The email arrives on a Tuesday, or a Thursday, or a random Wednesday in March. Then it arrives again. A reminder. Then another reminder. The deadline has been extended. There is still time.

A conference. International. Prestigious-sounding. The subject line mentions climate change, or diversity, or new directions in the humanities — something broad enough that almost any paper fits. The location is Rhodes, Greece. Or Lisbon. Or Copenhagen. Or Osaka. The submission deadline is six weeks out. All you need is a title and a short abstract. You don’t even need a finished paper yet. A couple sentences will suffice.

You’ve been meaning to get to Lisbon anyway.

Here’s what most people outside academia don’t know: in my experience, a significant portion of the “international conferences” that appear on faculty CVs are not what they appear to be. They are not rigorous peer gatherings where scholars pressure-test ideas and elevate their work. Many of them are, in my view, destination travel businesses dressed up in academic language — organizations that charge hundreds of dollars in registration fees, appear to accept a very high percentage of submissions (in my experience), convene briefly in desirable cities, and send participants home with a line on their CV that says “presented internationally.” The attached journals, in many cases, publish almost as freely as the conferences accept. Nobody audits any of it. Universities pay for all of it.

Predatory journals have been well documented for years — Beall’s List, library guides, warnings in academic forums. The conference equivalent has received far less attention — which is part of what makes it so lucrative.

A researcher who studies the phenomenon told the Times Higher Education that predatory conferences now outnumber legitimate ones put on by scholarly societies — and that scholars “seem to spend more time considering the timing and location of a conference than doing basic research into the organisation behind it.” The demand is real. The supply has risen to meet it A major report by the InterAcademies Partnership, a global network of national science academies, found that predatory conference practices are a serious and growing problem, but naming specific operators has proven harder than cataloguing predatory journals. Academic forums have been warning about Common Ground specifically for years, but no central authority has stepped in. This version of the grift comes with a university-funded flight and hotel room in some exotic location.

I know because I’ve been there. Literally. Prague was beautiful.

What a Real Conference Looks Like

Before we go further, let me be precise about what I’m not saying.

There are genuinely valuable academic conferences. I’ve been to those too. A regional conference I attended early in my career charged around $50 — which included membership in the organization and access to its publications for a year. It was held in the kind of city that does not appear on anyone’s travel bucket list. Toledo. Birmingham. Harrisburg. The sort of mid-sized American city with a perfectly adequate convention hotel and no particular reason to extend your stay. My university covered the registration fee and meals. I presented a paper that wasn’t quite ready. The conference chair had written out detailed, handwritten feedback on my paper — not a form letter, not a generic “interesting work,” but specific, pointed observations about my argument and methodology. I went home and rewrote the paper substantially. It was eventually published in a peer-reviewed journal that people actually read and it’s been cited many times in other academic research and even mainstream news stories.

I’ve also attended a faculty development conference that didn’t charge me anything. They paid for my travel. Not a stipend — actual reimbursement, flights and hotel, in exchange for my participation. The conversations were substantive. The people I met became collaborators. One of them co-authored a textbook with me that is still in print.

These conferences exist. They tend to share a few characteristics: they are run by scholarly organizations rather than businesses, they require completed papers rather than a title and short abstract, they have genuine submission deadlines because actual peer review takes time, and they are cheap or free because their goal is advancing scholarship rather than generating revenue.

Not all conferences outside this tier are outright fraudulent — some are simply low-value, which is its own problem. But the model I’m describing has a specific logic.

The conferences I’m about to describe are something else entirely.

Common Ground and the Destination Conference Industry

Go to cgnetworks.org and look at their conference calendar. Take a minute. I’ll wait.

Rhodes. Athens. Lisbon. Copenhagen. Singapore. Osaka. Antalya. Perth. Paris. Split, Croatia. Galway. Hong Kong.

Now look at the conference names: “New Directions in the Humanities.” “The Arts in Society.” “Global Studies.” “Sport & Society.” “Technology, Knowledge and Society.” “Tourism & Leisure Studies.” “Interdisciplinary Social Sciences.” “Religion & Spirituality in Society.” “Health, Wellness & Society.” They are broad enough to accommodate virtually any paper in any field. That is not an accident.

Common Ground Research Networks is one of the largest operators in what I’ll call the destination conference industry. They announce conferences years in advance — not months, years — and accept submissions until weeks before the event. Sit with that for a moment. Legitimate conferences close submissions early because peer review takes time. When an organization appears to be accepting papers until a couple weeks before the conference begins, it is difficult to see how meaningful peer review could be happening on that timeline. What there is, as best I can tell, is a rented conference room in Rhodes, 24 other presenters who also needed a CV line, and a registration fee of $500 or more that your university is going to pay.

This is not a hypothetical. As of this writing, Common Ground is accepting submissions for a climate change conference in Rhodes, Greece, beginning April 20th. The late submission deadline is April 13th — seven days before the conference opens. Someone reading this could submit a 50-word abstract this afternoon, receive an acceptance by Thursday, book flights and be standing on a Greek island in two weeks, all on their university’s dime. The submission deadline, for all practical purposes, is whenever you decide to go. That is not how peer review works. That is how vacation planning works. And this operation has been running for over 40 years, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This is not a fringe observation. On Reddit’s AskAcademia forum, a thread flagging Common Ground as potentially problematic has been circulating for seven years. A post in a Facebook group for academics described Common Ground as “the ultimate predatory conference and proceedings generator” after receiving a solicitation email. One attendee, recounting a conference in Vancouver, noted that he found some fellow presenters so unwelcoming that he skipped the organized city tour and went for pancakes instead. He did not seem to regret this. A PhD student who attended a Common Ground communication conference described it afterward on Reddit as “super small and disorganized” with little to show for the experience.

