Trouble over the AMS Ethics Committee

The American Musicological Society (AMS) is a sister organization to, but unaffiliated with, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM). AMS is for music historians studying classical music; SEM (where I’ve been a member since 1971) is for music scholars studying world music. A few weeks ago I learned of a petition circulation among AMS members saying that signers (by now nearly 500) would be withholding their membership renewals until the AMS investigated some of the things that occurred during the past year that have greatly troubled many members. One of these concerns the AMS Ethics Committee; a second concerns the AMS Program Committee, procedures for choosing (and rejecting) proposals for presentation at the annual conference; a third concerns the cost of the AMS administrative office, which includes an executive director and staff. I was especially interested in the controversy concerning the AMS Ethics Committee, because I served for many years on the SEM Ethics Committee. 

Here is the excerpt from the AMS petition concerning the AMS Ethics Committee: “The Ethics Committee was established in 2020-2021 with the explicit approval of the membership to provide mechanisms for members to convey ethics concerns independently of direct Board [of Directors] oversight, reporting to Council as well as the Board to ensure confidentiality and protect individual members. However, as detailed in the Ethics Committee's memo to the Board, there has been a troubling discrepancy between the charge provided to the Committee and what the membership approved. The Committee states: ‘The discrepancy between the charge provided to the Incipient AMS-EC and our understanding of what the Membership had approved in 2020 and we had been elected to form in 2021 is still extremely troubling to us, as is the lack of transparency in that discrepancy not being made visible to the Membership or even to the Council.’ The Committee has now been proposed for dissolution with minimal explanation to the membership about why the structure approved by members cannot function as intended."

This is a difficult situation. The AMS Ethics Committee would not accept the Board's charge, and so it must be dissolved. It’s unclear from the petition precisely how or why the AMS Board changed the charge to the Ethics Committee. but it's possible that the Board feared litigation from aggrieved members whose complaints would have received Ethics Committee endorsement before they came before the Board. We faced a similar conundrum in the SEM Ethics Committee, and we resolved it by making it clear, after receiving a number of complaints from our members, that we were not set up to function as a grievance panel, but rather that our remit was to advise the SEM Board of Directors and the membership on policy in regard to ethics. So for example in 2018 we revised the SEM Ethics Statement, a policy statement which had not been revised since the original in 1998. I must say that we also had difficulties in getting timely responses from the SEM Board as we navigated through treacherous waters, but the outcome was for the best. Given the SEM Ethics Committee’s policy statements (such as those on harassment, sexual and otherwise), the SEM Board (which is the only body that can resolve complaints and enforce punishment) now has guidelines. Resolution, I should add, only extends to SEM-related activities; for example, a complaint of harassment at an SEM conference might result in the offender being banned from SEM conferences for a period of time, whereas a complaint from a member regarding a denial of tenure at a college or university is outside the jurisdiction the SEM Board.