There's a lot of "quit lit" in the air these days (e.g., divorce memoirs, quiet quitting, leaving academia -- too many to link). I'm joining in.
I almost-not-quite quit my professional society in 2021. I just got back from their 2024 annual conference (used to go regularly, haven't since ~2018). And, I don't know if I'll ever go again [1]. Things will really have to change for me to go back. That feels like a big deal to say out loud, even though the organization itself will never notice [2]. In some significant ways that I'm still processing, I've realized I'm hooked on something that I need to get off of.
The gamble can be addictive.
If no one tries, nothing gets better. I'll say that loud and clear. We have to care; we have to try.
But, underneath all that, there are some troubling realities. When something gets even a teeeeeny bit better, we can feel compelled to try again. And, those small payoffs can keep us going for a lonnnng time. We even say out loud that we know change takes time and we don't know precisely what will tip the scales. This is true, important to acknowledge, and should ideally not dissuade us.
But, let's also note: psychologists have found that the uncertainty of gambling is a huge part of what makes gambling addictive. I'm developing a quiet hypothesis that this uncertainty (and the dopamine hits when some small effort for change unpredictably works out) [4] are also part of what hooks us into outsized individual investments in systems change for organizations clearly resistant to it. Certainly, there is real harm done to addicted gamblers. And, the stakes may not always be so high with systems change in a professional organization. So, perhaps this is a tenuous analogy. But, there can also be real harm done to people trying to change these systems [5] to accommodate them, let alone get STEM systems and organizations to welcome and support them.
To stretch this analogy a bit further, addiction researchers note key features of gambling [6] that align disconcertingly well with my experiences of trying to enhance ESA and my institution:
"Lights and sounds egg you on" in a casino or a betting app. As I've written before, the setting and circumstances of service work for systems change are really compelling to me. This feeds me continuing to work on change in an environment designed to be robustly resistant to it [7].
"Feeling like a winner while you’re losing" is baked into the cake with slot machines and phone games/apps. The machines let you make numerous bets; you have a small win and the other bets are all losses. But, your mind fixates on the one small win. The same ingredients are in the cake for those of us trying to change a system like a professional society, university, department, or even degree program. I've discussed several times recently how complicated it is that I was elected an Early Career Fellow in ESA this year. This huge honor -- uncommon for someone like me -- is both a big deal and actually changes nothing.
The "near-miss effect" has gamblers "chasing [their] losses." They are hooked, playing against games designed to look like the reel stopped spinning by chance one spot away from a win. But, these games and betting programs are designed. So a gambler might logically know that the game is playing them but keep playing because of the dopamine rush the almost-win triggers. Like them, we academics volunteer extra, hoping the system is actually responsive if we try enough, or try differently. Almost getting funding for our UW-MENTOR program several times over the last few years is certainly part of why I jump on every chance to fund it. This is true even though I have no more indication than ever that our administration is serious about investing in a program to make faculty better research mentors.
If everyone in ESA who tried this kind of work was stymied, we'd quit trying (I have to think). But, we have some success with it. That success is compelling, as it feeds a cycle of (a) positive reinforcement (group effort can pay off! wee!) and (b) thinking, "well, if we try harder, what could we accomplish next!?!"
What have these compelling successes looked like?
Relationships = main benefit of membership (for me)
Without meaningful connections, even the best cost-benefit ratio between membership dues, conference fees, and member services isn't valuable. The strength and pull of a professional organization is the people in it that we are connected to. I have a lot of relationships through (or associated with) ESA. They are meaningful in diverse ways, and while ESA isn't necessary to maintaining all of them, it has helped me make and maintain many of them over a decade.
Sunk costs that felt worth it
It's hard to end high-investment relationships. I've poured an incredible amount of energy and expertise into ESA over the past decade. At one point I calculated that for several years I likely worked (for free) a 0.25 or 0.5 FTE (like, half of a full-time job) in service of programs, resources, etc., to benefit ESA and its members.
I did all that work as an outlier in their typical membership. My first years as an ESA member, I was a freelance journalist. Then, I became a staff science communicator for a big research group. Eventually, I became a contingent, non-tenure-track faculty member in a STEM department at an R2 university. In none of these positions was that level of volunteering (aka professional service) expected, required, or reasonable.
I've previously written about what fueled my involvement at that level: amazing people working together to make things better (and probably some major childhood conditioning, but we'll tackle that another day). But, to the point today: I never felt like the organization understood, recognized, valued, or was in any way responsive to the needs of my various job types. The origins and beating heart of ESA are STEM academics, and yes, I knew that. But I saw many ways that ESA could serve and support people like me. So, my work in ESA centered on offering my fellow members (a) scicomm programming (training, resources) that didn't previously exist, and (b) pushing for leadership-level changes that would make the organization more genuinely welcoming to people like me [3].
Staying because "this time it will be different"
In ESA, I did some pretty major work with really awesome people. Things are categorically different, thanks to our efforts. Together, we:
ran a multi-year series featuring professionals doing all sorts of scicomm that I co-edited;
co-developed and co-edited a series in ESA's journal of record that highlighted all the vital human dimensions work being done by various sections;
launched a Communicating Science section (which I edited for several years) in that same ESA journal,
established a pair of annual scicomm awards,
and ran a weekly scicomm resource blog.
As I noted earlier this year, we also had a huge impact on ESA's annual conference content. When we started, there were only about 20 scicomm-related sessions and just a couple years later, the programming was clearing 51+ such sessions (excluding related posters/talks). But, as I've also mentioned, we did all this in the face of indifference (and some more direct resistance).
Can we walk away?
Like most people who gamble, most of my collaborators from the early days of the Communication & Engagement Section have been able to walk away. They've gone on to work in science museums, social work, science media companies, or outreach program administration. To my knowledge, none of them have gone to an ESA conference in years. (Despite being my co-founders, most didn't even know I got an award this year!)
But, I can't seem to fully quit this work, as much as I have wanted to. As much as I have decided to more than once. Indeed, in the mere two days I was at the 2024 conference (couldn't afford lodging/meals to stay longer!), I cooked up at least 3 awesome, game-changing programming/training ideas that collaborators and I could offer at the 2025 conference. That sort of brainstorming, building on past efficacy and current expertise, gets a bit compulsive.
What happens if we do walk away?
If people like us, who were dedicated, self-supporting, and effective, still found ourselves questioning whether it was worth it, what does that mean for the future of a major professional society?
If more people like us weighed the options and quit, ESA would be at risk of a kind of turnover that should matter. Sure, there is always some attrition and replacement for an organization whose members usually first join as graduate students. But, we need people at mid-career and senior career stages to contribute different kinds of insights and skills (e.g., admin, insider knowledge, robust social networks, discretionary funding). We need people like us to propose sessions that offer professional development or next-level networking opportunities that are relevant to later-stage professionals. And, we need people who understand that only precious few new ESA members will continue in academia.
Flatly stated, we need to be a society that serves the majority, despite the academic-centric inertia of a 100+-year-old organization. Otherwise, ESA will continue to see declining participation at annual conferences, and the nature of that participation will fuel a negative feedback loop that no amount of high registration fees can balance. We gotta figure out how to make contributing to a professional society less of a gamble and more of a meaningful, collective effort.
How about you?
What makes volunteering compelling to you? Have you ever over-invested in an unpaid role? What drew you into that work? How did you come to recognize that you might need to scale back your time commitments there?
NOTES
[1] For the past decade, my professional "home" has been the Ecological Society of America (ESA). That might sound funny when you know that I am not a formally trained ecologist. It could sound like a stretch given you realize I focus primarily on science communication beyond academia (and making academia more equitable and effective). It might sound absurd when you understand that I am, instead, formally trained in community development, nonprofit management, and the arts and humanities.
[2] Certainly, some people within the organization would notice -- I've been really involved in some aspects of leadership and programming for a decade. But ESA's bottom line (budget, governance structure, etc.) will never notice if I stop paying dues and cease attending conferences that cost upwards of $2,500-$3,000+ per year. Therein lies the most probable reason why (a) ESA is not responsive enough to retain people like me and (b) I will likely not go again unless circumstances change substantially.
[3] You might wonder why I didn't just go somewhere else. Well, I am also a member of the National Association of Science Writers and the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. But neither of those account for the myriad hats I wear/have worn professionally, either. There are some scicomm conferences that are attempting to coalesce into organizations, but they don't meet my mid-career/experienced professional needs, either. In some ways, the diversity and expanse of disciplines within ESA actually makes more sense for what I do than any of scicomm orgs [3]. That has long been true of my career, in fact. While my training was initially outside science, my career has always been in and in service to science. Of course, I could have joined a different scientific organization -- there are numerous such with far more mature investments in/programming around scicomm. But, it so happens (story for another time) that ESA is where I started and stuck.
[4] Christopher D. Fiorillo et al. 2003. Discrete Coding of Reward Probability and Uncertainty by Dopamine Neurons. Science 299: 1898-1902. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1077349
[5] See, for example, the stories recounted in this publications:
Merkle, B.G., S. Bayer, P. Shukla*, and E. Valdez-Ward*. 2021. Sharing science through shared values, goals, and stories: An evidence-based approach to making science matter. Human-Wildlife Interactions 15(3). https://doi.org/10.26077/9wss-av78
Prescod-Weinstein,, C. 2019. Grad school activism: While often necessary, it's not a substitute for technical proficiency. Inside Higher Ed. (17 January 2019). https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/01/18/grad-school-activism-while-often-necessary-isnt-substitute-technical-proficiency
Valdez-Ward, E., Ulrich, R. N., Bennett, N., Martinez-Maldonado, E., Mattheis, A., Treseder, K. K., Takahashi, B. and Menezes, S. (2024). Science communicators from marginalized backgrounds challenge STEM cultural norms to promote community belonging JCOM 23(04), A01. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.23040201
[7] Anil Dash has a provocative, compelling (and brief!) take on exactly why systems change feels impossible: because it's supposed to be. See more here: https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/.
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