The Final Report on ACSP '93, Philadelphia, October 28-31

Department of City and Regional Planning

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6311

This report is addressed to readers in three different roles:

1. the 1994 and 1995 organizers who may want to use the Philadelphia experience to shape their own plans;

2. prospective organizers who want to assess the implications of a decision to host the annual conference;

3. the conference and executive committees of ACSP who are concerned both with general policy matters and with the specific use of funds in 1993.

Though written as a single document, I have tried to address what appear to me to be the quite different concerns attached to each of those roles. The 1994 committee, for example, is likely to be interested in an evaluation of particular features of the program and details of budget decisions; prospective organizers, in contrast, are much more likely to be concerned with the way in which the conference requires uncompensated (or "off-budget") faculty and staff time than with expenditures covered by registration fees.

1. "Donations" and "Prices" I "bid" to host the conference in 1988 as chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. My goal then was to promote the department in the eyes of our academic colleagues. That goal faded in salience over time but, I suspect, that every bidder begins with promotional intentions and is sustained through the conference process by the belief that there is a local collective reward for all of the effort. The host's donation of time and dollars is, therefore, not a simple gift to the Planning Academy but the purchase price of program advertising. Representing the "donation" as an advertising cost points to two policy issues, one for ACSP and another for the host institution:

a. ACSP should understand that a high price makes it difficult for most institutions to host the conference; a low "off- budget" contribution broadens the group of potential bidders.

b. Potential hosts should understand their own organizational dynamics: Who will bear the costs of the effort and who will reap the rewards? The two issues are, of course, related. A program that is very strapped for funds may be able to bear the off-budget costs of the conference if an individual faculty member or a small group is willing to donate uncompensated time for the collective good; a quite flush program may be unable -- or better, unwilling -- to mount the conference if no one is prepared to make that donation. (If the time I gave to the conference beginning in the spring of 1992 had been charged to registrants I estimate that we would have required nearly a doubling of the registration fee and that we would have come crashing into an elastic demand schedule.)

2. Disciplines The original promotional intentions declined in salience because they did not prescribe major features of the conference design. As I began to work, therefore, other intentions directed my activity. Building on several years of talk about ways of enhancing the "quality" of the conference but no formal organizational agreement on the means to that vaguely specified end, I decided unilaterally to enhance what I called the "disciplines" of the conference. As you will recognize in the program, I relied on six forms of discipline:

a. Discussants I asked individuals proposing papers to suggest the names of three potential discussants. Many people made no suggestions; others contacted a discussant and asked me only to confirm the bargain that they had made. After panels were formed, I secured the agreement of a discussant for every paper session. In a few cases, I secured two or three discussants for a session with only one or two papers. Authors were asked in the strongest possible terms to have their papers in the hands of discussants by October 1. I often -- but not always -- followed authorial suggestions in seeking discussants. The only circumstances in which I regularly ignored these suggestions occurred when an author and proposed discussant were colleagues in the same program or where a student asked that a thesis supervisor serve as critic. I also made a deliberate effort to recruit discussants from outside the immediate ACSP family. (Some these outsiders only expected to "pop-in" for their session or part of the day and I offered them a program, a registration badge and a free lunch or reception ticket. I'll discuss the issues surrounding complementary registrations and non- registrants below.)

b. Appraisals, Reappraisals and Journal Symposia I created three panel formats -- "appraisals," "reappraisals," and "journal symposia" -- in which audiences would be able to read the central texts in advance of the meeting.

c. The Rule of Three I tried to hold every panel to a maximum of three – rather than four or five -- papers. This restriction -- plus the comments of the discussant -- would, I hoped, encourage lively and probing conversations. I violated the Rule of Three to accommodate excellent proposals and combinations of proposals but was willing to say "no" often enough to reduce the average number of papers per session substantially. (In 1992, all but a few sessions listed in the final program included four papers.)

d. Designing Markets The discipline of "Designing Markets" combined two elements: the intensive, all-day, focus on a single grand theme and the pre- circulation of papers so that the hours together could be spent in interaction rather than listening to one another read--out-loud from written texts.

e. Critique of Abstracts The flow of abstracts began in January, crested in February and March, and continued (at a trickle) through the Summer and early Fall. Each proposal was acknowledged, sometimes with a cursory comment but often with a substantial critical reflection on the argument or bibliographic suggestions in the style I would employ as a referee for a scholarly journal. Authors often replied and, in many cases, we went back and forth several times before the colloquy was concluded. I had commented in this style on the proposals to the planning theory track at Oxford but had assumed that I would not be able to replicate that effort across the larger and broader array of a whole conference. Once I began, however, I felt committed and ploughed ahead relentlessly. I only ran into trouble when late in March I offered cursory notes indicating that papers were not ready for prime time to a group of doctoral students. Some felt that I had been cavalier in not explaining my judgments; others that everyone submitting an abstract was entitled to a spot on the program. Many of these discussions surrounded proposals whose final inclusion in the program I never doubted. The quality of the authorial response -- often expressed in a revised abstract -- influenced my decision in another large set of cases, confirming me in my skepticism or persuading me that there was more potential in an argument than I had originally seen. The file of rejections includes approximately fifty abstracts -- most but not all presented by graduate students.

