RSA - Terms of Office - Officers and Board of Directors of the Society

Dear RSA members:

I write to inform you of a change in the terms of office of the Officers and Board of Directors of the Society.  This decisions driven by growth in size and complexity of the Society’s conference.  The focus of the President-elect has always been been on the conference and not much else.  In 2000, when Fred Antczak was President, we had about 325 attendees with about 8 panels per session.  We now hold a conference with in excess of 1,300 participants and nearly 30 panels per session.  With size comes complexity in site arrangements, media needs, scheduling, and so forth.  In fact, these considerations led Greg Clark to enlist Cara Finnegan and Jenny Rice as co-directors to help him manage the 2016 conference.  

Our current practice is to have officer succession occur on January 1, with Board composition rotation occurring on the same date.  This practice would make Greg our president in two weeks, when he is in the thick of getting the Atlanta conference in final form.  Meanwhile the Society has a heavy agenda of business dealing with future directions so that it may better serve you, its members.  A good deal of this must be ready for discussion and action by the May Board meeting.  Tending to both the conference and providing leadership for the Society’s business seems an unreasonable expectation.  These considerations led the Board to approve moving the officer succession and board rotation date to July1.  This means the current officers and board will serve an additional six months, after which terms of office will be normalized to a July 1 through June 30 calendar for the length of the term.  The constitution does not specify start and end dates for officer and board terms, but we will come to you later in 2016 to ratify this change through a vote on proposed constitution and/or bylaw amendments.

Sincerely,

Jerry Hauser
Executive Director