Wither/Whither the ACM

Two editorials in the July issue of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery ask about the decay and future of the organization itself.Jim Larus, editor-in-chief of the CACM, writes Wither ACM? Publish and Perish?ACM no longer has broad appeal as a professional organization, does not advance many members’ careers, and may not be a valuable affiliation in a more diverse technical world...It is time to recognize that ACM has shifted from functioning as a professional society for the academic computing community to a professional publisher....It is time for ACM members to debate what kind of organization ACM should be and how to remake it into the society they want to belong to!Vardi writes Whither Computing? starting with the concerns of PhD students whether they made the right choice by going into computer science and ending with a call for ACM to lead the conversation.A new team will assume the leadership of ACM on July 1, 2026, following the current general…