President’s Outgoing Message: What Does This Organization Need to Do? Why?

William Fleeson

William FleesonThe question I ask you in my last column is: What is this organization for? Why do we have an Association for Research in Personality? I will elaborate this question by first describing what we have done recently. This will communicate an answer to this question in descriptive terms – seeing what ARP does communicates in part what ARP is for. I will then consider some things ARP should consider doing in the future. This will provide an answer in normative terms. I will then ask you to consider your normative answers.

What does ARP do? What have we accomplished in the past two years? The biggest job we had was putting on the Third Biennial Conference of ARP. At the risk of bragging, I am going to say that this conference made me very proud. Mike Furr and the Conference Committee did an outstanding job, and the program put together by Jess Tracy, Oz Ayduk, and the rest of the Program Committee was one of the most interesting I’ve seen in a while. Please read their respective columns for more detail. We also raised over $20,000 in donations for the Charlotte conference, thanks to the generosity of Wake Forest University, High Point University, Hogan Assessment Systems, and Elsevier.

Our second biggest accomplishments were stabilizing the twin legal and administrative pillars of the organization. First, we established new bylaws for the organization, bylaws that I believe will now provide the basis of the administrative operations of ARP. The amount of work involved was enough to earn Dan Ozer a special award of appreciation from ARP (before he was President-Elect). The other twin pillar was the establishment of tax exempt status. This took quite a bit of hard discussion, soul-searching, and government documentation to accomplish. Tax exempt status is important for saving lots of tax costs, for encouraging donations, and for allowing us to not pay taxes every year. Lynne Cooper deserves a lot of thanks for getting this through. My favorite moment in this process was when our application was rejected because we couldn’t apply for tax exempt status since we already had it (we didn’t), but since it had lapsed too long ago (it hadn’t lapsed at all, because we never had it), we were not allowed to apply for renewal, and had to start a new application (which is what we had done).

We established an annual preconference slot at SPSP that will be sponsored by ARP, allowing us to keep in the mix at SPSP without committing us to holding a preconference in addition to our main conference. We established four standing committees of ARP, which will ensure that important work gets done on a regular basis. These committees are the Awards Committee, Web Committee, Training Committee, and Publications Committee. We began the process of enacting a formal relationship with EAPP. EAPP is a larger and richer organization from which we can learn a lot. We linked up several active blogs to our webpage, ensuring a constant infusion of creative energy. We continued the newsletter “P”, under the excellent Editorship of Simine Vazire, Chris Soto, Erik Noftle, and Jonathan Adler. The ARP leadership has also written columns for P. There are many other things we do as well, such as maintain membership records, take in membership dues and conference registration fees and pay out to vendors, manage regular emails to the organization, maintain a webpage, interact with other organizations, and discuss initiatives and plans. Jen Lilgendahl and Lynne Cooper have been indispensable in accomplishing these things.

What do we need to accomplish next? Most importantly, continue the initiatives we have recently started. Beyond that, four things. (1.) Financial stability. The past two years have completed the process of putting the organization on stable administrative and legal pillars. The financial pillar is still rickety, but once that is complete, we will have completed the process of creating a stable platform from which to reach upwards. (2.) Do we want to grow? Why or why not? And how? Attendance has stayed relatively steady at the past three ARP conferences, at around 200 attendees. I want the field of personality to grow, because I’m utterly convinced that one fundamental route by which psychology affects behavior is via personality. Since it is important to me that the field of psychology discovers the causes of behavior, it seems important that personality be strongly represented. But perhaps growth is not needed any more.  When I look at the young people in the field, I see great ideas, energy, and minds. But somehow these young people seem not to result in growing numbers. What is happening here?  What do you think about this – does the field need to grow? Why or why not? (3.) Diversity. Our field seems remarkably white and male. I’m happy that we have made progress in the organization’s leadership and at the recent conference in gender balance, but there is more to be done. In terms of race and ethnicity, please read the thoughtful column by Kelci Harris, "Reflections on ARP", about the experience of an African-American, and think about what we can do. (4.) Awards. Awards are important not only for rewarding excellent performance, but for their communicative function. Awards communicate to departments and administrators that our field values its members. However, ARP is unnecessarily sparse in its awards.

The two years of my presidential term are already coming to an end. Especially considering the six months as president-elect, I find it remarkable that the time went so quickly. Dan Ozer has already stepped into the president-elect role with style, so I am comfortable that the organization is in good hands going forward. I still have two years as past-president, but Dan’s skill and energy have made me relax about how much I will need to interject.

What does this organization need to do? Why? When we asked for your feedback last winter, wonderful ideas poured in. You may not have heard that those ideas formed the structure and content of the executive board meeting at SPSP. I hope that we members continue to think about the goals of the organization, to discuss them with each other, and to provide ideas and feedback to the organization leadership.