The American Sociological Association’s annual meeting drew about 6,000 people to San Francisco last month to share and discuss the latest research in the field, make professional connections, and catch up with colleagues. But missing from the crowd were scholars like Julie E. Hartman-Linck, an associate professor of sociology at Frostburg State University, in western Maryland, which provides her with only $200 a year for conference travel.
“I’d love to be connected to my professional association,” says Ms. Hartman-Linck. “But it really remains to be seen when I’ll go to an annual meeting again.”
Even where professors can get money to travel, they often find it falls short. For those off the tenure track, paltry wages and no access to institutional funds can keep them from attending scholarly meetings altogether.
With the face of the professoriate changing and slashed travel budgets not bouncing back, more professors say they’re shut out of the academic meetings long seen as a staple in their fields. Although attendance hasn’t decreased across the board, those trends chip away at the diversity of such gatherings, some say, narrowing the perspectives represented there.
Academics are challenging the meetings as is, publicly questioning whether scholarly associations are doing enough to help all faculty members—not just the ones with plenty of travel money—attend and feel engaged. Sociologists started a petition this summer promoting inclusion, and some scholars held an unofficial gathering before the Modern Language Association’s conference this year to encourage frank discussion of common frustrations, many of them about finances and the job market.
With more conversation than change so far, it’s hard to tell what it will take to keep a variety of voices at the big academic meetings, or to bring more in. The goal doesn’t seem to be to reinvent the events that hold so much allure for many scholars, but to put attending in reach for more of them.
Going to the sociology conference again would let Ms. Hartman-Linck “recharge my research batteries,” she says. “And I get to bring that research that I hear about into the classroom,” she adds. “It really makes a difference.”
One of her alternatives is the Eastern Sociological Society’s meeting, which was in Baltimore in February. It was a much smaller event only 150 miles away, but the $200 still didn’t cover it.
Petition for Access
Some sociologists recently decided it was time to put the meeting on the association’s agenda. Money wasn’t the only issue blocking access, they said. In July they started an online petition calling for the group to reconsider its traditional August meeting.
“The American Sociological Association (ASA) benefits immeasurably from its increasingly diverse membership,” the petition says. “The current timing and location of the annual meetings pose a series of particular difficulties for members who have fewer resources, who have children or familial responsibilities, or who work at teaching-intensive institutions that begin in August.”
The association should study how meetings could be held in less-expensive cities, the petition suggests, at a time of year that wouldn’t interfere with teaching schedules.
Timing is one factor that has kept Deborah J. Cohan, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort, away from the meeting in recent years. The one last month ended the day before classes at her institution began.
The group’s governing body, known as the council, takes the petition seriously and is planning to reply, says Sally T. Hillsman, executive officer of the association. A special subgroup will look into the petitioners’ concerns, she says, and the council will take them up again at its winter meeting.
Attendance at the association’s annual meeting has fluctuated over the last decade between 5,000 and 6,000 people. The message for now, Ms. Hillsman says, is that the association, which offers some travel grants for graduate students, is trying to make its meeting more accessible.
“We realize the timing can be problematic,” she says. The August date stems from attempts to accommodate graduate students and junior faculty members who can’t easily get away during the academic year, she explains. And moving the meeting to a smaller, less-expensive city might not be as easy as it sounds. Smaller cities usually can’t accommodate several thousand people unless they’re scattered in hotels all over, Ms. Hillsman says, and it’s tough to travel to places that aren’t major transportation hubs.
If he’s lucky, Timothy J. Haney, an associate professor of sociology at Mount Royal University, in Calgary, Alberta, can sometimes make it to the annual meeting. This year he managed to get an institutional grant (about $2,400 U.S.) to cover the bulk of his trip expenses.
“It’s not something I can rely on every year,” he says of the grant. “I go to meetings every two or three years.” This one cost about $2,800, about half of which went to accommodations at one of the conference hotels.
