Why Academic Conferences Suck

A brief complaint

Detail of a lithograph of Michael Faraday delivering a Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution, Public Domain.

Earlier this year, I attended the 2025 Ciceronian Society Conference. This isn’t an ad for them precisely, although if you are a Christian educator and scholar, I would highly recommend checking out their resources. That said, the excellent experience I had at that recent conference (though I ended up cutting my time there short due to weather) compared to other conferences I’ve attended inspired me to do a little bit of intentional reflection about what exactly makes an academic conference “good.” What is it about this one that felt so strong, and about others that have felt so lackluster?

For some background, I have attended quite a few academic conferences. Most often, these are yearly meetings organized by some society or organization, either national groups such as the American Political Science Association or the Association for Political Theory, regional groups such as the Southern Political Science Association, or more narrowly tailored academic associations for particular people or interests, such as the Ciceronian Society. There are other types of academic conferences, which take the form of intensive discussion seminars, and these are special in their own right. For my purposes, I just want to discuss the traditional academic conference.

These conferences, for the uninitiated, follow a fairly standard format: members propose papers by submitting titles and short descriptions of their work to a program committee who sifts through the submissions, accepts or rejects them, and attempts to assemble those papers together into “panels.” These panels usually consist of 3-4 presenters, a discussant, and a “chair” who keeps the trains running on time (the latter two roles often being taken up by participants, but sometimes being independent). Panels usually take place over an hour and a half time slot, where presenters take 10-15 minutes to present their research, discussants respond, and occasionally time remains for audience questions.

Outside of these panels, academic conferences include a variety of other offerings. Sometimes these consist of professionalization workshops, where some specific aspect of teaching or research is the focus. Sometimes these consist of receptions or networking events, where you have the opportunity to meet other scholars in your field and form important, lasting connections. All of this sounds good in theory, but in practice often proves to be lackluster at best.

So, in order to figure out why so many of these conferences fall flat and why some succeed, I want to think about why academic conferences exist, why people attend them, and how we could measure their relative success if we found it.

What is the point of it all?

In determining the “point” of an academic conference, we have to specifically assess each of the features of it I mentioned above. I would broadly put these into those three main purposes of 1. Presentation and refinement of scholarship, 2. Professionalization and continuing education, and 3. Networking. I’ll treat each in turn.

Presentation of scholarship

When it comes to the presentation and refinement of scholarship, I think this is the area you are most likely to hear academics complain about the quality of conferences. Academic panels are, on an ordinary day, an absolute mess. Presenters fail to circulate their papers in advance, leaving discussants with nothing to comment on. Presenters often do not read the other papers on the panel, discussants may not offer relevant feedback, and presenters and discussants both may simply just not show up to the panel with little to no notice. In such an environment, if your hope is to get meaningful “feedback” on your research, you will likely find these panels to not provide anything of value.

Outside of the formal participants in the panel, audience participation is wildly mixed; some panels with star academics draw huge crowds, while many (most) panels will be sparsely attended or not attended at all. Thus, while presenting your research to a broader audience may be a dream of attending an academic conference, the reality will also probably fall flat (this, like many of my other reflections, may be discipline-specific).

Professionalization

What about the second goal, professionalization or continuing education? This is an area where I am perhaps ill-equipped to comment, because after my first few experiences attending these sorts of workshops, I effectively despaired of attending anymore. I found them worse than useless in terms of teaching me anything of value, and instead found them to often consist of platitudes, anecdotes, and complaints. While I don’t intend to disparage all such events, my limited experience soured me on attending them.

There is, I expect, something of a selection effect happening. When academic associations solicit proposals or applications to present at these workshops, the people most likely to apply seem to me to be people with an ax to grind or a particular hobby horse they want to ride. Again, I hold nothing in particular against these people, I just found them not to serve my needs.

Networking

But surely the final goal of attending a conference, establishing helpful connections to build a professional network, is good enough to overcome these odds! Well, again, I must claim a bit of my own deficiency. I am absolutely horrific at networking. I am not ambitious in general, and also have a severe problem with remembering names. Socialization and networking events at these conferences have proven of low value to me, except when I know people in advance whom I can rely on to introduce me to others.

But while I’m fully willing to take a significant part of the blame, I know that other people share my experience. In general, the kind of person attracted to academia has certain character traits that do not necessarily make them warm, open, and welcoming to newcomers. For many, particularly younger scholars in graduate school or on the edges of their discipline, finding a route into the network of “Good Old Boys,” as it were, can prove challenging. In short, networking in these environments is a challenge even if you are skillful at it.

Why was this one different?

In brief, after attending some dozen or so conferences over the years, I have found them in the main to be less than excellent for achieving my goals. So what made the Ciceronian Society different from other conferences?

In part, it was what I would call “real” community. Not everyone at the conference agreed on major issues, and not everyone was from the same discipline. They did, however, share a common passion for Christian education, a common goal of scholarly excellence, and a truly supportive environment for people to learn about and pursue both. It was a group of people I truly wanted to spend time with, and they seemed to be okay spending time with me.

I may have a sort of outlying perspective on these events by virtue of my own discipline. As a political theorist, I am at times on the fringes of the discipline of “political science.” The majority of people who attend “political science” conferences are people who do work quite different from mine, and who may even think that work like mine shouldn’t exist, or perhaps should be relegated to philosophy departments (I assure you, the philosophers don’t want me either). It requires some intentional effort at times to find a group of people within political science who are “like me” in some way that facilitates community, network, feedback, and connection.

It also may be that academic conferences at scale can never be all that we dream they can be. An ideal environment for scholarly productivity, for example, might be something like what my former graduate advisor has attempted to organize on several occasions: mini conferences with real buy-in, where participants agree that in exchange for good quality feedback on their work, they will invest the requisite time to provide serious feedback on the work of others. This, of course, is what conferences should be in the first place, but finding examples of this is rare indeed.