Perhaps most tellingly, the Chief Social Scientist of Common Ground Research Networks — the person who signs the solicitation emails — has accumulated, after nearly 20 years of publishing, 76 lifetime citations. This is the organization determining whether your conference presentation is accepted.

An academic in the Reddit thread summarized the general rule neatly: “If they email you, they’re a scam.” Another noted that the broad, unrelated subject areas — climate change, e-learning, religion and spirituality, tourism and leisure, all under one organizational roof (as is the case with Common Ground) — is a reliable red flag. Genuine scholarly organizations develop expertise in a field. Organizations that will host conferences across unrelated fields begin to look less like disciplinary bodies and more like service providers.

The warnings have been out there for years. A successor to Beall’s List — the anonymous site that kept the index alive after Beall himself was forced offline — added Common Ground Research Networks in March 2019. Two months later, without explanation, they were removed. The list’s changelog records the addition and removal but offers no reason for either.

The lack of explanation is less mysterious when you understand how Beall’s List actually ended. Jeffrey Beall, the academic librarian who created and maintained the list, explained that he shut down the entire blog in 2017 — not because his work was wrong, but because he was facing intense pressure from his own university and feared for his job. Publishers had learned to fight back by targeting the institution rather than the argument: sending orchestrated email campaigns to university chancellors and administrators, making false accusations, and simply being as relentless as possible until someone in a position of authority told Beall to stop. The heckler’s veto, applied to academic watchdogging. By 2019, when Common Ground briefly appeared and then disappeared, the person making those calls was an anonymous postdoctoral researcher somewhere in Europe — someone who won’t even reveal their name, for exactly the reasons Beall described.

Despite the warnings, the organization is still running conferences in Osaka and Split and Galway and charging up to $595 a head. Nobody in any position of authority has done anything about it, as far as I can tell, because nobody in any position of authority is paying close enough attention.

From what I and colleagues have experienced, sessions are sparsely attended. Almost all of the audience is also presenting. The feedback, if any comes, is polite and generic. You collect your certificate of participation, snap a photo in front of the Acropolis or the Eiffel Tower or whatever landmark the city offers, and fly home.

The website photographs tell a different story than the one I’ve experienced. Packed rooms. Engaged audiences. Scholars leaning forward in animated discussion at prestigious university venues. In practice, the sessions I and colleagues have attended looked rather different — a handful of people, half of them waiting to present next, the other half checking their phones while someone reads directly from their slides. The photos are aspirational. The reality is a Saturday afternoon in a conference room that was rented to the highest bidder.

To be fair, most of these conferences are held at universities rather than hotels, which adds another layer of apparent legitimacy. Genuine institutions whose names appear on the conference program and, subsequently, on faculty CVs. What that affiliation actually means, in many cases, is that someone paid the facilities rental fee. Universities routinely rent their conference spaces to outside organizations as a revenue stream, with no vetting of the event’s scholarly merit.

On your annual faculty activity report, this becomes: “Presented at the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Lisbon, Portugal.”

It sounds impressive. It means almost nothing. Many faculty don’t list Common Ground Research Networks anywhere on their CV at all — they list the university venue instead. The conference organizer’s name disappears. What remains is The Sorbonne. St Andrews. The University of Hong Kong. The building launders the credential.

Common Ground describes their conference format, with apparent sincerity, as “living knowledge ecosystems — spaces for shared inquiry and multiple ways of presenting research and creative work.” Participants engage in “Talking Circles” featuring “reciprocal listening and shared insight.” These Talking Circles, the website explains, are “rooted in Indigenous pedagogical traditions” and “honor multiple ways of knowing” while fostering “an ethics of exchange that challenges hierarchical modes of academic communication.” A climate change conference in Rhodes is, apparently, challenging hierarchical modes of academic communication. The website says so. The registration fee is $595.

There are also “Cultural Site Visits that highlight the local context of the host institution.” This is the Acropolis. This is the thing. It is listed as a conference format.

The most revealing detail is buried in the FAQ: you can participate entirely online, asynchronously, by uploading a video. No travel required. No live presentation. No room to stand in. You upload a file and people — theoretically — engage through discussion boards. The CV line is identical to the one you’d get standing in that rented conference room in Rhodes. Which raises an obvious question: if the scholarship is the point, why does anyone go in person at all?

The answer, of course, is Rhodes.

Common Ground also runs attached journals — publications where conference participants can publish their papers. The journals are indexed, which gives them a veneer of legitimacy. In my assessment, the peer review appears to operate on a similar model to the conference acceptance process.

Some journals in the network publish no acceptance rate data at all. The most telling omission is the Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations network. Its flagship journal, International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations, vanished from Scopus in 2019, one of the main databases universities use to track legitimate academic journals. The only public explanation is the vague phrase “continuous curation.” The journal was discontinued that same year, and none of the replacement journals now publish acceptance rate data.

