Dear SCS Member:
This is my final message to members as Executive Director. Since I announced my retirement last summer, many of you have said many kind things about my work over the last 17 years. I very much appreciate those kind words and sometimes even recognize the person you're talking about. I also very much appreciate the apparent amnesia of long-time members about the fair number of things that did not go so well on my watch, especially early in my tenure. For instance, am I the only one who remembers that no one could pay dues to the Society for most of the first half of 2000 in between the demise of Scholars Press and the beginning of our relationship with the Johns Hopkins University Press?
I have a reputation for not taking credit for contributions I made to the Society and to the field. I won't be the judge of that reputation, but I am definitely proud of the time I have spent and the efforts I have devoted to collaborating with other classics organizations. I saw early on in my tenure that it would be important to demonstrate to the field what I think had been true but perhaps not sufficiently visible for a number of decades: that the Society wanted to collaborate with the larger body of classicists both because anyone studying or teaching classics at any level deserves our support, and because that "larger body" is, in fact, too small, and the challenges it faces, too many, to address separately. The SCS Board always encouraged my efforts in this regard. It consistently provided me both the time and the resources to work with other classics organizations and, in particular, to attend other classics meetings. I am confident that that support will also be available to my successor, Helen Cullyer, and that she will take advantage of it.
Over the past five months I have had a rewarding and a reassuring experience preparing to hand over responsibilities to Helen. For some time I have been saying to people who claim I'm indispensable that if the SCS needed the ideal executive director for 2003, then, yes, I'm probably irreplaceable. However, if you're looking for the ideal executive director for 2020, you have to look elsewhere. I think Helen is the ideal executive director for 2020. I would also like to point out as we approach our sesquicentennial in 2019 that she is the first female chief administrator the Society has ever had. About time.
During the spring, Helen was busy making arrangements to move the office to New York University, and the two of us were in regular communication about the details of office operations that she would need to take on in July. Since May 1, Helen has been a full-time member of the SCS staff. During that period she attended a number of meetings with me (the ACLS Annual Meeting, the regular spring Finance and Program Committee meetings, and an extraordinary Board meeting a few days ago that President Roger Bagnall will soon tell you about), and regularly visited the office in Philadelphia. She will have permanent space in an NYU building in September, and in the interim, thanks to Roger, has temporary space at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). As I explained a few months ago, both of us have been receiving e-mail sent to xd@classicalstudies.org since Information Architect Sam Huskey set up that account in March. Starting tomorrow, she alone will receive those messages, and she and the staff that she is in the process of hiring will receive the messages sent to info@classicalstudies.org. Her mailing address at ISAW is
Dr. Helen Cullyer, Executive Director
Society for Classical Studies
c/o ISAW`
15 E. 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
and her telephone number there is 646-939-0435.
In a few weeks she will issue information about this summer's election. You will again be able to vote online, but those of you who choose to submit printed ballots should send them to the ISAW address. Also in July she will open the web site for the 2016-2017 Placement Service year and send out decisions made by the Program Committee on the proposals you submitted this spring.
Fairly early in my conversations with Helen about our transition, I realized that I had taken over a largely paper based office in 1999, but I was handing over a digital one. As a result, I now have a lot of paper that Helen will not need. Some will go to the Society archives that Roger established in the rare book room of the Columbia University Library at the end of his term as Secretary-Treasurer, but a great deal needs simply to be recycled. Because Helen will not need to pay rent to NYU until September, I will keep the Penn office over the summer to perform this winnowing, and there is even the chance that I may have to ask one or two of you a question about what I'm finding while I do this work. Other than that, I look forward to returning to the status of ordinary SCS member. My personal e-mail address is blistein@comcast.net, and I would be happy to hear from any of you about anything except SCS business. I also hope to see many of you in Toronto where I look forward to the (for me) novel experience of listening to more papers than just the Presidential Address.
Renie Plonski and Heather Hartz will not be moving to New York, and I am very grateful to them for their professionalism in working closely with Helen on this transition up through today. I owe them even more gratitude for everything they have done for the Society for the last 17 (Renie) or 11 (Heather) years. I also want to mention with equal gratitude Minna Duchovnay who had Heather's job from 1999 to 2005, and Julie Carew, our Director of Development during the Gateway Campaign. I have said before that in many areas SCS offers more sophisticated services than other societies of its size, services that are typical of our much larger peers. The dedication of many volunteer leaders is one reason why we are able to "punch above our weight". The hard work of committed staff is just as important, and you have reaped the benefits of that commitment for the last 17 years.
I believe that the main job of any learned society is to facilitate communication among members, and an important subset of that communication is between the office and members. I noted above that the office that once relied on paper now relies on digital files; that was true, of course, of our communications as well. To some extent, that change meant issuing more e-mails like this one, and I came to enjoy meeting a member for the first time and invariably hearing "Oh, you're the one who sends me all the e-mails." However, the e-mails wouldn't have been as effective if I had not been able to use them to point to more detail about a given topic on our web site. And that, in turn, meant that I depended a great deal on, first, Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Editor of the web site from before my appointment until 2011, and, since then, on Sam. I am grateful to both of them for working so hard to post the information that members needed as soon as they needed it and, whenever they could, to make changes I suggested for improving the experience of using the site.
Apart from Robin and Sam, I will not try to list all the presidents, vice presidents, financial trustees, directors, editors, committee chairs and members, delegates, representatives, and ad hoc volunteers whom I need to thank. I believe you know who you are, and I hope you know that I appreciate all the help you gave me and my staff over the years.
Despite my exaggerated reputation for modesty, I accept the notion that I did a lot for the Society, but you need to understand that in return you did a lot for me personally and for my family. Part of why I want to retire is to have more time for a variety of projects, including some musical ones. Unlike the late David Porter, I am not capable of maintaining two (or three) full time careers at once. However, I consider myself fortunate that this position did give me the time to keep those passions and ambitions alive, and, in spots, my work even nourished them. For instance, in the course of just 10 months, from November 2008 to September 2009, you enabled me to visit Motown Studio A in Detroit and Graceland in Memphis and to have a long talk with Garry Wills in Washington DC about the relative merits of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. The occasions were, respectively, a meeting of ACLS society administrators, an Eta Sigma Phi meeting at which I received a somewhat premature lifetime achievement award, and a Gateway Campaign event at which Prof. Wills was the main attraction. I even got to Sun Studios during an ACL Institute a few years later.
Some of you have heard me say that this was the job I wanted for 10 years before it existed. In the late 1980's I was working for the American Association for Cancer Research, and after a few years there I finally woke up to the fact that I now had a career in association management, specifically the management of academic societies. Once I had that realization, I wondered briefly whether the Society would ever need such a manager but quickly dismissed the notion. Obviously, I was wrong to dismiss the idea so quickly, and I can assure you that over the last 17 years this has continued to be the job I wanted for 10 years before it existed.
Thank you for making that possible.
Adam D. Blistein