My comments -- extending to the final avuncular letter addressed to each panel -- also dealt with the integration of the panels. I encouraged authors to speak with one another and to adjust their arguments so that their papers converged on a small set of common issues. I wrote the titles for the sessions and often proposed new titles for papers in order to emphasize integrative links. (Not everyone accepted my revisions and the final decision on title rested with the authors of each paper.) I even encouraged organizers of some roundtables to circulate statements in advance or to settle on a common set of texts to which everyone might respond. Finally -- pushing the notion of "critique" to its limits -- I invented panels or went out searching for them; I took modest paper proposals and asked authors to recast them so that they could engage a broader set of issues. There is no reason, it seems to me, for program designers to play only with the cards they are dealt.

f. The Jury Room The Jury Room was intended principally to build bridges between Academy and Field but also was part of the attempt to discipline the talk of the Academy. The reprise meeting on Sunday was intended to allow the practitioners to assess their academic critics.

3. The Disciplines Evaluated We distributed an evaluation form with the registration materials. People who registered on Thursday did not receive the form but were asked at lunch to pick-up one at the desk. A copy of the form is enclosed with this report. The number of people who actually responded is quite small -- even when I add email messages, letters and oral statements to the stack of completed forms in my "In" box. The general character of the responses is, however, so overwhelmingly positive that unless there is a large set of quietly discontented participants, I'm confident that the conference was a great success in the eyes of those who came. I've provided here only my informal reading of the evaluations as they bear upon my six "disciplines."

a. Discussants Some discussants were wonderful and some were not so great. Overall, however, the policy of asking someone to read the papers in advance and to be prepared to comment on them, was perceived as an important step in improving the quality of the papers and of enhancing the instructional role of the conference. I particularly remember a telephone call from a doctoral student who felt cheated because her discussant had cancelled at the last minute. Her friends, she said, had benefited from the critical comments of their assigned discussants. Was it seemly, she wondered, to ask the missing discussant to comment on her paper. Several people noted that it would "take a while" before paper writers took discussants and conference deadlines seriously; before discussants found a way to be both frank and helpful simultaneously. I agree with that position. We should, I believe, see the institutionalization of discussants as the principal means of improving the papers and the conference experience.

b. Appraisals, Reappraisals, and Journal Symposia There was only one journal symposium and I have very little sense of it. The appraisal and reappraisal sessions were, however, widely perceived as great successes. (Andrew Hacker and Al Jacobs were the theatrical stars of the conference.) The format should be repeated in 1994.

c. The Rule of Three I didn't ask registrants specifically to contrast sessions with one, two, three and four papers so I have very little sense as to whether many people even perceived the decline in the average number of papers per session, let alone how they assessed it. In lively sessions, even with a small group of papers, participants complained about the lack of time. (At the other extreme, I am sure that there were sessions in which 80 minutes seemed like an eternity). Even under the best of circumstances, many speakers have yet to learn that they must prepare two papers: one for distribution and (perhaps) ultimate publication; the other for oral delivery and aural comprehension. I share the annoyance of one of my email correspondents who rued the number of people who still say: "My paper says this and that but I can't say it because I only have ten minutes."

d. Designing Markets By every account, this meeting was a great success despite an uncomfortable and overcrowded room. Participants had a sense that they were engaged by important issues; that over the course of Thursday and the two Friday reprise sessions -- one announced in the program and the other more informal -- initially defensive postures were relaxed and the conversation deepened. The advance circulation of papers -- though it was not perfect -- contributed to this success in two ways: 1. all the Europeans who were to be supported by the FannieMae grant understood that no funds would be available to them until the paper was received and 2. more time was available for critical commentary and conversation than would have been afforded in a meeting in which many speakers insisted on reading a long formal statement. I had initially planned a second "Thursday at ACSP" meeting -- this one devoted to the international trade in planning students. I dropped the scheme because I neither raised the requisite funds nor engaged a partner who would carry the idea forward while I turned to other matters. There is, however, no reason in principle to limit ourselves to one or even two meetings in the style of Designing Markets. Indeed, these meetings may 1. satisfy some of the demand for well-prepared and intensive intellectual discourse that is often frustrated within the frame of the eighty minute panel and 2. remove some of the pressure for slots in the core of the conference.

