Can A New Leader 'Heal' The AAAS?

WASHINGTON—The phone call on that January 1988 morning stunned staffers at the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Forensic pathologist Robert Kirschner, a member of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, had just been thrown into a Kenyan prison. Before heading for Kenya, Kirschner had received official government approval to attend an inquest into the death of a prisoner whose case had become a cause célèbre following allegations of government torture. Suddenly it seemed that Kirschner himself might become a torture victim; in any case, he was being detained a long way from home and needed help. Anxiously, the staff of AAAS ‘s science and human rights program rushed into the office of Executive Officer Alvin W. Trivelpiece and recounted the events. That’s when they received their second shock of the day: In their eyes, Trivelpiece seemed less concerned about the fate of a respected scientist and member of the association—or even about the cause of scientific freedom to which the AAAS has long been dedicated— than he was about how the incident might affect relationships between Kenya and the United States. He is even said to have expressed concern about whether the association could be sued for intruding into the affairs of another country. While the staff wanted him to cry out in protest, Tnvelpiece chose to work quietly behind the scenes, cabling the U.S. ambassador in Kenya for her advice. The Kenya incident may not count for much in the history of a 141-year-old AAAS. In fact, Kirschner was released unharmed after eight hours, and Kenyan authorities apologized for what they termed a mixup. Further, the AAAS continues to aggressively monitor human rights violations throughout Africa and in dozens of other countries. Why do AAAS members still recount this event one year after Kirschner’s release and five months after Trivelpiece announced his resignation as head of the association? The answer is that the event has become an emblem of a remarkably sharp culture clash that existed within the AAAS for the 21 months that Alvin Trivelpiece ran the 1 30,000-member organization. Indeed, Trivelpiece often fulfilled the stereotype of a politically conservative manager dedicated to trimming the budgets of entrenched interests in pursuit of fiscal health, whereas a majority of the staff and many member scientists support traditional, liberal AAAS programs with a fervor and conviction that sometimes overlooks fiscal concerns. But the intriguing part of this story is that the staff’s personification in the form of trivelpeice of all their frustrations actually masks difficulties endemic to the AAAS, difficulties that will severely test AAAS’s newest executive officer, Richard S. Nicholson. On January 1 of This year, Trivelpiece went to Tennessee to become director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a vice president of Martin Marietta Energy Systems Inc., which runs the lab for the Department of Energy. Next month he will be succeeded by Nicholson, currently chief of NSF’s directorate for mathematical and physical sciences. Nicholson has spent 19 years ma variety of jobs at NSF after beginning his career in the 1960s as an academic chemist. His new bosses on the AAAS board believe that his experience is good preparation for the problems that await him. A salary that tops $120,000 (compared with his current salary of $80,700) may make some of his future headaches more tolerable, as will the honeymoon period he is likely to experience from the relieved board members and staff. But it’s hard to know if he will be able to dodge the bullets that seem to have been directed at his predecessor. Trivelpiece’s problems began before he ever set foot in the AAAS’s H Street atrium in April 1987. For more than a decade, the associatio had been run by an enormously popular executive officer, William Carey, whose reputation was based on the fiscal acumen he brought from the federal Bureau of the Budget. Yet Carey’s legacy when he retired was three years of million-dollar deficits. These financial exigencies compounded the culture clash to come. For one thing, Trivelpiece insisted on calculating the true cost of every program, including such things as how much space and utilities each office consumed. That new accounting method highlighted the impact on the deficit of such wellmeaning but costly operations as programs to improve science educa tion and improve the status of the disabled and women scientists. The staff sometimes saw the numbers as an implicit criticism of their efforts in these areas. Another Trivelpiece initiative that might have been welcomed at many financially troubled organizations but that ranlded staff members at the AAAS was the exhaustive review of management practices that he launched. To a staff used to operating with minimal interference from Carey, this review was seen as an indication that their new boss was more concerned about internal operations than about the association ‘s grand mission to advance science. The Kenya incident highlighted yet another problem—namely, the perception that Trivelpiece was cool and dispassionate at precisely those times his predecessor would have shown compassion and moral indignation. That such a trait might have proved valuable had serious negotiations been needed seems never to have crossed the minds of Trivelpiece’s detractors. To them, his behavior