Ad Hoc Committee on the Nomination Procedure (AHNP)

Committee Report to the Board

Report Date: Jun 26, 2019

Committee Members

Antolak, John A., PhD

Dauer, Lawrence T. PhD

Hintenlang, Kathleen M. PhD

Kruger, Randell L. PhD

Lowenstein, Jessica, R. MS

Ma,Chang Ming Charlie, PhD

Mian, Tariq A. PhD

Paliwal, Bhudatt .R  PhD (Chair)

Simiele, Samantha J. PhD (consultant)

Yester, Michael V.  PhD

Zickgraf, Eric C. PhD

Committee Charge

To evaluate the effectiveness and ramifications of the current process for nominations to AAPM offices and to the Nominating Committee and make recommendations for improving the process. The committee’s considerations shall include, but not be limited to, processes that should be expected to yield the following:

1.     The nomination process should result in officers, members of the Board and members of the Nominating Committee that, over time, that reflect the diversity of the Association. No limited discipline or disciplines should decide, based on number of members, the leadership of the Association. The distribution should include the representation specified in the recent change of bylaws establishing seats on the Nominating Committee designated for:

a.     Academic therapy physicist,

b.     Community practice therapy physicist,

c.      Academic imaging physicist, and

d.     Community Practice imaging physicist,

but also look to other practice disciplines, for example medical health physics or nuclear medical physics and not overlook those medical physicists who work in several disciplines.

2.     The nomination process should be sufficiently flexible to also engage medical physicists working in newer disciplines, such as microscopy, not represented in the current Nominating Committee structure.

3.     The nominating process shall allow nominations from membership, but consider the requirements for such nominations, such as the minimum percentage of members making the nomination, that could apply as the organization changes over time.

The committee’s deliverable may be a proposed By-Law intended for a membership vote, if the committee concludes that that is what is needed, and discussion, suitable for distribution to the membership, supporting the committee’s recommendations.

Preface

The AAPM has a long history of engaging its members as volunteers to meets its educational, professional and leadership needs. Over the past seven decades the Association has grown by about a factor of two hundred. During this period the nomination process has been managed by a small committee which has led to a perception of favoritism and unproportionate representation of subspecialties of medical physics. In order to address these concerns of the membership the current leadership has laid emphasis on diversity as a major priority. Some gains have been made from recent efforts.  Creating additional procedures to emphasize diversity and bring even greater clarity to our diversity objectives continues to be part of the ongoing vision of the AAPM. The Nomination Committee is a small group that tries to nominate candidates from its familiar pool of individuals. It needs to be composed of individuals representing the diversity and having strong understanding of the mission of the organization.

Summary of Current Nomination and Election Process

Each year, the Nominating Committee (NOM) is charged with nominating individuals for election to President-Elect and Board-Member-At-Large (BMAL) positions. When the terms of the Secretary and Treasurer are ending in that year, NOM is also charged with nominating individuals for election to those positions. This is specified in the By-Laws Article I Section 3 (By-Law I.3), Article II Section 2 (By-Law II.2), and in Rule 3.5.

By-Law I.3 states that the nominations must be presented to the membership at least 12 weeks prior to the Annual Business Meeting, which is normally held on Wednesday afternoon during the AAPM Annual Meeting. Nominations by petition (at least 2 Members or Emeritus Members) are allowed for BMAL positions and must be received by the Secretary at least 10 weeks prior to the Annual Business Meeting. By-Law II.2 states that the nominations for the Officers are presented to the Board for their concurrence and there is no provision for nominations from the Membership. Rule 3.5 states that the nominations shall be presented to the Board at least 16 weeks prior to the Annual Business Meeting and that the Board must concur with the nominations for Officer positions.

Article Sixth of the Articles of Incorporation state that the “manner of the election or appointment of the directors and officers shall be provided in the By-Laws”. By-Law I.3 states that the Secretary shall provide ballots to the Membership at least 6 weeks before the Annual Business Meeting and the closing date for receiving completed ballots is 3 weeks before the Annual Business Meeting. By-Law II.2 states that Officer elections have the same terms as BMAL elections and in general, all elections are usually on the same ballot.

