Scholarly Societies and the Costs of Whac-A-Mole
Unbury the Lede: Here I reflect on the ways that the crises of the current moment make the older Whac-A-Mole problem something more and more risky for scholarly societies and those they serve. No moles are harmed in this post.
Wikipedia has a solid entry on Whac-A-Mole and how the arcade game became a colloquial expression “to refer to a situation characterized by a series of futile, Sisyphean tasks, where the successful completion of one just yields another popping up elsewhere.” Almost everyone I know lives, at times at least, in this Whac-A-Mole state of being. I do not propose to diagnose or assess that. In a more focused way, I want to reflect on the ways that elected leaders and professional staff in scholarly societies are today particularly stressed by Whac-A-Mole dynamics and evoke the consequences in the particular time and place that we are in (at least in my neighborhood of the North American scholarly, public humanities, and applied social science world). As in the previous two posts, my frame of reference is primarily the American Folklore Society (AFS), secondarily the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and tertiarily all of the scholarly societies of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS). These levels relate to my degree of direct experience, with my knowledge of scholarly societies in general being informed most heavily by the situation of the AFS.
I do not want to suggest that society leaders never faced the Whac-A-Mole dynamic in the past. Surely, they did. I do not want to suggest that others in the world or in academia, the public humanities, and the applied social sciences do not also face real challenges of the sort that I am evoking. Clearly, they do. But the focus of these reflections are the societies that I know, the AFS in particular. Some of what I reflect upon here is, I think, more generally applicable.
What scholarly society leaders—lay and professional alike—generally wish to do is to have a sound strategic plan and to work it. Even in good times, this is a challenge. There is always too much to do, and resources are almost always scarce. Money is the resource that gets discussed most often, but time and attention may be the most valuable resources of all. Whether a work week is forty hours or fifty hours or more hours, there are only so many hours to devote to the work. Elected (and appointed) leaders have “day jobs” (usually quite demanding ones) and can only devote a part of their work effort to the governance, or just basic service, tasks associated with their professional society. If a scholarly society is large and organized enough to have a professional staff (as both AFS and AAA do), the staff members will have many day-to-day duties to fulfill. Even if no unexpected problems were to ever arise, they would face challenging decisions related to the balance of work between tending to immediate tasks relative to advancing longer term goals arrived at in discussion between the elected leadership and the Executive Director. Sorting this out is a basic aspect of everyday leadership.
But in practice, matters are usually still harder than this. And I argue that they are harder today (much harder today) than they were fourteen years ago when I was elected to the AFS Executive Board or nineteen years ago when I was (as editor) an ex-officio member of the Council for Museum Anthropology Board (and thereby attending with special focus on AAA governance issues). Whac-A-Mole is the vernacular expression for the problem that is now, I believe, severe.
As a matter of planning, how much time should a paid or elected society leader set aside each week to deal with unexpected, but inescapable, problems that will arise unlooked for? How does a professional or elected society leader do triage in real-time when the day-today and longer-term-work still needs to be done, but the unexpected problems keep popping up? And what about when those pop-up problems are less “regular” and more existential? Even the conscious choice not to deal with a pop-up challenge can, and often is, time and attention consuming. And choosing not to tackle a pop-up challenge, while perhaps justified in context or on principle, can often generate still more pop-up challenges.
This dynamic has some reoccurring elements that can be isolated and described. Even in non-dumpster fire times, there is the problem of asymmetry. Membership organizations are comprised of numerous members and a small number of elected leaders and usually a still smaller group of professional staff. At any one time, there is only one Executive Director and only one elected President. This is an inherent design feature of these organizations, and I would certainly not wish to change this, but it means that many voices can be (and usually are) trying to be heard by a very small number of ears. Devoted to serving the membership that has entrusted them with leadership roles, society Presidents and Executive Directors are going to do everything they can do to respond to all who seek to engage with them, but as most professionals in my world experience, email (for instance) is also asymmetric. It is very easy to send a question or to state a demand or to make a suggestion via email, but it is almost always a bigger task for the recipient to reply and an even bigger task to do what the email sender wants or to address substantively the concern or suggestion being raised. As many of my colleagues who worked before and after widespread email can report, email is, in part, a means by which strangers (and friends) have direct access with which to write things on someone’s to do list. Some among us can ignore (or have no other choice, given time limits, but to ignore) email (and other communications channels), but a society President or Executive Director really cannot do this. Writing a letter on a typewriter and mailing it was once a laborious barrier to entry in this communicative economy, but despite efforts such as the slow email movement, expectations for immediate replies and easy communication, have intensified the Whac-A-Mole problem considerably.
That was true without dumpster fires (another contemporary idiom explained by Wikipedia), but now we are living in a time of near constant, and usually overlapping, crises and are doing so in crisis-saturated social environments. A scholarly society (AFS for instance) might set a strategic goal of working with members to establish new graduate programs in its field. In an AFS context, this is a perfectly reasonable goal to consider pursuing. I know individuals in folklore studies who would like to do just this thing and who work in contexts in which such an endeavor is reasonable and do-able. But in the world of Whac-A-Mole and of interconnected and endemic crises, there can be a difficult calculus. If a particular already extant graduate program in a field is in trouble and members (understandably) call upon their scholarly society to help make the case to, for instance, local university administrators, that is pressing work, and it very well may displace giving attention to the project of supporting the creation of new graduate programs. And under conditions in which crises are arising constantly and society members are expecting their society to respond, constantly, strategic goals—even strategical goals aimed at preventing crises from arising in the first place—can be forced, by the unfolding of human events in real-time, to the back-burner.
