Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Retinking Academic Travel

I am just back from an overnight trip to Vanderbilt University law school in Nashville, where I presented a paper on shareholder activism to a corporate governance colloquium. I had a great time. My hosts took me out to a lovely dinner (at which we had a fine bottle of wine, which is always a plus). I received some very helpful feedback on the paper at the colloquium. So none of what I’m about to say should be taken as casting aspersions at the event. It is simply that the event got me thinking about something, which almost inevitably leads to blogging.

Why are we academics still traveling all the time?

To be sure, some academic travel is justifiable. Traveling to present a colloquium when one is being considered for a position at the host school is a no-brainer. Both you and the school need opportunities for multiple interactions outside the job talk itself.

Likewise, I think travel to attend the occasional academic conference is perfectly justifiable. Having multiple panels each with multiple panelists is a very efficient use of one’s time, plus the opportunity for hallway schmoozing between sessions and catching up with old friends is invaluable.

But for the single speaker seminar type trip from which I just returned, I wonder whether we shouldn’t be thinking of technological substitutes to travel. Travel is expensive for the host school. Travel has high opportunity costs for the speaker. The opportunity cost problem is particularly pronounced in these days of god-awful airline travel. As a case in point, my flight home from Nashville was scheduled to connect through Chicago. The flight out of Nashville was delayed several hours, however, meaning I would have missed my Chicago connection. Fortunately, the unusually helpful United gate agent got me onto a direct American Airlines flight from Nashville to Los Angeles that got me home at roughly the same time the United flight would have done. All is well that ended well. But the potential for a typical modern air flight fiasco was hovering in the air, so to speak, for quite a while there.

Plus, of course, there are the environmental concerns. According to one website I checked, my carbon footprint for the round-trip flight to Nashville was 1500 pounds of CO2.

If we’d used some sort of fancy video teleconferencing equipment, however, I could have presented a paper and gotten the excellent feedback without having to spend a night away from home. Of course, I would have missed the opportunity to visit with my interesting hosts, but isn’t that what the AALS annual meeting is for?