At Cliopatria, historian Manan Ahmed writes about receiving the following letter from the American Historical Association after proposing a panel for its 2008 annual meeting:

Dear Manan Ahmed,

After meeting this weekend to consider the proposals for the 2008 AHA, the Program Committee has decided to accept your panel, "Contested Pasts and Constructed Presents: Memory in the Local," with certain conditions.

Since the AHA has a standing commitment to gender diversity on panels, the Program Committee has decided to require you to find a female participant, perhaps to serve as chair or a second commentator for your session.

We will need a response with the name and affiliation of the new participant by May 8, 2007 in order to include your panel in this year's program. If you do not respond, we will be forced to reject your panel.

Sincerely,

"The thought of going to any historian and asking him or her to be a token panelist to fulfill a quota is deeply offensive to all parties involved," he continues. "And I am quite taken aback by AHA's rather ham-handed efforts at diversity."

His solution is pragmatic--he puts out a call for a female historian to join the panel--and only, ultimately, mildly critical: He asks that the AHA make its requirement more prominent so that others can fulfill their quotas ahead of time, and not go what he has gone through. "I don't have any problems with AHA's policy - at all," he notes. "I am just certain that there are better, pro-active ways of going about it."

I was with him until the end. But he loses me in his bland acceptance of the AHA's outrageous attempts to impose demographic diversity on a scholarly event. Shouldn't the goal be to assemble the best panels and to host the most intellectually vibrant conference possible? Annual meetings of huge scholarly associations are commonly described as "zoos." But in requiring that every panel display a token female--see female historian talk! see female historian think!--the AHA is taking the zoo image to a new level entirely.