"It Would Be Too Expensive, Pour Moi": Academia Edition (Law & Society, Part 2)
Some of the people who have been targeted by the Trump regime as "foreign enemies" have been academics. Early this year, two graduate students from Tufts University and Columbia were swept off the streets for expressing views that Republicans now view as unacceptable. Scholars from outside the US have been turned away or even detained at the border, and the White House continues to threaten American universities with punishments for, in the end, not being MAGA.
Things are not getting better, and as with too many other areas of American life, the institutions that might do something useful are not rising to the moment. In particular, consciously or unconsciously, some American academics have at least implicitly decided that their financial comfort is more important than maintaining contact with their international peers. I do not draw that conclusion lightly, because it is a serious problem and deserves to be called out.
Last month, I wrote a rather angry (though restrained, at least by my standards) piece here on Dorf on Law, "When Crossing the US Border is Perilous for International Scholars, We Must Give Them Other Options," in which I discussed one seemingly minor example of how the new climate of fear is affecting higher education. I have been a longtime member of the Law & Society Association (LSA), which is one of many academic organizations that runs annual conferences in which scholars gather for a few days to share their work and receive feedback. These events have been around seemingly forever, and although I will again stipulate that they can and should be reassessed at all times to be sure that they continue to be a good idea, I am happy to say that their day is not in any way over.
Moreover, the people who run those organizations certainly do not think that the writing should be on the wall for what they do. They spend time and money running academic conferences, after all. It therefore matters to ask what they are doing in the face of the new American repression.
As I explained in last month's column, LSA's leaders were (like everyone else in the world) suddenly confronted earlier this year with this new Trump II reality, which created a special challenge because the annual LSA conference was to be held in May 2025 in Chicago. LSA has long expressed a desire to bring as many international scholars as possible together with US-based scholars at its conferences, but in the newly frightening US situation, many international scholars (including even US citizens who are living in other countries) had very good reason to worry about crossing the border.
I should point out that the leadership of such organizations tends to be senior scholars who have "day jobs" but who take on a one- or two-year stint with the organization to form committees and set policies, with a professional staff (usually overworked and underpaid) doing the administrative work. The academics who were in charge of LSA in the 2024-25 academic year were truly in a difficult spot, having very little time to change the direction of the proverbial ocean liner after seeing the iceberg at the last minute. They decided to change the conference to a limited hybrid format, and although I explained in my column last month why their response was at best a half-measure, it was at least responsive to the new, very unfortunate reality.
Here, I want to turn to the apparent explanation for what the new group running LSA decided, which was to tell everyone to pound sand that they are on their own. Seriously, even with months to plan, the new LSA leadership announced that the 2026 conference, which will be held in San Francisco (with host cities determined years in advance), will not even include the minimalist hybrid option that we suffered through in 2025. The announcement cavalierly offered some "tips for international travel," but that was it. No matter that things have become even more fraught in the ensuing months, if someone can only participate in LSA 2026 by traveling from abroad, they will have to roll the dice and face the possible consequences of losing in the US border-crossing craps game.
To be clear, many of us expected that the 2026 conference would be either fully hybrid or at least offer substantial hybrid options. Why would the committee go completely the other way? I barely nodded at that question last month by saying this: "That is not to say that there are not familiar arguments against hybrid conferences, but those arguments were barely carrying the day before Trump II came along." Let us consider those arguments now:
(1) This year's hybrid option was not great: Absolutely true. Everyone who was unable to attend in person was told that there would be a hybrid option, but we were not told until the day before the conference began that we would only be able to attend one session -- in a conference, by the way, where there are something like fourteen time slots over the course of four days. We were only permitted to participate in the session on which we were a speaker, even though there were other sessions that were set up for hybrid participation. (This makes the financial excuse, which I will discuss below, inoperative here.) And that indeed stank.
(2) People hate hybrid sessions: Yes, I think I speak for most people when I say that hybrid is my least favorite of the three options (all-live or all-online being the others), as a matter of my personal experience in the session. It is often difficult if not possible for those online to see or hear everyone who is in the room, and the interaction can be awkward. So in a perfect world, everyone would be able to meet together in person and interact naturally.
But as I emphasized in last month's column, that perfect-world option was never the reality, even pre-Trump. People with mobility issues and other disability-related limitations on travel and participation have long been implicitly told either to figure it out or stay home. And with global health now being a rather large issue, with an under-the-radar surge of cases of Covid now rampaging through the US and elsewhere, travel even within the host country becomes a gamble with one's health.
In short, we should have been holding hybrid sessions long before now. Saying that the new Trump-created crisis still changes nothing seems, shall we say, stubborn.
Moreover, even for everyone who does attend in person, the live-only policy presents a major tradeoff. The in-person requirement means that the people who are able and willing to attend the conference in person will now be attending a conference that has been shorn of its international participants. Hybrid sessions are not great, but this alternative is worse. That is not only my opinion, but one would hope that it would be the opinion of the people who have volunteered to direct an organization that has been so vocal about its commitments to global engagement. LSA has always fallen short of its most ambitious statements of inclusivity, but it has always tried to do what it can to bring in people from around the world to engage in scholarly conversations. As an American scholar, that was always one of my favorite aspects of the conferences.