The journals that do publish their numbers tell a more complicated story — but not a more reassuring one. Across the Common Ground network, acceptance rates on their own pages range from 14% to 66%. Some journals post numbers that approach legitimate territory: 14%, 16%, 17%. Others are harder to explain away. Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal accepts 66% of submissions and publishes them in an average of 75 days — faster than many journals complete peer review alone. The International Journal of the Arts in Society accepts 58%. The International Journal of Sport and Society accepts 46%. Information, Medium, and Society: Journal of Publishing Studies — edited by the organization’s own official, the same person who runs the conferences — accepts 47%. For context, serious academic journals typically accept 5-10%.

As someone who has reviewed for serious journals, I can tell you what those numbers mean in practice. Any journal receives a significant portion of submissions that are immediately unpublishable — poorly structured, riddled with typos, submitted to the wrong field entirely, failing to follow basic submission guidelines, citing Wikipedia as a scholarly source, or simply without a discernible argument. A legitimate journal rejects those on arrival, which is part of why acceptance rates stay low. A 58% or 66% rate suggests a journal publishing essentially everything that clears a minimal bar of coherence. Not good scholarship. Just passable. (For context: I once worked at an institution with a 73% acceptance rate for graduate admissions. The only applicants who didn't get in were the ones who failed to complete their applications. That is the company a 66% acceptance rate keeps.)

The wide range is itself part of the story. A network that produces both 14% and 66% acceptance rates under the same roof, the same brand, and the same conference infrastructure does not appear to operate as a single coherent scholarly system. It is running a portfolio. Some journals are aimed at scholars who need real credentials. Some journals function in ways that may appeal to scholars just seeking a CV line. The conference system does not appear to distinguish between them in practice, and annual faculty activity reports often do not either.

To be fair: Common Ground has real institutional affiliations and claims to follow standard publishing ethics guidelines. None of it explains acceptance rates reaching 66%, a flagship journal that disappeared from Scopus, a two-month appearance on the successor to Beall’s List, and an organizational structure in which the person running the conferences also edits a journal that publishes his own work. That person is worth examining more closely.

The editor of that journal is the organization’s own Chief Social Scientist — the same person who signs the solicitation emails inviting institutions to host Common Ground conferences. He runs the conferences. He edits the journal that publishes the conference papers. According to his Google Scholar profile, he has published four times since 2017, with nothing after 2023. Three of those four publications are in the specific journal he personally edits — and two of those three are introductions to journal issues, the brief editorial notes that appear at the front of a volume rather than peer-reviewed research contributions. The fourth publication, the only one to appear in an independent journal, is titled “Good and Bad Actors in Digital Space.” He is, in the most literal sense, filling the pages of his own journal with his own work — including work that isn't really research at all. The one time he published elsewhere, he wrote about digital ethics. Make of that what you will

There is one more detail worth highlighting. Common Ground Research Networks was founded in 1984 — over 40 years ago — by his parents. According to their own website, it began in a converted horse stable behind the founders’ home, where a small printing press became the heart of what they called “a new kind of educational publishing.” It has since grown into an international conference empire running events on six continents, charging hundreds of dollars per registration. It has since grown into an international conference empire running events on six continents, charging hundreds of dollars per registration. In 2016, their son took over leadership. This model has been running continuously for over 40 years. It did not slip through any cracks. It has been in plain sight the entire time.

Common Ground describes itself as an Illinois not-for-profit corporation. That is a state-law corporate status. In the materials I reviewed on its website, I did not see any specific statement about federal IRS tax-exempt recognition. The organization was not always a not-for-profit of any kind — it operated as a for-profit business for over three decades before the son converted it when he took over in 2016. Not-for-profit status means profits cannot be distributed to shareholders. It says nothing about salaries, travel budgets, or conference expenses. The organization hosts dozens of conferences a year in desirable cities around the world. Someone is going to those cities. Not-for-profit is a tax classification. It is not a character reference.

The organization explicitly states it offers no financial aid or travel grants to attendees. The not-for-profit dedicated to advancing human knowledge will not help you get there. It will, however, accept your $595 registration fee once you do.

The organization’s CGScholar platform was developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Education and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Your tax dollars and some of the most prominent philanthropic capital in American education helped build the infrastructure for an organization that many academics consider questionable.

The organization’s own platform description is perhaps the most candid thing on the website: it describes itself as “a trusted marketplace for knowledge work” that “rewards participants.” A marketplace. That rewards participants. In a not-for-profit dedicated to the advancement of human knowledge. Over 40 years. Make of that what you will.

Host the conference, publish the papers, edit the journal, publish your own work in the journal you edit, inherit the organization from your parents, describe it all as a mission-driven knowledge ecosystem. It is an apparatus perfectly designed to generate the appearance of scholarship without requiring any of the substance.

Two Sentences Will Do

Here is the actual barrier to entry for many of these conferences: a title and an abstract. Not a paper. Not a draft. Not a literature review or a methodology section. A title and a text box. I recently looked at the submission form myself. The abstract field says “Summarize the purpose, methods, and implications of your research as a concise description.” There is no word minimum. You could type two sentences. You could type one. The field allows up to 5,000 characters, which suggests they are more worried about people writing too much than too little. You can write your entire submission in under a minute on your phone and be on a plane to Rhodes by Friday. You can recycle a paper you’ve already published by giving it a slightly different title. Some faculty do exactly this — the same paper, presented at three or four conferences over several years, each time listed as a distinct scholarly contribution on their CV. The conferences don’t know. The universities don’t check. There is also this: each co-presenter must register and pay separately. Two people presenting together means two full registration fees — at up to $595 each. The university pays for both. One presentation. Two CV lines. Two trips to Rhodes.

