The Conference Is Not Dead—But the Version We Built It Around Probably Should Be

Let us be honest about what the traditional academic conference has always been, in addition to a venue for scholarly exchange. It has been a status marker. A networking ritual calibrated to those who can afford to attend. A mechanism for reproducing institutional hierarchies under the socially acceptable guise of intellectual community. And for many of the scholars who have benefited most from its conventions, it has been genuinely valuable—generative, energizing, professionally formative in ways that are difficult to replicate through a screen.

The pandemic did not create the tensions now roiling the conference industry. It simply made them impossible to defer. When the American Political Science Association, the Modern Language Association, and dozens of other major scholarly organizations were forced to pivot to virtual formats in 2020 and 2021, they discovered something inconvenient: attendance frequently increased. Participation from international scholars, contingent faculty, graduate students without travel funding, and researchers with caregiving responsibilities or disabilities rose substantially when the barrier of a $1,200 flight and a $250-per-night hotel room was removed. The experiment that nobody wanted to run produced data that nobody can entirely ignore.

What the Traditional Model Was Actually Optimizing For

To understand why conference reform is so contested, it helps to understand what the traditional model was implicitly designed to do. The large annual meeting of a professional association—think the Society for Neuroscience's annual gathering, which routinely draws more than 30,000 attendees to cities like San Diego and Chicago—was never purely about the dissemination of new research. By the time papers are presented at a conference, they have frequently already been submitted to journals. The conference serves other functions: it is where junior scholars meet senior figures who might write their recommendation letters, where hiring committees form impressions of job candidates, where collaborations are initiated over dinner rather than during sessions, and where the informal currency of disciplinary reputation is minted and spent.

These functions are real, and dismissing them as mere credentialism misses something important. Scholarship is a social enterprise. The relationships formed at conferences produce collaborations, mentorship chains, and intellectual cross-pollination that do not emerge from reading papers in isolation. The question is not whether those functions matter, but whether the current delivery mechanism is the most equitable and effective way to serve them.

The Equity Case for Digital-First Formats

The access barriers embedded in the traditional conference model fall disproportionately on scholars who are already disadvantaged within academic hierarchies. A doctoral student at a regional state university without robust travel funding, a faculty member at a minority-serving institution operating on a constrained budget, a researcher in the Global South attempting to participate in American-dominated disciplinary conversations—for all of these individuals, the annual conference is not a community gathering but a gated event. The badge they cannot afford to wear signals more than professional identity; it marks an exclusion that compounds over careers.

Virtual and hybrid formats do not eliminate all barriers—reliable broadband access, time zone differentials, and the domestic labor demands that disproportionately affect women scholars all remain real constraints. But they substantially lower the financial threshold for participation, and the evidence from the pandemic period suggests that the effect on representational diversity can be significant. Several organizations that tracked demographic data on virtual attendees found meaningful increases in participation from early-career scholars and from underrepresented groups when travel was not required.

Platforms purpose-built for scholarly exchange—including those developed by organizations like SUI Symposium and others in the academic conferencing space—are increasingly capable of replicating some of the spontaneous interaction that physical conferences facilitate: structured networking sessions, small-group discussion rooms, asynchronous Q&A threads that allow participation across time zones. None of these is a perfect substitute for a conversation at a coffee break. But the honest comparison is not between virtual formats and an idealized version of the in-person experience; it is between virtual formats and the in-person experience as it is actually encountered by the median conference attendee, which frequently involves standing alone in a crowded ballroom wondering how to break into a conversation among people who have known each other for decades.

What Is Actually Being Lost

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the genuine losses that accompany the shift toward digital-first scholarly exchange. The serendipitous encounter—the conversation with a scholar from an adjacent field that reframes a problem you have been stuck on for months—is harder to engineer online. The embodied experience of being in a room where a major scholarly debate is unfolding in real time, where the audience's reaction is visible and immediate, has an epistemic texture that video conferencing does not fully capture. And the social bonds that form over meals, walks between sessions, and late evenings in hotel bars are not merely pleasant; they are the connective tissue of intellectual communities.

There is also an institutional prestige dimension that cannot be wished away. For better or worse, the ability to say that one presented at a particular conference carries professional weight that a virtual presentation does not yet fully replicate. As long as hiring and tenure committees assign differential value to in-person versus virtual participation, the incentive to attend in person will persist for those who can—which risks creating a two-tiered system in which the equity benefits of virtual access are undercut by the continued privileging of physical presence.

A Productive Path Forward

The most defensible position is neither nostalgic defense of the status quo nor wholesale abandonment of in-person gathering. It is a deliberate rethinking of what each format does well and a willingness to design conference experiences accordingly. Smaller, focused symposia—the kind that SUI Symposium is built around—may be better suited to in-person formats than the massive disciplinary mega-conference, precisely because their scale is more conducive to genuine intellectual exchange. Annual gatherings of entire professional associations, by contrast, might be more equitably served by robust hybrid designs that treat virtual participation as a first-class experience rather than a discounted afterthought.

What is no longer tenable is the default assumption that the traditional format is simply what conferences are. The pandemic did not kill the academic conference. But it did expose, with unusual clarity, the gap between what we claim conferences are for and what the traditional model actually delivers—and for whom. Closing that gap is not a logistical challenge. It is a question of institutional values, and it deserves the same rigorous, evidence-informed deliberation that scholars bring to the questions they study.