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| Dr. Ruba with one of her awards |
Well, uh… no. You see, Gentle Reader, in order
to actually receive her awards in person at the convention in Minneapolis this
week, she’d have had to pay the organization $595. That’s the registration fee for someone like
herself: neither an APA member nor (anymore) a student.
Her response was predictable, at least to those of us who
aren’t professional psychologists: she told them to perform an exercise best
suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites.
Well, she was more polite than that, but there’s no doubt about her
intent. She tweeted,
So, let me get this straight. I won not one, but two @APA awards.
But, in order to accept these awards at the conference, I need to pay nearly
$600 in registration fees.
No one day pass. No fee waiver. No way to attend a 50 min
ceremony.
Conferences are a
scam. I’m not going. [an obvious typo corrected]
Kim Mills, the APA’s talking head, of course sniffed that it’s
not feasible to grant awardees free registration because the conference runs on
a tight budget: “We couldn’t possibly offer that many free registrations to
people.” There are
assholes, and there are idiots, but seldom do we see such a stellar example of
both at once.
First, Curmie knows a little about professional conferences,
having attended several dozen of them and served on a conference committee or
two. Breaking even on a conference is a
good but not absolutely necessary thing, especially for an entity like the APA, which sits
on net assets of about $49 million and makes the overwhelming majority of its
money through other means. Yes, there
are some professional organizations which are in danger of going under if their conference loses too much money; the APA isn’t close to being one of them.
Second, extending a one-day pass to an award recipient costs
the APA <checks notes> precisely the cost of a name badge, or maybe a buck
or so if you want the fancy kind with the accompanying lanyard. (I’m even willing to bet Dr. Ruba would have paid
for her own badge.) It’s not like the
hotel or conference center or whatever charges the organization for everyone
who enters the space. And Curmie will
bet the proverbial ranch that it cost more to send her the plaques than it
would have to let her pick them up in person.
Seriously, how freaking stupid can you get?
Are conferences a “scam,” as Dr. Ruba suggests? Well, Curmie isn’t going to go that far, but
it’s certainly true that they’re damned expensive. Curmie was lucky in that for the last couple
decades of his career his university would pick up at least a healthy percentage
of the cost of attending one and often two conferences a year.
Counting everything—conference registration, driving to and from the airport, parking, airfare, transportation to and from the hotel, the hotel itself, meals, internet (it may be free at the Super8, but not at the Hilton)…—we’re often looking at $2000 or more for a national conference. It’s also true that the people who benefit most from conferences, those in early career, are also those least likely to be able to afford to attend. Fortuitously, Dr. Ruba was already going to be in Minneapolis for other reasons, so she could have attended the ceremony… if the APA was run by people who actually gave a damn.
Curmie truly believes that his university got its money’s
worth on their investment in his conference attendance. I won’t deny that seeing friends is also a
perq, but I got better at my job—in the classroom and rehearsal hall, but also
in terms of understanding how universities operate—by talking with colleagues
from around the country (and sometimes from around the world).
I was able to advance my career, but, more importantly, I
was also able to make connections that helped advance my students’
careers. But Dr. Ruba has moved out of
academe, so this last benefit doesn’t exist for her. Her frustration, especially given her
specific circumstances, is more than understandable.
Curmie happens to be the national president of a
professional organization with considerably less than 2% of the APA’s
resources. We award a few thousand
dollars a year in scholarships to outstanding students. Usually, the recipients can’t attend our
annual meeting (held within the conference of a larger organization) in person,
but whereas we’re not going to underwrite all their travel expenses, if they
can get to the conference center, we’ll make damned sure they can get inside
without paying for the privilege.
There are so many downsides to the situation Dr. Ruba
describes, but the worst may be that the culprit here is the American Psychological
Association, an organization which one presumes is dedicated to furthering understanding
of how the human mind works. It is a
cruel irony that these are the folks who are apparently incapable of
understanding how people respond to stimuli, or how they should be treated.
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