ACM president's letter: on the importance of ACM being scientific and educational

In the February President's Letter , I tried to delineate in a moderately objective way the diversity of views involving ACM'S relation to the world outside of ACM. In particular, I tried to indicate the differences between what is classed by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) society (which is ACM'S designation) and the 501(c)(6), which is a different type of organization. In the latter category the organization is permitted to have as much involvement in what I called political/social and personal-professional issues as it chooses. 1 am strongly opposed to any attempt to have A CM be the kind of organization which is involved in these nontechnical issues. In this letter I shall indicate the reasons why I think we are already doing all that we should in these non-technical areas. First, I want to make sure that nobody is misled by frequent attempts to say that ACM should be a "professional society." In the practical and everyday use of that term, we are as much of a professional society as the mathematicians, the physicists , the lawyers, etc. However, the Internal Revenue Service uses that phrase in a special legalistic way, which differs from normal usage. Hence anybody who suggests to you that ACM should become a "profes-sional society" should be questioned to be sure you are both talking about the same thing. In other words, don't let advocacy of "more professional-ism" in the IRS sense be misinterpre-111 ted to mean "more professional" in the normal usage of that term. My first reason for wanting ACM to remain a scientific and educational society (sometimes abbreviated as "technical society") is to maintain the strength of this largest association in the computer field, which has been built up over a period of 29 years. There are people who are members of ACM solely because they wish to get the full scope of technical benefits from the scientific and educational work in which ACM is involved. To the extent that we do not devote full energies in those directions , we are giving those people less than they are entitled to. The second and third reasons why I object to having ACM get involved in political/social and personal-professional issues are time and conscience. Insofar as the time is concerned , the Council normally meets three times a year for a total of between 24 and 36 hours. We must make …