Incoming President Research Articles

APA's New President Plans Ambitious Agenda

APA's New President Plans Ambitious Agenda

Stand Up and Be Counted 2008*

It is an honor and pleasure for me to address you as the incoming 121st President of the American Orthopaedic Association (AOA). Today, I will speak to you about the AOA's commitment to leadership and how, through recent changes in its activities, it has embraced the challenge to “stand up and be counted.” But, first, I want to mention how my institution, the New York Orthopaedic Hospital, has been closely associated with the AOA and how I chose the title “Stand Up and Be Counted.” The New York Orthopaedic Hospital and Dispensary was founded in 1866, and there have been nine directors1. The Hospital sold its building in 1950 and became part of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and now New York Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University. Of the nine directors, three have been presidents of the AOA: Newton M. Shaffer, Harold M. Dick, and myself. Newton M. Shaffer, our second director, was one of the founders of the AOA. As nicely outlined in Dr. Urbaniak's A History of the American Orthopaedic Association, a preliminary meeting to discuss the formation of the AOA was held in Shaffer's New York apartment2. The AOA was formed in 1887 as the first orthopaedic association of its kind, and Newton Shaffer was the second president in 1888, following Virgil Gibney. The third director of the New York Orthopaedic Hospital, Russell A. Hibbs, one of the most famous orthopaedic surgeons in the history of our profession, was initially rejected. It appears that several influential AOA members did not like the manner in which he replaced Newton Shaffer as director of the New York Orthopaedic Hospital, and they blocked his admission. However, he was later unanimously accepted on the merit of his work concerning spinal fusion. Harold Dick was our eighth director …

All Astir

All Astir . . . Marvelling mild if mortal twice, Here and hereafter, touch a Paradise. “To Ned” G etting to Paradise once, as Melville did when he first went ashore in the Marquesas and Tahiti (or even that reverse-Paradise, the Galápagos), might satisfy someone for a lifetime. Getting to return physically, as he did on the United States, and then imaginatively in his novels and poems, Melville fully comprehended the miracle he had received. Through a similarly miraculous gift your “Extracts” editor, after reading about Melville’s paradises for decades, got to visit them as faculty lecturer on tour with MIT alumni—first in the Galápagos in November, 2008 and then Tahiti in February, 2009. Treading my way gingerly through a lava “Tartarus of clinkers” on Fernandina (Melville’s Narborough Isle) or sailing past the Maatea valley (Melville’s Martair in Tahiti), where he and John Troy briefly cultivated sweet potatoes, I felt the spell of “twice” touching magical realms. The Galápagos trip directly inspired the Melville Society lecture I delivered January 3 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Moby-Dick Marathon. Titled “Crossing the Line and Exploring the Equator in Moby-Dick,” illustrated with maps and pictures of the Offshore Grounds Melville sailed, the talk discussed “the equator as a theme in Moby-Dick but also as a line that Melville traveled, wrote about, and returned to in later writings.” It is hard to convey the deep pleasure of sailing the seas Melville knew, speaking about his books with different readers, and discovering new latitudes in his writings. The sabbatical, in other words, has been a revelation. Likewise, the activities of the Melville Society in the last six months have allowed some members to touch more than once, if not at paradises, then at scenes of fellowship and scholarship within the community of Melville readers. The MLA, always the site of the Executive Committee’s annual meeting, drew an unusually large number of officers to San Francisco in December, 2008. Outgoing President Carolyn Karcher and incoming President Robert Milder joined with Executive Secretary Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, outgoing Treasurer John Matteson, incoming Treasurer Tony McGowan, Melville Society Cultural Project representative Robert K. Wallace, Editor John Bryant, and Associate Editor Wyn Kelley. You will find the reports of the Executive Secretary and Treasurer in this issue. We are grateful for the unstinting devotion, hard work, and service represented in these reports and among all our officers. C 2009 The Authors Journal compilation C 2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 89 E X T R A C T S Clockwise from far left: Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Tony McGowan, Carolyn Karcher, Wyn Kelley, Robert K. Wallace, Robert Milder, John Bryant, and John Matteson. At a festive dinner following the Melville Society panel (see our “MLA Abstracts” in this issue), Mary K. Bercaw Edwards announced the winner of the Hennig Cohen Prize, Matthew Cordova Frankel from the University of Rhode Island. Matthew Cordova Frankel, Cohen Prize winner. 90 L E V I A T H A N A L L A S T I R Melville scholars show that tattooing is not simply an academic subject. Professor Frankel’s article, “Tattoo Art: The Composition of Text, Voice and Race in Melville’s Moby-Dick,” published in ESQ, naturally provoked discussion of tattoos inspired by Melville’s art. More than one person attending the dinner could claim to have acted on this inspiration. We were fortunate to record in the photo above the genial competition that ensued. In January 2009 the Melville Society Cultural Project met in New Bedford with the Whaling Museum’s new director, James Russell, and his hardworking staff. The group were delighted to hear that under James Russell’s new leadership the Museum’s financial picture, organization, attendance, and staff morale have considerably improved. Madelyn Shaw requested input from the MSCP for the projected renovation of the Sperm Whale Gallery, which we provided in succeeding weeks. As Mary K. Bercaw...

