Academic conferences must be the oldest scam in SA’s universities.
A conference is supposed to be an assembly where two things happen: you present groundbreaking research on a topic for your peers to engage, refine or reject; and you take along younger or aspiring academics to be inducted into this tough environment, where feedback can be ruthless and where networking with leaders in a field could launch your career.
But this once noble event has become an expensive racket.
Scamsters are taking advantage of the desperation of academics, usually the weaker ones with self-esteem issues.
Not a day goes by when I am not invited to speak at an international conference in Asia or Europe on anything from neurological issues in rats to bariatric ventilation in obese patients.
Why do they do this? It’s big money. You pay ridiculous conference and registration fees in foreign currency and someone on the other side gets very rich.
Academic tourism is real in our universities. Notice that these events are usually in exotic places such as Paris, Caracas or Honolulu. Never in Diepsloot, De Doorns or Skilpad-vrek-van-dors.
Many academics do not even present papers but go along for “the experience”.
Since the acceptance standards for papers are often low (see the fees scam), it is easy to knock together a “research” paper for presentation.
There is a very low turnover rate of conference paper to published research article, a standard requirement from a responsible academic head of department or dean.
As a result, the worst offenders have a long, long list of conference papers but relatively few scholarly articles in learned journals.
That is how the corruption happens.
Another dimension of this scam is the imbalance of national versus international conferences.
A head of department who is a good steward of public money will require the academic to first present their research at a faculty seminar; then, if good enough, test the waters at a national conference in the field; and only then allow for an expanded paper to be presented overseas on condition that it is also submitted for submission in a serious journal.
Why is this important? Because publication in a journal means the return of funds through the government subsidy, which if managed well in a large department or faculty, ensures there are enough funds in the kitty for newer or younger academics to attend conferences in the future.
More or less the same logic that would keep NSFAS afloat if students repaid their loans.
As one who does educational research, we are among the worst offenders.
Scan the academic papers at any conference of South Africans and one is astounded by the poor quality and the meaningless titles.
The attitudes of teachers towards corporal punishment. The drinking habits of coloured school principals. The reasons for teenage pregnancies in schools. This kind of rubbish.
Low-level research questions, intellectually stunted, theory-poor, methodologically suspect, and preachy throughout. Save the children!
Of course, this is not the problem of the postgraduate student or the young academic.
It reflects the poor quality of supervision and mentorship in our schools/faculties of education.
This leads to poor quality master’s and doctoral dissertations which, in turn, leads to weak research articles for conferences, if not publication.
There is another serious problem with papers showing up at academic conferences.
They often descend into mimicking the latest fads going around.
The one moment it is all about the fourth industrial revolution; shortly after that every paper had something on decolonisation or, among the more sophisticated, decoloniality.
So eager were younger and more experienced academics to ride the political winds, they wanted to have their papers fall on the right (sic) side of the fallist movement.
Tragically, one conference after another gave decolonisation as their thematic focus and the academic rats followed the pied piper over the precipice.
Part of the reason for this explosion of low-level conference papers is the pressure on academics to publish for the prestige and finances of their departments or faculties.
To the rescue comes predatory conferences and predatory journals, where peer review is either absent or of such dubious quality that anyone gets into print.
Those of us who review promotion applications now spend a significant amount of time checking whether the conference is legitimate or the journal outlet accredited.
It is time for the Council on Higher Education to conduct a focused study on the scam called academic conferences.
What processes are in place to validate the academic value and significance of different conferences?
Of course, the council can only offer guidelines to institutions and advise the minister.
But merely launching such an inquiry might just get some of our universities to exercise not only managerial but more importantly, intellectual oversight over what counts as a conference research paper before using taxpayers’ money for a trip to the Seychelles.
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