Robert’s Rules Recommended Nomination and Election Process

The standard nomination and election process contained in Robert’s Rules (RONR, Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised), which is the parliamentary authority for AAPM, would be used if the By-Laws did not specify how positions would be filled. The following represents what the authors of RONR might consider to be good practice.

·       Nominating committee, if it exists, nominates at least one eligible individual for each open position.

·       The nominating committee would present their nominees for each position at the Annual Business Meeting, and it would not require Board approval prior to presentation.

·       The presiding officer of the Annual Business Meeting would then ask for nominations from the floor for each position, in the order they are listed in the By-Laws.

·       After asking for nominations from the floor for each position, the presiding officer would close nominations and the assembly would proceed to the election balloting.

o   The balloting could be one position at a time, in the order specified in the By-Laws, or it could be everyone on the same ballot. If it was the latter, individuals might be nominated for more than one position and would choose one position to take if they one more than one election. The position left vacant would be put up for re-election.

Within AAPM, the By-Laws state that the Nominating Committee must make at least 2 nominations for President-Elect and least 8 nominations for the 4 BMAL positions that are elected each year. In addition, Rule 3.5 states that 2 nominations are required for Secretary and Treasurer, which is more restrictive that the By-Laws. RONR suggests that it “is usually not sound to require the committee to nominate more than one candidate for each office, since the committee can easily circumvent such a provision by nominating only one person who has a chance of being elected.”

Because the current election process is completed before the Annual Business Meeting, there is no opportunity for any nominations from the floor, as required in the standard RONR process. The current nominations by petition for BMAL positions is a reasonable substitute for nominations from the floor, but there is no equivalent for Officer positions. Individual members may contact the Nominating Committee to suggest individuals for any elected position, but if the Nominating Committee chooses to ignore a suggestion for an Officer position, there is no way for that member to get that individual onto the ballot (other than as a write-in candidate).

Under the current AAPM governance, the Nominating Committee is required to present their nominations to the Board and the Board must concur with the nominations for Officer positions. This implies that the Board has the authority to not concur with the nominations, which implies that the Board can control the nominations. To be consistent with RONR, the Nominating Committee can report to the Board, but the Board should not have the authority to prevent any of their recommended nominations being presented to the Membership. The Nominating Committee is also restricted from nominating any of their members for any elective office, and RONR suggests this is not good practice because it takes away one of the privileges of Membership as a result of being elected or appointed to the Nominating Committee. However, similar restrictions can be found in the ASTRO governance.

Comparison with Peer Professional Societies

ASTRO bylaws are located at https://www.astro.org/About-ASTRO/Governance/Bylaws. Nominations by the nominating committee are forwarded to Membership at least 120 days prior to the Annual Business Meeting, and the nominating committee is required to nominate at least 2 candidates for most of the elected positions. For nominations by petition (from the Membership), they provide 30 days for a petition with signatures from 30 voting members to add someone to the election ballot. Election ballots are distributed to voting members within 30 days of the close of Membership nominations, and completed ballots must be returned within 30 days of the ballots being sent out. Voting results are announced at the Annual Business Meeting. Of note, the ASTRO bylaws do define sub-classes of eligible members as radiation oncologists, medical physicists, and radiation biologists. The bylaws also state that at least one Board members should be a medical physicist, radiation biologist, and community practice clinician. However, there is no provision in the bylaws saying how this is accomplished and the use of the word “should” implies that not satisfying that condition is a goal rather than a requirement.

ACR bylaws are located at https://www.acr.org/-/media/ACR/Files/Governance/Bylaws.pdf. ACR Councilors are elected by ACR chapters (e.g., by state), so the bylaws do not say how they must be elected. After all Councilors are elected, the minority Medical Physics and Radiation Oncology council representation (over all chapter and society Councilors) is compared to the overall ACR membership percentage. If the representation percentage is lower than the membership percentage, the speaker of the Council appoints extra Council members using lists furnished by CARROS and the chair of the ACR Commission on Medical Physics. The Board of Chancellors has at most 34 members and is the Executive Body of the ACR, comparable to the AAPM Board of Directors. The bylaws prescribe how the chancellors are chosen and who they represent with up to 15 at-large Chancellors elected from eligible Councilors. Chancellor positions only require a single nomination, but multiple nominations are encouraged. For nominations from associated societies, the society (i.e., RSNA, ARRS, ARS, ASTRO, and CAR) provides at least 3 nominees to the ACR nominating committee (CNC) to choose from. CNC can choose from the names provided or ask for more names. There appears to be no mechanism for nominations from Membership, but a petition signed by at least 15 Councilors (there are several hundred in ACR) can be presented to the speaker of the ACR Council at least 2 weeks ahead of the Annual Meeting of the College.