More Med Students Choose Psychiatry, Reversing Recent Year Declines

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Education & TrainingFull AccessMore Med Students Choose Psychiatry, Reversing Recent Year DeclinesMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:17 Apr 2009https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.44.8.0002The number of U.S. medical school graduates entering PGY-1 psychiatry residency slots this year increased by 10 percent over last year, according to data from the National Resident Match Program (NRMP).A total of 656 U.S. graduates chose psychiatry, up from 595 last year. The increase reverses three years of slight declines that began in 2005.As a percentage of the total number of U.S. seniors who matched into residency positions in any specialty this year (14,566), however, those matching into psychiatry has remained stable over several years at 4.5 percent.As in past years, international medical graduates (IMGs) continue to be critical to the larger picture of psychiatry's emerging workforce: in addition to the 656 positions filled by U.S. graduates, 396 first-year residency positions were filled mostly by IMGs (a small number are filled by U.S. graduates who didn't graduate this year). Altogether, 1,052 positions were filled, or 99 percent of those that were offered. That total figure is up from 1,013 in 2008.“We at APA are pleased at the continued increase in psychiatry positions filled through the match,” commented Deborah Hales, M.D., head of APA's Division of Education. “Advances in our science, more flexible practice options, and patient need all make psychiatry an attractive choice.”David Kaye, M.D., incoming president of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training, told Psychiatric News,“ The good news is that we are holding our own and growing a little bit. I'd like to think there is a lot of excitement today about being a psychiatrist. Our treatments are better and better established, and there is less stigma.”He noted especially that only 11 positions went unfilled this year.“ Not too long ago we had hundreds of unfilled slots,” he said.Regarding the continued heavy reliance on international graduates, Kaye said, “Most of us believe the country needs a lot more psychiatrists. So we need IMGs to come in and fill that public-health need.”The results of the annual match, reflecting the specialty choices of physicians who will be in practice for the next 30 to 40 years, are looked at like tea leaves for clues to the shape of medicine in the future. Five specialties experienced a 10 percent or greater increase in the number of U.S. graduates choosing the specialty since 2005: anesthesiology, emergency medicine, obstetrics-gynecology, plastic surgery, and radiology. Surgery and internal medicine have experienced equivalent declines.APA Trustee Sidney Weissman, M.D., who has long taken an interest in workforce issues, said he believes that efforts at health system reform—which likely will have an impact on physician earnings—are bound to be a factor in shaping psychiatry's future workforce.“Career selection or matches in future years, I believe, will be greatly impacted by the outcome of the proposed reorganization of the American health care system,” Weissman stated. “It is argued that our country's current health care expenditures can be reduced by one-third without loss of quality and with a concurrent expansion to the uninsured.“Whether true or not, we can anticipate changes in how our health care services are structured, which may or will impact on physician incomes,” he said. “Proposals exist to alter the current physician payment system. This may or will lead to changes in our current fee-for-service models and could either positively or negatively impact on psychiatry.“In light of the degree of indebtedness of graduating U.S. medical school seniors, any perceived or real changes in potential incomes of specialties will likely impact on their career choices.”The match, conducted annually by the NRMP, uses a computer algorithm to align the preferences of applicants with the preferences of residency program directors to fill the thousands of training positions available at U.S. teaching hospitals each year.The NRMP is a private, not-for-profit organization established in 1952 to provide an orderly and fair mechanism for matching residents with residency programs.The NRMP is sponsored by the American Board of Medical Specialties, American Medical Association, Association of American Medical Colleges, American Hospital Association, and Council of Medical Specialty Societies.More information on this year's match results are posted at<www.nrmp.org/>.▪ ISSUES NewArchived

