Couple of questions:

This "particularly heavy conference stretch" involves (including travel days) only Fridays through Mondays?

In terms of "juggling" conferences and teaching classes, when an irresistable force (a conference) meets and immoveable object (a class), which gives way?

Gowexu: depends on the conference, doesn't it? If it's a conference that meets only once every two years, focuses on my sub-sub-subspecialty, and has my mentor as the guest of honor ( a senior scholar who comes to the States all too infrequently), there's no contest. The conference wins.

But perhaps I feel this way because my institution values my contribution so little that they have asked me to dispense with 10% of my work (theoretically, though not in practice) for 10% less pay, and I wasn't getting paid all that well to start with. It is getting along quite well without me, or so our Chancellor says, and therefore I might as well spend my own time and my own money furthering my research agenda. (My "assigned duties," my Aunt Sally.)

I suppose I am irritated because I am at an institution that *counts* on my self-immolation to make up for its own terrible treatment of students: it's ok for the administration to raise fees by 32% and cut our pay by 10% and raise our class size, but *heaven forbid* we compromise our students' class experience in any way. The administration also counts on cranking up my work load so I cannot write my way out of my job--ever. I don't want to participate in my own subjugation, thank you.

Dr. Jackson, I wish I were compensated for attending conferences. I had to cut back because along with my low pay, I could not manage the debt.

renprof, your point about how these experiences pivot on distinctions between ostensible academic "haves and have nots" is important to emphasize. The heated debates about my last post are worth the effort when such points come to the fore.

goxewu, say more about what you're getting at. Are you lobbying for the complete abolitioin of all academic conferences?

And, goxewu, what is your field and what kind of an institution (Research I, 4 year liberal arts, ...?) are / were you at?

It seems to me that Professor Jackson is taking the comments--and the commenters--far more seriously than they deserve. Probably far more seriously that their students, colleagues, department heads, and families do. Taken as a whole, the earlier comments reeked of barely veiled envy, sanctimonious "concern" for the poor abandoned classes, and a ludicrously judgmental attitude toward a teacher whose principal "offense" was being honest about conferences.

The funniest accusation, imo, is that Professor Jackson has been guilty of "careerism" and "self-promotion." Should he write his columns anonymously, never mentioning what he himself is doing? Could be tricky. No doubt the immaculate modesty of the commenters is the reason for their pseudonyms.

I appreciate the reasonable desire of the commenter I assume to be anthropology professor at the University of Cincinnati (hope you make a BCS bowl, by the way) to know similar about me. But I'll cooperate only part of the way by saying that my field is in the humanities and that I taught full-time over the many years at three R1's and one second-tier state university. I've done part-time guest teaching at an Ivy and an SLAC.

Of course, I could be lying, and really a disgruntled troll with no particular credentials at all. But Professor Foster is probably expert enough to analyze my kitchen middings, as it were, and reconstruct my civilization, as it were, from them.

As long as I've got the floor, a couple of ripostes:

Renprof's blowing off a class if the conference is important enough to him/her is, to me, like someone who'll keep at date with a nerd but if the homecoming queen/king calls, the hell with ettiquette.

dank48 seems to think that Prof. Jackson's being "honest" about conferences exempts him from criticism about attending them. First, "honesty" is praiseworthy because (perhaps only if) it's courageous, and the courage Prof. Jackson displays is hint-by-context that he might be blowing off a class here and there in order to attend a conference, especially during "a particularly heavy conference stretch" (I'm quoting that from memory from another thread). If so, and since he's an Assoc. Dean for Undergradute Studies, and since there's lots of commentary on "Brainstorm" about teaching, and since its' "The Chronicle of Higher EDUCATION" and not "The Chronicle of Higher Research Only," it seems reasonable, if not outrightly necessary, to ask questions about the relation of conference-going to that quite common student complaint, "The professor cancelled class."

Attending conferences, even if only one per year, should be considered part of the professor's professional responsibilities. I always choose seesions about which I know the least, and they are energizing even if I leave confused.
The point about the inequities in funds available for such travel is most relevant. The Have's should remember their fortunate situation.

Thank you, Goxewu. Of course my 'signature" or whatever it's called could be a lie too, and I could really be Queen Marie of Rumania (yes, it's RUmania, not ROmania). But I somehow don't think either of us is lying.

I dont think I agree with you on the general leval of value of conferences but I do agree we oughtn't "blow classes off". I always told classes where I was going, what I was doing, and if the paper I was summarizing was relevant to the class, told em as much as practicable about it. And again where practicable had some kind of activity in the class(es) I missed, as for instance having shown a pertinent film or video tape with a GA primed to stop it at particular places to point particular things out. It took a lot of work to go to conferences and when the "returns" began diminishing, I stopped going. And since classes and preparing for classes was the "funnermost" part of my job, it would have been self defeating to have used a conference to get out of class. And I was fortunate enough that getting a reputation for giving good presentations at conferences got me invited on a few occasions to give named lecture / colloquia series at other universities.

