The rapid spread of the coronavirus is wreaking havoc on higher education’s business-as-usual, sometimes in unpredictable ways.
The latest casualties came on Monday: The American Council on Education canceled its annual conference, set for March 14 to March 16 in San Diego, and the American Association of Community Colleges pulled the plug on its 100th anniversary meeting, set for March 28 to March 30 near Washington, D.C. Similar announcements will almost certainly follow.
At risk are the conferences and seasonal convenings of higher education’s veritable alphabet soup of associations. Some take place at plush resorts in sunny locations, others in the humble ballrooms of a small-city Hilton or a Ramada Inn.
The gatherings are valuable places for academics and administrators to connect (or cut loose). But for the associations themselves, the meetings are also a significant source of income — more than half of the annual revenue for some small organizations.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
And conferences are logistically complicated: The associations hire high-priced keynote speakers, arrange catering and transportation contracts, court corporate sponsors for support, and set aside whole sections of hotels for the attendees. When a conference is canceled, an organization can be on the hook for some or all of the costs, with sums totaling in the millions. All of that comes at a time when higher-ed associations are already struggling with declining membership and conference attendance.
So with the emergence of the coronavirus, organizers did not decide lightly to cancel the annual meeting of ACE and, three days earlier, the famed South by Southwest conference, in Austin, Tex.
“We’d been monitoring the situation for several weeks and came to the conclusion over the weekend that events had overtaken our ability to plan for them,” said Ted Mitchell, president of ACE. Concerns over the safety of attendees, along with no-travel policies instituted by colleges across the country, had made the association’s meeting untenable.
Now some tricky negotiations need to take place between ACE and the various companies supporting its conference. Mitchell said the vendors and hospitality companies had been willing to work with the organization because “everybody understands that we are in this together.”
“Putting these events together is incredibly complex. Taking them apart is equally complex — maybe even a little more,” said Mitchell, who declined to detail the finances behind the annual conference. “We’ve spent eight months putting our conference together, and we’re now trying to unwind it in a week or two. It’s a load. And it will be a load for other associations that make the same decision.”
Holding On, for Now
Other organizations are considering that very option. The National Association of College and University Business Officers canceled a meeting on higher-education accounting, scheduled for early April in Seattle. Now the organization is monitoring the bookings for its annual conference, which generates about a third of the association’s yearly revenue. This year’s meeting is scheduled to take place in July at the National Harbor complex, just outside Washington, D.C.
Matthew Hamill, the group’s senior vice president for strategy and solutions, said its university members, not the association’s staffers, were driving the decision about whether to hold conferences or not. Many administrators can’t plan to attend a conference that is months away when their campus might be in the midst of a coronavirus crisis.
We’ve spent eight months putting our conference together, and we’re now trying to unwind it in a week or two.
For now, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges intends to hold its annual conference, as planned, also at National Harbor, but in early April. Henry Stoever, president of AGB, said that he had been in contact with national health officials about the fast-changing coronavirus situation and that the health of attendees is the top priority. But the financial considerations for an organization as large as AGB are considerable.
Stoever said the association draws about $1 million from registration fees at the national conference, roughly 6 percent of its annual revenue.
The effects of a cancellation would go well beyond that: AGB has contracts with sponsors, food and beverage suppliers, audio-visual companies, and hotels that cover about 3,000 “room nights” for attendees. It could total more than $1 million in expenses for the association, should the conference be canceled.
Contract clauses allow the association to escape some of its obligations, Stoever noted. A national declaration of a pandemic or a national travel ban would trigger “force majeure” clauses that would nullify portions of the contracts.
Small associations might take a big hit on a canceled conference, but they might also have more room to recover. The National Association of Branch Campus Administrators, for example, expected to draw about a third of its annual revenue from its annual conference, scheduled for mid-April in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
But Joseph Rives, the association’s president and a senior vice president for strategic initiatives at Western Illinois University, said that the organization is managed very conservatively and that it would be able to absorb a loss in revenue thanks to growth in other programs. For now, its conference will go ahead as planned. But Rives and his colleagues are monitoring news from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Society for College and University Planning draws about half of its annual revenue, around $5 million, from face-to-face meetings. SCUP’s annual meeting, scheduled for July in Cleveland, would normally draw a couple of thousand attendees for several days. If the conference is canceled, the organization could end up having to cover some portion of those hotel nights reserved by attendees, said Michael D. Moss, the group’s president. “Hotel attrition for lost room nights is always a major issue for small associations,” he said. “Those contracts can be a significant risk.”
SCUP, like other associations, is looking for ways to absorb those costs — and how to change the offerings and revenue streams in the future. Moss said that SCUP had considered virtual gatherings for years. Now, he suspects, his association and others will move toward more online interactions with members. Both the members and the corporate sponsors have voiced support for that type of engagement, so a virus-caused cancellation might not mean a “terminal hit” for the association.
“We are finding that people are more willing to work with us,” Moss said. “We have probably a higher level of optimism that it’s not terminal because the vendor community, the member community, and the association community are coming together to make sure that we can all move forward together.”
