Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
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President's Report
Fay Gale
This is my last column in Dialogue as President of this important Academy. I have enjoyed, and been challenged by, my three years as President. It has been an honour to represent you nationally and internationally at this time of great significance for the social sciences. I have also been honoured to be the first woman President of the Academy.
These three years have been very interesting, encompassing many changes. We have reorganised the committee structures and guidelines, established an operational finance committee, acquired delightful new independent premises and extended our international linkages and influence. I have been very appreciative of the Fellowship, especially the members of the Executive and the Academy staff, in making all these advancements possible.
I should like to congratulate Professor Leon Mann, elected at the recent Annual General Meeting to be the incoming President. I wish him well. If he is supported as strongly and loyally as I have been in that role, as I am sure he will be, he will find a demanding job made very rewarding.
Because much of the time the affairs of the Academy seem to run relatively smoothly, it is difficult to give a sense of the level of support provided to its office bearers. Not only do numerous individual Fellows assist in a variety of ways, sometimes stepping into the breach at the last minute, but the staff in the Secretariat provide services which go well beyond those which might be expected of employees. It is with considerable regret that we accept Barry Clissold's retirement after more than eleven years with the Academy. We lose not only his tireless dedication, but also a wealth of corporate knowledge. He has overseen a great deal of change in the structure and program of the Academy. The difference between the Academy as it was when he joined the office - under Executive Director Bruce Miller, with the assistance of Wendy Pascoe, joined shortly after by Peg Job - and the present, is dramatic. On behalf of the Fellowship, I wish Barry a leisurely and satisfying retirement, with ample time to enjoy his first granddaughter, his long-standing interest in war history, his voluntary commitment to the War Memorial and the golf course.
I would also like to express my enormous appreciation of the work carried out by Ian Castles, whose three year term as Vice President also comes to an end with my term. He has been extremely supportive, always reliable and ready to step into any situation at short notice. So often he has answered difficult correspondence or attended meetings on my behalf, with great professionalism. He has generously agreed to stay on a further year in a voluntary capacity to assist the new Executive Director, whose appointment we hope to announce very soon.
I'm very appreciative of the work of Pam Shepherd. Her efficiency, attention to detail and support in areas such as the restructuring of the membership process have been outstanding. I wish Kylie Johnson well as she leaves early in 2001 to pursue motherhood. Kylie has managed the website and helped us move into a new era. Peg Job, editor of all our major publications, deserves a special thanks. During recent years she has revamped our image by changing the old Newsletter into Dialogue, and produced the Annual Report and Occasional Papers. Ensuring contributors produced material on time has been no mean feat.
Nineteen new scholars were admitted to our Fellowship in November 2000. The annual dinner at which new Fellows are welcomed and presented with their Testamurs is always a joyous and celebratory occasion. Those so honoured are listed under 'Academy News'. I welcome them, and hope that they will not only share the prestige accorded to the Academy, but will make an ongoing contribution to the advancement of the social sciences in Australia, through the auspices of the Academy. The dinner is also an opportunity to recognise young social scientists and each year we give the Academy Award for Younger Scholars to the scholar who has won that recognition under very stiff competition. Congratulations this year to Dr Andrea Whittaker.
I have represented the Academy at a number of national and international meetings this year. It is increasingly clear that Australian social scientists are highly respected. Evidence of this is the number of invitations I, as President of the Academy, received to attend international discussions, with, for example, the British Academy in London, UNESCO Social Science Branch in Paris and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Unfortunately urgent surgery prevented my attendance at Beijing for a major conference organised by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in early November on 'The Prospect of Social Sciences and the Humanities in the 21st Century'. Professor Sue Richardson attended in my place, and her report is included later in this edition, under 'Academy News'. Interestingly, one of the issues raised at the Beijing conference was the way in which our ability to alter nature in the twentieth century has outstripped our management of that power, and a major task identified for the social sciences and humanities was an examination of the moral and ethical dimensions of such management. The first edition of Dialogue in 2001 will focus on the theme of 'Morality' in the social sciences.
The current edition takes up some of the vexed issues in a region which has figured prominently in the headlines of the past year or so - the South Pacific. These international connections have shown me even more clearly how poorly funded our Academy is in Australia in contrast with all other areas I have visited in Europe, Asia and North America. The contrast with grants for the British Academy is simply ridiculous, indeed our grant is infinitesimal in comparison and yet we are expected to represent the social sciences at all levels. The Asian countries seem to be more supported by their governments than we are and dismay was expressed at the low level of grants we receive in what is perceived as a 'wealthy nation'.
The Review of the Academies was very disappointing in this respect. Clearly the government expects greater public representation of the social sciences on a whole range of issues but does not offer any suggestion as to how we will fund such activities. For example the Academy was unable to subsidise any of my international visits. These were made possible only by the generous offers of the host countries and my own financial commitment.
We earn more than fifty percent of our income from the Fellows' subscriptions and competitive research grants. Indeed the establishment of the Research Committee, ably chaired by Professor Sue Richardson and guided and serviced by Dr John Robertson, has made it possible to extend our activities and effectiveness well beyond the limits of our annual grant. Similarly the Workshop Committee, supported so well by Sue Rider and chaired by Professor Peter Saunders, enables us to stimulate important interactions between scholars with many beneficial results. These activities also tend to receive external subsidies once the Academy has endorsed the importance of the particular issue being considered. Some indeed have been run entirely with outside finance based on the imprimatur and initiation of the Academy. I thank Professor Jill Roe, the former Chair of the Workshop Committee, who did so much to develop the role and significance of our workshops.
Our influence on our society thus goes well beyond the capacity of our small grant, thanks to the scholarly activities of our Fellows and the high standing of the Academy in the intellectual community. I am sure that under Professor Mann's leadership these many initiatives will be greatly enhanced.
Fay Gale
2000
Last modified: 2 November 2009.