What the letters after my name owe

I have two sets of letters after my name, FRSA and FRGS, and the honest thing to say about them first is that they are read as credentials and they are not. Nobody sat an examination for them. They are fellowships, memberships of two old societies that elect people who share their aims, and the temptation, for the fellow and for the reader, is to treat them as a mark of standing. Their history says otherwise. Both societies began as bodies that owned a problem and paid people to work on it, and a fellowship, read the way its founders would have read it, is a claim on the fellow rather than a compliment to them. This post is about what the letters owe, and it ends with a test I apply to my own.

A society that paid for solutions

The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce was founded in 1754 by William Shipley, a drawing master from Northampton, on a proposal that was more like a prize fund than a club. The society would announce problems and pay premiums to whoever solved them: a dye that did not fade, a method of raising a crop, a way of producing a material Britain was importing. According to the society's own history, by 1764 it was publishing 380 prize categories across six committees, and by 1766 the premiums it had paid out totalled 16,625 pounds, an enormous sum for a voluntary body. Its response to fears of a timber shortage was a medal for whoever planted the most trees each year, and Anton Howes, the society's historian, reckons in Arts and Minds that the medal winners planted at least sixty million of them.

The Geographical Society of London, founded in 1830 and chartered by Queen Victoria in 1859, owned a different problem: the map was not finished. It existed to fund and record expeditions, and its list of the people it backed reads like the index of nineteenth-century exploration, Darwin's circle, Livingstone, Scott, Shackleton. Membership meant contributing to a body that sent people into blank spaces on the map and published what they found. The letters came later. FRGS means Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, elected by the existing fellows, and the society today has around 16,500 members; the RSA elects fellows from over 80 countries and has more than 30,000 of them.

What changed, and what did not

The bars above measure the change in the model. In 1764 the society's output was a list of problems with prices attached, and a person's relationship to it was defined by which problem they had worked on. Today both societies' most visible output is the roll of people they have elected, and a person's relationship to them is a subscription and a pair of letters. That is not a fall from grace; a body with thirty thousand members cannot run a prize fund the way a body of a few hundred did, and both societies still run programmes, grants and publications that carry the old purpose forward. But the change moved the obligation from the society to the fellow. The society no longer names your problem. You have to.

That is what a fellowship was always for, underneath. A fellowship is membership of a problem-owning body, and its value is the obligation it places on the fellow to contribute to the problem. The premiums made that explicit, because the only way to be involved with the Society of Arts in 1760 was to have solved or funded something. The modern election makes it implicit, and implicit obligations are the ones that decay into decoration.

The postnominal test

So here is the test, in two questions. Can you name the problem your fellowship exists to work on? And can you say what you contributed to it in the last year? If the answer to either is no, the letters are decoration, however honestly they were earned, and the honest response is either to do something about the second question or to stop using the letters.

The test has a property that credentials lack: it can be failed after it was passed. A degree, once earned, is earned. A fellowship under this reading is renewed by contribution, and a year without any is a year in which the letters quietly stopped meaning what they say. That is the sense in which the founders would have understood membership, since a subscriber to the premium fund who stopped subscribing stopped being involved, and it is the sense the modern election has to recover on its own, because nobody sends a reminder.

It also has a limit that should be stated. The test measures use, not worth. A fellow who does nothing visible for the problem may be doing a great deal invisibly, and a fellow who does a great deal for the problem may not be able to name it in the society's terms. The test is for the person holding the letters, applied to themselves; it is a poor tool for judging anyone else's.

Applying it to my own

The RSA's problem, in its founding charter's words, was to embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve manufactures and extend commerce, alongside relieving poverty and securing employment; in modern terms, the society's work is about how communities and economies can be made to work for the people in them. I can name that. What I contribute to it is narrower than the charter: the philanthropy I do is directed at digital access and opportunity for children, which is one small corner of the problem of communities working for their people, and the work I do building software for small businesses is, at a stretch, enterprise emboldened one client at a time. That is an honest answer to the second question and it is not a large one. It passes the test, and it passes it modestly, and the year-on-year version of the question is whether the corner grows.

The RGS's problem is geography: the discipline of where things are and why, and what it means for the people who live there. I can name that too, and the honest answer to the second question is thinner. My connection to geography is the geography of access, the fact that a child's chances depend heavily on the place they were born, which is the thread that runs through the philanthropy, and it is a connection I would struggle to defend to a field geographer as a contribution to their discipline. By the test's own terms, the FRGS is closer to decoration than the FRSA, and I would rather say so than let the letters imply otherwise. The year I have to change that is this one.

Why write this down

The reason to publish a test that finds one's own letters wanting is the same reason the premium scheme worked: a public obligation is harder to let decay than a private one. The founders of both societies understood that a name attached to a problem was a commitment, and they built institutions that made the commitment visible, first as prizes and then as fellowships. The visibility is what survived. What the fellow does with it did not come with the letters, and it is the only part that was ever worth anything.