Here is the reply that I received from Judy Franz to my message
about the lack of PUI representation among the candidate for APS office.
It is now up to us to suggest the names of well-qualified candidates for
future nominations.
(Note to CUR-L readers in other disciplines: you might want to
keep track of how many PUI reps there are on the governing boards of your
professional organizations.... These boards are where a lot of policy is
set!)
Dr. Mark H. Shapiro
Physics Department
California State University, Fullerton
Fullerton, California 92634
You raise a very good question which I will try to answer.
The candidates are chosen by the nominating committee
which consists of 9 volunteers and the APS past president.
Three of the nine volunteers are elected by the membership
as a whole and the other 6 elected by the Council. This
year's nominating committee was chaired by a national labs
person and had two representatives from industry and
another that spent most of his career in industry.
Each nominating committee tries to come up with a
balanced slate but seems to focus on one or two groups that
are underrepresented. Last year a focus was physicists in
industry and 2 of the 4 general concillors elected were from
industry (50%). (Another focus was youth.) This year the
group noticed that particles physicists and people of Asian
descent were largely missing from the Council and they
concentrated on getting good nominations from among these
two groups.
There have been members of Council from 4 year colleges
but not many. Three that I can think of are Stuart Crampton
from Williams, David Hafemeister from Cal Poly who
currently chairs POPA, and Jerry Gollub from Haverford.
Others have been nominated but not elected. Jorge Lopez
was on the ballot last year and I believe that he is at a
non-PhD university. Perhaps the nominating committee
should concentrate on four year college physicists next year.
Gerry Crawley from Michigan State will chair the committee
and you might suggest this to him. You might also nominate
some excellent 4 year college people. If you do, keep in
mind that for a national election, name recognition carries
more weight than it should.
I think that on the whole the Council is fairly representative of
that part of the community that are employed as physicists.
We don't have many from the "other" category although we
do have self-employed and unemployed members of Council.
Our industrial colleagues are well represented if you include
physicists who may now be in academia but have spent
most of their professional careers in industry. There are 5
now in industry and another 5 who recently left industry.
(That's 10 out of 50 or 20% which is close to the membership
as a whole.) National labs are very well represented as well
(17 out of 50 - more than the membership as a whole) and
several have and will be presidents.
I hope that this gives you the information that you were
seeking.
Judy Franz
<shapiro@sputter1.fullerton.edu> 07/03/96 01:40pm
I just received my American Physical Society 1997
election ballot this morning, and noticed that nine of the
candidates (for the constitutional offices and the general
council) are from major research universities, two from
national laboratories, and one from industry. This seems to
me to be unrepresentative of the membership at large. It
surely is not the case that 82% of the membership of the
APS is employed at major research universities. Many of
us work in predominantly undergraduate institutions,
industry, and government.
Why can't the leadership of the APS be more
representative of its membership?
Dr. Mark H. Shapiro
Physics Department
California State University, Fullerton
Fullerton, California 92634