This is a report on activity in the Association Office during 2011, and I apologize for not producing it in advance of the recent annual meeting as I have in recent years. This report is intended to supplement information about Board and committee meetings and especially the reports of our very hard-working vice presidents that appear on the web site and in the Newsletter. The following paragraph appears, with few changes, in each of my annual reports, but it bears repeating at least once a year if not more often.
The APA is ambitious in that it operates programs that are similar to and sometimes even more sophisticated than those of much larger learned societies. If Classics is to continue to be a core discipline of the humanities, we have to do the kinds of things that, e.g., MLA, AHA, College Art, and Religion do for their fields with a third or a fifth as many members. Volunteer labor, substantial amounts of it, is the only way we can provide the kinds of essential services that our bigger sisters do, and I am grateful to the many APA members who take on our work without compensation and sometimes without reimbursement of expenses.
Financial. Our fiscal year ends on June 30 of each year, and our auditors, Briggs, Bunting and Dougherty of Philadelphia, completed their audit of our financial statements for the 2010 fiscal year last winter. It is posted on our web site (see the link at the bottom of this page) and you can also request a copy from my office.
I expect to be able to post the report for the 2011 fiscal year by the end of February.
To talk about the 2010 report, I want, first to explain the three categories to which the auditors assign our assets. Permanently restricted assets are gifts that the donor expects us to keep in perpetuity and invest so that we can use the proceeds of that investment for one or more of our programs. Gifts to the current Gateway campaign and to a capital campaign led by, among others, current Director Roger Bagnall in the early 1980’s, as well as bequests received over the years, fall into this category. So do the initial gifts that set up the Pearson and Coffin Funds. Temporarily restricted assets consist of the investment income generated by the permanently restricted assets plus any grants we receive from the NEH or a foundation to carry out a specific project. Unrestricted assets are funds we can use for any Board-approved purpose.
What Page 3 of the 2010 report tells you is that during that fiscal year we acquired about $260,000 in new permanently restricted assets, all of which consisted of gifts to the new Gateway endowment. In addition, the second row of the temporarily restricted column tells you that at the end of the fiscal year we had received just under $175,000 in grant money during the year that had not yet been expended. (Almost all of this amount is the unspent portion of a grant received from the Mellon Foundation in April 2010 to make improvements to l'Année philologique on the Internet). A little bit down from that figure, the row entitled “Net assets released from restrictions” shows that we spent just under $300,000 of previously received grant money or investment income to fund, for example, the American Office of l'Année (still operating on its traditional NEH year-to-year funding through June 2011) or the Pearson Fellowship (investment income from Lionel Pearson's gift). Note that in the Unrestricted column the positive figure in that row equals the negative figure in the Temporarily Restricted column. Once we spend grant money or investment income in accordance with donors' wishes, it becomes ordinary income to pay expenses, and needs to be treated like dues revenue or annual meeting registration fees.
The subsequent rows show the program areas in which we spend our income, and it's no accident that most of those rows correspond to our division names and other major activities. While Page 4 of the report will tell you what we spent in typical expense categories like salaries, travel, and insurance, auditors want in the first place to show the extent to which a not-for-profit organization is using its funds for its programs as opposed to "supporting services" like fund raising, general administration, and member services. In fiscal 2010 supporting services represented almost $245,000 out of $1,250,000 in total expenditures, slightly above 19%. Our auditors consider a supporting services percentage of 25% or below to be reasonable and in one year cautioned us when they thought the figure (12%) might be too low.
The expense section needs two more comments. First, as noted, you can connect the expense headings to our regular programs and divisions except that "special projects" will not immediately be clear. We use the special projects line to show expenses from one-time grants to carry out a task over a specific time period. The grant from the Mellon Foundation described above is a good example. While this grant supports improvement to APh Online, we do not put its income or expenses in the Research Division line where we show, among other things, the ongoing costs of running the American Office of APh. However, the grants come and go, and they generate substantial expenditures in one year and very modest ones in the next. By segregating their expenses into the Special Projects line, we get a truer picture of ongoing operations in the Research Division.
Second, while I am your chief administrator, not all of my salary goes into the three supporting services lines (although some of it does). I estimate how much time I and my colleagues in the APA Office spend on each program area and allocate appropriate percentages of not just our salaries and benefits but items like the rent we pay to the University of Pennsylvania, photocopying expenses, and depreciation of computer equipment to those program areas. I periodically review these allocations with the auditors and the Finance Committee, and any major change in our operations (like hiring Development Director Julie Carew in 2007) generates a complete revision of those allocations.