A graduate student on Reddit recently described submitting a single abstract and receiving acceptances from five different “international conferences” simultaneously. Five. The abstract had not been peer reviewed. It had not been evaluated for scholarly merit. It had been received, processed, and accepted by organizations that needed bodies in conference rooms in five different cities. The student was confused about which one was credible. The answer, unfortunately, was probably none of them.

I have also, more than once, been accepted to such conferences and then simply not gone. The acceptance email arrives, you mark it as something to deal with later, and later never quite comes. No follow-up from the conference. No concerned inquiry. I learned quickly not to pay the registration fee until I was certain I was actually going — because the conferences, it turns out, are not particularly invested in whether you show up, and they do not issue refunds. The system is not built around participation. It is built around processing.

And if coming up with a short abstract is too demanding, there is this: a food studies conference in the Caribbean — since apparently sustainable agriculture requires a tropical setting — whose submission form included, alongside the usual panels and workshops, an option to host a social reception. A happy hour. As your scholarly contribution — not a sponsor package, not a publisher’s networking event, but a listed mode of academic participation available to any registered attendee. The conference organizers had determined that standing around with a drink in hand counted as a mode of academic exchange. They are not entirely wrong. It is, at minimum, more honest than a Talking Circle.

I know how this system works because I used it.

Prague

I attended one of these conferences early in my career. It was in Prague. I was an assistant professor making a salary that did not go far, and Prague seemed like a reasonable consolation prize. I submitted my 50 words, got accepted — as everyone does — and the university paid for the flight and the hotel.

I should mention that it was a senior colleague who first pointed me toward these conferences when I was a new tenure-track professor. He had been assigned as my faculty mentor. He recommended Common Ground the way you’d recommend a good restaurant: enthusiastically, from experience, with full knowledge of what he was ordering. He had been working the destination conference circuit for years. The trips, the easy publications, the CV lines — he understood the system perfectly. He just didn’t mention that part when he mentioned Prague.

I was young and impressionable. He knew exactly what it was. That’s the difference between us.

The paper I presented was real work. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. There was no feedback. No questions. The sessions were politely attended and quickly forgotten. The conversations over dinner were more memorable — but then, so was the architecture.

I understood, even then, that I was gaming a system designed to be gamed. I told myself it was a victimless transaction. The university got a faculty member who came back with a CV line. I got Prague.

I’m not sure that reasoning holds up. The transaction was not victimless. It just took me a while to understand who was paying for it.

What the Price Tells You

Here is the simplest way to evaluate any academic conference: look at what it costs to attend.

Legitimate scholarly conferences are cheap or free because they are run by academic organizations whose purpose is advancing knowledge, not generating revenue. The registration fee covers logistics — the venue, the program, maybe a dinner. The goal is participation, not profit.

Destination conference businesses are expensive because they are businesses. The registration fee — sometimes $500 or more, not including flights or hotel, which the university pays separately — is the product. The certificate, the journal publication opportunity, the laurel graphic — these are the deliverables. Add it all up and a single destination conference can easily cost a university $2,000 to $3,000 per faculty member. The scholarship is incidental.

A regional conference that costs $50 and includes organizational membership is trying to build a scholarly community. A conference that costs $500 to attend and announces its dates two years in advance is trying to fill a conference room in a desirable city on someone else’s dime.

The difference is not the quality of the scholarship. It is who is making money.

The Taxonomy of the Full Grift

The destination conference is just the entry level. Once you understand how lightly audited academic travel is, the options expand.

The Ghost Attendee. Register for the conference, get reimbursed for travel, attend day one. Spend days two through four at the beach, or the museums, or visiting someone you’ve been meaning to see. No one takes attendance. The certificate says you were there for the full conference. The receipt says you were at the hotel. Nobody checks.

The Recycled Paper. Present the same research at multiple conferences, each time with a slightly different title and framing. “Media Literacy in the Digital Age” becomes “Digital Citizenship and Media Competencies” becomes “Information Literacy in Contemporary Society.” Three conference lines on the CV. One paper, or maybe just an abstract. Zero new ideas.

The Miles Hustle. Book your flights on personal miles or credit card points accumulated over years of university travel. Submit a receipt for the cash equivalent. Pocket the difference. This violates most university travel policies. It is also almost never caught, because the receipt looks right and no one is comparing it to your frequent flyer account.

The Double Dip. The abuse isn’t limited to destination conferences. The same lightly audited reimbursement system that funds a 50-word abstract in Rhodes will process a claim for a conference someone may never have attended without asking a single question. A colleague of mine once presented at a conference in a city where she happened to live — a trip from our campus that commuters make without blinking. She co-presented, which raises a question nobody will ever be able to answer: did she show up at all, or did her co-presenter handle it while she stayed home? Conference attendance is never audited. Nobody reports back. Her session was listed as hybrid — meaning she could have presented from her office or living room without getting on a train at all. She submitted a reimbursement request for $400 anyway. No registration fee submitted — notable, since this conference charged a substantial fee to attend. Whether she was officially registered to present at all is a question the reimbursement form doesn’t answer. What the form does show is a train fare to her home city on one day, and then the following day, mileage reimbursement claimed by personal car for the same route — in both directions. A full round trip by vehicle on a day she had already arrived by train the night before. Three legs claimed. Two modes of transportation. All reimbursed without question. Nobody flagged it. Nobody was going to — she had a well-established habit of responding to any scrutiny with a union grievance. In a lightly audited system, weak documentation functions as documentation. And who knows if the conference line even went on her CV. She had already announced her retirement. Whatever the conference was meant to advance, her career was no longer it.

