Dec 9, 2009

Maybe It's Just Me ...

by Cliopatria

Yesterday, members of the Organization of American Historians received an e-mail from its president, Elaine Tyler May, announcing the choice of a new executive director for the OAH.

After an extensive process that resulted in 54 applications, Katherine (Kathy) Finley has been selected by the OAH Executive Board ...
Kathy holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, and has served history museums and associations. In addition to her passion for history, she is also a trained and seasoned nonprofit executive whose experience and talents will help us achieve the ambitious goals of the recently adopted Strategic Plan ...
Kathy will be coming to us from her current position of Executive Director of the Real Estate Investment Securities Association and the TICA Foundation in Indianapolis. Previous experiences have been as Director of the American College of Sports Medicine Foundation and senior executive team leader for Advancement, Education and Meetings for the American College of Sports Medicine; Executive Director of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) and Associate Faculty in Philanthropic Studies at IUPUI; and Executive Director of Roller Skating Association International and the Roller Skating Foundation.

Maybe it's just me, but one of my colleagues at Cliopatria thought this announcement sufficiently odd to call it to my attention.

You'd think, for one thing, that there's no crisis in the employment of historians, if this is the leader we choose. Has the OAH ever had an executive director without a doctorate in history? Here's Ms. Finley's cv. Her education: Ohio Wesleyan, Case Western Reserve. O.K., those are the undergraduate and graduate degrees in History. Then, she did an M.B.A. at Indiana and a whatever doctorate at"Union Institute and University." Don't tell anyone with one of its degrees, but UIU is, ah ..., marginal, at best, in American higher education. A doctorate from there cannot be in history and is, to understate the case, unimpressive.

Then, there's the employment track record: seven years directing roller skaters, a year with the folk in sports medicine, and, most recently, three years with the the"Real Estate Investment Securities Association". Tell me about the origins of the collapse of the American economy. And why has she held her jobs so briefly and bounced around so often? Don't count on her to stay at the OAH for long. But with so many historians in search of a decent job, had I been on the OAH's search committee and had 54 applications in hand, I doubt that she'd have made the first cut.

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Andrew D. Todd - 12/11/2009

Well, as I see it, the real issue is that a learned society has gotten itself into the position of being in the travel agent business, what with negotiating special hotel rates and all. If you are in business, it is normal to lose money from time to time, on deals that go wrong. You're supposed to take your losses with a shrug, like a professional gambler. Ya win some, ya lose some.... Katherine Finley would appear to be a reasonably well-qualified travel agent. Many years ago, in the mid-1980's, I remember sitting through an enraged argument at the monthly meeting of a local computer society, which had lost money on a Computer Fair. The day of the fair, it had rained cats and dogs; and a lot of people felt disinclined to go out; and attendance was low; and the speakers' fees, etc., came out more than the receipts. The losses might have amounted to six months or a year of the society's income. These things happen. It's part of the business.

The other major economic activity which learned societies take on is publication. With the increasing tendency towards websites and print-on-demand, this is becoming a comparatively minimal-risk activity. Ms. Finley's qualifications as a printer/typographer are probably not terribly relevant. Large corporations are phasing out business travel in favor of videophone, and, again, once the dust settles, the marginal costs are not very high, and it is correspondingly difficult to make expensive blunders.

At some point, you might want to stop and think about what conventions are for. If the purpose is for people to get to know each other, the money could equally well be spent to send people on speaking tours, geographically organized so they don't require too much air travel. The speakers could stop at places fifty or a hundred miles apart, and stay in inexpensive motels, YMCA's, etc. without any of this block-booking business.

Chris Bray - 12/9/2009

On a positive note, given her employment record, she probably won't be around long enough to cause any real harm.

Especially with a PhD from the Union Institute (.com), which will bring the headhunters calling.

Michael Kazin - 12/9/2009

My first reaction, like Ralph's, was a mild WTF? But since the job description is mainly financial and administrative, I think we should see how she does. We have lots of smart historians, but how many would want to spend 40+ hours a week raising and managing funds for an organization of underpaid professionals?

-Michael Kazin

Ralph E. Luker - 12/9/2009

That sounds far more reasonable to me than the passionate defenses of bad OAH decisions five or six years ago. Otoh, I'm quite confident that the OAH search committee could have found a historian with substantial experience in financial management and/or fundraising.

Jeremy Young - 12/9/2009

Far be it from me to defend an established institution -- that's not my style -- but...hasn't the OAH's single biggest problem over the past half-decade been a lack of financial capacity that almost destroyed the organization, triggered by some disastrous decisions regarding the forfeiture of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to non-unionized conference hotels? Maybe Elaine Tyler May et al. felt it was more important to get someone with a bit of financial knowhow who could build an endowment for the group, rather than to serve as a charitable organization for unemployed historians.

Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but for once I was pleased with the hire.