Because the APA is a not-for-profit organization, our "bottom line" is called "Change in Net Assets", and the way our auditors show these figures is another area where some explanation of terminology would be helpful. First, the auditors provide a figure they call "Change in net assets before other changes", which is very close to an individual year's operating budget: i.e., all the income and expenses I have discussed above. The "other changes" to which this heading refers are – in the Unrestricted column – investment activities in the General Fund and – in the Temporarily Restricted column – investment activities in the Coffin, Pearson, and Research and Teaching Funds. These "other changes" include money drawn down from the funds, dividend income, capital gain distributions, actual gains and losses on instruments bought and sold, and, perhaps most important, changes in the value of funds we continue to hold. This part of the financial statement thus shows both how we were able to fund our activities from our regular sources of income (Changes . . . before other changes) and how much we relied on income from the General Fund (Changes in net assets).
You can see how the “Investment income” figure is calculated on pages 10 and 11 of the auditors' report. It is standard accounting practice for non-profit organizations to show unrealized gains and losses in investments as if they represented actual transactions. Our calculations of the amounts we can prudently withdraw from our endowments are based on market values. Our policy is to draw down 5% of the average value of a given fund over the previous three years. It is therefore useful for our financial statements to track the increases and decreases in these values.
As you can see from the positive numbers in the “Investment income” row for 2010 (especially as compared to the negative numbers in the 2009 column), our investments participated in the general recovery from the very low points of financial markets in late 2008 and early 2009. When I post the auditors’ report for 2011, you will see that the value our investments grew even more rapidly in the first half of 2011.
Finally, on Page 3 of the auditors' report, please look at the Total expenses line. For 2008 it was $1,227,000; for 2009 it was $1,225,000; for 2010 it was $1,251,000, and the preliminary number for 2011 is $1,237,000. This consistency reflects our efforts to keep expenses as low as possible, something we’ve managed to achieve despite year-to-year fluctuations expenses for Special Projects (all of which are grant funded). You can be confident that we are doing our best to find economies wherever possible.
Capital Campaign and Annual Giving. I am very grateful to the members who continue to be willing to make generous gifts not only to the campaign but also to annual giving. Particularly in difficult financial times it is unpleasant to have to ask you to support two different fund-raising goals, but it is necessary. Annual giving is about our present. Unrestricted gifts reduce the deficit in the "Changes . . . before other changes" figure, and the NEH grant supporting the TLL Fellowship still has a matching gift requirement fulfilled by annual giving designations. The Minority Scholarship is particularly dependent on annual giving designations. The Gateway Campaign is about our future: our ability both to maintain the American Office of l'Année philologique now that the final year-to-year NEH grant expired last June and to fund new projects.
It is helpful to keep in mind that we currently face two very different matching fund requirements from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I alluded to one in the previous paragraph, our ongoing requirement to obtain gifts that will release matching funds for the TLL Fellowship. For the last dozen or so years, the NEH has funded the Fellowship in the following way: The Endowment provides about 70% of the necessary funding for this project as – in its terminology – “outright funds”. That is, as long as we continue to award the Fellowship in accordance with the procedures the NEH approved in our grant proposal, we can draw down this money as we need it. In addition, however, the Endowment makes available an additional sum, constituting about 15% of the annual amount needed, provided that we raise the same amount from non-federal sources. To avoid operating the Fellowship at a deficit, therefore, we need some members to designate part of their annual giving contributions to support the TLL.
The second major matching fund requirement is, of course, the one contained in the NEH Challenge Grant that kicked off our current Gatekeeper to Gateway Campaign for Classics. For this grant, the NEH gives us $1 for every $4 we raise from non-federal sources, up to a maximum of $650,000 (matching $2,600,000 in outside gifts). What is unusual about the terms of this grant, however, is that in all challenge grants the NEH makes award installments before the grantee raises the full amount of the required matching funds. Because we are close to the end of this Campaign with $2.2 million of the required $2.6 million raised, we have, in fact, received all the matching funds that the NEH will give us. Our efforts now are to make sure that we don’t need to give any of that money back.
Members have played a big role in getting us so close to our final goal. Over 900 donors have made a contribution to the Campaign of some size, and at least 800 of them are members. That means that at least 27% of our individual members are Campaign donors. In addition, the approximately 100 current and former members of the Board of Directors in our database have accepted their responsibilities as leaders and have contributed over $400,000, nearly 20% of the amount raised to date. However, these numbers also mean that about 70% of all APA members have not contributed to the Campaign. We realize that we will need several major (probably nonmember) donors to get us to the goal of $2.6 million, but participation by a larger number of members will help us to complete this task much more quickly.
