Report on the Sigma Xi Annual Meeting

Nov. 5-7, 1999

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Mary Ashley, Chapter Delegate

I attended the Sigma Xi Annual Meeting on November 5-7, 1999 in Minneapolis. This is a brief report on the meeting. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the Sigma Xi forum that preceded the meeting on Nov. 4-5. The topic of the forum was, Reshaping Undergraduate Science and Engineering Education: Tools for Better Learning. The general reaction was that this was a very successful forum and everyone was talking about undergraduate education throughout the meeting.

The two candidates for President-elect were Jared Leigh Cohen, president of Carnegie Mellon University and Marye Anne Fox, Chancellor, North Carolina State University. Neither candidate attended the meeting, which I understood to be unusual, and neither had much of a history with the Sigma Xi organization. From their bibliographies, both are extremely accomplished scientists, administrators, and politicians. I voted for Fox, she won.

The only other voting of the entire assembly was on renewal of the dues structure, which was approved, and a vote on a resolution introduced by the Quinnipiac Chapter. This had to do with voting for elections and business by electronic ballot prior to the Annual Meeting. Although this initially sounded reasonable to me, there was much discussion and revision of the resolution, and apparently a history of rebellion by the infamous Quinnipiac Chapter, and in the end the resolution was defeated. I cast my vote against the resolution.

Something new this year was the formation of Constituency Groups of delegates, namely: 1) Baccalaureate Colleges, 2) Canadian/International, 3) Comprehensive Colleges and Universities, 4) Area Groups Industries, 5) State & Federal Labs, and 6) Research & Doctoral Universities. The reasoning here is that chapters in different types of institutions would have different issues and interests. At the two short meetings of Constituency Groups that occurred (of course the UIC chapter is in category 6, RD for short) nothing much was accomplished except elections of committees. The Regional Assemblies will continue to exist.

I attended workshops entitled Challenges in Managing a Successful Chapter and A Sigma Xi Program for Dissemination of Best Practices in Undergraduate Education Reform. The first workshop made me feel that UIC has a fairly successful chapter, because many people were simply exchanging ideas on how to breath some life into moribund chapters.

U.S. Representative Rush D. Holt (New Jersey), a physicist, spoke on the first day of the meeting. The Proctor Prize Lecture was given by Lynn Margulis, known primarily for the endosymbiosis hypothesis for the origin of eukaryotic cells bur more recently for more radical ideas on Gaia and symbiogenesis. Both speakers were interesting and entertaining.