simply showed that the decision to install a conservative-minded manager at the helm of a liberal-leaning organization had been ill-conceived. As one board member put it, in retrospect, “A1 just wasn’t in tune with the staff or the organization as a whole, and we should have known it.” For now, the disaffected are professing the conviction that Nicholson will make perfect harmony with the association staff and board. “I’m looking forward to Rich’s arrival,” says William Golden, the long-time treasurer of the association. "He’s straightforward, honorable, intelligent, experienced in the ways of Washington, and someone who’s concerned about, and dedicated to, science." Golden’s approval could greatly ease the transition for Nicholson. It was an open secret that Golden and Trivelpiece disagreed strongly about how the association should allocate its $30-million operating budget, which the executive officer sets, and its $25-million investment portfolio which Golden controls. And Golden is a force to be reckoned with. As treasurer for the past 20 years, his permanence amid an endless succession of one-term board members gives him an unusual degree of authority for a volunteer officer of a major nonprofit association. His power is augmented by a 40-year career in science policy (he wrote a memo to President Truman that led to the creation of a mechanism to advise the president) as well as by the fact that a portion of the association’s earnings from its endowment are used to support annual operating expenses. Increasing Tension AAAS board members readily admit that this last practice has long created tension between the executive officer, who always has more program ideas than money to pay for them, and the treasurer, who will invariably prefer to see his investment pool increase even in. lean years. In fact, as current board members also concede, that tension in. creased in recent years because of continual deficits. “We gave Al a tough job—to balance the budget,” says Sheila Widnall, a professor of aeronautics at MIT who was president when Trivelpiece came on board. “We were used to seeing deficits of $1.5 million or so each year” she recalls, “and it was quite a challenge for Al to do it responsibly, without hurting staff morale. I think that Al actually wanted to balance the budget that next year [1988], but the board took a different approach.” Board members are extremely reluctant to provide any details of those disagreements, however. “I don’t see what you’re getting at,” bristles Walter Massie, vice president for research at Argonne National Laboratory and immediate past president of AAAS, when asked about differing budget priorities. Trivelpiece will say only that he balanced the 1988 budget. Then the board decided to move some money from one account to another, and as a result created a paper deficit.” For the record, chief financial officer Carl Amthor says that 1988 ended with a deficit of between $800,000 and $1 million. The deficit stems in part, he says, from a board decision to shift $500,000 (part of a five-year, $2.25 million deferred payment from the sale of its magazine Science 86) from its operating budget to its capital recovery budget. As sharp as those differences were between Trivelpiece and the board on financial matters, the clash of personalities between him and Golden was even more divisive. “They’re very different types of politicians,” notes one Washington lobbyist about the two men. “Al is much more Machiavellian. He’s a game player, and he never makes a move without calculating its political impact. Bill Golden—and Bill Carey, for that matter, when he wasrunning things—has the good sense to act on principle. Both men care deeply about the association, and try to do what. they think is right.” The big question hanging over AAAS’s future, though, is whether—once the honeymoon is over—Golden and Nicholson will see eye to eye on what is right for the AAAS. The fact is that the budget tensions promise to continue even though Trivelpiece has left the scene. The budget for 1989 is in balance, says Trivelpiece with satisfaction, and Massie adds that he fully expects the association to end the year in the black. But Golden, though conceding that the numbers add up, notes realistically, “The hard part is holding down the operating costs to .the projected figures.” One of the ironies that have emerged since Trivelpiece’s departure is that the beleaguered former executive officer speaks like AAAS’s greatest booster. The association’s net worth has risen to its highest point ever, he points out, and concludes from this that the association has a bright future before it. But critics say that the apparently healthy numbers have been achieved not through economies or new long-term streams of income but largely because of the $8.9 million it will net from the sale of Science 86 and its 1984 decision to sell its own building and rent space in a fancier new office building a few blocks away. Mixed Reviews Undaunted, Trivelpiece. also takes pride in his effort to get the AAAS board to look more closely at where the association should be headed. Board members, who will hold a weekend retreat later this month to explore how the association can get the biggest bang for its buck, agree that such long-range planning is long overdue. But the association’s 220-person staff is said to be still reeling from a similar intemal exercise that Trivelpiece conducted to position the