How important are the professional organizations to the professoriate? I had to think twice before composing the last sentence, since I started to write “professional disciplinary organizations,” when many of the most relevant organizations for each of us are based on something other than disciplinary expertise. I suspect that most tenured faculty members pretty much take these organizations for granted, receiving their journals four times a year and occasionally attending their annual meetings. But most of those journals are now online and accessible without membership in the learned society, and senior scholars deliver papers less frequently at the meetings. They continue to be important as “meat markets” for seeking jobs (especially for graduate students), and perhaps for the graduate students and junior faculty members who present papers as part of their career development. It may be, however, that what I have just asserted is truer of the large (and generally disciplinary) societies than of the smaller and more specialized groups which genuinely constitute “communities of the learned.”
I was moved to think about the professional organizations by a November 20 piece in The Chronicle
by Jennifer Howard on the recent split between two important humanities societies, the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. These two organizations have held joint meetings for many years and they co-own a headquarters building in Atlanta. The impetus for the split seems to have come from the Academy, whose executive director suggests that the religious studies folk have moved away from faith-based analysis. The executive director of the Society responds that Biblical studies have moved into the mainstream in liberal arts colleges. It is hard for an outsider to be sure what is at work here, though my (religion) colleague Jeff Stout, this year’s Academy president, seemed to try to create a bridge in his address, asserting that “Not all religious people are threats to democracy.”
Why should scholars care? Apart from the material concerns (real estate) that are not ordinarily in play in these matters, what are the intellectual and professional stakes at play? The principal one will clearly be the inability of members of the Academy to attend annual meeting sessions with Society members — something that happens in most large disciplinary societies who hold their annual meetings with smaller, affiliated societies. The Academy’s desire to split from the Society, whatever its actual motivations, will have the effect of redrawing the cognitive map for scholars in both societies.
But of course this will only be so for those who actually attend the meetings and care about rubbing elbows with Bible scholars. And that is the question that came to my mind in reading Howard’s piece: How many will care? What difference will it actually make?