Discussion

Charge #1: Diversity of Nominations and Board Members

The Rules governing the composition of the Nominating Committee specify a mix of therapy and imaging physicists, from academic and community practice settings, as well as a regional chapter representative (this is new since the AHNP was formed). AAPM members are asked to voluntarily provide their “area of practice” (see Table 1) with the intention of choosing NOM candidates from those identified. However, as of May 2019, only 1598 AAPM members have chosen to provide this data, so the data is not necessarily reliable. It is also not comprehensive as it only includes medical physicists that are in clinical practice.

Table 1. Area of practice for 1598 AAPM members as of May 14, 2019. Current data for Board Members is in parentheses for the 18 of 38 Board members that specified an area of practice.

	Academic	Community Practice	Total
Imaging	17.2% (22.2%)	12.1% (0%)	29.30% (22.2%)
Therapy	31.6% (50.0%)	39.1% (27.8%)	70.70% (77.8%)
Total	48.8% (72.2%)	51.2% (27.8%)	100.0%

AAPM demographic data also includes a self-identified specialty, with 7846 members reporting and those data show that only 54.59% have a specialty of Radiation Oncology, which is much lower than the proportion shown in Table 1. However, almost 21% indicate a specialty of “other” and if we exclude those, the percentage of Radiation Oncology specialty is 69.3%, which is fairly consistent with the data in Table 1. AAPM also has a report comparing the specialty composition of the Board to that of the Membership. If we again exclude the “other” specialty, then about 80.5% of the Board composition is Radiation Oncology, and 19.5% is imaging, engineering, health physics and other specialties. Currently, the Board has 38 voting members, so the Radiation Oncology representation is 30.6 Board members. Specialties can be broken down into percentages for each Board member, which is why the number is not an integer.

One might think that Board members might be a little more compliant in filling out such demographic information. However, more than 20 of 38 current voting members (including one Officer) do not have an area of practice specified. Only four Board members identify their area of practice as Imaging (all academic, no community practice), but there is 1.4 FTE of Diagnostic Imaging “specialty” with an area of practice that is not specified.

The area of practice demographic data was added so that there was a way to categorize nominees for the Nominating Committee, as required by the Rules. However, the split into therapy or imaging, academic or community practice, does not capture all of the members. In particular, anyone that is not involved in clinical practice will not be eligible to be on the Nominating Committee because they could not truthfully fill in that data. If those data were used to determine nominees for elected positions, AAPM would be taking away the rights of some members to volunteer for those positions. Therefore, the categorization should be changed to be inclusive of all AAPM members. In addition, any categorization used to select a certain subset of the voting membership should ideally be defined in the By-Laws, as ASTRO does by defining sub-classes of eligible members.

The AHNP was also asked to consider that the nomination process would result in diversity of Officer and Board members that, over time, represents the diversity of the organization. In order to do this, accurate measurements of the diversity of the organization are needed, and this may be intrusive. We already have many members that do not specify a specialty, and the vast majority do not identify an area of practice (and are therefore not eligible to serve on the Nominating Committee). The areas of practice are also limited to Radiation Oncology, Imaging, Academic and Community Practice, which does not entirely represent the diversity of the organization. We should also take steps to ensure that the entered area of practice is consistent with the member’s specialty information, if available. For example, there is one current Board member who has entered only 20% Radiation Therapy as the specialty, but is listed as Academic Therapy as the area of practice.

Recommendation: Amend Rule 3.5 to be more inclusive so that all AAPM members are eligible to be nominated for a position on the Nominating Committee. This will also facilitate future implementation of the next recommendations.

Recommendation: Encourage members to complete their demographic profiles by making it a criterion for eligibility to be nominated for any elected position and perhaps even committee appointments.

Recommendation: Once reliable demographic data is available, consider requiring a percentage (or a minimum number) of Board members from certain minority areas. Similar to ASTRO and ACR, the Chair could appoint extra Board members to move closer to the desired (or required) Board demographic representation.