Even if everyone—all members of a society, for instance—had abundant knowledge and clear insights into the state of various matters, and of the world as a whole, this dynamic would be hard, but it is harder still because such perfect knowledge is not how things are. Different people know, or think that they know, different things. And regardless of what they know and don’t know and think that they know, they have different priorities. An Executive Board, for instance, can assess and rank priorities, but some possible goals can be simply incompatible with other goals. And very few Executive Boards devote time (or have time to devote) to setting general priorities for addressing specific crises that emerge unlooked for. What tends to happen in most organizations, is that leaders fall back on what they understand to be shared values and historical precedents for dealing improvisationally with emergent challenges in their field.
(For an example that is actually unfolding now…) If a AAA member is understood by a significant number of AAA members to being treated unfairly by their home institution, the general value of supporting members and the historical lessons of earlier instances of AAA interventions in support of other AAA members under threat kicks in. I am not saying that it should not be thus. What I am flagging is the general problem that some elected leaders of a scholarly society and some professional staff of a society in this situation will wind up devoting time to the emergent problem and in doing do, other work will be hindered. Pursuit of strategic goals are part of what gets hindered in the world of Whac-A-Mole.
The basic problem relates to the fact that almost no organizations in which we work and few individuals working within them, budget “slack time” for addressing unexpected crises. I see this in my own College at my own University in which my Executive Dean is working almost around the clock to address profound structural problems, but each day he is handed a raft of pop-up problems, the addressing of which is unavoidable but the addressing of which will not solve or ameliorate the structural problems that are on his agenda. I have writing group colleagues who set aside a few hours each week for pop-up problems, but the pop-up problems of an individual faculty member and those of a whole scholarly society and field (or College) are of a different order of magnitude.
Returning to the different priorities of individual members and constituent groups within societies, they can not only have different priorities and hopes and needs, but they can also have different levels of expectations of both norms and of service. For instance, one of the hardest problems for societies right now is that senior members often expect the maintenance of, or enhancement of, both quality and coverage of services and activities. (Doing fewer things, doing things less well, etc. is a choice that very few individuals are willing to openly endorse, but older members (a group I am in) especially bring “historical perspective” to the matter.) Senior members also often expect—as experienced members who have served their societies in various ways over extended periods—to have gained from this (1) direct and regular access to current leaders and (2) that their expectations for what the society is attending to will be given due weight. This would just be a familiar social dynamic under less crisis-filled conditions, but it makes hard problems harder under present ones, when demands for change, demands for stasis, and vigorous demands for active responses to crises—some contradictory, irresolvable, or lose-lose in character—are constantly being called for. This is just one more part of the Whac-A-Mole calculus. One could offer a companion analysis of the parallel special demands of younger members and the ways that they get expressed through other channels. Similarly, the contribution of an ever-changing digital social media landscape to Whac-A-Mole could be discussed. The problem comes from all sides through many channels.
Will Whac-A-Mole get worse? I cannot see how it will not get worse, at least in the short term. If one society member is being subjected to a doxing campaign today (a real example on my mind today), chances are pretty good that two or three will be so threatened sometime soon. While such new, sometimes completely unprecedented, crises emerge and have to be addressed by society professional staff and elected leaders, the endless stream of less dramatic but still insistent emails and text messages will also continue. Society leaders don’t stop fielding calls for more online meetings and fewer online meetings, the restoration of print conference programs and the elimination of print conference programs, the restoration of more rigorous screening practices for conference participation and the lowering of barriers to entry to the conference program, etc. In such circumstances, my response has been to try to cultivate empathy for those who take up the work of scholarly societies, even when they are pursuing policies that I do not favor, or not taking up the tasks and challenges that I would myself prioritize as urgent. We are contemplating the lives and work of human beings who are trying, usually trying their best, to serve others.
Empathy can help, but it is also not enough to get societies through the multiple and intersectional crises that they and the fields that they serve are now facing. Members have, I think, to more actively give society leaders a break and grant them some time (which means perhaps letting some things slip for a while) to sort out and prioritize not just strategic goals and tactical plans, but also to sort out day-to-day workflows and—this is most difficult—the mission and values-based frameworks by which (and this hurts) they will decide on our behalf what not to do and not just what they will (with us as members) do. As my posts on the potential banning of public funds for scholarly societies and on the impacts of forced change in general education were trying to suggest, giving society leaders some space to learn about emerging risks is one of the things that we collectively can be doing. The way that we would do this would include individually learning more about what our societies (and fields) and their leaders are up against and, also, engaging in a bit of triage ourselves. Do I need to send this email? If I need to send it, do I need a reply and if I do not need a reply, can I tell my recipient this and then not feel bad if they take me up on my offer of not replying? You get the idea.
Shreds and Patches 