The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced the results of its recent elections.
The new office holders are listed below:
Board of Officers
Member-at-Large
Gwen Bradford (Rice University)
Central Division
Vice President
Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado Boulder)
Executive Committee Member-at-Large
Julia Staffel (University of Colorado Boulder)
Nominating Committee Members
Anthony Kelley (Louisiana State University)
Eileen Nutting (University of Kansas)
Sarah Robins (University of Kansas)
Raul Saucedo (University of Colorado Boulder)
Eastern Division
Vice President
Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia University)
Executive Committee Members-at-Large
Lucy Allais (Johns Hopkins University and the University of the Witwatersrand)
Ned Hall (Harvard University)
Quill R Kukla (Georgetown University) (elected to a two-year term, 2023–2025, filling a seat on the committee that is currently vacant)
Nominating Committee Members
Ásta (Duke University)
Jennifer Saul (University of Waterloo)
Pacific Division
Vice President
Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College)
Executive Committee Member-at-Large
José Jorge Mendoza (University of Washington)
Board Representative
Clair Morrissey (Occidental College)
Graduate Student Council
Aatif Abbas (Syracuse University), 2023–2025
Rachel Keith (University of Southern California), 2023–2025
The terms of most of these positions begin July 1st.
RE Central Division (my division). Nothing against any of the newly-elected candidates and I congratulate them and appreciate their willingness to serve. It’s striking and unhealthy, however, that five of the six elected officers came from two institutions. We ought to have done better than this.
Is there an underlying explanation, such as the extent to which those departments count such positions toward service obligations?
I think this is actually just a coincidence. I’m looking at the set of officers of the Central division this past year (https://www.apaonline.org/members/group_content_view.asp?group=110423&id=188237) and I see a President from UT Austin, a Vice President/President-Elect from UI Chicago, an Executive Committee of members-at-large from UM St Louis, Texas A&M, and UI Chicago, and a nominating committee from Northwestern, Texas Tech, UM Columbia, UT Austin, and UA Birmingham.
There are in fact two duplicated institutions in that list (UI Chicago and UT Austin) but neither of those institutions is represented in the newly-elected set, and the institutions multiply-represented in the newly-elected set have no representation in the past year officers.
There’s probably something mildly problematic about even coincidentally having a bunch of people from the same institution at the same time, but I see no evidence that there is any systematic overrepresentation of these two institutions (whether due to home-department service credit or divisionwide biases towards these institutions).
This was just coincidence. I didn’t even realize my colleagues were running for election when I agreed. And we don’t get any special credit from our home institution for this (though that would be nice).
Really good point