The Strategic Task Force on Membership and Organizational Issues has spent a significant amount of time discussing and researching the structure, timing, and format of our semiannual meetings. We have come to appreciate that the meetings serve several functions. They are where the association conducts its business and holds its scientific proceedings; they are also where psychoanalysts from around the country convene and become acquainted with one another and with each other's work. We have come to appreciate also that The American depends on the income generated by the meetings.
Because many constituencies are represented at these meetings, it is difficult to design a change that will satisfy everyone. As those who attend regularly usually have a greater say in how meetings are scheduled, the structure and location of the meetings tend to remain the same. Over time the task force has been concerned about those who may be underrepresented and are therefore less able to voice their preferences—namely, younger members and those we might call our “geographically disadvantaged.”
Over the past decade and a half, fifteen week-long meetings have been held in New York City, while another five were sited within a 225-mile radius of the city. For the analyst living in New York, this represents a tremendous convenience; he or she can attend meetings as they are scheduled while continuing to live at home and see patients. Over the past fifteen years, this analyst would have had to make only ten trips longer than a one-hour plane ride (or a three-hour drive) to attend all thirty meetings.
By way of comparison, if an analyst in Los Angeles wished to attend the same thirty meetings, he or she would have had to travel approximately 148,000 miles (round trip), or an average of 9,870 miles per year. A colleague in Chicago
would have had to travel about 63,500 miles, or approximately 4,200 per year. For both of these analysts, only one of the thirty meetings was held within a 200-mile radius of home.
The analyst based in Chicago or Los Angeles must bear not only the cost of travel and hotel accommodations, but the much more significant loss of practice. This time away from practice represents the major expense for all who attend, but is especially burdensome for those unable to commute.
Our task force has concluded that holding one meeting a year in New York, while allowing the site of the May meeting to track meetings of the American Psychiatric Association, has led to a distribution that imposes an unfair burden on some of our colleagues and restricts participation by many of the “geographically disadvantaged.”
If we are to remain a truly national organization, the task force believes, these inequities must be addressed. To that end, we offer the following recommendations.
We should ensure greater geographic diversity in the siting of meetings. No more than one meeting a year should be located on the Eastern Seaboard (Boston to Washington). This would mean changing the regular scheduling of the December meeting in New York or ensuring that the Annual Meeting is always held in another part of the country. We believe that with our new multidisciplinary membership, tracking the meetings of the American Psychiatric Association is no longer necessary.
We should move toward shorter meetings, to be held over extended weekends. With modern travel, distance is a less significant factor in time and expense; for many members, midweek time away from practice is the more critical factor. We are proposing that at least one of the two yearly meetings be restricted to a three-and-a-half-day format (Thursday afternoon through Sunday).
We recognize that it will be difficult for the organization to break from some of its time-honored traditions, and that we will be challenged to streamline our work and increase our efficiency and productivity at the meetings; nevertheless, we feel it is time to move to a meeting schedule focused on weekend formats and a more representative distribution of sites.
The proposals of Richard Fox on behalf of the Strategic Task Force on Membership and Organizational Issues have evolved, taking into account the information and experience offered by myself and the Committee on Arrangements.
If the proposal to meet for a shorter period over an extended weekend involves both administrative meetings and a scientific program, their simultaneity would require more meeting space (at greater cost to The American) and would mean that those attending administrative meetings would miss out on the scientific meetings.
If there were two extended meetings (one for administrative purposes, the other scientific), some would not want to give up additional weekends and pay twice the travel costs—e.g., women (and men) who might wish to be with their young families, and those of us who need to work on the weekend. Lower attendance at each meeting would cost The American more for meeting space because we could not provide enough backup guest room bookings.
The question of tracking the American Psychiatric Association has become more complicated (not less): we may find that because of the changing nature of our practices, more—rather than fewer—of our members wish to attend the APA Meeting in the spring. Certainly we have had many forceful complaints about our 1995 and 1996 defections.
Therefore I suggest that a survey of the membership be made, rather than merely asking for a vote in Council. A carefully designed questionnaire would allow us to assess more accurately the changing needs of the organization.