When The Homeschoolers Throw a Better Convention Than You, It's Time To Rethink Your Convention Strategy
Final Notes from the Homeschool Convention, with Reference to My Normal Academic Conference-Going
It’s great to have big organizational meetings, but who are they for, and who should these things serve? The final in a series on the homeschool convention, what it illuminates about my ordinary academic conferences, and what it means to attend to the needs of a population you purport to serve. Read the first and second installments here.
What Is An Academic Conference For? An Insider’s Account
For the last several years, the Fall is my conference season. The bread and butter meeting for people who do anything with religion academically is the annual joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. For the uninitiated, these are two of the largest guilds in the world for this kind of study, and the annual meeting (pre-COVID) usually drew anywhere from 7,000-10,000 people. You’d better pack a lot of granola bars, because it’s frequently impossible to get a good dinner without a long wait.1
I’ve presented three times at the national meeting, and to be fair, each time I’ve gone, I’ve enjoyed myself. But it’s mostly academic Disneyland: lots of rides and lots of fun, but no one goes to watch the documentaries. It’s a great time to catch up with colleagues from across the country, to eat some good food, and to (very occasionally) listen to a good paper. But after going to this meeting for nearly 20 years now, it’s 90% just meeting with friends and editors.2 This is less true with my other annual meeting: the Society of Christian Ethics. There, I’ve presented at three times as well, but am much more invested in the papers and the topics. It’s also a much more niche group of maybe 600 people: the papers are longer and more in-depth and the conversations more rich.
In short: you go to the AAR for the fun and the networking. If I really want to read a paper, email the author. Sitting through hours of comments-disguised-as-questions is for suckers.
This is my frame for conference going, and it took going to a very different convention this summer—the homeschool convention—to see what’s so desperately broken about the arrangement present in the AAR-SBL.
These academic guilds ostensibly exist because of the need of its members to have spaces for intellectual discourse. And as far as a mission statement goes, it’s fine. The problem with both of this is, however, that their material structures are built for realities which no longer exist. To attend the American Academy of Religion, by the numbers:
—registration fee: 300$
—membership fee (to get the lower rates): 200$
—copious self-abasement: priceless
And this is just to get in the front door. You’re not talking hotels, flights, food, travel to the airport, anything. Typically, when I attend, I bunk with three other people into two queen beds, take the cheap flights, eat junk, and it still runs easily over $1,000 altogether. Thankfully, I have a travel budget from my department, but this exhausts the whole thing. To attend the SCE requires about the same.
This kind of conference was built for a world in which there were many full-time positions which typically came with professional development budgets, the need to network with colleagues, and the understanding from universities is one that takes not only smarts but time to think.
Every year, there is handwringing about what to do in a world where more and more people who would attend this are adjuncts without full-time jobs, or who lack travel budgets, or who have qualms about the sheer amount of resources and money these involve.
And every year, the prices go up, and fewer people get traditional academic jobs, almost as if helping people achieve this end of years of study was outside the end toward which a professional guild exists.
Who Do These Things Even Serve?
Increasingly, this is…a very good question. Both of my normal conferences ostensibly serve their members. But let’s dig a little deeper, based primarily on the first previous observation: the rising costs of attendance, and the inability of most of those interested in the topic to pony up hundreds of dollars in fees before they go in the front door.
Case in point: the American Academy of Religion—the umbrella organization for all things academic religion—just advertised a volunteer position for their journal. This is a company which rakes in quite a bit of money annually, and it asks for one of its members to take up the duty of helping it generate this money for free. If you’ve ever done any work for an academic journal, you’ll know that the publishing house for these are doing just fine, and the thought of asking for free labor is a preposterous one. You have, in other words, a gap between the aspirations of the organization and its members’ reality which continually is bridged by “mission” and “value”, ignoring that what the members actually want is to not pay hundreds of dollars for sessions that half the people don’t attend and a quarterly journal which immediately lines my trashcan.
