes information on national policy and programs relating to the humanities and advocates for these initiatives.

I have recently begun a term as NHA president this year. We are currently focusing on assuring that NEH programs will be protected from budget cuts and eventually expanded to reach levels of funding consistent with the support present at its founding. NEH programs are directed to both national-level research and grants to states administered through state humanities councils. NHA is also committed to assuring an equitable balance in such allocations.

One important NHA initiative is sponsorship of Humanities Advocacy Day, when scholars and academic administrators meet in Washington, DC, for a round of scheduled congressional visits. All APSA members are encouraged to participate. More information is available on the APSA website and at http://www.nhalliance.org.

Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). APSA is a founding member of COSSA, which advocates for social, behavioral, and economic sciences funding from the NSF, the National Institutes of Health, and other federal agencies. COSSA was instrumental in coordinating a response to last year's Senate proposal to defund political science research conducted through the NSF. In 2010, the Consortium included 18 governing members, 23 membership organizations, 57 universities, and 12 centers and institutes. Political scientist Ken Prewitt recently assumed the COSSA presidency for a two-year term. John Freeman of the University of Minnesota represents APSA on the COSSA board of directors.

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). We also work closely with the ACLS, both naming a delegate to the general ACLS meetings and coordinating actively with the Conference of Administrative Officers, which networks humanities societies at the executive director level. In addition to administering many research fellowship opportunities, the ACLS has also been a leader in seeking foundation support for stimulus funding for young scholars and the development of alternative career opportunities.

Political scientists have not taken advantage of ACLS-administered fellowships to the degree that might be expected. In the future, APSA will work with ACLS to bring more political scientists into reviewer teams and encourage more scholars to apply. Joseph Lane of Emory and Henry College represents APSA at the ACLS.

Consortium for International Education (CIE). APSA also works with the CIE, which advocates to protect international education programs, including Title VI and overseas area study centers and language programs, and to increase funding for and attention to these programs. Past concerns focused on political litmus tests proposed for Title VI programs; the current focus is on the protection of funding in the face of cutbacks and the narrowing federal focus on higher education infrastructure.

State Department. The State Department Historical Advisory Committee oversees the preparation of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, which is the official historical record of U.S. foreign policy, dating back to the Abraham Lincoln administration. The Committee is obliged by statute to ensure that the FRUS series constitutes a “thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions.” APSA is recognized in national legislation as one of several scholarly bodies nominating a member to the Historical Advisory Committee; this year, the association named James McAllister, professor of political science and chair of the Leadership Studies Program at Williams College. He will serve a three-year term as a representative of APSA.

Membership

The past several membership updates to the Council have reflected a modestly positive tone as the association has weathered the uncertain economic climate. Beginning this summer, we have seen a softening of membership numbers and the first real signs of potential decline.

Table 3 APSA MEmbers 1974–2010

The trending numbers are not overwhelming and may well represent some shifts in renewal patterns. Compared to the previous year, total memberships are down nearly 3%. This decline is partly the result of a smaller retention rate over each of the past four months, with July being particularly weak. Student members make up nearly 60% of this number. These reduced membership numbers come in the face of exceptionally strong registration numbers for the 2010 Annual Meeting.

Retention and membership are problems experienced by all professional associations. Earlier this summer, the American Historical Association reported a 10% decline in its membership compared to one year prior. The associations for sociology, anthropology, and geography also all face challenges in retention.

APSA has reacted to these trends with actions to promote recognition of our value and community in order to retain current members. At the same time, outreach efforts to lapsed members and those communities who have not traditionally been part of APSA are ongoing. As earlier reports have detailed, these are areas that pose significant challenges to growth.

Organized Sections

APSA now has 39 organized sections with the recent addition of the section on Experimental Research, launched by a group of scholars led by Don Green of Yale University and Rebecca Morton of New York University. The need for this new section was articulated:

Sections provide a nimble way for the discipline to recognize new fields and approaches. The recent addition of the Health Politics and Policy section, the Political Networks section, and the Canadian Politics section provide evidence of the ability of the section model to foster new and newly emphasized areas of scholarship.

Table 4 Organized Section Membership

Web Update

The APSA website continues to serve as an integral communication, data collection, and e-commerce tool for the association and its various constituencies. The site supports a large volume of traffic annually, including 11,000 Annual Meeting proposals, $100,000 in e-commerce per month, and over 1,300 content pages managed by APSA staff on an ongoing basis. The site receives 1.5 million visits per year. We are continually improving the site with the needs of external users and APSA programs and staff in mind.

Notable developments in the past year include the development of new e-commerce systems and real-time connection to the association database, resulting in significant improvements in user experience and workflow for staff; functional and visual overhaul of MyAPSA, DSPonline, and personal update forms, as well as structural efficiencies in the association database; XML conversion of Annual Meeting data to produce a downloadable PDF and print-on-demand version of the program; connection of several data collection forms directly to our database, reducing staff workload; and fine-tuning of the conference submission processes. In the past year, we also introduced the new MyScheduler tool to the Annual Meeting online services to allow attendees to save events to a personal calendar and download events to an external calendar such as those supported by Outlook and Google. In the coming year, we will address usability concerns related to the Annual Meeting proposal submission and evaluation system on the website.

Facilities

We have also continued to use our building as efficiently as possible and take on tenants in all available rentable spaces. The budget proposals include placeholders for possible expenses to upgrade phones and the HVAC system; a report on these needs will be presented at the meeting. The phones that we use now have been in place since 1993, and in addition to their lack of many modern features, the availability of service and parts has become scarce. The heating and cooling system in the building has been a patchwork for many years—central air only reaches the front half of the building, and rear offices are cooled by window units. Running new ductwork through the building would be prohibitively expensive today; newer technologies that place small air handlers directly in each office may provide a realistic and affordable solution. We continue to lease space in the headquarters building to other nonprofits: the Policy Studies Organization, Pi Sigma Alpha, and the Environmental Investigation Agency.

APSA's second building behind the headquarters building is presently leased to the School for Ethics and Global Leadership (SEGL), a semester-long residential program for high school juniors from across the United States. The program offers a unique curriculum that emphasizes ethical thinking, leadership development, and international affairs. While formally independent of SEGL, APSA is pleased to have such a complementary use in its facility.