Both members and nonmembers have embraced efforts to solicit gifts by "Friends" of a number of distinguished Classicists. The appeals currently underway honor:
- George Goold
- Erich Gruen
- Helen North
- George Kennedy
- Ludwig Koenen
- Mary Lefkowitz
- Michael Putnam
- Zeph Stewart
As you can see in the acknowledgment list published in the annual meeting Program and on the web site, https://classicalstudies.org/images/uploads/documents/FY11Recognition.pdf, donations of any amount are ascribed both to the individual donor and to the appropriate Friends group. In addition, as is our custom, a donor of $250 or more may choose to add this tribute to the listing of his or her individual gift. (Please note that not all qualifying donors chose to make such a designation.)
Two events raised money for the Campaign this year: Jeff Henderson, Kathleen Coleman, Mary Lefkowitz, and Michael Putnam organized a reading on classical themes by four poets in Boston, and Daniel Mendelsohn donated his time to get the annual meeting off to a good start by giving a wonderful reading from a forthcoming book on his travels with his father in classical lands. Both of these events not only brought in Campaign donations; they reminded participants why they care about classical antiquity. If the discipline of classics is to continue to thrive, we will need both those resources and that encouragement.
And, in fact, there was a great deal of encouraging news about the Campaign this year, starting with the fact that we transferred support of the American Office of l’Année from the year-to-year NEH grant that expired last June to the Campaign endowment with no interruption in its activities. Thanks to gifts from the Delmas Foundation, the endowment funded an additional minority scholarship last summer and will continue to do so in subsequent years. Thanks to a gift from Daniel and Joanna Rose, the winners of teaching awards at the Philadelphia meeting received larger honoraria and a stipend for their schools to use in purchasing classroom resources.
Communication with Members. Each November I attend a meeting with 50 to 60 other people who are the chief administrators in learned societies that belong to the ACLS. At that meeting this past November I was asked to be on a panel entitled “Strategies for Integrating Member Communication”. The bad news I brought to my colleagues at that session (and I would say it was the principal lesson I learned on the job this past year) was that as each new form of communication emerges, we need to find a way to use it in order to reach those members who have decided to make that new technology their preferred method of obtaining information. More important, we needed to take up each new technology without for a minute giving up on any previous technologies, including print.
In a year when the press of business has made it no easier to produce newsletters on a timely schedule, I have been very grateful for the redesign and enhancements that Sam Huskey has brought to the APA web site in his first year as Information Architect. First, Sam has made it easier to find the minutes and reports that, until recently usually had to be found by searching through a series of Newsletter issues. In the top menu bar, if you click on "About", one of the submenus that appears is called "Reports". Recent minutes of the Board of Directors, the audited financial statements, and my annual reports are now available from this submenu. We will add more to that submenu, especially reports of vice presidents, during the coming year.
The APA Blog feature that Sam installed (http://apaclassics.org/apa-blog) makes it very easy for me to post current news for members. If you have not yet looked at that section of our web site, I urge you to do so. There's a link to the blog about half way down the right hand side of the main page. Clicking on that link takes you to a section of the site with a new set of links on the right side; these new links refer to the categories of blog entries: APA Announcements, Classics in the News, Funding Opportunities, etc. Some of these sections obviously correspond to the traditional sections of the Newsletter; others to types of information that we think members will find useful. It's possible to apply more than one category to a given entry. For example, as we post instructions for submission of materials to the APA Program Committee, that entry will appear under both "APA Announcements", "Calls for Papers", and "Meetings". If you use RSS feeds, you can subscribe to the blog and be notified when any new post is made.
Even better, Sam has set up the blog in such a way that all posts to it (not just mine but Sam's as well as those of other officers) go directly to our Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SocietyforClassicalStudies) and Twitter (@apaclassics) pages. However, I am aware that many members have come to rely on my occasional e-mails, and that we need to continue the printed Newsletter to reach a core of (usually) very senior members. I will devote considerable effort in 2012 to following the advice I gave my ACLS colleagues: to keep all Association communication vehicles as up to date as possible.