Let me contrast this to my experience at the Great Homeschool Convention. All caveats fully registered about the ethos of some of the booths and speakers, the convention itself cost 50$, and for that 50$, you could bring your entire family to the sessions if you wanted. It operated with low frills, packed lunches, and no expectations of this being a luxurious event: you’re parents and families spending two and a half days talking about homeschool curriculum and strategies for teaching math and homesteading. Because the topic itself was serious, nothing else was needed to lend gravity to why we were there.
Among the homeschool convention, there was a seriousness of why you were there: everyone’s doing this and looking for resources. When I’m at AAR, I see this look in the eye of grad students, hungry for connections and for information, trying to find their place in the broader world of religious studies. But I think, along with an increasing lack of understanding of what even counts as religion, there is a loss of this kind of fervor across the board: few are hungry, most are tired. Increasingly, I think of the AAR as falling under Neil Postman’s criticisms of an entertainment culture: when a medium produces information that has no immediate context or use, it has to build up apparatuses to make what it does appear useful and serious.3
The Need for Anti-Utopian Thinking
The difference here I can be sliced in various ways, but it comes down to whether one engages in utopian or anti-utopian thinking about how to pull this kind of conference off—and by extension, how to be an institution which is of material good.
The term “utopia” has various meanings, ranging from “an ideal circumstance” to “otherworldly and dreamy”, but the literal word utopia means “eu” (no) “topos” (place). Utopias are desirable not because they are ideal first and foremost, but because they do not have to contend with the real limits and contours of time and space. They do not have to acknowledge that their attendees are short on budgets and time, and don’t have time to fritter with nonsensical sessions. Instead, they can carry on saying that if adjuncts will just be patient, we can appeal to the better angels of the most monied and make a conference built for the masses.
Anti-utopian thinking doesn’t mean not aspiring to a better world, or working for the benefit of the members, and it certainly doesn’t mean being lowest common denominator. It does mean recognizing that organizations have to live in the world—and are built from the same world—are there participants. I’ve written frequently on institutions and their inhuman presumptions in the past, but now, it occurs to me that one way of turning this over is that they’re utopian in the root sense of the word—ungrounded, hovering above creation, and thus unsure of where they fit in the world or what it would mean to advocate for real flesh and blood people.
In the end, the homeschoolers threw a better convention because they knew not only the reason they were getting together, but as importantly, who they were asking to get together. There are many lessons here—that a vacancy of purpose means an invention of fake purposes, that a detachment from the populations you serve lead to less than wise decisions. But the main one to take away here is that the moral life lies close to the ground, attentive to the lives of its people, and that no institution devoted to this end can afford to be otherwise.
For a few years in the first decade, these two societies listened to a very loud minority who thought that people who read the Bible and people who study religion should meet independently. I mean, I get it, but they made the decision to do that, and then 70% of their constituents came back in a poll to say “We really hate this decision.” This is the level of competency that frequently rules the AAR/SBL.
The camaraderie elements of these have both dimmed in recent years, as more and more, I’m reminded of who’s no longer there: friends who are no longer in the academy, or whose travel budgets have been squeezed out by their departments, or who are buried in so much extra teaching that they eventually quit being interested in the conversations of these societies.
There are many academic meetings which have a strong sense of mission and purpose. And it’s entirely possible that the AAR suffers this malaise because of its size. But every time there’s a political event that the board disagrees with, a statement is put out by the board, ostensibly on behalf of the members. Reader: no one cares what the AAR, or really any academic institution, thinks about any public issue. This, to my mind, is another example of the AAR as an entity without a clear vision of what its subject is (religion), meaning that it produces fragments of knowledge (theories of religious knowledge, etc.) which then have to have a context for justifying their existence (public statements). Now, what national immigration policy have to do with the study of religious experience as a human phenomenon? I have no idea. What immigration has to do with the commitments of a covenental people whose God tells them to care for the foreigner? That’s a very different story.