The Falsified Receipt. The logical endpoint of a system with no real auditing. AI image generation tools can produce a convincing hotel or airline receipt in under a minute. A University of Connecticut professor was arrested in 2025 after allegedly disguising 19 personal trips — including three visits to Disney World — as academic research, submitting edited and photoshopped receipts totaling over $58,000. She wasn’t caught by any auditing mechanism. She was caught because someone filed an anonymous tip. I am not saying falsified receipts are common. I am saying that in an environment where receipts are submitted electronically, reviewed by administrators with no way to verify them, and never audited against actual booking records, the incentive structure is not exactly discouraging. The UConn case is the exception. The anonymous tip is what made it one.

Who’s Actually Paying for This

It’s worth pausing on where the money comes from.

Every dollar spent flying a professor to Rhodes for a conference that nobody serious attends is a dollar that came from somewhere. It came from tuition. It came from student loan debt that will take decades to repay. It came from families who were told that the price of a university education reflects the quality of the institution and the seriousness of its faculty. Some of it paid for a 50-word abstract and a photo in front of the Eiffel Tower. That’s not a metaphor. It’s a budget line.

I’ll add a dimension to this that I didn’t have as an assistant professor: I now sit on the other side of the desk. As a department chair, I see these funding requests come across my desk regularly. A faculty member submits a travel request for a conference in Bali, or Paris, or Rio de Janeiro. I recognize the organization immediately. I know what it is. And I approve it anyway — because the collective bargaining agreement gives faculty the right to request conference funding and gives me essentially no grounds to deny it on the basis of conference quality. The union negotiated that right. It is now, in practice, a contractual entitlement to spend tuition dollars on a junket to Rhodes.

Some faculty do three of these a year. Three conferences, three CV lines, three trips to cities they wanted to visit. Their annual activity report looks globally engaged. The scholarship produced is, in my assessment, essentially nil — and you can verify this yourself. Go back and check the CV a few years later. The paper presented at the international conference in Lisbon never became a journal article. Never became a book chapter. Never became anything. It just sits there on the CV as a permanent line item, generating no subsequent scholarship, citing nothing, cited by no one. Real conference presentations are the beginning of something. Destination conference presentations are the end of the road. The CV line is the excuse. The free vacation is the point.

The research that resulted from any given destination conference, in many cases, will never be read by anyone. This is not an argument against the humanities; some of it is genuinely valuable, and the people who produce it generally aren’t the ones presenting in a rented conference room in Rhodes. It is a specific critique of the scholarship that gets presented at destination conferences, which was not selected for quality. It was selected because someone needed a CV line and had a university travel budget. The destination conference system doesn’t produce bad research by accident. It selects for it. Serious scholars with serious work get invited to serious conferences. I suspect what fills the Common Ground calendar is often work that found its way there because the bar is low and the location is appealing — dressed up in the language of international collaboration and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Tuition has tripled in real terms over the past 40 years. Nobody can fully account for where all that money went. Some of it, at least, went to Rhodes.

The Film Festival Version

The same psychology operates in the arts.

A colleague of mine I mentioned in my previous post — the aging-bohemian-auteur type, brimmed hat, suspenders, the whole aesthetic — had accumulated an impressive-looking collection of film festival credentials: Award of Merit, Certificate of Merit, Special Jury Prize, from festivals in Jakarta, Madrid, Los Angeles, Warsaw.

What he did not advertise was that these came from what filmmakers bluntly call award mills. Organizations that function less like curators and more like vanity publishers. Submit a film, pay a fee — usually $30 to $60 — receive a laurel graphic suitable for posters and promotional materials. The “festival” may or may not involve actual screenings. The “jury” may or may not exist in any meaningful sense.

He listed these on his CV and annual faculty review reports as evidence of scholarly and creative achievement. Nobody looked closely enough to ask whether the “World Documentary Awards” in Jakarta was the kind of festival that screens films, or the kind that processes submission fees. Filmmaker communities and forums like FilmFreeway have long documented the existence of so-called award mills — festivals that collect submission fees and distribute hundreds of laurels with little or no actual curation. The deans and tenure committees evaluating his CV were not filmmakers. They had no way to distinguish a Sundance selection from a pay-to-play laurel mill in Jakarta. They saw “Award of Merit, International Film Festival” and counted it.

His films were largely unedited footage shot by students and assembled without apparent structure. The awards were essentially purchased. The reputation was highly embellished. The institution validated it for years because validating it was easier than examining it.

What Good Looks Like

The new faculty hire who replaced this colleague is doing it the right way. He’s submitting his documentary work to festivals with real acceptance rates. Sundance. Places that actually curate. The rejections come more often than the acceptances. He doesn’t seem bothered.

That’s what the system is supposed to look like. Rigorous, occasionally humbling, worth the effort.

The destination conference industry exists because we built an incentive structure that doesn’t reward distinguishing between real scholarly activity and the appearance of it. When the system can't tell the difference — and doesn’t try to — the grift fills the gap.

