The Halfway Mark
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As the Presidents See It...
The Halfway Mark Harry Leamy, 1983 MRS President In writing this retrospective, I find myself unable to limit my remarks to the year 1983. Not only has my personal record of events in that year been long since discarded but, as Russ Chianelli pointed out in his remarks, the MRS presidential experience is a protracted one. In my case, I can only refer to an MRS-intense period of roughly five years, during one of which I happened to hold the office of president. From this vantage point, around a decade later, I find myself struck by how much our Society has changed and by how little it has changed. Let me explain. In 1983, MRS was animated by a rebellious spirit that was fueled in many of us by the absence of a proper forum for the discussion of our work. The disciplinary societies had no scheduled sessions that attracted the people with whom we wished to converse, and the recognition we sought for our own achievement from our educational cohorts was typically not forthcoming. At that time, only the Gordon Research Conferences represented the sort of gathering we sought. The desire for intellectual intercourse had led originally to the creation of MRS, a story best left to earlier presidents to tell. The spirit of the society just a decade ago, however, was still one of rebellion and power. MRS was, in 1983, very much an adolescent society. It possessed no institutional infrastructure and only one annual meeting, and was entirely a volunteer organization; workers were motivated by the opportunity to do things in a different and better way than was being done elsewhere. The concept that all symposia should be topical, for example, was crystallized in 1983. Previously, they had been topical simply because the Society hadn't the support organization to do it any other way. Leaving all decision-making in the hands of individual symposium organizers was a necessity whose intrinsic power really manifested itself as the Boston meeting became increasingly spirited, and as it addressed a wider range of topics. At this juncture, I confess that Rustum Roy had probably always known that this was the best way to ensure technical vitality. Rusty was among the early MRS leaders who believed strongly in the "loose federation
of interests" structure that is still visible today. Indeed, 1983 was the year in which a great debate over the wisdom of securing permanent staff for the Society was taken up seriously, with Rusty in the opposition. The institutionalizers prevailed, of course, and the Society was able to rise to new levels of capability with staff support. What has remained the same is the constant renewal that is still afforded by our practice of decentralized decision making regarding topics, formats, and agendas. This is, in my opinion, MRS's most important contribution to its membership.
In 1983, MRS was animated by a rebellious spirit that was fueled in many of us by the absence of a proper forum for the discussion of our work. The MRS Bulletin in 1983 was still being composed and edited in m
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