POTUS on the Road: International and Domestic Presidential Travel, 1977‐2005

As a president's time is perhaps his scarcest resource, the strategic choices that determine its allocation are some of the most significant that a president and his aides will make. When and where a president chooses to travel, and what he does while he is there, can reveal a great deal about his priorities. This essay analyzes patterns of both international and domestic travel over the past five presidential administrations in order to provide the incoming president and his aides with information that will assist them as they decide when, where, and for what the next president should travel.

LTC Physicians Detail Financial Challenges

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Medicare payment problems continue to challenge long-term care professionals, AMDA president Charles Crecelius, MD, PhD, CMD, reported at the AMDA Annual Symposium. Eric Tangalos, MD, CMD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., explained—and personally supported—long-term care practitioners' participation in Medicare's pay-for-performance program, the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI), which offers some small bonuses. Other speakers on the topic of fiscal issues facing long-term care described other specific Medicare issues. Medicare's latest experimental strategies to address costs include bundling (paying global fees to be distributed among caregivers), gainsharing (offering health care facilities and physicians shares of savings they generate), developing the medical home model (paying incentives for coordination of care), and pay for performance (creating financial incentives for facilities to demonstrate quality and efficiency), Dr. Crecelius said. “This year I want you to embrace PQRI,” Dr. Tangalos said. “Strategically, it fits in with everything the Obama [administration] has to offer with regard to changing the way we look at medicine.” He also encouraged medical directors to adopt electronic medical records so they can take advantage of pay for performance going forward. There are 153 quality measures that can be reported by physicians under the program. Of these, 26 can be reported in nursing home settings in 2009. The measures for nursing homes include controlling hemoglobin A1c, blood pressure, and LDL cholesterol levels in residents with diabetes; beta-blocker and oral antiplatelet therapy for residents with coronary artery disease; and evaluation for age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, and fall risk in all residents. Some measures are grouped, and, of seven groups, only diabetes is eligible to be reported in a nursing home setting. Dr. Tangalos shared PQRI-related results of AMDA's 2008 survey of members, which indicated that 16% of AMDA members participated in the program last year. In a follow-up survey, 70% of 2008 participants said that they planned to participate again in 2009–2010. But 80% of the respondents who are no longer participating in PQRI said that it was not worth the money, and 70% of all of the follow-up respondents said they felt that participation in PQRI did not improve their practices. More details about PQRI reporting are available online at www.cms.hhs.gov/pqri and through AMDA at www.amda.com/advocacy/pqri/index.cfm. Cheryl Phillips, MD, CMD, the incoming president of the American Geriatrics Society and an AMDA past president, said that the latest effort at a geriatric assessment code, the proposed Geriatric Assessment and Chronic Care Coordination Act (GACCCA), could be good news for LTC clinicians and residents. The GACCCA stalled in Congress 2 years ago, but Dr. Phillips said the bill now has bipartisan support and should be reintroduced soon. The act would create separate Medicare payments for comprehensive geriatric assessments and coordination of chronic care. Covered geriatric assessments would include medical condition, function, cognition, environmental and psychosocial needs, and availability of care. Services to be coordinated would include care planning, education of patients and their caregivers, medication management, care transitions, community and hospice services, and clinical-decision support. The GACCCA is needed because of the complexity of coordinating care for geriatric patients with multiple medical conditions, said Dr. Phillips. “There is no fee-for-service mechanism for comprehensive assessment and for the coordination activities that go across time, place, and profession,” she said. Under the GACCCA, care coordination would be paid monthly for each beneficiary who is defined as an at-risk and vulnerable elder, Dr. Phillips said. Heidi Splete is a senior writer with Elsevier Global Medical News.

