Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
immediately denied this depiction, calling it “too narrow,” the popular
perception that the ACM catered solely to academics was diffi cult to
counter.
33
The ACM leadership was not entirely unaware of or unsympathetic
to the needs of the business programmers. In his unsuccessful bid in 1959
for the ACM presidency, Paul Armer urged the ACM membership to
“THINK BIG,” to “visualize ACM as the professional society unifying
all
computer users.”
34
That same year, Herbert Grosch, an outspoken
proponent of a strong, American Medical Association-style professional
society (and later ACM president), roundly criticized the ACM for its
academic parochialism: “Information processing is as broad as our
culture and as deep as interplanetary space. To allow narrow interests,
pioneering though they might have been, to preempt the name, to rele-
gate ninety percent of the fi eld to 'an exercise left to the reader,' would
be disastrous to the underlying unity of the new information sciences.”
35
Several attempts were made during the next decade to make the ACM
more relevant to the business community. In response to widespread
criticism of the theoretical orientation of the
Journal of the ACM
, a new
publication,
Communications of the ACM
, was introduced in 1958. The
main contents of
Communications
were short articles, mostly unrefereed,
on technical subjects such as applications, techniques, and standards.
36
In 1966 the Executive Council announced a $45,000 professional devel-
opment program aimed at business data processing personnel. The
program included short “skill upgrade” seminars offered at the national
computer conferences, a traveling course series, and self-study materi-
als.
37
There was even talk, in the mid-1960s, of a potential merger with
the DPMA. In 1969, ACM president Bernard Galler announced a move
toward “less formality, less science, and less academia.”
38
Despite these short-lived efforts to reconcile with the business com-
munity, however, the conservative ACM leadership continued to pursue
a largely academic agenda. As early as 1959 it was suggested that the
ACM should impose stringent academic standards on its members, and
in 1965 a four-year degree became a prerequisite for receiving full mem-
bership. Frequent battles arose over repeated attempts to change the
name of the association to something more broadly relevant. In 1965 a
proposal to change it to the Association for Computing and Information
Science was rejected; a decade later the same issue was still being
debated.
39
When Louis Fein suggested in 1967 that the ACM faced
a “crisis of identity,” ACM president Anthony Oettinger insisted