I have benefitted even more than most in my department from the computer and internet rise. Being the only linguist, ethnoastronomer, and Balkan-N Asian specialist in the department and almosst in the university, I was enabled through the computer rise to have a level of activity and participation in the field I wouldnt have otherwise had. And through Ask a Linguist, it enabled me to help "teach the world". But there are some things that are more readily done face to face, or in ordinary conversational interchanges.

And our experience has been that faculty who are known in the field through oral and personal presence interchanges as well as publication have an easier time getting students into graduate schools, some professional schools, or related nonacademic employment. For one thing, if we know somebody and have seen how they operate in a public forum, we may have a better idea how to evaluate a letter of recommendation from them.

And thanks for your good wishes for our Bearcats in the BCS running.

To push this just a bit further:

Why don't the people who SCHEDULE conferences confine them to the summers, that month-plus interval between semesters most schools have, or the weekends, when there'll be the least conflict with classes?* Realist that I am, I suspect it's a one-hand-washes-the-other deal that offers attendees the chance to say, "Hey, I can't help it if they scheduled that conference at which I've got to present my important paper in the middle of classes."

*I'd still like a tally of exactly how many classes Prof. Jackson is going to miss during his "particularly heavy conference stretch," but that's probably wishing for too much. And "stretch" suggests not, say, four conferences per academic year evenly spaced, but rather a three-week or month-long skein during which Prof. Jackson will hardly have time to touch ground at Penn. From his posts, I'd guess that Prof. Jackson might be closing in on Stan Katz for the (ahem!) conference championship.

goxewu:

Are you not getting/reading my replies? I'm not trying to duck your question. I've answered it twice! The conferences during this "particular heavy conference stretch" have started during the week, but I teach from Tuesdays to Thursdays. So, I leave Philly on Fridays and return on Mondays, not missing any classes. Of course, it does mean that I miss some of the conferences, but I don't believe that missing a couple days of a conference are a huge deal. As far as I'm concerned, they don't really rev up until the weekends anyway.

And I don't think that piling all the academic conferences into the summer months could work at all. There would be even more ridiculous overlap between conferences, triple and quadruple bookings. Also, faculty often use the summer to conduct research--or to work on the writing that they couldn't get done during the academic semester. If they gave that up, the creation of scholarly knowledge might grind to a complete halt.

Reading your replies, Prof. Jackson, but obviously not "getting" them. Sorry. My apology.

Of course, only professors with a Tues.- Wed. - Thurs. on-campus schedule can do what Prof. Jackson does. Anybody who teaches classes on Fridays or Mondays is going to have to...well, you know.

But as to conferences during the summer:

How many conferences does (let's say a humanities) professor have to attend during a year? Two seems reasonable. One in January (during the "winter conference season"), one in June or July (during the "summer conference season") sounds sensible. The number of professors who operate in two fields, e.g., history and political science, and who "must" keep conference-current in two fields is small. They'd just have to be more selective. And the number of professors who'd have to return from doing research they can do only in Borneo or France to attend an American conference is small, too. (And a flight from Paris to Philly for a conference isn't much more difficult than a flight from L.A. to Philly for one.)

Here's my guess: The academic conference industry is about one-third necessary and truth-in-packaging, about one-third mostly unnecessary but well-intentioned, and about one-third boondoggle. by boondoggle, I mean "You invite me to your conference, and I'll invite you to mine," a freebie or at least tax-deductible R&R trip from someplace like Lafayette, LA to San Francisco under the veneer of alleged academic necessity, a chance to career-network at least partly on somebody else's dime, etc.

Academe could chop it by at least 50 percent and not lose any substantive circulation of scholarly knowledge. They didn't hold so many conferences in the days before air travel was so commonplace and scholarly knowledge seemed to circulate just fine, and there's no reason why, in the age of the computer and virtual conferencing, they couldn't hold a lot fewer with little or no damage to the circulation of scholarly knowledge.

Prof. Jackson may have done academe an unintended service with his post on conference-going, which unintentionally shone a light on the academic equivalent of Congressional junkets (which are also about a third legit, a third of marginal use, and a third paid vacations).

goxewu:

I've taught on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, too. At Duke, we went back and forth from semester to semester. Many academic conferences try to pack things into weekends, which means that I would just leave after my class on Fridays. I actually teach on Fridays next semester, so I'll have to deal with such a scenario in the Spring.

Part of what makes the conference grind so tough is that you do have to teach all the while, reading on planes and trains to make sure that you are prepared for class lectures. That is EXACTLY what a scholarly life looks like these days, no? It isn't either-or. It is both-and.