Let Your Right Brain Soar at APA's Annual Meeting

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Annual Meeting HighlightsFull AccessLet Your Right Brain Soar at APA's Annual MeetingStephanie WhycheStephanie WhycheSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:20 Feb 2009https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.44.4.0033Mark your calendar: APA's Art Association will again be mounting its art exhibit at the annual meeting in May, providing a venue for some of its most creative members.Even if you don't have artistic proclivities, block out a time to drop by and check out the popular attraction now in its 41st year. The exhibit runs from Sunday, May 17, to Wednesday, May 20.“San Francisco is a wonderful art city,” said Kenneth Koury, M.D., president of the Art Association, so the APA exhibit should blend in well with the host city.“I'd encourage APA attendees to visit the de Young Museum and experience California in the Andy Goldsworthy display,” but not before they first drop by at the APA art show, and check out the work of their colleagues, he said.The artistic talent of many APA members and significant others is quite impressive. Although paintings in an array of media dominate, other media usually include sketches, ink prints, ceramics, glass, fiber, computer art, crafts, graphics, jewelry, black-and-white and color photography, and sculpture and artistically mounted poetry.“It's fun for the artists because they have the opportunity to show their work and get feedback,” said Koury, who practices psychiatry in Escondido, Calif. “Some people are quite accomplished and have their own following; there are other people who do it for their own personal enjoyment.”As in years past, all meeting attendees will be able to weigh in and vote on their favorite pieces in each category to recognize some of the most outstanding work.Christel Lembke, M.D., of Evanston, Ill., is the exhibit coordinator. Already signed up to show his work is color photographer Robert Trivus, M.D., of Pittsburgh, a forensic and geriatric psychiatrist and the incoming president of the APA Art Association. Black-and-white photography by Ira Glick M.D., director of psychiatry and chief of the Schizophrenia Clinic at Stanford Medical Center, will again be on view this year, as will be portraits painted by Wilma Rosen, M.D., of Providence, R.I.As for Koury, “I'll bring my oil seascapes and landscapes from Southern California.”Koury has been painting for about 10 years, about a third as long as he's been practicing psychiatry. He describes his artistic medium as literally“ painting outside.”“Especially over the last 10 years, I have found outdoor painting to be a passionate complement to the joys and challenges of my psychiatric practice,” he said. “It gives a lot of vitality to your work to see all the nuances and light.... It's great fun because you are out in nature.” The challenges, he added, are having to adjust your technique to allow for paint that dries faster outdoors and having to cope with bugs and unpredictable shifts in weather.Final exhibit entry information from participants must be received by May 8. Works described on entry forms received after that can still be exhibited, but late entries may not be listed on the exhibit ballot for judging.The registration form for APA's Art Association's art exhibit is posted at<http://psych.org/MainMenu/EducationCareerDevelopment/Meetings/APAAffiliatedPrograms/APAArtAssociationSchedule.aspx>. Forms should be sent to Kenneth Khoury, M.D., President, APA Art Association, by mail at 125 South Grape St., Escondido, Calif. 92025-4406, or fax at (760) 743-1040. More information is available by phone at (760) 743-1205 or e-mail at [email protected].▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Collaboration -- No Better Time for Libraries: An Interview with Dr. Camila Alire, President-Elect, 2008-2009, American Library Association

Camila Alire, Incoming President of the American Library Association and a member of the Collaborative Librarianship Advisory Board, discusses the ideals and realities of collaboration in the library environment in response to a series of questions from CL's editors. She refers to her experience to describe examples of successes and failures, and highlights the critical ingredients of success in collaborative ventures.