association to deal with the future. “The sheer volume of work that fell on us was staggering,” says one staffer who requested anonymity. “Between long-range planning, program reviews, and an outside management audit, the cumulative effort on a staff already stretched thin just wore people down. What happened, I think, is that he put all his eggs in this one administrative basket, and he never got around to dealing with issues that relate to the outside world.” Member Apathy If that assessment is true, it’s certainly not because those other issues weren’t considered important. For years, AAAS leaders have been stymied by the low level of member involvement in association activities. Carey, for one, admits that he “never got a handle on it.” And a recent survey showed that members had scant knowledge about some of the activities that AAAS was pursuing. Trivelpiece’s response was the AAAS Observer, a 16-page newsletter that is inserted bimonthly into every copy of the journal Science. Praised by some as a lively attempt to inform members, even this wellmeaning effort has been criticized; it’s viewed by others as a costly and ineffective way to strengthen the bond between AAAS members and those who run their association. At bottom, AAAS officials explain that it’s never been easy for members from many disciplines to find common ground. As Nicholson notes, “The average member joins AAAS as a second society, after their primary professional affiliation, becauseit has a good reputation, and it looks good on their CV. And they appreciate the broad perspective that they get from reading Science. But they don’t vote on association business, and They don’t participate in AAAS affairs.” That apathy may lie at the heart of what could prove the most troublesome problem of all: AAAS’s failure to expand. Daniel S. Greenberg, in the February 1 issue of his Science & Government Report, cites figures showing. an impressive rise in the rolls of most professional societies during the past decade, and he chides AAAS for what has been essentially a flat curve over the same period. Trivelpiece says that the numbers hold an ambiguous message: “The good news is that it’s stable; the bad news is that it hasn’t grown.” But Nicholson, and some board members as well, are more concerned. “I would have expected it to grow in proportion to the community’s overall- growth,” Nicholson says. “One reason it may not have is that, as a second organization, it may be the first one people drop if the economy gets tight. I’d also suspect that, like most professional societies, its overall membership is aging, meaning that it’s not attracting its share of young scientists.” Golden agrees, and argues that AAAS must take a more aggressive approach to finding members. “I think it should be growing,” agrees Golden. “And I think that we need to change our style to help it grow. All I know is that we’re not getting anywhere with our current promotional efforts.” If all the key players seem unable to propound a solution to the membership problem, they’re united in their belief that Nicholson’s arrival will benefit AAAS’s central mission—to advance science. Nicholson’s long tenure at NSF has brought him in touch with all the major players in science policy, notes board member Mary Clutter, who has worked alongside him as head of NSF’s biological and behavioral sciences directorate. “Rich knows the type of people that we’d like the executive officer to know,” Clutter says. “And he’s dealt with many of the important issues we’re facing today, like strengthening science education, improving the university infrastructure, and increasing collaboration between government, industry, and academia.” Succeeding in that mission also means reaching the public. For some AAAS officials, that could signal another try at a national publication. “I loved Science 80,” says AAAS president Richard Atkinson, referring to the magazine’s title its first year, “and I was angry that we couldn’t figure out a way to keep it going. I’d certainly welcome any links we might be able to forge with an existing publication that is already reaching the public in a responsible manner.” Golden, for his part, thinks that such a model may already exist: The Sciences, the bimonthly publication of the New York Academy of Sciences. Speaking as outgoing president of that state academy, he notes that “we are undertaking efforts to expand its circulation without living beyond our means. There may be an opportunity for symbiosis toward that end” with the AAAS, Golden adds. All For Love Can Nicholson handle the diversity of challenges awaiting him? Interviewed in his government office, where he has promised to remain until the end of congressional hearings on the NSF budget, Nicholson talked about his new job as if he were a kid let loose in a candy store. “I love science,”he says. “I guess that’s what really attracted me to this job. I’ve been interested in science since the fourth grade, and the attraction of NSF was that I could still stay close enough [to the laboratory] to feel the excitement. “I sure hope that will be true at AAAS,” he adds. “After all, if you don’t have that feeling, what’s the point of getting involved in science at all?”

Can A New Leader 'Heal' The AAAS?

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Jeffrey Mervis

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March 1989

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