Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
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President's Report
Fay Gale
It is with great sadness that I write this report following the recent death of our previous President, Professor Paul Bourke. Paul did so much for the Academy in the four years he was President. His work with the Review of the Social Sciences in Australia was a major undertaking. It will be a document of great significance for many years to come and Paul's leadership of this project was critical to the success of the very comprehensive and forward-looking document that resulted. Paul took an initiating role in establishing the National Academies Forum and was its first President. Bringing together the four learned academies for the mutual benefit of research and scholarship in this country was a major undertaking and took a great deal of energy and insight. He will be greatly missed.
I write this from New York where I have just visited the Social Science Research Council. This followed contact with the Academy of the Arts and Sciences which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an earlier meeting in London to discuss the newly formed Academy for the Social Sciences.
In London I was joined by Dr Jim Jupp, who was fortuitously in Oxford at the time. We met Lord Raymond Plant of Highfield who is currently President of the Association of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences and Andy Cawdell, the Executive Secretary. The present Association has thirty-three member societies and its Council is made up of the Presidents and Chairs of those disciplinebased societies. Last year an implementation group was set up to consider ways for developing an Academy and Lord Plant has been crucially involved in this development. This is a natural result of the flowering of the Social Sciences over the last fifty or so years. It was thought that the long-established British Academy more appropriately represented the leading scholars in the Arts and Humanities and that Social Scientists were less acknowledged and the time had come for a separate Academy. The intention is to launch the new Academy in November this year. We discussed linkages with the Academy and ways in which we might arrange exchanges and joint meetings in the future. This new Academy will be structured very similarly to ours in almost every way and our future relationships should be very extremely beneficial.
Lord Plant, who is Master of St Catherine's College, Oxford, is a life peer and he generously entertained us in the House of Lords. After our discussions Lord Plant invited Jim and myself to sit in the Lords and listen to a most fascinating debate on the future of the House of Lords. I certainly felt very honoured to be able to represent our Academy at such an auspicious moment in history.
Unfortunately my visit to Harvard was not so well timed and I was unable to meet with Professor Daniel C Tosteson who is President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Tosteson was in Europe at the time but Kevin Synnott, the Chief of Staff in the Academy, gave me useful information.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 and represents all branches of knowledge. In this sense it incorporates all of our four Australian Academies. However it has four classes: the Mathematical and Physical Sciences; the Biological Sciences; the Social Arts and Sciences; and the Humanities. Each of these classes has sections. In the case of the Social Arts and Sciences there are six sections which are: Social Relations; Economics; Political Science; Law; Public Affairs; Business Administration and Journalism; and Educational and Scientific Administration. The professional interests of Fellows in the Social Arts and Sciences are very comparable to those of our own Fellows.
In an Overview published by the American Academy in 1997 the stated goals are certainly similar to those we would wish to endorse as a position where we would might like, in some measure, to see ourselves in the future.
Free of the pressures and responsibility of the university and independent of the constraints of government control, the Academy has secured a special place among the varied academic institutions. With its ability to establish broad contacts, the Academy has an opportunity to develop new forms of communication among the highly specialized cells of our culture and to forge new channels of integration not only within the intellectual world, but also between it and the rest of society.
There are two regional centres of the Academy, the Western Center in Irvine, California and the Midwest Center in Chicago, Illinois. These were established in 1969 and 1975 respectively to encourage greater involvement of Fellows in academy activities. The Academy publishes a bi-monthly Bulletin covering current events and projects. It also publishes quarterly a highly respected academy journal, Daedalus. Some of the projects carried out by the Academy have considerable resonance with some of our own projects, namely 'The New Inequalities' and 'Higher Education'.
There are some 3,600 Fellows of whom just over 1,000 are in the Social Sciences categories. The Academy also has some 600 foreign Honorary Members across the whole range of disciplines.
In New York I visited the Social Science Research Council which is extremely well located at 810 Seventh Avenue. I met with Professor Orville Gilbert Brim who is Interim President of the Council and also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Craig Calhoun, currently Professor of Sociology and History and Chair of the Sociology Department at New York University, has been appointed to be the next President but had not taken up the position when I was in New York.
The Social Science Research Council defines its role primarily as a resource for international scholarship. It does this through workshops and conferences, research consortia, scholarly exchanges, summer training institutions, fellowships and grants, and publications. It is primarily an initiating and funding body largely supported by private philanthropic foundations. It has an extensive international program and I was able to meet with Mary Byrne McDonnell who is the Executive Program Director and is responsible for the international arrangements. Interestingly, in view of our long-standing association with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Social Science Research Council in November 1998 signed an agreement of cooperation with the Chinese Academy. The Council publishes a number of documents including a regular newsletter entitled Items (which our academy receives).
As we agreed at our meeting, it seemed advantageous that we should exchange other publications as appropriate. A very important and exciting piece of news for Fellows is that at last we have a new home. We will be leaving University House for premises which will be more accessible and distinctively ours. As many Fellows will know, we have been searching for more appropriate accommodation for some time, one that would give us a clear and separate identity and one that would have easy access for Fellows and for visitors as well as giving more spacious rooms for our offices and our meetings. From 1 January 2000 our new address will be 28 Balmain Crescent. It seems a most auspicious time to move to new premises. This is an excellent location, almost opposite University House, making easy access for Fellows who reside there. I should like to thank Professor Deane Terrell, Vice- Chancellor of the Australian National University, the University Facilities staff and our Executive Director, Barry Clissold, for making this possible.
Fay Gale
1999
Last modified: 2 November 2009.