Incoming President Address – Alastair Moseley 11th September 2008

Incoming President Address – Alastair Moseley 11^th September 2008

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Christopher A. Reed I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Twentieth-Century China’s new coeditor James (“Jay”) Carter of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Jay and I are co-editing volume 34 (2008–09) of the journal; Jay will assume full responsibility for editorship of the November 2009 (35:1) issue. In addition to being a historian of the Republican period, Jay is the incoming president of the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC, see below). In a related vein, Twentieth-Century China has been privileged to have several new members join our Editorial Board since November 2004 (30:1), my first issue as editor. The board has grown in number (from fifteen editors to seventeen) but also in intellectual and geographic range. This expansion reflects the deepening and broadening of historical scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese history as well as the maturation of this journal. Nearly half (eight) of our current editors have joined since 2005: Geremie R. Barmé, Morris L. Bian, John Fitzgerald, Bryna Goodman, Christian Henriot, Kubo Toru, Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, and Peter Zarrow. Each brings new scholarly specialties to the efforts of our long-time members to embrace the full range of scholarship on China in the twentieth-century. It is clear from the board’s composition that English-language, Chinese-documentbased scholarship on twentieth-century China must no longer be limited to the native-speaking Anglophone world. With members now hailing from Australia, Austria, France, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan in addition to the USA, our new board reflects the globalization of modern China historiography as well as the broad range of countries from which the journal typically receives submissions. Readers who are involved with the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC) already know that, at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, TCC and HSTCC affiliated with each other. Two years ago, I opened discussions with Keith Schoppa, head of TCC’s Editorial Board and, coincidentally, president of HSTCC’s executive board, about this project. In Atlanta, the HSTCC board voted unanimously to accept my proposal. Both partners are pleased with the outcome of this vote and look forward to future collaborations between TCC and HSTCC. The overlap in the two entities’ names suggests that this pairing might be destiny playing itself out, but to make everything more concrete, HSTCC members are now being offered preferential TCC subscription rates when they renew their membership. See page 111 in this issue and the HSTCC website ( www.towson.edu/hstcc ) for further details. In the current issue, we present three articles and one research note. In “Teaching Baihua: Textbook Publishing and the Production of Vernacular Language and a New Literary Canon in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Robert Culp explores three ways in which textbook publishing influenced the production and spread of China’s modern vernacular language. The article also demonstrates that commercial publishing houses enabled several different types of modern intellectual to play [End Page 2] active roles in producing China’s modern vernacular language. Through their activities, these intellectuals transformed China’s linguistic and print cultures while also creating new identities for themselves in the post-imperial socio-cultural order. Chieko Nakajima’s “Health and Hygiene in Mass Mobilization: Hygiene Campaigns in Shanghai, 1920–1945” examines Shanghai’s hygiene campaigns over a multi-decade period. The author argues that the campaigns connected personal hygiene practices with the larger goal of achieving national strength, and in the end, helped to strengthen the state’s authority, whether Nationalist or Japanese-Occupationist. This study demonstrates that through educational programs as well as various forms of political symbolism, the Nationalist and Japanese-Occupationist states penetrated residents’ everyday lives. Next, Lee S. Zhu’s “Communist Cadres on the Higher Education Front, 1955–1962” argues that Communist cadres in higher education played an important role in fomenting conflict between the Communist Party and academics. Because of their common prejudice against professors, these cadres responded with great reservations to the party center’s first attempts of 1955 and 1956 to integrate the high-level intellectuals into the new political system. From 1958 to 1960, encouraged by the general political environment...

The US elections and the global recession: what's next?

On 4 November, 2004, Americans elected their first ever African–American President, Barack Obama. The historic event has been hailed by the news media as signifying the breakdown of the last remaining racial barrier in US society. That’s the good news. The bad news is that President-elect Obama confronts a crisis like no other incoming President has faced since Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to office in the midst of the Great Depression. The country is fighting two wars, and the global economy just collapsed. At least American voters picked the right team to deal with the economic wreckage. In most exit polls, fixing the economy was foremost on voters’ minds, and their enthusiasm was evidently not aroused by Senator McCain’s economic advisors, who included the likes of fellow Republican Phil Gramm of Texas, who opined during the election campaign that America was a nation of “whiners” stuck in a “mental recession”. (For the record, Senator Gramm was also one of the key figures in the deregulation of the investment banking industry in 1999 that scrapped the laws and protections passed by Congress in 1933 after the last great market crash). In one sense, therefore, the election of Obama was a resounding repudiation of the economic policies of the last 8 years. Market deregulation, laissez-faire and corporate greed did in the economy. The subprime mortgage crisis and the resulting credit crunch are spilling their toxic effects to the rest of the globe, even to countries that were initially believed to be insulated from the shocks, like China. Yet it seems like yesterday that commentators were applauding the sagacity of the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s stewardship of the economy—does anyone remember Bob Woodward’s act of hagiography published not so long ago, entitled “ Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom ” …