You can assist me in this regard by making sure that you have supplied us with a valid e-mail address. I realize that we will never have such addresses for the entire membership. Even in the second decade of the 21st Century, there are members without good access to either computer equipment or the internet (or both), and I am committed to keeping them informed as best we can. In the majority of cases, however, we don't have valid e-mail addresses because members do not update them when they move to a different location, or because they are concerned their e-mail addresses will be shared too widely. I want to assure the latter group that the APA never shares e-mail addresses with any other organization, I try to limit my e-mails to the membership to one per week, and the frequency is usually much less. It is very easy to add your e-mail address to your membership record. Just send an e-mail to the Johns Hopkins University Press which maintains our membership database (jrnlcirc@press.jhu.edu).
Membership. As of December 31, 2011, we have almost 40 more members than we had on that date a year ago (3,177 versus 3,139). In fact, this number includes 50 more individual members because the total figure includes 13 institutional subscribers lost during 2011 (almost the same number we lost in 2010). This is part of a trend that has been going since the beginning of my tenure in 1999, and is now much less of a concern than it once was because we know from the regular increases in royalties we receive from Project Muse and JSTOR, that a growing number of institutions are subscribing to TAPA in electronic form. Interest in the Annual Meeting and the Placement Service was clearly responsible for some of the growth in individual members. As I'll describe in more detail below, the numbers of individual abstracts submitted and of candidates registered for the Service were the highest in my twelve years with the Association.
I am very grateful to the 42 departments who participated in our departmental membership program in 2011 (see page 67 of the annual meeting Program or https://classicalstudies.org/departmental-membership-scs). At a time when everyone has to institute budget cuts, even the $100 payments from B.A.-granting departments must have been hard to come by. We rely on the income generated by this program to obtain NEH matching funds for our TLL Fellowship and to support the American Office of l'Année now that its NEH grant has expired.
At Sam Huskey's suggestion, in 2012 the APA Facebook page will "like" the page of any paid-up departmental members. Departments need only provide their page's URL when they register. In addition, we are asking departments to make a gift to the Gateway Campaign in addition to their membership payments. We understand that individual university regulations may prohibit such donations, but we hope that all departments will explore this possibility.
Interactions with Other Organizations. I mentioned above my participation in the ACLS' Conference of Administrative Officers (CAO). This activity enables me to learn about events and issues confronting other groups in the humanities and social sciences. Another important source of information for me is the National Humanities Alliance (NHA). Please see the latter organization's web site (http://www.nhalliance.org/events/am-had/2012-annual-meeting-humanities-…) to learn about NHA's Humanities Advocacy Day this coming March. This is a program designed to inform members of Congress about the NEH and other issues of importance to the humanities. I regularly participate in this event and find that it is a useful way of simply making sure that members of Congress know that the NEH exists and what it does. The Endowment's budget is, of course, very important to the APA and to many of its members, but it constitutes a minuscule portion of the entire federal budget and could easily be invisible even to a conscientious legislator.
Thisyear as usual, Heather Gasda or I planned to attend all of the other Classics meetings that are regularly on our calendar: CAAS in the fall, CANE and CAMWS in the spring, and the ACL Institute in early summer. At the last minute, however, a family funeral kept me from CAMWS, and I want to thank that society's outgoing Secretary-Treasurer, Anne Groton, for making sure that the APA exhibit (which was already at the meeting site) was set up and, afterward, sent back to us, and CAMWS and APA member, Nicholas Young, who sat at the display for a good part of the meeting.
An important activity that I expect to emerge from APA's interaction with other classics organizations in North America is a central web site where everyone in the field can have immediate access to a single source of information about classics: information such as subjects taught and degrees offered, enrollments, and subsequent career paths of classics students. Vice President for Education, Ronnie Ancona, has led discussions of this project at the meetings of the Joint Committee (with ACL) on the Classics in American Education, and at our Philadelphia meeting, representatives of both regional and national classics groups were enthusiastic about it. Some of this information already exists, and the site would simply link to that. A great deal does not exist, and the various groups will have to share the responsibility for gathering it.
Work of the Divisions. As noted at the beginning of this report, the reports of our vice presidents are the best places to read about the APA's many activities. Those of us in the office support that work as appropriate, and this is a brief list of programs in which we were particularly active.
We have not been able to publish an issue of Amphora since spring 2010. This has been a result of both cost-saving measures the Association undertook to reduce its printing and postage expenses and the decision that Editor Davina McClain made with considerable regret to resign that post. I was a member of the Search Committee that Outreach Vice President Judy Hallett appointed to find new editors for the publication, and I am very much looking forward to working with Editor Ellen Bauerle and Assistant Editor Wells Hansen to produce new issues in both print and on the APA web site. The first such issue should appear by June.
