Submitted April 28, 2008, 1:32 PM
What is your status with the AHA?
member for 31 to 35 years
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How many of the last five AHA conventions did you attend?
To how many scholarly associations do you pay membership dues?
What is your blogging status?
Have you interviewed (either as interviewer or interviewee) at the AHA convention?
some interviews there happened without AHA knowledge
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What is your experience with job search committees?
have sat on both sides of the table
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What is your age?
What is your gender?
What is your race or ethnicity?
What is the highest degree you have obtained?
If applicable, how many years have you spent teaching history?
If applicable, how many years did you spend on the job market trying to obtain full-time employment?
If applicable, how many years ago did you receive your PhD?
If applicable, what is your academic rank or status?
If applicable, what is your tenure status?
What is your experience with history doctoral programs?
currently teaching and/or advising doctoral students
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For whom or what do you work?
What is your field/subject/discipline?
What is your geographical area of historical specialization?
What is your annual income?
The AHA does more advocacy for the historical profession than any other organization.
The AHA does a good job of defining ethical and professional standards.
The AHA does a good job of disseminating information about best practices in the field of history.
The AHA does enough to preserve primary sources for historical research.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA does a good job of publicizing historical research.
The AHA does a good job of revising its Constitution and Bylaws.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA Council is doing a good job.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA's Professional Division is doing a good job.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA's Research Division is doing a good job.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA's Teaching Division is doing a good job.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA's various committees are doing a good job.
The AHA staff are doing a good job.
The American Historical Review is the best journal in the field of history.
The Perspectives magazine provides excellent news about the historical profession.
The AHA runs an excellent convention each year.
The AHA does a good job of providing information about the various careers available to historians.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA publishes excellent directories to the historical profession.
The AHA publishes some great pamphlets.
The AHA does a lot of work with other historical organizations to advocate for the rights of historians.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA does more for foreign scholars and organizations than any other historical organization in this country.
The AHA awards plenty of prizes, fellowships, and awards.
The AHA publishes an excellent guide to funding sources for historians.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA publishes useful materials for history teachers.
The AHA superbly supports the National History Day program.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA has put together an incredibly useful web site.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA provides valuable support to the History Cooperative web site.
The AHA provides major support for federally-funded historical programs.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA is a major advocate for part-time and adjunct history instructors at the college level.
The AHA will never succeed in serving all types of historians.
Historians favor smaller conferences in their specialization over the AHA conventions.
Membership in the AHA is a waste of money for most historians.
Joining the AHA will help your career.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA does little more than run an annual conference and publish a magazine and journal.
The AHA has the power to reform the Job Market.
The AHA has little to no power.
The AHA should spend more time lobbying Congress.
The AHA cannot change our profession.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA cannot change how the historical profession is treated by the government.
University administrators pay little attention to AHA recommendations.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA is so spineless that it does not want to police plagiarists in the profession.
The AHA does not have enough influence to help historians obtain higher salaries through collective bargaining.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA would never advocate collective bargaining because the tenured professors in the AHA oppose unions for their graduate students.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA has no influence over the university administrators who have been lowering the salaries for history faculty.
AHA membership has increased over the last decade.
The AHA should expand its membership base.
The AHA will never succeed at recruiting large numbers of new members as long as it has no official membership committee.
The major reason why younger historians are abandoning the AHA is not because they can read AHA publications for free through their library web site, but because they have lost faith in the AHA's ability to fix the problems of the job market.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA should make the recruitment of "high school and community college teachers, public historians, and members of state and local history societies" its highest priority.
The AHA should recruit and strengthen its relationship with affiliated societies.
As the OAH and AHA compete for new members, they will find it harder to work together.
The AHA should charge history PhDs more than everyone else for membership and conference registration.
Historians with tenure should pay the most for AHA membership and conference registration.
Most sessions at the AHA conference are poorly attended.
The AHA convention should be fully wireless.
The AHA should devote up to a quarter of its conference program to the needs and interests of underrepresented constituencies.
Research will always be the emphasis of at least 90 percent of the sessions at the annual AHA convention.
The AHA Job Market reports have lost touch with reality.
The AHA should prohibit job interviewing at its annual conventions, because this practice is making things worse, not better, for job seekers.
The AHA has no power over search committees at the annual convention that flout AHA guidelines and fail to inform the Job Register of the time, place, and existence of their interviews.
Departments that refuse to follow AHA guidelines about the interview and hiring process should be blacklisted from the Job Register and refused ad space in Perspectives.
neither agree nor disagree
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After the close of its convention, the AHA should send out an e-mail to everyone who registered for the conference or who reserved a room in one of the conference hotels, and ask them to fill out a brief survey about their experience with the job market that year.
The AHA is reluctant to fundamentally change the interview process at its convention, because the AHA raises most of its money through the convention.
The AHA should help create an academic jobs wiki that cannot be deleted or vandalized.
neither agree nor disagree
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Shaming departments that fail to follow AHA guidelines in the hiring and interview process is a much better idea than having the AHA punish or sanction these departments.
The AHA will never persuade the people who register for its conferences to disclose their applicant status, because there are a lot of history faculty on the job market who are secretly trying to switch to a different college or university.
The AHA should punish departments that fail to provide their job applicants with thirty-days notice about interviews at the AHA convention.
The AHA should create incentives for history departments and institutions to submit their job ads early in the fall semester and should try harder to erode the customer base of H-Net.