Regional meetings are less expensive, he says, but they don’t hold quite the same appeal. At the main event, “you hear talks on very recent research by some of the leading scholars” and mingle with thousands of sociologists, says Mr. Haney. “It’s fun.”
Meanwhile, he thought about groups that might be excluded—"people at small, liberal-arts colleges or any college with a limited budget,” he says—and signed the petition. “I get that ASA is in a tough position,” he says. “But these are all discussions that we need to have.”
The association, of course, already tackles such issues academically. This year’s conference theme: “Hard Times: The Impact of Economic Inequality on Families and Individuals.” Six sessions were broadcast live online.
Even a group that caters to people who work on the margins of academe, the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, heard from adjuncts this year about making its biennial meeting more inclusive and accessible. Those concerns led to an alternative conference dubbed #altCOCAL.
Straight Talk and Twitter
Not only do some would-be attendees feel as if annual meetings are a stretch, but even when they do go, they may wonder if they belong. A group of graduate students and adjunct faculty members in English and related fields decided recently to organize a separate conference on their own terms.
At the main Modern Language Association conference, “everyone is under extreme pressure to get a job and to present themselves in a particular kind of way,” says one of the subconference’s organizers, Lenora Hanson, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “We needed to have a space that took us away from the pressure that’s a part of that culture.”
The idea was to create a free meeting where graduate students, adjunct faculty members, and even nonacademics could talk frankly with one another about student-loan debt, adjunct labor, and a job market that offers few opportunities to get on the tenure track. They could propose ways to tap into activist strategies, organizers thought, that have worked for groups outside of academe that focus on similar issues.
The first Modern Language Association subconference was held in January, a day before the main meeting. About 100 people attended over a two-day period, says Laura Goldblatt, a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Virginia. They “could say things like, ‘I have $150,000 in student-loan debt, and I don’t have an academic job, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.’”
A second subconference is slated to take place ahead of the next MLA meeting, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Organizers are trying to raise money to pay participants’ way.
Although the association has devoted more attention to issues that were the focus of the subconference in recent years, part-time faculty members still aren’t present in large numbers at the main meeting, says Rosemary G. Feal, the MLA’s executive director. Attendance in general at MLA meetings was nearly 9,000 for about half of the last decade, but since the recession has slipped to just over 7,000.
“We’re very much aware that we have to make special efforts to reach out” to members with all kinds of employment statuses, she says. The association provides a limited number of $400 travel grants to offset the expenses of its members who are graduate students, adjunct faculty members, or unemployed, or who live outside the United States and Canada. It also encourages attendees to tweet, and it recently created an online platform for members to discuss ideas or work together on projects.
Technology makes it easier to extend conversations to a wider group, says Brian Croxall, a lecturer in English at Emory University. A few years ago, he skipped the MLA meeting because he couldn’t afford to go. When a colleague read the paper he was supposed to deliver—on adjuncts missing from the meeting—and Mr. Croxall simultaneously posted it on his blog, it went viral.
“You can still engage even if you’re not there,” he says. “You can follow the conference on Twitter, people are on Facebook, people are blogging, they post their entire talk online immediately after.”
Using the hashtag for the recent sociology meeting, the Twitter user @argyle_sox wrote, "@JessieNYC is tweeting the Sandberg #asa14 session for those of us who wish to observe but can’t attend. Because JessieNYC is awesome.”
In fact, Jessie Daniels, a professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, was posting updates from a session with Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook. “Sandberg: I learned that despite the huge diff’s in culture over the world,” @JessieNYC wrote, “the gender stereotypes are *EXACTLY* the same.”
But a virtual conference wouldn’t fully satisfy members, Ms. Hillsman believes. “There is still a need for face-to-face meetings.”
The six thousand people who showed up in San Francisco last month—some of them despite challenges—are “telling us something with their feet,” Ms. Hillsman says. “But people are rightly concerned,” she says, “and we’re open to new ideas.”
Associations and scholars alike seem to recognize the desire to gather the flock. Researchers in the same field, teachers trying new techniques, job seekers commiserating over a tight market: They still want to connect with a group that understands them.