During the spring and summer I helped Jim May to send out the census of classics departments that poses questions about enrollments and staffing that are essential to the work of the Classics Advisory Service. Very often the most effective information the Service can provide to a department seeking its help is data showing how classics is taught on similar campuses, and the census is our only source of that data. Of course we do not identify specific institutions in these instances, but thanks to the census we can answer questions such as: How many full-time tenure-track faculty does a freestanding classics department in a small liberal arts college typically have? If your department has not already provided its data from the 2009-2010 academic year, it is not too late to supply it at www.stolaf.edu/apps/classics. With the help of several students at St. Olaf, Jim was able to put this survey on a web site for the first time. If you are not certain whether your department filed the data, I can consult our list.
My principal role in this work is to make sure that the list we maintain of classics departments is as up to date as possible. Obviously, this is work that is never done. Chairs change, and departments move, merge, (in a few cases) disappear, and (in more cases than you might realize) come into existence. Before the end of February, I will send an e-mail to all departments on our list asking them to be departmental members for 2012. If no one in your department receives this appeal, please let me know so that we can update your information.
At the recent annual meeting the members present approved a change in our By-Laws that merged the Publications and Research Divisions effective next January. The Board proposed this change after long-range planning retreats held by both of those Divisions envisioned projects where decisions about how to conduct scholarship had to be considered simultaneously with decisions about how ultimately to publish that work. The two Divisions have also been collaborating on a proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the feasibility of creating a digital library of Latin texts of sufficient sophistication to serve the needs of students and scholars at all levels. In addition to considering complicated technical issues, the working group being formed for this project (to be led by Information Architect, Sam Huskey) will need to make basic scholarly decisions about what texts should be included and how variant readings should be treated. Members of the working group, particularly Sam, Kathleen Coleman, Roger Bagnall, Jim O'Donnell, and Tom Elliott, have done the bulk of the work of preparing this proposal, but I have coordinated the submission of successive drafts to the Foundation as well as the preparation of the budget. If the project is funded, work will begin this summer.
All of the divisions will participate in a retreat that the Board of Directors will conduct in late March to make a long-range plan for the Association. There are several reasons why we are undertaking this effort at this time. First, last spring, when the Finance Committee contemplated slight declines in membership, two successive annual meetings with comparatively low attendance, and two Placement Service years with low numbers of jobs being offered, it urged the Board to re-examine all of our activities to make sure that we are providing what our members actually need after a few decades when the nature of scholarly communication has changed drastically. Also, when we started working with our fund-raising consultant, Laura Mandeles, in 2005 at the beginning of the Gateway Campaign, she told us that capital campaigns always change the institutions that conduct them. The impending end of the Campaign is another reason for us to take stock of our situation.
The effort of organizing this retreat has been underway since the fall, and, of course, since then we have held an extremely well attended annual meeting, membership has increased slightly for the first time in a few years, and even the job market seems to deserve a grade of C-minus rather than F. With no guarantee that these trends will continue, however, we will continue with the planning process. Heather Gasda has helped me to find a suitable location for the retreat, and all of us in the office have been and will continue to be engaged in gathering the historical information about Association activities that the Board will need as background to its discussions.
Placement Service. A little over 50 institutions conducted job interviews at the annual meeting in Philadelphia. This number is probably the best indicator of the job market at this time of the year because it can be compared to the same number last year. (In the spring, near the end of the academic year, I think it makes sense to compare the number of jobs posted from one year to another.). This figure is, of course, far lower than the numbers just a few years ago (over 70 in 2007 and over 80 in 2008), but at least it is an increase over the 40 interviewing institutions at the 2010 and 2011 meetings (hence the barely passing grade I awarded in the paragraph above).
This fall, of course, we implemented a system that allowed for both registration and scheduling online. We appreciate the patience of both candidates and institutions with the difficulties that arose, but clearly the system was manageable as a record number of candidates (over 500) signed up for the service, and institutions had little difficulty posting jobs. The system enabled us to achieve a long-term goal: making job listings available to registered candidates as soon as we received them and reviewed them for adherence to Placement Service guidelines. The developer who created the software has ideas for improving this aspect of the Service next year.