It would be pointless for the AHA to impose sanctions on job search committees that fail to provide thirty-days notice to the people they want to interview at the AHA convention, because these search committees often find that obtaining clearance from university administrators and human resources departments is a slow process.
The AHA has no business telling departments to behave more professionally.
The AHA should gather daily updates about the progress of job search committees and broadcast this information through mass e-mails to job applicants.
In 2009, graduate students will show up in mass and take over the business meeting at the AHA convention if the AHA does not try harder to reform the Job Market.
neither agree nor disagree
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Graduate students in history should unite and become a voting bloc within the AHA.
If the AHA imposed sanctions on departments whose search committees did not follow AHA guidelines, these departments would stop sending their search committees to the AHA convention.
The AHA cannot prevent departments from booking a hotel room at the AHA convention and holding interviews that are not reported to the Job Register.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA could easily survey history departments and find out how many applications they received for each of their job searches, whether it was only 25 or more than 200, since these departments already have to report the numbers to their human resources departments and the EEOC.
The AHA should monitor unadvertised searches for faculty more closely.
neither agree nor disagree
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As history faculty retire, the AHA should lobby their departments to search for replacements in American or European history, so that the openings for history faculty will match the specializations of the majority of recent history PhDs.
The AHA should allow departments who want to advertise in Perspectives to select from a large number of primary and secondary categories for their job ads, rather than from just a small number of primary categories.
The AHA should host blogs on its web site.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA should serve as the "gatekeeper and authority" for digital media in history.
The AHA could never attract history bloggers to its web site like the History News Network has done.
The AHA should create "gated discussion forums for members on specialized subjects."
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA should offer listservs for historians because H-Net is in decline.
The AHA does a good job of balancing the members-only and freely-available content on its web site.
The AHA needs to endorse digital scholarship.
The AHA web site should become an archive, portal, and search engine for history blogs.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA is too far behind in the digital revolution to ever set the lead for historians who work in digital media.
The AHA should evaluate history departments and issue accreditation.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA should ask history doctoral programs to provide full disclosure of their attrition rate, placement rate, years to degree, and information about where their students end up working after graduation on their departmental web site.
If history doctoral programs won't reveal their attrition, graduation, and placement rates to the AHA, then the AHA should use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain this information.
The AHA should not try to protect students who ignore the warning signs of the Job Market and enter history doctoral programs at their own peril.
The AHA should tell history doctoral programs how many many students they should admit annually, in order to eliminate the oversupply problem in the job market.
The AHA allows history doctoral programs to admit as many students as they want because this adds prestige to history departments and those departments then lend their prestige to the AHA when they sit on its committees.
The AHA should fight harder against elitism in the history profession.
The AHA will never seriously combat elitism in the history profession, because it serves the interests of its leading members.
The AHA is doing enough to fight against discrimination in the historical profession.
The committees that govern the AHA are representative of the AHA membership.
neither agree nor disagree
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The leadership of the AHA will become more representative of history teachers and public historians as the AHA recruits more members in these areas.
The AHA should make the pursuit of social justice part of its mission statement.
The AHA does not treat job seekers with enough respect.
History instructors at community colleges feel like the AHA does nothing for them.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA should sponsor regional conferences for teachers.
The AHA should do more to lobby for required history courses in K-12 and college curriculum.
The AHA cannot change the number of history majors at the undergraduate level.
The work of the AHA's Teaching Division will always be a lower priority than the work of the AHA's Professional and Research Divisions.
The AHA will continue to pay lip service to the importance of teaching, but teaching will never become a priority within the AHA because it does not help history faculty to obtain tenure.
The AHA should spend its money on a new headquarters.
The AHA can realistically raise $10 million to fund its programs.
The National History Center should serve the interests of the AHA.
The AHA should create a major endowment that will secure its financial future.
The AHA could do much more to bring the profession's production of history and the nation's consumption of history into closer alignment.
Public historians feel the AHA does not speak for them or represent their interests.
neither agree nor disagree
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The AHA should create awards and prizes for popular history books and historical museum displays.
Now that we have entered the digital age, where e-mails have replaced letters and are easily deleted by government officials, the AHA should work more closely with archivists to meet the new challenges of preserving the historical record.
The AHA should partner with public historians and offer a summer institute for academically-trained historians who want to retool and receive training on how to apply their skills outside academia.
The AHA should find and survey history PhDs in the "backlog" so that we will have better a statistical picture of everyone who is competing for tenure track jobs in history.
The AHA should become more proactive in its collection of data about the historical profession.
The AHA Directory lists only members of the AHA.
The AHA Directory lists only about half of the history departments in this country.
The AHA should try harder to determine what proportion of faculty openings in history departments are being filled by recent PhDs from related fields or foreign universities, rather than by U.S.-trained historians.
The AHA should survey history faculty who earned their PhD 30 or more years ago to obtain estimates of when they expect to retire, as well as the likelihood that their department will hire a replacement once they retire, and then use this information to produce forecasts about the market for job seekers in history.
The AHA should carry out an annual survey of all the institutions that placed job ads for historians in Perspectives, H-Net, Chronicle of Higher Education, OAH web site, HigherEdJobs.com, Insidehighered.com, and major newspapers--rather than just surveying the 600 to 700 departments listed in the AHA Directory--in order to more accurately analyze the total numbers of jobs and job seekers (supply and demand) in the historical profession each year.
Please use the below space to enter any comments you would like to make.
Quite a few of your questions are based on rather unproven assumptions; eg the decline of H-Net.
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