American Society for Theatre Research - ASTR Executive Committee Responds to Membership Survey

By Scott Magelssen and Dorothy Chansky

The ASTR Executive Committee has been working with the membership survey report delivered by the Ad Hoc Committee on Membership Assessment at the November 2010 meeting in Seattle.

The survey project was conducted over the spring and summer of 2010 (the full report is available HERE). The concerns expressed in the membership survey include but are not limited to:

A lack of transparency with regard to how individuals get leadership positions in the organization.
A lack of transparency with regard to how themes for the annual conferences are determined.
Concerns about the rising costs of conference registration and membership.
General concerns about the state of the profession, the state of graduate education, crises in hiring, and whether ASTR is doing as good a job as it could be in leading the conversation regarding these issues.

At its Spring 2011 Meeting in Dallas in February, the EC conducted several items of business with an eye toward addressing some of the concerns expressed in the membership survey. Here are some of the highlights:

Beginning with the November 2011 Conference in Montreal, ASTR will sponsor a leadership breakfast, inviting any and all members interested in getting actively involved in the leadership of the organization in order to learn more about how to do so.
Starting this year, ASTR will more actively poll individual members on how they would be interested in contributing to the organization (leadership, serving on awards committees, etc.).
The cost of student conference fees has remained the same for ten years, defrayed by higher general registration fees, but the rising costs of conferences make keeping the current student rate increasingly untenable. Using some of the surplus generated from a particularly well-attended conference in November 2010, however, ASTR will delay raising student fees for the 2011 conference. This will give the EC time to consider restructuring the fee schedule with an eye toward making the conference welcome to all of the organization’s members.
The EC approved a motion that any money not awarded for research grants be redirected to travel grants to assist members in attending the conference.
The EC approved a motion to redirect $500 from the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award to an additional David Keller travel grant to assist members attending the conference.
Director of Fellowships and Awards, Dorothy Chansky, will work with the webmaster to list the awards available to members in a more accessible manner, i.e., listing awards on the website by category (publication prizes, research grants, travel awards).
The EC approved a motion to add a partner/spouse/family-member category to the conference registration page, with fees equivalent to the current student rate for conference registration.
President Rhonda Blair appointed an ad hoc committee to assess the structure of the Executive Committee with regards to the number of members and the constitution of that membership. Among other things, the ad hoc committee on Executive Committee Structure Assessment will consider the status of the Director of Fellowships and Awards and the Chair of Publications. The President currently appoints members to fill these roles. While the current Director of Fellowships and Awards and Chair of Publications are both on the EC, this is a happy coincidence, and is not always the case.
The Committee on Conferences, chaired by the Vice President, will direct conference program chairs for 2012 and 2013 to consider ways of making the conference themes more broad and capacious in order to allow a greater range of specializations, methodologies, areas, and research projects.
The EC endorsed the continued work of the ad hoc committee on New Paradigms for Graduate Education, which seeks proactive ways to address concerns about the current state of graduate programs and the ways in which we are preparing our graduate students for a changing world and a changing profession.

The EC reminds ASTR members that the minutes of EC November and Spring meetings are available on the ASTR website: (http://www.astr.org/members/ec-meeting-minutes). Any member of ASTR is welcome to attend EC meetings.

Scott Magelssen is Associate Professor of Theater and Film at Bowling Green State University and Chair of the ASTR Ad Hoc Committee on Membership Assessment. He also currently serves on the ASTR Executive Committee.

Dorothy Chansky is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University, where she is head of History/Theory/Criticism. She is Director of Fellowships and Awards for ASTR.