Candidates for APA President
Rosie Phillips Bingham is vice president for student affairs and professor at The University of Memphis. Bingham received her BA from Elmhurst College and MA and PhD degrees from The Ohio State University. Bingham began her career as an assistant psychology professor at Ohio Dominican College in Columbus, Ohio, where she focused on academic effectiveness among college students. She then became a staff psychologist, adjunct professor and later associate director of the University of Florida Counseling Center. Bingham moved to the University of Memphis Counseling Center with a charge to establish an APA-accredited internship and to expand the outreach services of the university counseling center. Bingham later became assistant vice president and has been vice president since 2003. Bingham is a licensed health-care provider and has ABPP in counseling psychology.
Bingham's contributions to psychology are numerous. She has served as president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, the International Association of Counseling Services and APA Div. 17 (Society of Counseling Psychology). Within APA, Bingham has also chaired the Board for Professional Affairs, served on the Ethics Committee, the task force to assess the change in structure of the annual convention, and on the transition team for President Richard Suinn. Bingham is active as a Council of Representatives member from Div. 17. During her tenure on COR, she served as chair of the Caucus for the Optimal Utilization of New Talent and is on the Executive Committee of the Women's Caucus. Because of her commitment to bringing issues of science forth into APA governance, Bingham chaired a committee for the Coalition of Scientists and Practitioners that worked to establish the top science priorities for the caucus. Along with Drs. Lisa Porche-Burke, Derald Wing Sue and Melba Vasquez, Bingham founded the National Multicultural Conference and Summit in 1999. The summit focused on cutting-edge multicultural psychology research, science and practice. The summit was so successful that the four were asked to coordinate a 2001 follow-up summit.
Bingham has published numerous articles and book chapters, and co-edited one major book. Her scholarship has focused primarily on multicultural career counseling. Bingham has provided foundational models for career counseling with ethnic-minority men and women (with Ward and Fouad). Bingham and Ward have published two instruments that directly help practitioners obtain multicultural information from clients and counselors. Bingham has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Counseling Psychology, the Journal of College Student Development and the Journal of Counseling and Development. She currently serves on the boards of In Session for the Journal of Clinical Psychology and the Journal of Career Assessment.
Bingham is a fellow of Divs. 1 (Society for General Psychology), 17 and 35 (Society for the Psychology of Women) and a member of Divs. 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues) and 51 (Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity). Bingham is chair of the Board of the Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis, a philanthropic organization focusing on economic self-sufficiency for women.
Phillips Bingham's candidate statement
Exclusion is easy but Inclusion is Power. APA is a 150,000 member organization of some of the most able minds in the world. We should be leading the world toward peace and humanity. When we have factions and fractures, our power is diluted and we do not take on the major issues of our time. We must draw a circle that includes all of our practitioners, all of our scientists, all people of color, all international psychologists, all state and regional associations, genders, religions, all with disabilities, all gays, lesbians, bisexuals, all orientations, all ages, all ethnicities. In APA we have been working on welcoming many of these groups and have a focus on multiculturalism and diversity, but we have much more to do. Some of our colleagues who are scientists need to feel more welcome. Some of our practitioners need to feel that APA is more relevant. We must devote time to drawing a bigger circle that results in a much stronger and more inclusive organization and profession.
I want a more powerful and inclusive APA because we need to help academic programs that get threatened with closure when they are not bringing in enough grant dollars. We need a more powerful APA in order to generate more research dollars from federal agencies. We need a more powerful APA so that practitioners can earn a respectful living. We need a more powerful and inclusive APA so that our scientists and our practitioners can design the most effective interventions for individuals and organizations. We need our scientists and practitioners to help us figure out how to end violence in our streets, end conflicts, get out of wars and stay out of them. It is time for APA to step up, include all of us and deal with what matters.