e. Critique of Abstracts Very few of the evaluation forms came back with comments on the critique of abstracts. I am disappointed by that lack of response because the effort was costly in time and (in a few instances) occasioned angry attacks on my judgment. My own sense, however, is that the time was well spent; that the interaction mitigated the cynical interpretation of paper-giving as a ritual intended only to command travel funds. It may even have improved some of the papers. I was particularly delighted by the comment of a senior professor who thanked me for helping her students: the voice of a stranger sometimes is more influential than that of a "parent."

I hope that the discussion of "reviewing" abstracts does not obscure the prosthetic opportunities engendered by "critique." It may be possible to share the burden of interaction in the manner anticipated in the Phoenix call for volunteers. I suspect, however, that the sharing must be done "in-house" within a small committee if conference planners expect to bring the contacts with prospective authors to bear upon the design of the program. When I began to sort the abstracts into boxes, I understood the texts in a way that allowed me to imagine unusual combinations and to open the possibility of reshaping the papers in order to increase the coherence of the sessions. I doubt that the same understanding could be brought to bear upon on the design if fifteen people scattered across the country had read the abstracts and corresponded with their authors.

f. The Jury Room The Jury Room was simultaneously a failure and a success. We won't be able to sort-out the elements unless it is replicated in Phoenix and Detroit.

First the bad news:

1. I knew in advance that the use of pipe and drape to divide Ballroom D into four quadrants would not create acoustically isolated spaces. I didn't realize how noisy the spaces would be -- particularly when the TV set was on for the film festival. If I wanted to house my "experiment" in second-class space, I would have done better, I now think, to locate them in several rooms that I rarely used for regular panels because they were small or irregularly shaped.

2. I tried to highlight the Jury Room presentations by describing them together in a separate section of the program. Unfortunately, the result of this decision was that the sessions were "hidden-away" at the back of the program. Their obscurity was compounded by the difficulty of many registrants in finding the Jury Room sites within Ballroom D. Our crew at the registration desk knew how to point the way to the ballroom but hotel employees did not recognize the names we had invented.

3. Hard to find and noisy when you got there, the sessions were almost all poorly attended. One critic, reflecting on his session with an audience of two, exploded: "Talk about a message that academe couldn't care less about practice!" The physical difficulties of the site make it difficult, of course, to know whether greater affordance would have led to larger audiences or whether, indeed, we "couldn't care less." The good news of the Jury Room leads me to hope that the effort will be replicated and improved in Phoenix so that we will be able to distinguish between botched implementation and an uncaring Academy. I spoke to several presenters. Even as they rued the lack of an audience, each affirmed that the critics were both well-prepared and very helpful. (I certainly had a good feeling after the session in which I participated.) I was particularly struck by the comments of the San Diego team at the (small) Sunday reprise session. They had begun to think about using the Jury Room format within the California APA chapter conference and hoped that it might be also be copied in national APA meetings.

6. The Organization and Financing of the Conference When I bid for the conference in 1988, I imagined that Jon Lang and I would arrange the program and that John Keene would handle local arrangements. When we were given 1993, I immediately visited hotel "properties" with a representative of the Philadelphia Visitors and Convention Bureau and decided to use the Wyndham Franklin Plaza in order to gain the advantage of a center city location. After that initial rush of activity there was nothing much to do -- other than to create a file of conference ideas -- until the spring of 1992. When I started to work in earnest (roughly eighteen months before the conference), it was apparent that I would be largely on my own. Jon Lang had left the University of Pennsylvania and John Keene was absorbed by the demands of the departmental chairmanship. There did not seem to me to be anyone else in the department who was likely to assume an active role in the organization of the conference. I turned only to Steve Putman who agreed to organize the Computers Users Group meeting. (When Steve began to work on the CUG meeting in the late summer and fall of 1993, he relied heavily on the advice of Dick Klosterman for whose cooperation I am very grateful.) I set to work in 1992 with very few resources. I had released Dorothy Ives Dewey, my Fall, 1992 teaching assistant, from most of her pedagogical obligations -- I assumed those duties myself – in return for her help with the conference during the 1992-93 academic year. Dottie was not, however, available during that first summer.