The Placement Committee is not convinced that the APA Office should continue to schedule interviews, noting that the other major disciplinary societies simply set aside meeting space and let individual institutions schedule appointments directly with candidates. I think that the involvement of Placement Director Renie Plonski keeps appointment schedules manageable for both search committees and job seekers and reduces the stress of interviewing process (to the extent possible). However, if we are the only society that controls scheduling so closely, it is certainly worthwhile to consider whether we should continue to do so. Further, we need to think about whether the Service - if it does not schedule interviews - can still collect useful data about the field and encourage junior classicists to become members of either APA or AIA as it does now.
Annual Meeting. Members will know that we implemented a different online submission system for panel proposals and individual abstracts in 2011, and we think that it was easier for members to use than its predecessor although it presented some challenges for the Program Committee during the review process and some significant challenges for Heather and Sam Huskey around the publication of accepted abstracts on the web site and in the Abstract Book. I hope you liked the new Abstract Book design that Heather developed with our printer (which also manages the abstract submission process). Our printer has used its experience with us last year to make improvements to the submission system for the 2013 meeting, and we anticipate an easier process for all in the next few months.
The meeting in Philadelphia attracted just over 2,800 paid registrants, an increase of 40% over the 2,000 in San Antonio. Total attendance was just over 3,000. The Anaheim meeting attracted only 1,900 paid registrants and in 2009, the last year we were in Philadelphia, the figure was 2,450. This is by far the largest meeting in my experience as Executive Director, and is probably the second largest in the history of the joint meeting. (The 1996 meeting in New York had a total attendance of just under 3,100.) While the number of panel proposals submitted to the Committee for its April 2011 meeting was about the same as in recent years, the number of individual abstracts (473) submitted for the Committee's June meeting was the highest in my experience. Perhaps more interesting, this is the first time that a record number of individual abstracts correlated with a large increase in annual meeting attendance.
Last month we asked all members to complete a survey about their attendance at annual meetings and their attitudes towards various aspects of the meeting. We would have conducted this survey as preparation for the Board's retreat even if this year's meeting had not been so successful, but it will certainly be helpful to obtain this information now. The survey will also be an opportunity to study reactions to the changes to the program implemented by the Program Committee in Joe Farrell's first year as Vice President for Program. These changes were designed to improve discussion and attract presentations by senior scholars and may well have contributed to the large increase in attendance. We are chauvinistic enough to think that our home city makes an attractive venue for the meeting, and Local Arrangements Chairs Jeremy McInerney and Robin Mitchell-Boyask produced a useful city guide that we were able to post on the web site well in advance of the meeting
During the year we signed one more annual meeting contract, for Toronto in 2017. As I reported last year, the intervening meetings will be in Seattle (2013), Chicago (2014), New Orleans (2015), and San Diego (2016). We have agreed with our colleagues at AIA not to sign any additional contracts until we can assess attendance at the Seattle meeting. Many members have expressed interest in going there, and the local community is very eager to host us, but for many members it is not as easy to reach as Philadelphia. The societies could incur financial penalties if we book more sleeping rooms than we need, and Seattle will be a good test of our Philadelphia experience: Was that high attendance a "new normal" or just a blip?
University of Pennsylvania. We are now well settled in our new offices on 40th Street, and we stay in touch with Penn Classical Studies Department in a number of ways. The increased size of the offices made it possible for us to host the Ad Hoc Committee on Archives, chaired by Ruth Scodel, over two working weekends last winter. As I explained in my previous report, Roger Bagnall (a member of the Ad Hoc Committee) had concluded his term as APA Secretary-Treasurer in 1986 by establishing archives for us in the Columbia Rare Book Room. However, none of his successors, including myself, had ever added any material to those archives. The Committee therefore went through close to 80 file boxes and identified the materials that, we thought, would be useful to historians of the field in the 22nd century and beyond. It was extremely interesting and challenging work.
Conclusion. I want to conclude by thanking all members, especially those on committees and the Board, for their support of my office's efforts. I particularly appreciate the recent vote of confidence I received from the Board. My current term as Executive Director expires this coming June; so, last fall I asked Kathleen Coleman to convey to the Board my request to be reappointed for an additional four-year term (until June 2016) at which point I hope to retire. As specified in Regulation 13, Kathleen assembled a dossier on my performance based on communications with vice presidents and other APA leaders, presented that dossier to the Executive Committee, which recommended my reappointment to the Board. At its meeting on January 5, the Board accepted that recommendation.
I look forward to working with APA members for the next 4-plus years, and I urge you to let me know if you have any questions or suggestions about Association operations.
Adam D. Blistein
Executive Director
February 21, 2012