I wouldn’t quite say I was surprised at this report of unrest within the American Sociological Association over the choice of Las Vegas as the location for the 2011 meeting. And I’m fairly certain that some of the more extreme sentiments of disdain for the choice of venue reported in this Inside Higher Education article will eventually be disavowed as misquotes or distortions by the scholars quoted in the article. (Despite the fact that they’re fairly detailed comments.)
Most professional associations of academic disciplines rather markedly avoid Vegas as a venue. Despite what gets said by some sociologists in the IHE article, that can’t be about cost. Las Vegas is consistently one of the cheapest airfares in the country from almost any location within the United States. It has a huge price range of accommodation, particularly if you’re willing to stay somewhere a bit away from the Strip. There are way more beds at affordable prices in Vegas than in Chicago, New York, or San Francisco, the perennial favorites of most of the big disciplinary associations. In the current recession, which has had an especially sharp effect on Vegas, I would think that most professional associations could negotiate deeper discounts than in any other major American city with a large range of hotels and services. If you really wanted to do graduate students and adjunct faculty who may need to attend a professional meeting to be interviewed a favor, you’d put the meeting in Las Vegas every single year. I’d even bet that at least some hotels or conference centers in Vegas gouge less on providing projection services or wireless connections to presenters. It would be nice to attend a major professional meeting where presenters aren’t left to scrounge for their own presentation technology, as has happened at some of the meetings I go to, because “it’s too expensive for the association to deal with”.
So take cost off the table. What’s the problem with Vegas? Some of the sociologists interviewed by IHE complain that Vegas is more complicit in the exploitation of women, the reproduction of capitalism, or the exploitation of low-wage workers than other possible venues. It’s odd, you know. I’ve attended big professional meetings in San Francisco, New York and Chicago where the main hotel venue is right around the corner from one of several red-light districts or businesses without hearing that this makes that venue unacceptable. I’ve been to New Orleans for meetings, both pre- and post-Katrina, in hotels right on the edge of the French Quarter, where solicitations to come inside sex-related venues are found in plenitude, drunken young men harass women, and gambling is right nearby. Philadelphia will soon have yet more gambling near its downtown. If you’re so upset by capitalist excess that you don’t want to go to your professional meetings, I assume you always complain when the meeting is in New York.
I’m not saying that you have to like Vegas as a destination. I have weird, conflicted feelings about it as a place, like many people do. I straightforwardly like some things about it (the restaurant scene is great, I like poker, and there’s some beautiful places to hike nearby.) I personally dislike the timeless, adrift feeling of most of its internal architecture, which is totally intentional. But that’s the problem with this whole story: that it should be a non-story. Meaning, that it’s fine to say, “Look, I find this is a creepy place, that’s just me, I have more fun or prefer or enjoy another venue,” in which you admit that at least one of the reasons why you attend a professional meeting is because you enjoy the venue. And in which you admit you are drawn to some aesthetics and not to others, that you find some places pleasurable and not others. I can completely sympathize. I didn’t attend one professional association meeting once because it was in Gary Indiana. Not because I object to Gary for political reasons, or believe there is something uniquely critique-worthy about it. Because I didn’t want to go there. That’s all. Nothing grand, nothing I’d make a fuss about, no sentiment that I’d care to soapbox about.
For some reason, this really reminds me of a passage in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle. Describing his father’s commitment to being “Conscious Man”, he writes “To be Conscious Man was more than just the digestion of obscure books that happen to favor your side. It was a feeling, an ingrained sense that something major in our lives had gone wrong. My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.”
I don’t think the academics who go beyond personally disliking Vegas as a venue to argue that there’s something structurally or institutionally wrong with being there are Conscious People in quite this sense. It’s more that they think performing Conscious Personhood is a necessary affect of their professional identity, like a psychoanalyst’s couch or a physician’s lab coat. Vegas is like TV: it presents a surplus of meanings that can’t be accepted or enjoyed as such, that allow no escape into some safe meeting ground between bourgeois academia and the Authentic Masses. It’s all small talk, it pre-empts profundity.
Which, honestly, might be a good reason why more academic conferences ought to be there.
Tim, I think a lot of the resistance to Vegas as an academic conference destination is status- or class-based.
A couple of years ago, the American Philosophical Association was scheduled to have one of its meetings in San Francisco and controversy arose because the hotel was in a bitter labor dispute with its employees. The Association polled members about alternative locales (Oakland, Phoenix, LA, Vegas) and Vegas finished last. (Ultimately the conference ended up taking place in SF.) But I recall some comments in the blogosphere to the effect that Vegas was tacky, unserious, etc. My sense is that academics feel the need to buttress their sense of being a member of the respectable middle-class, and cities like Boston, New York, Chicago, etc., mirror that sense back to them. Free buffet, slots everywhere, hock your wedding ring, $69-a-night Vegas? Not so much.
That said, I agree with you. And you didn’t even mention that the predictable weather in Vegas means no meteorological catastrophes, like people simply not making the conference or being stranded there trying to get home. (This has happened at least twice with one of the three regional APA meetings, which are — inexplicably — held between Christmas and New Year’s in Boston/NY/Philly/DC/Baltimore.)
Conscious Man = Ernste Mensch + Drama Queen.
I do not particularly like Vegas since I do not gamble. So I have only been there once. It was for my brother’s wedding in 2000, but the restaurant scene was awful. It was far worse than Sacramento where I lived at the time and much, much, much worse than Reno which had excellent food. For academics Reno also has the advantage of being the location of the main University of Nevada campus. The main proble with Vegas compared to other cities is that it only has one industry, gambling. If your vices or interests are eating, drinking, sex or anything else other than gambling then Vegas is just about the worst city in the world to enjoy them.
On restaurants, I just flat out have to disagree, unless we’re talking about buffets or something horrible like that. There’s at least ten really great restaurants in the Strip. The MGM Grand alone has six or seven.
The main problem with Vegas compared to other cities is that it only has one industry, gambling.
My understanding is that Vegas has been working hard to develop itself into a a real city with a more diverse economy than just gambling. I’ve heard from some of the product reps I work with that it’s working on trying to develop a serious manufacturing base, for example.
Back in 1986, one of the large physics meetings was held in Las Vegas. I suppose this was all before the modern renaissance of Las Vegas, so things perhaps would be different now, but nevertheless the headlines read “Physicists in town, lowest casino take ever.” And the physicists were asked not to hold subsequent meetings there. And we haven’t.
The largest of the physicists’ meetings has in recent years been in quite a variety of cities: Austin, Montreal (my favorite), LA, Baltimore, Denver, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Portland (Oregon), and Dallas. Next year will be Boston. Dallas and Portland, even though they have fine convention centers, don’t really have enough hotel capacity near the convention centers to handle meetings as large as it’s become (nearly 8000).