My future prospects were also not glowing. While Dottie was covered by the modest TA stipend for 1992-3, I had no promise of additional support for her for the summer and fall of 1994. My own time was also problematic. The Dean refused to grant me the one course released time I requested for the spring of 1993 and I didn't anticipate any relief in the fall of 1994. (She subsequently and surprisingly released me from one course in the semester of the conference itself.)

During the first months of work, I honed the idea of the Jury Room, sought financial support for what I hoped would be two specialized meetings (Designing Markets and the International Trade in Planning Students), drafted the invitation and call for papers, and collected competitive design and printing bids. My name was on a list at the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau and I received a steady stream of offers of service. One came from Susan Smith of Destination Philadelphia. I called, we talked about her experiences, I checked her references and we agreed that she would provide help with local arrangements in return for receiving a commission from providers whom she would bring to us. It was, however, quickly apparent that while I needed a great deal of help there were not a great many "commissionable" expenditures in the offing. Susan's first task was to help me choose a site for the Friday reception. I chose -- with her concurrence -- to use the University Museum for the reception but no commission could be earned there. If she had helped me choose a hotel and to negotiate a contract, she would have earned a commission on the rental of sleeping rooms but our contract with the Wyndham had been long-signed when she entered our affairs. (We did not actually know what the hotel would charge for rooms at that time.) I wondered what she would be willing to do in return for very little income. Susan took the initiative in making a proposal. Our May 1989 contract would have permitted a rate as high as $102 for a double room. After discussions with her, the hotel was, however, prepared (she told me) to charge us $89 per room. If, however, we agreed to allow it to charge $99 and to pay her a $10 per room commission, and to hire The Travel Authority with which she was associated as our agent, she would handle relations with the hotel, the AV firm, the bus company and a variety of other service providers. She would also directly provide a variety of advance services to the registrants, and help us on site during the conference. I came back with a proposal that she "kick-back" $3,000 to Dottie to pay for her services during the summer and fall of 1993. Susan agreed. As a result, the formal conference financial report shows no allocation of funds for an assistant. The use of a "destination planner" deserves careful attention and I provide an accounting of her costs and her services in a separate section.

In the Fall of 1992, I drew-up the first budget for the conference in order to establish a University account that could receive an advance from ACSP that was required to pay for the design and printing of the invitation and call for papers. A copy f that budget is appended. (In fact, I never have created a second normal budget.) You will note that (as already indicated) there s no provision for Dottie. Nor is there money for regular secretarial or budget management services. In effect, Dottie and I have been the secretaries: almost nothing has been asked of the overloaded department staff. The Dean’s staff has kept our accounts and paid the bills: again, nothing was required of the departmental staff. I knew, however, that the department would face a sharp increase in its communications costs in order to support the conference. Rather than trying to monitor those expenditures closely, I provided for a blanket payment from the conference account of $2,000 to pay for phone, fax, e-mail, and minor postage. (Major mailings would be separately accounted.) That sum has now been transferred from the ACSP '93 to the departmental account. I anticipated hiring office temporaries for occasional work surrounding major mailings. In fact, until October, 1993, we spent only a few dollars for additional assistance. In the weeks before the conference, however, we asked planning students to "volunteer" their services. Those who served four hours before or during the conference were allowed to register at no cost; ten hours earned a full meal plan. The combination of this group of students, Dottie and the full-time efforts of Susan and her employee allowed us to staff the registration desk and book room, to prepare reports on the Designing Markets sessions, to collect meal and reception tickets, and to be available for a variety of "trouble shooting" tasks. I received additional help beginning in the Spring of 1993 when Ann Strong assumed responsibility for Designing Markets. Ann began work knowing that there was a $15,000 grant from FannieMae to ACSP to finance the meeting.

The FannieMae grant was the result of an extensive effort to raise funds from government agencies and foundations to support Designing Markets and The International Trade in Planning Students. When Jim Carr at FannieMae agreed to support Designing Markets, I deliberately channeled the grant to ACSP to avoid University management charges. Rolf Engler has directly paid the hotel bill of nine European participants, has covered their major travel expenses, and given them each $100 for incidentals. While we have not asked for a transfer of funds into the ACSP '93 account, Rolf will credit the registration fees of these nine participants ($1530) plus $500 for the reproduction of papers and other expenses associated with the meeting to our ACSP contribution. (Looked at from the other side: we will report registrations and expenses without a matching revenue in our ACSP '93 account.) When all his checks are cleared and the transfers affected, Rolf will have several thousand dollars from the original grant still in his hands. This is not part of the ACSP '93 contribution. We will discuss the uses and fate of that surplus with Jim Carr.

