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Procedural: I don’t think the discussion was well served by the advice on parliamentary procedures that was being fed in real time to meeting chair Alan Goodman. In my reading of the AAA By-Laws , when the Business Meeting has a quorum (as there was in this instance for the first time in years) a vote cast in support of resolutions has a binding effect. No further referendum of the membership is needed. I don’t find Gerry Sider’s energetic assertions about the structural silencing of the membership supported by the facts. If you want to get the Association to act, all you have to do is troll the bars and hallways for 250 of the 5000-plus in attendance, and you will have a quorum.

My own sense, however, is that had anyone had the temerity to point out that the sweeping generalizations in the language of the two resolutions actually serves to undermine the Association’s credibility, they would have been shouted down by the “coercive harmony” (to use the phrase David Price borrows from Laura Nader) of angry activists wanting to turn back the clock to the glory days of campus protests.

Substantive: In fact, the Association has now passed a binding vote that, among other things, demands release of the names of all prisoners held in US prisons (including federal prisons domestically and abroad, regardless of genuine privacy concerns the prisoners may have), demands release all prisoners held in these prisons (including, for example, US soldiers convicted and incarcerated for homicide and sexual assualts against citizens in foreign territories), singles out Jerry Bremer as principally responsible for the ongoing mess in Iraq (when, in fact, I believe there is plenty of collective responsibility to go around), and insists that the US pay for all cleanup and decontamination of everything in Iraq, whether it was the result of the Iran-Iraq war, the Saddam regime’s environmental excesses, or the current conflict. We also simultaneously called for the withdrawal of all US troops and the establishment of a UN peace-keeping force – that I guess would have to limp along without the US since its troops are to be withdrawn.

I find such high-temperature rhetoric to be self-defeating, as it undermines the Association’s credibility and allows its intended audience to discount a deeply felt and widely held sense of the Association.

I hope that Professor Gonzalez is willing to entertain some friendly assistance to enhance the credibility of the resolutions’ language without undermining its substantive strength.

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Most of the 2.5 million articles published yearly in our planet’s 24,000 research journals are inaccessible to a large portion of their potential users worldwide, but especially in the developing world. One might think that the reason for this is……

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I tend to agree with the argument that the structural stuff keeps people from attending the AAA business meeting at the AAAs. I am really active on committees and in two sections but the business meeting for the entire association usually just seems like a waste of time.

I must also add that although I think it is great that so many people showed up for the meeting and that they adopted these resolutions, it seems strange that the AAA is behind the entire rest of the United States in terms of saying that they are ‘against the war in Iraq.’ Sure, symbolic, but why didn’t this happen five years ago (my students reminded me this morning that the war started when they were all in high school)?

On another note, I did attend the dance this year. The band was fantastic and really what is better than watching your colleagues booze it up and get down? But alas, the dance was also poorly attended. What was worse was that it was in a truly terrible space.

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