The Closing of the American Minds

Another set of Trumpian indirect costs

By French Picman - Palais des congrès, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21342848

Academia, as a profession, was supposed to have some rewards: autonomy, respect, stability. Each of those stools has been serially kicked away, with the Trump administration’s anti-university efforts pointing toward an even greater acceleration of decay, compounding state-level trends that had already eroded the system—tenure, for example, is now somewhat of an honorary status in many public university systems.

There remain a few perquisites of the job, at least for full-time faculty: a private office, for instance, and (paradoxically equally prized) liberal work-from-home policies. Another is travel. True, conference travel budgets have been steadily eroded; when I joined my previous employer, in 2015, my annual travel and research budget was $1,500, and when I left, after years of stiff inflation, my annual travel and research budget was $1,500. Nevertheless, traveling to a conference was a good excuse to go to new—and old—haunts, and to have at least some part of it paid for as a work benefit. (Which isn’t even all that much of a stretch—not only do most professions have some equivalent of the conference-in-a-fun-place trip, a great deal of networking and work does get done at conferences.)

A good chunk of this is about to be gutted. Specifically, the conference circuit as I have come to know it, centered on North America and with the expectation that scholars from dozens of countries will attend, is being ripped up by Trump administration political risk. The consequences of this will include the closure or financial endangerment of many scholarly associations, a demise in the importance of the United States to intellectual fields, and an overall reduction in human progress.

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Let’s start with the basics. Right now, a lot of folks are wary about traveling to the United States. For instance, the German foreign ministry is warning its nationals about their risk of being detained should they even slightly overstay their visa after three Germans (including one green-card holder) have been detained and at least one “violently interrogated” and two others were put in chains. Other recent high-profile cases have put people, especially those with Middle Eastern backgrounds or views on Israel that diverge from the administration’s, on edge about traveling. Some of this might be recency bias—certainly there were abuses and failings of the “border security” system under Biden, for instance—but it’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that an administration whose messaging is relentlessly opposed to international ties and in favor of both mass and artisanal deportations might perhaps be more hostile to visitors than other administrations have been.

The people who are wary of traveling to the United States include many scholars who would otherwise be attending U.S.-based conferences. As the world’s (current) leading center of knowledge production, the United States hosts a disproportionate share of leading and even workaday conferences. Some of these can attract tens of thousands of participants; others in the thousands or low hundreds. Together, they constitute a physical manifestation of research networks, enabling the flow of knowledge and of creativity that powers scientific advances. That so many of these are on home turf for Americans has been a real advantage for U.S. academia, making it possible for many U.S.-based scholars to travel to them at relatively lower costs than their internatinoal colleagues and even to attend more of them.

Like any network-based system, the appeal of conferences is based in part on their network effects: even though smaller workshops can supercharge a research agenda, one of the reasons everyone goes to larger conferences is because they offer chances to make connections with a larger group of researchers—you’re not interested only in meeting people on your panel but larger groups of people in the coffee shop or the bar, for instance. Having bigger and more varied agglomerations is therefore incredibly valuable.

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It should be clear by now why having researchers from other countries refuse to attend—or even be barred from attending—conferences in the United States would start to weaken U.S. academia. By reducing the reach and quality of conferences, the value of those conferences becomes much less. Even if selective conferences (those that refuse half or more of their applicants) can still fill their chairs after boycotts or refusals, those chairs will be filled by people who are, bluntly, less desirable than the researchers who would have taken them, reducing the overall appeal of the conferences. The annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), for instance, which isn’t known as a particularly international conference, still attracts more than a quarter of its attendees from outside the United States. Moreover, if international attendees can’t or don’t attend, they’ll stop joining U.S.-based scholarly associations. For APSA, this could be a big deal: about a fifth to a quarter of APSA’s members are international scholars, and attending the conference is a big reason to be a member.