Fix the incentive structure — audit the travel, scrutinize the CV lines, ask what the acceptance rate was — and the market for 50-word abstracts in Rhodes dries up on its own.

Until then, the emails will keep arriving on a random Wednesday.

Prague is still beautiful, I’m told. But scholarly treats deserve better than a scenic backdrop.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

There is a specific kind of silence that falls over a faculty meeting when someone brings up Professor So-and-So. You know who I mean. Tenured since the Reagan administration. Hasn’t published anything — not a book chapter, not a conference paper, nothing — since current students’ parents were in college. Teaches the same two courses he’s always taught, fills the seats through grade inflation and low expectations, and spends the rest of his time defending the precise square footage of his office and complaining about the parking situation. The chair glances down at the table. The junior faculty study their laptops. Someone changes the subject. The meeting moves on.

This is how it has always worked in higher education. And it is slowly strangling the enterprise from the inside.

Last semester, a professor at a university I know well resigned in protest over a routine course enrollment cap. He was replaced by lunch. The department kept moving. Nobody panicked. The students were notified of their new instructor and went about their lives with the indifference that 18-year-olds typically bring to news about adjunct staffing changes.

I want to talk about what that looked like — and why it matters.

How the System Made Them

You can’t really understand these guys without understanding the world that built them.

Professors who entered academia in the 1970s and ‘80s landed in a version of the profession that basically no longer exists. Tenure decisions were looser — more about relationships and collegiality than actual scholarly records. Publication expectations were a fraction of what junior faculty navigate today. Departments ran on seniority and informal consensus rather than management, and chairs were colleagues first and administrators basically never. “Academic freedom” — which is a real and important thing — got stretched over time into a catchall that somehow covered everything from how you graded to whether you showed up to curriculum meetings to how many students you jammed into your film elective.

In that environment, a certain kind of operator thrived. Not necessarily the best scholars or the most dedicated teachers. The ones who were good at staying. At making themselves just inconvenient enough that previous chairs decided it was easier to work around them than through them. At accumulating small perks — a course release here, an administrative stipend there, a long-standing exemption from whatever policy everyone else had to follow — until those perks hardened into something that felt, to them, like rights.

Thirty or forty years later, those operators are in their seventies. Some have technically retired but stuck around as adjuncts, in courtesy arrangements that let them keep the office, the classroom, the identity. And when someone finally comes along and actually manages the department — enforces the course cap, reassigns the administrative role that’s been collecting a stipend on autopilot for a decade, asks why the internship program has been generating student complaints for years — they react with the only thing they have left.

Righteous indignation. Scaled to an eleven.

Victor

Let’s start with one such professor I’ll call Victor. He fancied himself a filmmaker.

You would know him immediately if you saw him. The brimmed hat. The suspenders. The bolo tie — yes, even though we are nowhere near Texas. The full aging-bohemian-auteur aesthetic, assembled sometime in the 1980s and maintained without revision ever since, the sartorial equivalent of a man who decided what kind of person he was going to be and never saw reason to reconsider. He also did tai chi. Of course he did.

He had made documentaries — or something that functioned as documentaries. Largely unedited footage assembled without much apparent structure, the kind of thing that results when someone with access to a camera mistakes enthusiasm for craft. The films had collected a respectable haul of festival laurels: “Award of Merit,” “Certificate of Merit,” “Special Jury Prize.” What Victor perhaps did not advertise was that the film festival ecosystem has an entire shadow tier of what filmmakers bluntly call award mills — organizations that function less like curators and more like vanity publishers, trading laurels for entry fees. Submit, pay, receive a graphic you can put on your poster. His films had found their natural home there. He mentioned the awards when the opportunity arose.

Over the years, Victor had also carved out a small academic fiefdom: a curriculum minor built around courses he liked teaching, which mostly meant watching films, discussing films, and celebrating films. His classes filled every semester. He took this as confirmation of his legendary status.

The actual explanation was less flattering. His courses counted toward general education requirements students needed regardless of who was teaching them. The demand wasn’t for Victor. It was for the credit hours. You could have put a mannequin at the front of that classroom and gotten the same enrollment — though the mannequin might have graded harder.

The minor Victor had spent years building around his interests had, at last count, zero declared students. Not a struggling handful. Zero. Not one student in the entire university had decided his minor was worth committing to. But it stayed on the books semester after semester, because no previous chair wanted the conversation.

He also gave literally everyone A’s — including students he complained didn’t belong in college. Students knew it, talked about it, and sought out his courses specifically for that reason. Victor considered this a sign of his effectiveness as an educator.

When Victor retired, the department let him continue as an adjunct at his request — a professional courtesy, the kind extended to people you don’t want an awkward conversation with. But he apparently interpreted the arrangement as: same job, same informal exemptions, indefinitely.

So when a standard reminder went to all faculty — course caps exist, they apply to everyone, don’t overenroll your sections — Victor responded with something approaching genuine bewilderment. He had been overenrolling for over 30 years, he explained. No harm had come to the department. Most of his students weren’t even majors — they enrolled because of his reputation. He doubted, in fact, that those students would bother with another communications course taught by a colleague who didn’t have “a good enough reputation to attract enough students on their own.”

Sit with that sentence. A retired adjunct — semester-by-semester courtesy appointment, no governance role, no tenure, no standing — put it in writing that his tenured colleagues couldn’t draw students without him.