Charge #2: Nomination Process Flexibility

The current nomination process does not restrict the nominating committee from nominating anyone for the Secretary, Treasurer, and BMAL positions, except for the requirement that they have been on the Board of Directors in the past. However, an unwritten rule restricts President-Elect nominations to alternate between Radiation Oncology and Imaging specialties. As mentioned above, the Membership is not given an opportunity to nominate anyone after the Nominating Committee has selected their nominees, but a key component of an open election system is the ability of the Membership to have a voice in the nomination process.

Recommendation: Document the rotation between therapy and non-therapy for President-Elect nominations in the AAPM governance. If this was done in a Rule or Policy, then this could restrict the nominations from the Nominating Committee. To similarly restrict nominations from the Membership would require changing the By-Laws instead.

Charge #3: Nominations from Membership

The current AAPM By-Laws require 2 voting members to nominate someone for BMAL, and nominations for Officer positions are not possible. Robert’s Rules, which is the parliamentary authority for AAPM, suggests that there should be a mechanism for nominations from the floor for all elected positions. Nominations from the floor are only possible at a meeting, so the existing nomination by petition for BMAL is a reasonable alternative if the current election timeline is desired. Alternatively, the nominating committee report could be presented at the Annual Business Meeting to allow nominations from the floor, with the actual election to be held immediately after the Annual Business Meeting. No matter which timeline is chosen, nominations by the Membership for Officer positions should be allowed.

At one point, the AHNP was considering raising the bar for nominations from the membership; however, that would not be consistent with the desire to have nominations from the Membership. For example, ASTRO’s requirements to have 30 voting members sign a petition to have a nomination from the Membership effectively stifles the ability of the Membership to have a voice in the nomination process. Robert’s Rules suggest that good practice would be to allow for nominations from the floor and those only require one Member. Our current standard of having a petition signed by just 2 Members is a low enough bar to be almost equivalent to nominations from the floor, but the practice should be expanded to include nominations for the Officer positions.

Recommendation: Amend By-Law II.2 to remove the requirement for the Board to concur with the Nominating Committee report, and similarly amend Rule 3.5.

Recommendation: Amend By-Law II.2 to allow nominations for EXCOM positions from the membership (same process as Board-Members-At-Large). These changes should still require any nominations from the membership to have prior Board service.

Miscellaneous

Current AAPM governance does not specify that election results are decided by plurality, even though this has been the practice in the past. RONR specifies that elections should be decided by a majority, unless otherwise specified in the governance. With only 2 candidates for a given office, even a small number of write-in ballots could mean that neither candidate gets a true majority of the votes cast. Since the desired result is that the candidate with the most votes win the election, the By-Laws should explicitly state that.

Recommendation: Amend By-Law I.3 and By-Law II.2 to specify that a plurality of votes will decide the election of officers and Board members.

Summary of AHNP recommendations

1.     Amend Rule 3.5 to be more inclusive so that all AAPM members are eligible to be nominated for a position on the Nominating Committee. This will also facilitate future implementation of the next recommendations.

2.     Encourage members to complete their demographic profiles by making it a criterion for eligibility to be nominated for any elected position and perhaps even committee appointments.

3.     Once reliable demographic data is available, consider requiring a percentage (or a minimum number) of Board members from certain minority areas. Similar to ASTRO and ACR, the Chair could appoint extra Board members to move closer to the desired (or required) Board demographic representation.

4.     Document the rotation between therapy and non-therapy for President-Elect nominations in the AAPM governance. If this was done in a Rule or Policy, then this could restrict the nominations from the Nominating Committee. To similarly restrict nominations from the Membership would require changing the By-Laws instead.

5.     Amend By-Law II.2 to remove the requirement for the Board to concur with the Nominating Committee report, and similarly amend Rule 3.5.

6.     Amend By-Law II.2 to allow nominations for EXCOM positions from the membership (same process as Board-Members-At-Large). These changes should still require any nominations from the membership to have prior Board service.

7.     Amend By-Law I.3 and By-Law II.2 to specify that a plurality of votes will decide the election of officers and Board members.

Respectfully Submitted,

Bhudatt R Paliwal PhD, Chair AHNP