Long before now, many have started to ask why U.S. academics can’t just replicate their big conferences outside of the United States. There’s a few reasons:

• Moving conferences outside of the United States will, almost by definition, exclude somewhere between many and most U.S. academics. My travel budget at a good-not-top research university could cover one trip domestically, but international travel? Not really. (You’d be surprised at how many people arrive at big U.S. conferences by car or train, which are not approved methods for getting to Europe.)

• The risk would, perversely, be greatest for non-U.S. students and researchers resident in the United States, who would now face visa problems potentially entering another country and returning to the United States. Some universities are already advising international students and staff to reconsider traveling outside of the United States to avoid any visa complications.

• Moving big conferences right now is just not feasible. Major conferences—the pinnacle ones—are planned five to seven years in advance. The International Studies Association conference, for instance, is already booked through 2030, and I can all but guarantee that discussions about where 2031 will be held are well advanced.

That last point is particularly important because already, and predictably, people on social media are beginning to ask why major conferences aren’t just relocated as a result of the Trump administration’s policies. Big conferences are big deals. You can’t just go on Expedia and reserve a block of two thousand hotel rooms a week in advance. Booking a major conference is a complicated process that involves asking cities to decide whether they’d like to host your conference—and academic conferences, which are pretty low-spending and often bizarrely high-maintenance, aren’t high on anyone’s priority lists to host. There may literally not be suitable venues to which major conferences can be relocated. Moreover, once a contract is signed, breaking it is extremely expensive: hotels and conference centers are businesses and they write contracts that all but ensure they will be paid by the association that is organizing the meeting. Penalties can run into the millions of dollars depending on the details. And the election of an orange president does not constitute force majeure.

(Why not move the conferences online? Well, because then the association is paying for both the original physical conference—which it has already booked—and now for a hybrid conference, which is far more expensive. More to the point, even though a lot of people are loathe to admit it, the online conference experience sucked. I did two of them and I feel like I paid a thousand dollars to have a glitchy Zoom meeting that took me to the scenic venue of exactly the same place where I work all the time. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not better than the alternatives, to be honest.)

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It gets worse.

Directly and indirectly, the vast reduction in federal funding for academic research is going to make it harder for huge categories of U.S.-based academics to travel anywhere anyway, domestically or foreign. Along the way, this will, again, gut scholarly associations, which are more or less infrastructural and which will be incredibly difficult to put back together again once they are lost. It does not take much to tip many of these institutions into deficits, and cuts to them will get to the muscle and bone really quickly. Perhaps some of the associated changes will be good, but it’s hard to see, on net, how reducing the resources available for coordination and collaboration will help the professions that invented these organizations in the first place.

It gets still worse.

Every conference panel is now a potential target for political attack, which can manifest in many ways—selective IRS audits, congressional attention, (further) cuts to relevant NSF funding agencies, stopping researchers at the border to prevent them from sharing their work, etc. In other words, there’s apt to be a chilling effect, even if it just means that everyone titles their work something really dull to avoid being the one who catches Sauron’s eye.

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On a gross material basis, you can see how the supports for the conference circuit are pretty rickety—start draining the bathtub, and pretty soon there’s no more circulation. And you can see why Europeans, Asians, and others would just choose to avoid the whole thing—why schlep to Seattle when you can just stay closer to home? You can see why on both a profound and a selfish level I’m sorry to see this whole edifice broken apart

Four years of this will be grim. More than that will be devastating. Intellectual leadership has been surrendered before—think of Germany before the 1930s—and we may be witnessing it being given up again. .

Perhaps most serious is the threat that nothing will replace the vibrant internationalism of these conferences. There’s no reason that we have to have giant, globe-spanning conferences. It could well be that the intellectual world fragments into a few regional circuits, with the United States existing as just one of those regional fragments—an intellectual horizon bounded by a border wall. Breaking apart the systems of truly international science accessible not only to each country’s elite but to something like a global intellectual middle class—what a waste.