The reply from the chair was calm: policy applies to all faculty including adjuncts, no exceptions, send students who ask to me directly.

It’s worth being clear about why course caps exist, because Victor’s argument — I’ve been doing this for years, no harm done — is the one people who don’t work in academia might find superficially reasonable. Caps aren’t bureaucratic formality. They exist to maintain quality, prevent a race to the bottom on rigor, and distribute enrollment fairly. When one person overenrolls indefinitely, they shrink the department’s overall section offerings, limit other instructors’ hours, disrupt course rotations, and force colleagues to absorb the imbalances. What feels like personal flexibility is structural hoarding. And when that person is giving everyone A’s to keep seats full, the harm to academic standards compounds quietly over years.

Victor announced he was resigning. He would contact the deans. He would personally explain the situation to his students. There was, in his telling, simply no other honorable path.

He resigned. In writing. Twice. Same day.

By lunch, the course had been reassigned. The department kept moving. Students notified of the change responded with the indifference 18-year-olds typically bring to news about adjunct staffing.

Victor, discovering his theatrical exit hadn’t triggered the expected institutional crisis, regrouped. Two days later he sent a new email — cc’ing the director of a campus support program for neurodiverse students, a well-regarded initiative that does genuinely important work. His cinema courses, he explained, had been a “launching pad” for these students. It would be a shame if the department were to lapse in its support of this much-respected community.

There was one student from that program in his class. One.

A dean later confirmed what was by then obvious: Victor’s sustained refusal to follow the enrollment policy had violated his own collective bargaining agreement. His union concluded there wasn’t much of a case to make — a polite way of saying you quit over a course cap, and you’re on your own.

Decades of self-mythology — the beloved maverick, the irreplaceable draw — sustained by an institution’s long habit of finding accommodation easier than confrontation. When the accommodation stopped, the myth didn’t slowly deflate. It just ended. On a Tuesday afternoon. Before dinner.

He wasn’t fighting the chair anymore. He was fighting the reality that the department didn’t actually need him. That is a much harder fight to win.

Gerald

Gerald’s situation is different in the specifics but identical in the psychology, and in some ways sadder.

Gerald had once been department chair himself — a tenure during which enrollment dropped by 50%, facilities deteriorated, and the department drifted into the comfortable stagnation that sets in when nobody is actually steering. He left the role with his relationships intact and a deep, unshakeable belief that his years of service had purchased permanent insider status that subsequent leadership couldn’t really touch.

The clearest expression of that status was the internship coordinator role. Stipend, course release, a decade of occupancy. What it didn’t have, under Gerald’s watch, was functioning results. Colleagues had been quietly complaining for years. Students had escalated concerns to the dean’s office — some of them seniors who’d received such vague advising they couldn’t figure out how to graduate on time. The chair had to personally clean up multiple situations that never should have required a chair.

When the role was reassigned to a junior colleague who had actually built the program’s current infrastructure — done the real unglamorous work of making the thing run — Gerald was livid.

The email he sent deserves a moment of appreciation. He called the decision “frankly, disturbing.” He wrote that he “couldn’t let this continue” — the chair’s decision, about the chair’s department — as though the org chart ran in the other direction. He audited his junior colleague’s teaching schedule and declared she obviously had bandwidth for the role, as if other people’s workloads were his to assess and judge. He invoked his support during a contentious hiring dispute that, on closer inspection, he had opposed just as loudly as everyone else.

The response was short: decision is final, schedule is submitted, all internship questions go to the new coordinator.

Gerald threatened to go to the union. Said students were confused and distressed. Demanded a formal meeting with the chair and a dean present — this from a man whose job was to help students find internships.

Four days later, on a Saturday night — the classic hour of the humbled — he emailed asking if they could find time to “square things up.” The chair offered office hours the following Tuesday afternoon. Not Gerald’s preferred morning slot, but a perfectly reasonable time.

Gerald wrote back: actually, let’s just pass on the meeting. Let’s maintain our collegiality going forward.

He had burned through every available escalation in three weeks. And he folded because the offered time was an hour later than he wanted, and he realized somewhere in that gap that showing up would only mean hearing “no” to his face. The gracious withdrawal was not graciousness. It was self-preservation dressed up in the language of magnanimity.

A month later he tried again, demanding he be reinstated to his sinecure — longer email, words like “arbitrary” and “cutting” and “unprecedented.” The reply, which deans were copied on, said the matter was closed and future emails on the subject would go unanswered.

He went quiet. Started routing requests through the department secretary. Applied for a research release and was denied. His last academic publication of any kind appeared when most of his current students’ parents were in college. The faculty voted to cut his signature course from the core curriculum. The internship program, in its first semester under new coordination, improved measurably.

A look at Gerald’s current syllabus tells you most of what you need to know about where he is intellectually. It’s a History of Mass Media course — genuinely his subject, the thing he’s spent a career on — and it devotes one hour-long class session to the internet and artificial intelligence. Social media gets no treatment. His readings include dead links pointing to webpages that haven’t been updated in years and some that show error messages. The contact information lists a personal AOL address. Gerald teaches the history of how communication technologies transform human society and consciousness. He still uses AOL. There’s probably a McLuhan thesis in there somewhere about how we never fully abandon old media environments. Gerald is living it.

Gerald still walks the halls. He nods when he has to. He doesn’t make eye contact with the chair if he can help it.