The American system: US foreign and domestic politics since the Second World War

Historians, like politicians, need to find a language and frame of reference to connect with their audience or readership. In the current US presidential campaign the candidates, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, are offering the voters a bridge between the troubled past and a more hopeful future. The works under consideration in this review article employ a similar method. All the authors share the widely held view of the broad shape of US foreign relations since the Second World War, in particular the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union known as the Cold War followed by the more amorphous attempt to maintain American primacy, which has characterized the last two decades. Throughout this longer period the processes and goals of US foreign policy have been controversial: there has not, of course, been complete consensus. One topic which was and remains debated is the role and value of individuals, either high-level politicians or senior diplomats, in the conduct of foreign policy. Another area of debate, often fierce argument, is the impact of domestic forces upon policy-making. In the present case the leading example is provided by the amalgam of influences which determine US policy towards that nexus of competing interests often optimistically short-handed as the Arab–Israeli peace process. One link between these two topics is the role of the US in multilateral bodies; and American actions within the United Nations and towards other international organizations are also examined. These and other related issues are contextualized geographically through an examination of American policies in the Greater Middle East, in particular the predominantly Muslim states which stretch eastwards from Egypt to India. While not providing a partisan political programme for the incoming president to follow, the collective message of these texts offers guidelines, even injunctions for the future conduct of US foreign policy.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way: Questioning Presidents

On February 7, 2001, as the new Bush White House settled into a rhythm, a handful of reporters from various news organizations secured some time to interview Larry Lindsey, the president's top economic advisor, who had also advised George W. Bush during his campaign. Young White House Press Office aides--graduates of the hard-fought Bush-Cheney campaign and new to Washington--walked the band of reporters to the West Wing lobby to await a final escort to Lindsey's office. The reporters sat on a cushy sofa and several chairs, browsed courtesy copies of the morning newspapers, and enjoyed the sweet scent of blush roses arranged by the White House florist specifically for the receptionist's desk just 10 feet away. The reporters, most of whom had covered Bush's predecessors, understood right away that the president's new press team had made a small mistake, but they remained mum, accepted the hospitality and made themselves comfortable. The West Wing lobby, which is basically a hushed waiting room, was, in an era long gone, accessible to reporters covering presidents. But over the decades, journalists found themselves confined to press quarters near Richard Nixon's covered-over swimming pool. They are escorted during all movements (and often roped off like a herd) and branded as PRESS with color-coded ID tags. Bush, like his father before him, frowns on reporters who shout questions and simply ignores journalists who try waving their hands to summon his attention. Loitering in the lobby, therefore, afforded the band of scribblers unsupervised access to both observe and question the president's top aides and their associates, who strode through the clubby expanse in mid-conversation, aiming for a doorway that opens to the VIP offices beyond. The longer the reporters sat, the richer the pickings. Karen Hughes, then the president's communications counselor, had never laid eyes on some of Washington's economic reporters when she nodded a cheery hello while sailing by. Seizing the opening, the journalists identified themselves and brought her to a halt with a few impromptu questions. Clearly caught off guard, Hughes frowned, volunteered as little as possible and beat a hasty retreat. The reporters chuckled as they returned to their seats, knowing the lobby would be off limits to the Fourth Estate for the remainder of Bush's tenure. Karen Hughes and her colleagues could have learned from the assembled journalists there, if they had sought a few tips. On inauguration day 2009, when the new president and his White House team trudge indoors and peal off their thermal underwear after the final parade float turns off Pennsylvania Avenue in the dark, there will be three groups of people who at that moment know a lot more about the White House and presidential routines than they do. First are the members of the residence staff who control the president's new house and the traditions of the presidency within it; second are the career executive branch workers who understand what continuity of government really means and can be an incoming president's best friends; and third is the White House press corps, including journalists who know the Oval Office well enough to give the new president an engaging tour and seasoned enough to remind him that, in a democracy, communicating is governing. No president can move an agenda forward or win reelection without majority support of the American people, and a free press continues to furnish voters with the best fact-based translations of the president and his chosen administration. History is littered with tales of newly inaugurated chief executives who vowed to soar over the heads of the media to control their messages and speak directly with voters; all of them revised those goals when they dug into the job. Even with the explosion of the Web and other instantaneous, direct-connect forms of communication, presidents remain locked in a mutually dependent and politely adversarial relationship with the White House press corps. …

Association of Senior Anthropologists

•A Message from the Incoming ASA President Tony Paredes

Presidential Address: Our Voice in Action: Advancing Science, Care, and Our Profession