I did not confine my search for support to the Thursday meetings or to major foundations and agencies. In the fall of 1992, I drafted a letter for Denise Scott Brown, who revised and signed it. We mailed the letter to roughly 600 planners. The list included both Penn alumni from New York to Washington and members of the Pennsylvania chapter of APA in the Delaware Valley. The letter encouraged attendance at the conference, promoted participation in the Jury Room, and asked for support as sponsors or donors. The letter led to contributions of $1400 – including the full page advertisement for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission -- probably three of the fifteen Jury Room presentations but, as far as I can tell, very few practitioner registrations. Following upon a suggestion in Amy Glassmeier's report, I also sought advertisements from publishers and journals. The returns of what I believe is the first such search were very modest: the quarter page advertisement for four Carfax journals in the preliminary and final program. I hope that the Phoenix organizers will use this advertisement as an ice-breaker and will find advertising an important source of income.

7. Hiring a Professional

I have discovered that there is a world of professionals who will manage virtually any aspect of a conference -- beginning with the choice of city, time and "venue." Some are paid a flat fee and some are paid a commission on hotel rooms or other services. Some work principally with the professional staffs of large associations; others with amateurs like me. They pride themselves in a craft of conference design and management; share professional associations, journals and a substantial literature rich with advice on how to do this and that. I did not know that world at the outset and I did not enter it confidently seeking competitive bids. Essentially, Susan Smith --

running a one-person service with a close connection to a large travel agency -- sold me on her role before I understood that there were other folks out there who might do the same thing. I don't regret at all my decision but I assume and hope that subsequent organizers will spend a little time with the journal, Affordable Meetings, read a book or two, and seek competitive bids from professionals in their region. Following is a list of the services that Susan undertook in her own name or through the Travel Authority: a. She secured a competitive bid on printing that confirmed me in my decision to use the University Publications Service.

b. She first reviewed and "priced" alternative reception sites. When we settled on the University Museum, she guided the conversations with the caterer there and reviewed the contract. Once the contract was signed, she attended to virtually all relations with the caterer, the bus company and the musicians. I had virtually nothing to do beyond appearing on Friday, October 29.

c. She guided our conversations with the hotel conference officials, keeping close track of our spatial requirements, and resolving conflicts and confusions. She advised me on menus and managed the strategic game in which the host provides a guaranteed number to the caterers that is lower than the actual enrollment knowing both that some people will not use their tickets and that the caterer will provide more food than has been ordered.

d. She secured competitive AV bids, reviewed contracts, and then (working closely with Dottie) managed the relations with Projection Video. I had virtually nothing to do with an important support activity. Using Projection Video rather than the in-house service of the hotel probably reduced our AV bill by 25 per cent.

e. When it appeared that the hotel and Projection Video did not have the pipe and drape required to divide Ballroom D, she secured the required materials and service at a very reasonable price.

f. On her own initiative, she secured a block of rooms at the Center City Holiday Inn for students. In October, as the Wyndham Franklin Plaza was fully booked, she secured and managed overflow rooms at both the Holiday Inn and the Ramada Inn. She was particularly helpful in making arrangements for the Central and Eastern European participants in Designing Markets. At all of the sites, she helped registrants find roommates, reducing the average per person payment below what it would have been if we had not provided the coupling service. That is to say, I suspect that the actual per person payment was below what it would have been if we had not hired Susan.

g. She secured the bus for the city tour on Sunday morning.

h. She set-out an array of bag and folder options and encouraged us in the decision to use an inexpensive (though, I believe, handsome) folder. (Dottie did most of the work in actually making this purchase.)

i. She suggested and secured the Philadelphia promotional pamphlet we used with the preliminary program and the substantial city guide we distributed at the registration desk.

j. She initiated the offer of free airport-to-hotel transportation for those who purchased their tickets from the Travel Authority and used the Authority to compare the cost of various tickets for the Designing Market participants from Central and Eastern Europe. By aggressively marketing its services, the Travel Authority increased our contacts with potential registrants.

k. She offered a variety of advance services – dinner reservations, theatre tickets etc. -- to the registrants. Though I believe that there were only a few "takers," several people commented on the graciousness of the Destination Philadelphia offers in the preliminary program. l. She oriented the student volunteers, hired her own full- time employee to provide stability at the registration desk, and managed both the desk and our relations with the hotel during the conference. Relying on Susan and Dottie, I managed to attend a conference in Philadelphia in which I was a member of three panels, part of the audience at three more, and went to five "business" meetings.

m. She counted the cash returns each day of the conference and deposited them in our hotel master account. The checks were placed in our safety deposit box.

n. She provided me with a constant flow of advice on matters about which neither I nor Dottie had any substantial experience. Susan reports that her income from the conference was earned as follows:

Commission on hotel rooms:

Wyndham Franklin Plaza $9452.00 for 954 room nights

Holiday Inn $410.80 for 52 room nights

Ramada Inn $171.60 for 26 room nights

Commission on AV Rentals $900.00

In addition, we paid for a hotel room for Susan on one night and Dottie for two nights at a cost of $361.61, including tax and parking.

8. Who Was There, Who Registered and Who Paid?

The three questions in the title of this section are not the same and they present quite different problems of measurement. Indeed, I suspect that the differences were larger in Philadelphia than in other settings because of an important feature of the program design. The invitation to practitioners to present their work in the Jury Room and the deliberate attempt to encourage the participation of critics and discussants from outside the ACSP family created a pool of participants who saw themselves as outsiders or as guests.

I encouraged or endorsed that self-image for some members of the pool. In inviting Andrew Hacker and Phillip Selznick, for example, to respond to assessments of their recent books, I promised to have a registration packet waiting for them and a ticket to an appropriate lunch or the Friday reception; I made a similar offer -- usually in a slimmer form without a promise of a meal -- to discussants outside of planning who expected only to pop-in for a single session. In early October, Dottie alerted me to the fact that many people on the program had not registered. I was sure that most people on her list would, indeed, arrive but in order to avoid embarrassment I sent the memorandum dated October 14 appended to this report. For the first time, I had enunciated a general rule. My memo generated a flurry of paid registrations but there were also calls from speakers -- notably practitioners in the Jury Room -- who protested that they should not be required to register. They intended to be there only for their own session or they saw themselves as performing a service for the Academy. I sighed and relented.

We also received forms from individuals on the edge: they described themselves (sometimes to my surprise) as outside the family and appropriately to be treated as guests in their role as discussants or critics. Again: I sighed and relented.

With a large pool of potential registrants outside the family and with my unwillingness to enforce my understanding of the terms of the October 14 memorandum, we certainly had more "complementary" registrations (though not with meals) than I had expected and some people on the program who were there but who did not pick-up the packets we had prepared for them. (I interpret the latter group as signaling that they were not really registering.) In addition, of course, some people who did not pick-up their packets were not there. In some cases, members of this group had called-in their regrets just before or during the conference; in other cases, however, they had not. Some members of this group who had paid their registration fees have requested refunds and the checks are in the works. As far as I can tell, no one owes us money at this point in time.

There is also uncertainty on the positive side of the ledger. When I reported a large number of on-site registrants -- there were eighty-six -- I assumed that many of these would be professional planners in the Delaware Valley. That was not the case. There were, indeed, very few registrants in that category. I saw some "locals" in the corridors who do not appear on our rolls but I don't have any idea of the size of the group of undocumented attendees. I'm afraid that I did not control our corporate borders.

The end of this tale is that I do not know how many people attended all or part of the Philadelphia conference. I have therefore, only reported on three classes of registrants: those who paid, those who volunteered their help in return for registration, and those whom we registered but who did not pay. The total I record for the combined categories -- 786 -- approximates the number of 800 that was announced to general astonishment at the conference. For some purposes, however, that number is either irrelevant or misleading.

A copy of the registration form is included in the appendix. For the purposes of this report, I have not distinguished between registrants before and after October 2. Note also that I have not been able to distinguish the number of meal tickets offered as part of complementary registrations. I suspect, however, that the 54 people on the program who were registered without payment did not receive more than ten meal tickets in aggregate. The index in the program records 587 persons as participating in the program. The figure is actually slightly higher since a few of the Jury Room presentations are attributed to an agency rather than an individual speaker so that there is no appropriate entry in the index for those sessions. In effect, then, about 9 per cent of the people on the program received complementary registrations.

a. Paid Registrations

Basic Conference Registration 440

Students with Meals 59

Students without Meals 164

Non-Academic Planners without Meals 21

TOTAL 684

b. Volunteers

Registration with Meals (10 hours) 13

Registration without Meals (4 hours) 27

TOTAL 40

c. Complementary Registrations

Rolf Engler 1

On the program with a single meal ticket or none at all 54

Not on the program with two meal tickets 1

Not on the program with one meal ticket 6

TOTAL 62

9. Specialized Programs

The registration form offered a choice of four independently priced activities: the Sunday bus tour with the Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Designing Markets, and the Thursday meetings of the Computer Users Group and the Faculty Women Interest Group. In addition, department chairs were asked to contribute $25 each to finance a Saturday evening reception for junior faculty and graduate students. This table reports on the registration for the first four activities and the response of chairs to the call to finance the Saturday reception.

