The Seminar Industry

The academia around is keen to make some fast bucks on the flourishing seminar industry. More and more colleges are jumping into small scale industry called running national and international seminar because it is seen as an easy way to raise fund for the college. Not many questions are raised by the participants who either are mere participants or are contributing papers to be read in the seminar. End of a seminar, the balance sheet looks pretty promising and in the rush to reap the monetary gain principles and ethics are thrown to winds. 

 National and international seminars are being organized in the country more often than not with financial assistance from the University Grants Commission (UGC). UGC often provides decent financial support for the organizing colleges and departments to run the show. It also promotes fund raising by the college through registration fee from the participants. But what is happening in the guise of the seminars and conferences is often far from what the UGC has envisaged. The organizing institutions are beginning to fleece the enthusiastic participants by charging exorbitant amounts from them. The amount collected from the paper presenters and the participants in a national seminar often vary between Rs. 500 to Rs. 1500. If it is an 'international event', then the price tag will still shoot up. When an outsider does the preliminary kind of calculation regarding the revenue generated, the take home at the end of the programme is pretty handsome. Are the seminars turning quickly into events where fund raising takes precedence over issue raising, conscience raising or even problem debating? 

UGC has shifted to an API Score format for evaluating performances of the college and university level teachers. To move up the promotion ladder, seminar / conference participation  / paper presentation is where the teachers can score some points. Thus the teachers would naturally try to gather points by presenting / participating in these programmes. This is where the eye of the fund-conscious organizers lie. This is where the entrepreneurship urge of the academicians turn turn its tail up too. When money gains upper hand, academic concern may take the backseat. The economics is rather straight forward. More registrations, better income. A world where each college teacher is trying to gather targeted API score, abstracts for presentations will sure flow in. Rs. 500 - 1500 may be big amount, but not big enough not to sacrifice for the sake of the potential promotion. The participating academicians get points for career promotion  and the organizing academician get the event promoted. Looks like a clean win-win kind of offer. 

But there are collateral damages of the serous kind in the process. When the eye is  on money, an anything-goes-attitude begins to build up. It gets increasingly difficult for the organizers of the seminars to reject an abstract since abstracts bring money in. By extension, when all abstracts are accepted with no quality filtering, time becomes a serious constraint. Each presenter is mad to run through the presentation and often time for worthy discussion is the casualty. When the presentations are run in parallel sessions, the available audience gets split and not much worthy audience will be available to listen through and to interact with the presenter. A pedestrian crowd may be neither informed nor inspired to be part of the interaction. If quality questions are a vital gain from a seminar presentation, helping the presenter to fine tune and to reposition the arguments, that is well neigh impossible in the seminars, generally speaking. 

The fall in quality we experience in seminars seems to be inversely proportional to urge to raise funds. Cashing in on the drive to pocket API scores, the institutions of higher education around are giving into dilution of academic quality. This phenomenon has to be looked into by the authorities concerned. Otherwise soon we will come to experience seminars as exercises in inanity where mediocrity is celebrated and nothing but fund raising is promoted.