(3) Sorry, it's too expensive: This, of course, must surely be the concern, and I will say that it is a real concern. I am an economist, and even though my views are heterodox, I am keenly aware that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Decisions have consequences. Indeed, as I noted in the immediately preceding paragraph, the "I won't sit in a hybrid session cuz I hate it" decision carries with it the unspoken consequence: "... and if that means that people with disabilities, or health issues, or reasons to worry about detention or worse at the border can't attend, fine with me."
But maybe the financial consequences change the calculus. After all, the LSA conference is huge, hosting over its four days something like 400-600 sessions with 2000-3000 participants. Setting up the dozens of hotel conference rooms with the necessary equipment to make everything hybrid-capable would surely be an expense. Without getting into educated guesses about the numbers, however, we can at least acknowledge that one way to limit that expense would be to have only half of the rooms set up for hybrid, or a third, or a quarter.
Would that decision have consequences? Of course. People who cannot attend would be left with a more limited menu, but at least they could get a decent meal. (As a vegan, I know how important even half-measures can be.) And yes, there would also be a tradeoff in that offering fewer hybrid sessions (thus saving money) presents coordination challenges (thus increasing non-monetary costs). Having been in the administrative trenches for these conferences for two decades, I can say that that is not nothing. But again, the LSA's chosen alternative is to have no hybrid participation at all, which as I have tried to explain here, is very much not nothing.
But let us imagine that the people making this decision -- a decision that, although I am criticizing it harshly, I have no doubt was not made lightly -- nonetheless concluded that it would "cost too much" to do what is necessary to not shut people out. What could that mean? It means that the people who made the decision have deemed other available tradeoffs -- that is, other ways to find the money needed to pay for this added expense -- to be unacceptable. Could that be a matter of reasonable disagreement, a "fair enough" judgment call? I am not convinced.
I did note above that (as far as I know) the academics who populate the relevant committees every year are unpaid, and if they have expense accounts or whatever, those must surely be minimal. If not, that would be a scandal worth exploring, completely separate from this discussion. Moreover, I am absolutely certain that I was correct when I wrote above that the LSA staff is overworked and underpaid. So there is no blood to be squeezed from those turnips.
That leaves revenues, which in this world is collected through registration fees. So this is another standard economic tradeoff: Should we increase registration fees in order to allow more people to participate? And what would the new fee structure look like?
To be clear, LSA (like most such organizations) already has a somewhat economically progressive fee structure, allowing lower costs fees for students and some discounts (on annual membership fees but not on conference registration fees) for scholars from certain "low and lower-middle income economies only (World Bank list, click here)." This means that there is already precedent to have "complicated" fee structures, and other professional organizations tie fees to members' income. We would not be sailing in unknown waters.
So where does that leave us? Consciously or unconsciously, US-based scholars at LSA are telling people outside of their country -- and people everywhere with disabilities and other travel restrictions -- that it would be too expensive to US-based scholars to make it possible to include others in their conference. I noted above that fuller participation is also good for US-based scholars, in exactly the way that LSA has long claimed to believe.
And I have always thought that they do believe it. If they were only saying that such full participation would be nice, but only for the other scholars who are now being excluded, that would be a rather elitist attitude. ("We're willing to let you in, because it will be good for you, and we care.") Precisely because I absolutely do NOT believe that anyone at LSA thinks like that, I must turn to the alternative excuse, which is that fuller participation is nice and all that, but not if it means that the US-based people have to pay more.
Understanding that the US-based population of possible participants is itself economically diverse, a progressive fee structure could spread that added cost more fairly. Would some people at the top choose not to attend? Perhaps, in the same way that some wealthy people claim to move from high-tax states to low-tax states (although the evidence on that is mixed at best). But even if that were true, the tradeoff would involve getting more people from around the world (and within the US) involved in the conference while losing some higher-income scholars who decide not to spend their budgets after blanching at an $x increase in fees.
Unless that hypothetical negative response were unimaginably large, that would still leave the conference with a more diverse and inclusive set of attendees. (Just to be clear, I could have worked in the word "equity" there, to be explicitly in favor of DEI.)
Finally, note that I have until now completely left aside the possibility of giving potential hybrid attendees the option of paying the higher costs for the tech themselves, via increased registration fees for non-live participants. That strikes me as a very bad idea, but it would leave the US-based people who can attend in person untouched, if that were the priority. Unless, of course, we are back to point (2) above ("People hate hybrid sessions"), which would instead force us to admit that the unpleasant aesthetics of hybrid sessions are more important than inclusivity.
In the end, I am honestly flummoxed by what LSA did this year. The least bad of the arguments above is that extra tech costs extra money, but if that is truly what drove the decision to exclude so many people from the US and abroad, then it amounts to a decision to save a bit of money for people in the US, with the undeniable consequence that everyone else is left to find somewhere else to go.
- Neil H. Buchanan