May 31, 2018

Dear Jeff Engel, Kate Epstein, and Amy Sayward,

Thank you for reaching out to us. We write as organizers and signatories of the letter contesting the decision to invite David Petraeus to deliver the keynote lecture at SHAFR’s annual meeting. The letter was written by a small committee of SHAFR members and signed by 277 historians, including 141 SHAFR members and 136 non-members. The signatories ranged from past SHAFR presidents to graduate students attending their first meeting. The letter was a collective expression of concern by hundreds of scholars.

We appreciate your willingness to consider and respond to the letter. We particularly appreciate your explanation of the way that keynote speakers are chosen, and we recognize the limits of the program committee’s authority. That said, we believe that a roundtable to debate counterinsurgency does not address the concerns in the letter.

The letter dealt with the keynote address: it argued that SHAFR should not have given David Petraeus the honor, institutional platform, and honorarium associated with a keynote lecture. Given that he was already on the program, we asked for two reforms: first, a more open process allowing members to discuss and debate future keynote invitations, and second, a revised format for this year’s keynote. We did not write our letter because we felt that SHAFR members needed to have a debate about the merits of counterinsurgency. Instead, we believed that David Petraeus needed to face and address the kinds of criticisms that SHAFR members have published for decades. We believe that he is unlikely to do so as long as his address is a keynote moderated by John Nagl, his colleague and public champion. We therefore asked for a SHAFR moderator who would be in a position to pose critical questions and follow-ups. The program committee might not have the authority to alter the format of the keynote address, and it is possible that you have offered all that you can. We appreciate the gesture, but asking members of SHAFR to debate one another does not address our concern.

Our conversations with signatories revealed that members have many questions and concerns about the organization, and we therefore recommend an open discussion of SHAFR itself as a separate session scheduled apart from the keynote. We believe that this is a critical moment for members to be informed about basic procedures and policies: how keynote speakers are paid, whether membership dues contribute to honoraria, and what roles organizations that cosponsor keynote sessions play in financing those events and/or selecting speakers. We hope that an open conversation between SHAFR members and leadership will allow us all to discuss how SHAFR can create a more inclusive process for selecting keynote speakers. We also hope that it will lead to a needed discussion of SHAFR’s purpose and commitments. Providing and supporting such a session would go a long way toward generating good will among current members and the larger community of historians who share the concerns in our letter and are following SHAFR’s response to it.

Sincerely,

Brian D’Haeseleer, Assistant Professor, Lyon College

Hannah Gurman, Clinical Associate Professor, New York University

Monica Kim, Assistant Professor, New York University

Paul Kramer, Associate Professor, Vanderbilt University

April Merleaux, Assistant Professor, Hampshire College

Kaeten Mistry, Senior Lecturer, University of East Anglia

Amy C. Offner, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania

Naoko Shibusawa, Associate Professor, Brown University

Brad Simpson, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut