Last week, I pondered whether it's possible to be addicted to trying to make things better at an organization or institution. And whether such an addiction is a concern. And if so, if it's a pattern that I/we need to break.
This possibility has deep roots for me, given I first started active civic volunteering around the age of seven [1] and have continued in that vein ever since. In pretty much every volunteer or organizational leadership or consulting role I've had, I've been focused on (and often responsible for) helping an organization, agency, or institution get better at how it operates, how it treats people within it, and how it serves people/society beyond it.
The result is a lifetime of examples of (a) just how hard it is to change a group of people and their culture (that's what an organization is!). And yet, (b) how utterly possible and worthwhile it is to achieve this change. In between those two rests a lot of the frustration, effort, and meaningfulness of trying to make such changes.
Given the wide range of organizations, initiatives, communities, and entities I've been involved with in this capacity, I've seen a lot of attempts, a lot of failures, and...not-so-remarkably, a lot of successes. And, as I noted last week, and earlier this year, it's these successes, and the shared meaning in trying together, that keep me at it.
But, what happens when trying, and even success, don't feel sustainable anymore!?
Even though I'm not a senior ecologist (at least not in this sense), I was extremely involved in several levels of leadership and member support in the Ecological Society of America (ESA) for a decade. Interestingly, I'm the only one of the C&E Section founders who stayed involved as long as I did, despite being the only one not formally trained in ecology! (Others moved on to museum work, social work, admin, media companies, or even left the country.)
Why did everyone quit?
I can't speak for them, but I can speculate a bit, based on our shared experience.
Connecting with each other in-person at the annual conference is the main benefit of membership in ESA once you're even a little ways along in your career [2]. Put another way, in ESA as in scicomm, most of the free programming/content is offered by folks with experience and expertise, not for us. And I'm not talking just about the conference. While ESA staff do their very best, most of the year-round and virtual programming doesn't feel relevant to me at my career stage, let alone in my niche field adjacent to ecology. That means that my only way to access the main benefit of membership is through in-person interaction with colleagues, collaborators, and potentials at the annual conference.
But, attending the 2024 conference (which I could only afford to do for two days), made my membership costs skyrocket waaaay past the annual membership fee. Here's the math: 👇
$116 annual membership + $530 conference registration (early bird) + $343.68 Denver-LAX rt + $403.12 Laramie-Denver rt + $18.60 mileage to airport + $ 9.75 LAX-Metro shuttle + $74.57 Uber to LAX + $ 1,023.30 lodging + $ $428 per diem/meals = $2,947.02.
So, we're talking a minimum annual membership cost of nearly $3,000 to get the main benefit I receive from the organization. If the conference is somewhere more expensive, these costs go up. If I can get a registration waiver or travel support through ESA, those costs drop a few hundred dollars. But, I have to spend real time and mental energy writing a request for funding support that is compelling enough that they pick me [2].
And, I'm trading off the time I spend getting there, recovering from crap travel schedules (living in a rural part of a rural state inevitably means really early-morning and frequently also late-night travel), and the time I spend there. It is a trade-off, because I could be doing other things. Some of those things pay (like consulting, talks and trainings that are compensated). Some of those things pay off (like commenting on a manuscript, drafting a press release, or coordinating a move (finally, after 7 years at my institution) into an office with a window). Some of those things enrich my life (like weeding the garden, hiking with my dog, reading a good book, drawing). None of those things are possible while I'm in transit to/from or spending time at an ESA conference.
Which is not to say that attending a professional society conference cannot pay (I've been paid by other conferences for a workshop, say), pay off (see all we accomplished in ESA's C&E Section), or enrich my life. This latter one is another subtle benefit of attending a conference in-person. I make it a priority to go to a museum and a thrift store in every city where I attend a conference. I go out of my way to eat local food. I walk everywhere I can. This combination results in all sorts of delightful experiences that add dimension (and new earrings or postcards!) to my life.
But, those are pretty costly earrings, if we figure the travel and time involved in me getting to the same zip code where I find them.
So, it's predictable, really, that the cost of attending a conference, plus the cost of my time at the conference (vs. spending it elsewhere), starts to already feel like too much. It is untenable given I belong to a whole subclass of members (e.g., non-tenure-track faculty, research staff, nonprofit staff, and others beyond academia) who do not have independent funding to attend [3]. And then, it becomes enough-I'm-done when we add in the year-round volunteering to the same organization.
As I've written already this year, all that volunteering, with amazing people, happened in the face of the predictable friction of an organization established by/for tenured academics. We made a big difference in some ways (e.g., more scicomm activities at the annual conference), and no difference at all in others (e.g., still no leadership-level commitment to fostering scicomm or members whose primary career is in scicomm). But, there's one specific area in which it feels we made zero progress. That is: we never got the momentum, internal funding, or organizational investment to ensure there was programming for mid- and advanced-career members, not just by us [4].
Given most of my collaborators in ESA aren't even members anymore, and others of us haven't attended in years, it's clear that many of us have reached the point where it is not worth our time or money to only offer programming; not receive any. Add to that the inertia in academia around valuing scicomm and non-academic careers [5], and I think it's fair to deduce that most of us have just decided to take our formidable energy and expertise elsewhere.
Where did everybody go?
Well, they went and did all kinds of things. Most still have some connection to scicomm, which implies some connection to ecology. For example, I've instead put my efforts into projects like Meteor: The (Overly) Honest Podcast About Scicomm with Impact, a program offering career transition support for experienced scicomm professionals (which absolutely could've been an ESA program had I thought it would find real funding and support there), and the UWyo SciComm Initiative (loads of resources for all career levels, which is what we long envisioned within the C&E Section).
As I weigh whether to attend the 2025 conference in Baltimore, I know I could spend that time leading the $1 million, NSF-funded scicomm research grant I just got (with AMAZING collaborators, none of whom are from ESA). Or I could spend that time figuring out how to keep out the ground squirrels that resorted to climbing my garden fence and razing the whole thing to the ground for the umpteenth time this summer. I could read for fun, spend more time in the community pottery studio, or re-run our department's climate survey (we're due for a re-survey). Knowing I can do those things without spending $3,000 and still not seeing very few of my old ESA friends means my likelihood of going to Baltimore next year is very low.
How about you?
What's a professional cost-benefit ratio that you've waffled over? What was at stake if you stayed vs. if you moved on to something new?
NOTES
[1] Yes, I've really been volunteering or working for the good of my community since I was a kid. I discuss that a bit more in the first note on this post.
[2] Full transparency: I've been selected twice for travel support from ESA. First, for the Montreal meeting, which I ultimately didn't attend because I couldn't pull together enough other funding to cover costs. Second, this year, for a registration waiver. All other travel costs were still my responsibility. I didn't actually think it was going to happen, which would have been absurd given I was going to receive a major award from the society. (As I've written before, the gap between who can afford to attend and who can't speaks volumes to who the presumptive awardees are. And, I can't help but note that several awardees this year didn't attend who seemed -- from the nature of the awards, or their career stage -- to be facing a similar barrier to me.)
[3] Paying out of pocket vs. not attending has been a persistent issue in my experience of ESA. I've been a member for about a decade. I paid out of pocket the first several years I went. This was only possible because I could cut costs thanks to a couple years of free registration on a press pass and sharing a room with someone whose employer covered a room just for them anyway. Then, for a couple of years, I worked for a big research group, and my boss paid my way in full. But, when I left that job, I stopped going to ESA. I wasn't willing to spend thousands of my own dollars that way, especially when I was also volunteering with the society to an probably-extreme degree. I calculated I may have worked a 0 25 or 0.5 FTE for ESA for several years! (detailed more in last week's post, as well as here and here).
[4] I'm talking specifically about scicomm/public engagement here. But people elsewhere have recently said the same issues exist for ecology-focused members, too.
[5] I have a paper in press right now that I really really hope you'll read. It took me and co-authors >2 years to craft it, and it scopes out the challenges in "traditional" academia that devalue and impede scicomm and, importantly, how you can help change that. Please let me know if you can't access the paper; I'll gladly share a PDF with you! Here's the full citation. 👇
Broder, E.D.♦, B.G. Merkle♦, M. Balgopal, E. Weigel, S. Murphy, J.J. Caffrey, E. Hebets, A. Sher, J. Gumm, J. Lee, C. Schell, and R. Tinghitella♦. 2024. Use your power for good: An applied framework for overcoming institutional injustices impeding SciComm in the academy. BioScience, in press. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae080 (♦ = co-lead authors)
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