Number of Paying Registrants

Computer Users Group 38

Designing Markets 39

Faculty Women’s Interest Group 67

Bus Tour 42

Number of Chairs Supporting the Saturday Reception 37

10. Budgetary Decisions and Account Notes

The next section of this report describes our expenditures and payments in a way that, I hope, will satisfy the requirements of the new reporting format. This section describes my major fiscal decisions and explains some features of my accounting.

a. I received hotel menus in the fall of 1992 and realized that my meal costs were going to be substantially higher than they had been in Columbus. That recognition drove two decisions: 1. I selected the least expensive breakfast, break and luncheon options and 2. I decided to reduce the cost of the conference satchel by adopting a folder rather than a bag.

b. I wasn't similarly parsimonious in the choice of a reception menu, choosing to spend $20 per head rather than a feasible $10-$15. I was encouraged in this decision by the realization that the rental bill at the University Museum was less than half that of the science museum in Columbus and that the Columbus menu had been criticized as skimpy. I hesitated for a long time over the decision as to whether to provide drinks as part of the fixed price -- 2 drinks would have cost $5.00 – before deciding on a cash bar. In order to compensate for what I took as the lack of grace in my treatment of alcohol, I decided rather late in the day to spend $500 on the jazz trio -- substituting a public for a private good.

c. In the spring of 1993, I proposed a fee schedule to the Executive Committee. The schedule was based upon:

1. quite firm estimates that our variable costs (two luncheons, the reception, three breakfasts, four "breaks," and a conference folder or bag) would be $96.75 per person.

2. less firm estimates that our fixed costs would be $23,596. (This estimate included a $10,000 payment to ACSP before a per person charge of $25 had been mandated.) Tentatively setting-out a denominator equivalent to 400 fully paid registrants ($23,596/400), I proposed a basic pre-October 2 fee of $155, with all other fees scaled appropriately. Worried about the dramatic rise over the Columbus rate, Jerry Kaufman and Sandi Rosenbloom suggested changing the denominator to 500 and reducing the basic rate to $145. The fee structure announced in the registration form follows their suggestion. In the event, we met the target of the larger denominator. I interpret the 684 paid registrations recorded in Section 8.a as roughly equivalent to 575 registrations supporting the fixed costs of the conference: each student without meals contributed 70 per cent of a full registration and students with meals contributed nothing.

d. In all of these calculations, I assumed from the very beginning that special activities -- CUG, FWIG, Designing Markets, and the bus tour -- would pay their own way without subsidy from the general registration fees. (The grant from FannieMae allowed us to use $500 to general conference expenses associated with Designing Markets. That sum is described in Section 10 as a grant to ACSP '93. The balance of the Fannie Mae grant will be accounted separately in a report from ACSP to the agency.) I also hoped that by asking department chairs to pay-for (and attend) the reception for graduate students and junior, that activity would also be freed from its underprivileged status as a ward of the general treasury. As you will see in the next section, these expectations were largely but not wholly met.

e. The accounting in the next section is knowingly incomplete.

1. I have not attempted to impute a direct cost to us of paying students with registration vouchers. Nor have I tried to compare that cost with the obvious alternative -- paying dollars at an hourly rate – and allowing students to register or not as they chose. In these accounts, the student workers are invisible.

2. Neither Susan's income nor the two payments to Dottie -- from the TA fund of the Department and from the $3,000 kickback from Susan -- appear in these accounts. Anyone planning a conference should, however, attend to the full description of these payments and the issues surrounding them in sections 6 and 7.

3. The complementary meals were few enough in number that we did not take them into account in setting the guarantee. I have not, therefore, imputed a cost to them. The guarantee for the two luncheon and the three breakfasts were all set below the number of paying guests. The guarantee for the reception was set above the number of paying registrants and I was tempted to think of the high guarantee as a mistake. The caterer was, however, awed by how much food our "550" ate and after checking with my students, I believe that there were a substantial number of gate crashers: people who did not have a bus ticket but found their way to the Museum door on their own.

4. The reporting is a blend of the "functional" accounting that the new format proposed by the committee specifies and a simpler categorization of types of expenditure. I have, particularly, not tried to divide our communication costs across functions nor to estimate the costs of staffing the conference site.