Presidential Address: Our Voice in Action: Advancing Science, Care, and Our Profession

Doing Things Differently

Doing Things Differently

Presidential transitions during capital campaigns

In the past few decades, capital campaigns at institutions of higher education have increased in duration, while collegiate presidential tenures have been doing just the opposite. Turnover in the top post was frequent, even during major fundraising campaigns. Before this study, presidential transitions during campaigns had not been previously analyzed. Therefore, the objective of this exploratory study was to better understand presidential transitions during capital campaigns from the perspective of the chief development officer (CDO) who maintained continuity. Nine CDOs, who experienced presidential transitions during campaigns were interviewed to better understand their experience. The strategies for dealing with a presidential transition during a campaign included (a) providing input in the selection of the new president; (b) communication with constituency; (c) education of the incoming president; (d) involving the new president in the campaign right away; and (e) creating new funding priorities. Recommendations for a CDO dealing with a change in leadership during a campaign have been outlined in this paper.

Incoming CMA president impatient for reform

It could be argued that the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) is a trifle impatient. After all, Dr. Robert Ouellet says that he is “allergic” to pilot projects and “a bit against consensus because I am a man of action.” The problem with consensus, the 62-year-old

New Wave Utilization Research: (Re)Imagining the Research/Policy Nexus

My interest over the past few years in books on the research/policy nexus—beginning with the National Academy’s Scientific Research in Education report (National Research Council, 2002) and moving through focuses on evidence, standards, and the relationship of research to policy—has been and continues to be based on my refusal to concede science to scientism. What science is, who determines what it is, the costs of a narrow scientism, and what a more capacious sense of science adds to such debates I have addressed elsewhere (Lather, 2007). Here, I attend to a turn toward what used to be called “research utilization” that involves a certain reflexivity regarding the impact of education policy research itself. In other words, I note a certain shift in education policy discourse from cheerleading for experimental design to assessing the uses of education research in policy arenas. A recent Education Week article terms the latter approach translational research, defined as putting clinical findings to work in classrooms (Brabeck, 2008).1 This translational work might instead be termed new wave utilization research, after Carol Weiss (e.g., 1979), who laid down earlier tracks in the 1970s. Many examples of this new wave of research are collected in When Research Matters: How Scholarship Influences Education Policy, edited by Frederick M. Hess (2008c), director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. The book contains a foreword by Lorraine McDonnell (2008a), who is the incoming president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and a policy expert in the political science department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. McDonnell has worked closely with the National Research Council over the past decade or so. The Hess edited collection grew out of a 2006 Brookings Institution conference on class size and small schools and a 2007 conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute on the uses of research in policy. Many of the book’s contributors argue that too much attention has been devoted to research design and analytic methods. Many agree as well that education research is in a sorry state, dominated by qualitative and case study approaches and resistant to large-scale studies. The situation is attributed both to structural causes and to “obstinate indulgences of abstraction and narrative in preference to quantification” (Henig, 2008, p. 53). What the contributors to this volume want is to “break new ground” (Hess, 2008b, p. 11) in addressing the “stagnation” into which utilization studies have fallen, thus improving our understanding of the research/policy nexus. The hope is that it is not too late, given the reauthorization troubles of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the political regime shifts on the horizon, including the end in November 2008 of Grover Whitehurst’s 6-year appointment as director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Hence “what’s ahead” for federal education research might indeed be the “perfect storm” prognosticated at a recent American Enterprise Institute conference, where some noted a “brewing backlash” in Congress that threatens to “undo” the evidence-based movement (James Kolmoos, president of the Washington think tank Knowledge Alliance, as quoted in Viadero, 2008). My focus in reviewing the Hess collection is this new wave of interest in “how scholarship influences education policy,” as reflected in the book’s subtitle. I organize my remarks around three points that come to mind in response to the book: (a) The “new ground” to which the contributors aspire appears to be a frank assessment of the limits as well as the possibilities of the research/policy nexus; (b) among most of the contributors, the view persists that education research should be disciplined and punished; and (c) the process of (re)imagining the research/policy nexus needs to push beyond this book.

Mary L. Ryan, AHIP, FMLA Medical Library Association 2008–2009

Mary L. Ryan, AHIP, FMLA Medical Library Association 2008–2009