Take it easy this conference season

We’ve been writing this column for long enough now that we’ve mustered the courage to take on a topic sure to stir controversy. Isn’t that what universities are all about, after all? 

Amid the many milestones of the academic year — the fall return to classes, reading week, the end of the semester — there is one that occurs just as the spring flowers come into bloom: conference season.  

The groundwork for this season is laid in the fall, as calls for papers circulate for colloquia, conferences and talks, both in Canada and abroad. Submitting a proposal is just the first step: as the acceptances pile up and spring draws near, it’s time to buckle down and prepare the paper for presentation. This comes on top of balancing winter course evaluations, ongoing research projects and committee meetings. Sound familiar? We wrote about overwork in a previous column. 

In today’s column, we hope to elicit your reflections on conferences and how they fit into academic life. In essence: why should you participate in a symposium, colloquium or conference? The usual answers come to mind: to test out ideas, to share new knowledge with a specialized audience, or to promote research findings within a community of peers. Conferences may also serve to build or enlarge professional networks. And, though this may not be an end in itself, presenting at a conference may also add a line to your resumé.  

That said, if you’ve ever been part of an evaluation committee for tenure, promotion, or research grants, you know that scientific and professional talks generally don’t count for much. And yet, we’ve noticed that they are often over-represented on our colleagues’ CVs compared to academic publications (peer-reviewed articles, book chapters or monographs). In our capacity as deans we’ve participated in evaluations within several fields, and we can confirm that, even outside of our own field of educational sciences, we commonly see a ratio of five talks for every published article. 

Think about everything that goes into a conference presentation. Not only do you have to write the proposal and the presentation, but you also have to factor in travel time — often several days if it’s an international conference, or if you work at a university outside of a major city. It may cost several thousand dollars of your publicly funded grant money to spend a week at a conference, for the sake of one or two 20-minute talks (sometimes less) and a few Q&A sessions that often fall by the wayside due to overscheduling. Online conferences cut costs and travel time, but they hardly offer the same networking opportunities. 

Readers may have guessed by now that we have a nuanced, even critical, view of the usefulness of conferences. That’s not to say that we don’t participate in the occasional conference. But we’ve encountered various problematic situations at these events — and we’d guess we’re not alone.  

Our non-exhaustive list: talks that have been moved or cut short (sometimes by half); talks given to a nearly empty room; audiences full of people we already meet on a regular basis; presentations by doctoral who are only there to add a line to their CV. And what about the odd “Lost in transit” sign hung where a poster ought to be, or the occasional colleague who’s more interested in the vacation destination than the conference itself? 

For all of these reasons, we encourage you to exercise moderation this conference season. Some are certainly worth your while, but our advice is to choose wisely. When you think about it, are scholars really obliged to present at all these conferences? Doesn’t it make more sense to target specific events based on your professional goals? For example, which conference will help you most to develop or strengthen your network at a certain point in your career? Will your paper be published after you present it? If so, this will enhance the impact of your work and give you more value for the time spent. Do the conference organizers intend to compile the presentations in an issue of a peer-reviewed journal? Would this be preferable to publishing your work in a collection of non-peer-reviewed conference proceedings on little-read website? 

The conference-season frenzy raises other concerns, too. Long-distance travel is hardly compatible with sustainable development, and may not be the most responsible use of your research grants. 

In short, we’re hoping to discourage conference overcommitment. Every year conference season rolls around, and every year some people feel compelled to participate. But just because we’ve always done things a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s the best way. 

We’re not arguing for an end to conferences. By all means, let’s keep them —but  bear in mind that their original purpose was to bridge a gap between people (who, at the time, couldn’t communicate regularly), and not to remind us just how much that gap no longer exists.