And do you really think that a third of all academic conferences are "You invite me to your conference, and I'll invite you to mine" tax-deductible R&R trips with only "the veneer of alleged academic necessity"? That sounds like another academic universe to me. Do I think that we could cut down the number of conferences a bit without losing any sleep at night. Definitely. But I don't imagine there is a conspiracy of academics conning/gaming the system to get free vacations.

Hey, if we want something for academics to cut back on, how about a five-year moratorium on all scholarly publications (books and articles) so that I can finally try to catch up on all of my reading?! I would, only half-jokingly, vote for such a measure.

As a doc candidate soon to finish, I would like to mention the sincere value I have gotten from the conferences I have attended, both as a training ground and an opportunity to network.

I also appreciated Dr. Jackson's admitted ambivalence about conference activities in his original post, as well as the various viewpoints on conferences from many of the commenters. It is interesting to see the perspectives of people farther along in academia than I.

The weird obsession with coverage of Dr. Jackson's classes-- well, that I find a little odd. The suggestions that conferences could all be in the summer, or that academics don't really need to attend them? Unrealistic.

re #12:

In his OP, Prof. Jackson said, "I teach on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays this semester, SO I haven't had to miss any class sessions for conferences, even during this recent stretch." [Emphasis mine] The clear implication is that if he had to teach on Mondays and/or Fridays, he WOULD have to miss class.

What's the point? It's not a "weird obsession with coverage of Dr. Jackson's classes" (#13). Rather it's that lots of OTHER professors attending the same conferences as Prof. Jackson do teach on Mondays and/or Fridays and, unless they just happen to be sampling the exact same parts of the conferences as Prof. Jackson, lots of other professors are probably missing classes back at their schools.

re #13:

Of course conference attendees such as bthomas5 testify to the "sincere value" (sincere?) they get from conferences because they get to go to them. What we've yet to hear is testimony from people left back on campus that there's a net, tangible educational gain (and not some distant, cloudy "Down the road, my attending this conference reflects favorably on my university"). And we've yet to hear from a student who says, "The tradeoff of my professor cancelling my class with him/her to attend a conference was a net educational gain for me and my classmates."

Although conference attendance is, or can be, a hardship for faculty who need presentations in order to get tenure and promotion and who have to pay to attend conferences out of their own pockets, for the "haves" such as Prof. Jackson and other professors at R1's, Ivies, and SLAC's, they're part of the perqs of position. To suggest that conferences be severely cut back gets the same entitlement cries of protest that you hear when, say, government officials of a certain level are told that their government cars/drivers are going to be taken away and that they'll have to take public transport or drive their own cars. Their reasons for why having to drive their own cars or take public transport will hamper them in the performance of their public duties usually sound about as believable as professors saying that their performance of their pedagogical duties will suffer if they can't actually travel to conferences, but instead have to get the information otherwise. This attitude, and little else, is what makes shrinking or confining the conference boondoggle "unrealistic."

Today, the qualities of virtual conferencing--reading the papers online, seeing presentations via video, asking questions and making comments via conference calls, and e-mail/iChat/Skype communication with participants, etc.--make the alleged irreplaceable aspects of in-the-flesh conferences (experiencing the je ne sais quois of the speakers in person, seeing what a potential job candidate is like performing in public, etc.) seem pretty thin. And as the virtual conferencing technologies get better--as they will, pretty fast--the putative need for professors to sit for hours on planes and trains, to drain budgets with hotel bills and, yes, to miss classes, because a two-day conference requires four days off all told will seem less and less credible.

(I'm talking the humanities here. The hard sciences may have better reasons for why in-the-flesh conferences are so necessary.)

As someone who has always had as many or more inter-disciplinary project colleagues in the sciences as in the humanities, I'd say that the science conference junket is even more problematic -- the sciences generally indulge in transatlantic (and transpacific) conference-organizing far more than those in the humanities ever do. And I'll spare you the stories of all the "hook-ups" which have nothing to do with academic research and presentations.

Recall that the sciences have a very different relationship to publication: all the late-breaking stuff is in pre-publication venues; paper publication often only reifies results already well-known in the field. Nevertheless, the relationship of the conference to the size and perceived importance of the sponsoring grant funding is clearly the driving force in the location of many science conferences.

One need only survey the CHE's "Events in Academe" to see that conference-proliferation does bear out many of the criticisms voiced in these comments. However, as someone who organized several state-wide, regional, and (participated in organizing) even national conferences, sometimes they do indeed serve a unique purpose in creating academic project networks.

As to the technology's replacing the face-to-face interaction, actually, in my experience (and I believe there is some research supporting this), technology works best when it supplements rather than replaces face-to-face human interaction. As part of a SUNY consortium which tried in the nineties to coordinate campuses via teleconferencing on a FIPSE project, we quickly learned that a conference with actual presence -- for the one-on-ones and the seminars where some of the nitty-gritty questions could be asked and explored in a way that texting and instant messaging today would not enable -- provided the personal contact which was obviously essential to make the technologically-enabled conferences actually work.