SCS Newsletter - February 2019 (Main)

I turn now to 2018. This was a busy year across our programs, and I summarize here some highlights that are discussed in more detail by the Vice Presidents in their individual reports. I focus here on some things that happened in 2018 that did not get a lot of publicity, but have made and will continue to make a positive impact. We made some changes to criteria of two of our awards, which may seem minor but which have really made a difference. The Education Division worked hard this summer and Fall to simplify the nomination and application instructions for our Precollegiate Teaching Award and increase the value of the award with financial support for award winners to attend either the ACL Institute or SCS Annual Meeting. As as result of these efforts, we received a fantastic group of nominations and applications. Both award winners attended the Annual Meeting in San Diego. For our Minority Scholarships, we changed one element of the application criteria, as recommended by the Committee on Diversity in the Profession. Students no longer have to have a letter of recommendation from a SCS or AIA member. This has opened up the scholarships to many students at institutions that do not have Classics faculty who are members.

For the first time at our Annual Meeting, we featured "lightning talks", a recommendation of the Program Committee way back in summer 2017. The lightning talks flip the usual model of longer talk followed by short discussion period, with short talks of six minutes each followed by fourteen minutes of audience discussion. We hope to see more submissions in this category for 2020. We were also delighted to work with Classics and Social Justice and the Onassis Foundation to bring playwright Luis Alfaro the the meeting for a public lecture, and with two recently-chartered affiliated groups, Eos (chartered in 2017) and the Mountaintop Coalition (chartered in 2018) on their events.

In our Publications and Research division, we signed a publication agreement with University of Oklahoma for the Digital Latin Library, whose Library of Digital Latin Texts is now accepting proposals for new open access editions of Latin texts. We also started making preparations for a special issue of TAPA, which will be published later in 2019 by Johns Hopkins on the occasion of the Society's 150th Anniversary, along with a timeline of the journal's history. SCS office staff, students assistants and interns also worked to understand the history of the Society's book publication program, the results of which you can view here.

Our Professional Matters division worked very hard in 2018 on the following revisions of policies and statements: a revision of the Placement Guidelines, which now include guidelines on remote interviews; a revision of our annual meeting harassment statement and our grievance procedures in the Regulations; and ongoing work on our Professional Ethics statement, more revisions to which will appear on this summer's ballot. SCS also issued the first ever survey on harassment and discrimination in the field. Although there was vigorous debate about the wording of this survey, it is a major achievement to have completed this. A report is forthcoming in April of this year. In addition, we welcomed AIA back into the Placement Service.

In the Communications and Outreach division, our blog and social media presence continued to thrive. We also launched in Fall 2018 the Classics Everywhere initiative that is providing funds for public outreach initiatives in 2019 and hired Nina Papathanasopoulou as a part-time public engagement coordinator.