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In a presidential address prepared for the 2006 Council on Anthropology and Education (CAEj meeting, I argue that the new mission statement for CAE represents not a new direction/or the organization, but simply a shift in emphasis, albeit an important and timely shift. [Council on Anthropology and Education]
In April 2007, members of the Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE) voted to accept a new statement of Mission and Purpose as a preface to our by-laws.1 The new mission and purpose statement had been crafted as the result of a long process, and it has created both great excitement and some anxiety among members. I would like to explain my interpretation of the significance of the new text, as I would have done in a parting presidential address at the November 2006 annual meeting if illness had not kept me home.
The new text is one product of conversations that have been going on within the CAE for at least eight years. In 1999, CAE leadership became aware of concerns about racism within the organization. Not everyone called it racism; some talked about an apparent cliquishness; some talked about the difficulty of deciphering the committee system and the rules for participation. However, a special task force investigated, and in 2002 it produced a report that revealed disturbing patterns (Mahoney 2002). This is not to say that CAE was necessarily more exclusive or unwelcoming than many organizations. However, it was ironic that an organization whose members could identify hidden patterns of race and class and gender in school systems could be blind to similar problems within its own organization.
Much work remains to be done. At the practical level, we still need to rethink the structure of the organization and find ways to make it more transparent and accessible. At a deeper level, the Board still needs to grapple with difficult questions. For example, why did the list of issues developed by the Diversity Committee in 2005 get interpreted by some members as "over-sensitive" while other members saw in them the crux of institutional racism (cf. the list of seemingly trivial matters such as inches of laboratory space that, when added up, convinced the leadership of MIT that there really was a gender gap at that...