10. Financial Accounts

a. Revenues

Cash Advance from ACSP $2,600

Gifts to ACSP '93 600

FWIG Grant 250

Paid Advertisements 750

General Conference Registration Fees 78,415

Special Conference Fees

Designing Markets 1,200

FWIG 1,675

CUG 950

Bus Tour 1,050

Chairs' Reception 925

Sub-total 5,800

TOTAL $88,915

b. Expenditures

1. Publications

Invitation and Call for Papers (1600 copies) $1,220

Preliminary Program (1900 copies & envelopes) 2,165

Final Program (800 copies) 1,996

Design Charges 1,020

TOTAL $6,401

2. Communications

General Payment to the Department of CRP $2,000

Mailing Costs 312

Stationary and Supplies 699

Conference Folder (700 copies) 1,184

Phone at Registration Desk 37

TOTAL $4,232

3. General Conference Functions

Friday Continental Breakfast (400 guarantee) $2,520.

Friday Morning Break 767

Friday Luncheon (489 guarantee) 9,242

Friday Afternoon Break (400 guarantee) 2,520

Friday Reception

Room Rental 750

Bus Rental 2,581

Food (550 guarantee) 11,000

Music 550

Total Reception Costs $14,881

Saturday Continental Breakfast (400 guarantee) 2,520

Saturday Morning Break 1,008

Saturday Luncheon (500 guarantee) 9,450

Saturday Afternoon Break (400 guarantee) 2,520

Sunday Continental Breakfast (250 guarantee) 1,575

Sunday Morning Break 725

Total $47,729

4. Special Conference Functions

Executive Committee Food Charges $1,256

Committee on Review and Appraisal Breakfast 113

Computer Users Group Luncheon and Refreshments 390

Designing Markets

Paid Directly by ACSP '93

Wednesday Night Reception 129

Thursday Luncheon and Refreshments 1,603

Transportation 91

Reproduction 500

Sub-total $2,323

[ Paid Directly by ACSP

Transportation 6,337

Hotel Rooms 1,998

Living Expenses 900

Sub-total $9,235

Designing Markets Total $11,557]

FWIG Meetings

Thursday Food Charges (60 guarantee) 1,978.20

Saturday Reception (40 guarantee) 422.96

Sub-total 2,401.16

Chairs Reception (40 guarantee) 756.21

Sunday Bus Tour Bus Rental 431.00

Preparation of the Jury Room 600.00

TOTAL OF SPECIAL CONFERENCE FUNCTIONS $7,770.72

5. Audio-Visual Rental and Materials $6,104.50

6. Miscellaneous Materials, Hotel and Transportation Costs 466.61

TOTAL EXPENDITURES BY ACSP'93 $71,420.72

ACSP '93 Accounts with ACSP

ACSP '93 Income Held by ACSP

FWIG Reception Grant 250

Designing Market Registrations Charged to Grant 1530

FannieMae Grant Available for Conference Expenses 500

ACSP Cash Advance to ACSP '93 2600

Excess of Revenue over Expenditures $10,911.28

Payment to ACSP $10,911.28

ACSP Income from ACSP ‘93 After Repayment of Cash Advance $10,591.28

11. Miscellaneous Evaluative Notes

a. In 1988, when I first looked at the Wyndham Franklin Plaza, I recognized that it did not have adequate mid-size rooms (accommodating 75-100 people), that the elevators to meeting rooms on the first and second floors would be congested, that there weren't enough of chairs in the lounge areas, and I was suspicious of the insulation from external noise in some rooms even outside the divided Ballroom. All of these concerns were on target. (Interpersonally, however, the WFP was a delight: the staff was cordial, helpful, and competent.) The one hotel -- then and now --that might have served us better -- the Adams Mark on City Avenue -- would not have provided the same walking access to Center City. (Center City was a great hit!)

We have grown large enough that the quality of the hotel should figure significantly in our evaluation of bid. Reversing the ordinary decision sequence, with the help of a conference planner we might select a hotel and city before we organize a program committee.

b. I was delighted when Carolyn Adams asked whether the Governing Board of the Urban Affairs Association might meet jointly with ACSP '93. I hope that at least that level of cooperation will continue in the future. Beyond that level, I would like us to explore running a joint conference.

c. I do not have comparative figures but I suspect that the high student enrollment was the most striking feature of the Philadelphia conference. I certainly tried to encourage such participation -- see the invitation to he conference, the subsequent note to department chairs, the student hotel rates, and the Thursday "night on the town" -- but I suspect that location and a growing perception of the salience of ACSP within doctoral programs were more important than anything we explicitly attempted. I hope that the Conference Committee and the Phoenix organizers will reach out to the Executive Committee student members and to the new student liaisons, listening to their views on the design of the meeting.