The tantrum, when it came, wasn’t just ego. It was the sound of an entire obsolete power structure collapsing in real time — and Gerald being the last one to hear it.

Why Nobody Says This Out Loud

Every dean in every building in this country knows who their Victor is. Who their Gerald is. The junior faculty know. The staff knows. In many cases the students know, or sense it.

The knowledge isn’t the problem. The problem is that saying something has always cost more in the short term than saying nothing. So previous chairs absorbed the entitlement and worked around it. Previous deans took the complaints and filed them. Previous colleagues covered for the disorganized advising and told themselves it wasn’t their problem. And those years of accommodation stacked into something the recipient eventually couldn’t distinguish from something earned.

Victor built a mythology around being a celebrated filmmaker — and his evidence for this was a stack of “Awards of Merit” from organizations that essentially charge a fee and mail you a laurel graphic. Gerald spent a decade running an internship program badly enough that students went to the dean, and still wrote emails about how the department couldn’t function without him. Neither of them seems to have ever asked the basic question: what have I actually produced lately that justifies this level of certainty about my own importance?

The answer, in both cases, is: nothing. For decades.

And that’s the thing about this particular flavor of boomer academic entitlement — it’s not just confidence, it’s confidence that has been completely insulated from feedback. Real feedback, anyway. The kind that comes from peer review, from enrollment trends, from student outcomes, from any external measure of whether the work is actually good. They opted out of all of that, quietly and gradually, and replaced it with the in-house validation of a department that was too conflict-averse to say otherwise.

The self-regard isn’t the cause of the problem. It’s the symptom. The cause is 30 years of institutional silence that let them mistake tolerance for admiration.

By the time anyone says “no” and means it, the person hearing it has spent 30 or 40 years being told “yes.” They don’t experience refusal as correction. They experience it as betrayal. Which is why the meltdowns are so out of proportion — a course cap, an internship reassignment, a policy that applies to everyone. Those things aren’t really the issue. The issue is the sudden discovery that the protective arrangement is over. That seniority doesn’t mean immunity. That the institution moved on while they weren’t paying attention.

The Generational Ledger

There’s a financial angle to this that doesn’t get talked about much, and it should.

The same senior faculty who accumulated the informal perks also came of age in an economy their junior colleagues will never see. They bought condos and houses in major cities when academic salaries could actually do that. They have pensions that no longer exist for anyone hired after a certain year. They started at salaries that, relative to cost of living, were much better than what incoming faculty make today — and then accumulated raises on top for 30 years while entry-level wages stagnated.

A professor who started at a regional university in the early 2000s at $63,000 has watched starting salaries inch up to around $80,000 two decades later. That sounds like progress until you run the inflation numbers and realize junior faculty are actually earning less in real terms than their senior colleagues did at the same career stage. Junior faculty in expensive cities aren’t building wealth. They’re not buying property. A lot of them are barely keeping up, while watching the people who hold the stipends and course releases treat those resources as personal property.

The people who got the better deal are the ones fighting hardest against change. This is not a coincidence.

The department at the center of these stories lost more than half its majors over the decade Victor and Gerald helped shape. In a single year under new leadership it is up 25 percent. Production studios are being built. It’s on the campus tour now for the first time anyone can remember, because there is finally something worth showing.

Victor’s minor had zero declared students. Gerald’s internship program runs better without him.

Neither man contributed anything to the turnaround. They weren’t obstacles to progress so much as part of the drag — the accumulated weight of low standards, protected mediocrity, and 30 years of everyone deciding it wasn’t their problem. The building happened in spite of them, or after them, or over their explicit objections. But they’ll tell versions of this story for the rest of their lives in which they were reasonable and principled and the institution lost its way. That’s fine. The department doesn’t need their understanding. It just needs to keep moving forward.

What Actually Has to Change

This isn’t an argument for being cruel to old professors. Many senior faculty are doing the work, mentoring students, contributing in ways that matter. Long careers earn real things.

The argument is narrower.

Courtesy appointments need to be treated as courtesies — time-limited, conditional, revocable. Not a second tenure. The moment an institution lets a retired faculty member return as an adjunct and acts like it can never take that back, it has created exactly the dynamic that produces Victor.

Policies have to apply to everyone. This sounds obvious. It is apparently radical. The course cap that applies to the new hire but somehow not to the person who’s been ignoring it for 30 years isn’t a policy. It’s a caste system.

Chairs need their deans to back them. The culture that treats administrative accountability as a personality conflict — that expects department chairs to absorb insubordination indefinitely in the name of not making things awkward — protects the wrong people.

And the faculty meeting silence has to end. The glance at the table, the changed subject, the careful non-confrontation — that’s not collegiality. That’s complicity. Silence isn’t collegiality; it’s often the mechanism by which the problem compounds. Every time a room full of people who know exactly what’s happening decide it’s not their problem, the problem gets a little more entrenched.

The Last Dinosaurs didn’t fall from the sky. The institution built them, fed them, and looked away. It can stop.

The course cap was just the occasion. Someone finally didn’t blink. And the department — the students, the junior faculty, the staff, everyone except the two people described above — is better for it.

If you work in higher education, you know exactly who I’m writing about. You probably have your own Victor. Your own Gerald. And if you’re the chair who finally said enough — or the junior faculty member who has been waiting for someone to — this one’s for you.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now