The ASA’s ridiculous deadline

As you may know, the ASA’s submission deadline is tomorrow, January 7, at 3 pm EST. As you may have noticed from the title of this post, I think that this deadline is ridiculous. It is a ridiculous deadline because it falls in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week. It is a ridiculous deadline because those who have jobs that require substantial amounts of teaching probably don’t have much time to work on their papers until winter break, the first few weeks of which are likely filled with traveling and family visits, leaving a few days to throw something together. It is a ridiculous deadline because the ASA wants a completed paper seven months before the conference (though how complete that paper needs to be appears to have been relaxed, as Jeremy noted). And finally, it is a ridiculous deadline because session organizers can’t even access the submissions until a week later. If you take a look at the Call for Papers webpage (excerpted in the image below), you will see that the module for session organizers opens on January 14:

Curious about why papers need to be submitted a full week before anybody can actually start looking at them, I sent an e-mail to ASA using the “meetings@asanet.org” e-mail address. The response I received was that “Once the submission site is closed, ASA staff has to then do some things in the system before we open it up to the session organizers.” I don’t know what these “things” are, but I have doubts that they take a week. Thus, I propose the following changes to the ASA deadline:

• Stop requiring full papers.
• If #1 isn’t possible, make the submission deadline January 31st every year, with notifications due by March 31st
• If #1 and #2 aren’t possible, make the submission deadline midnight on the Sunday before session organizers are given access. This year, that would be January 11, giving ASA workers the ability to start doing their “things” on Monday morning when they get to work and finish them by Wednesday.

We are the ASA, so there should be no reason that we need to continue punishing ourselves like this, struggling to finish our work in time for a mid-day mid-week deadline and hoping that DC will get enough snow to push the deadline back.

Since today’s snow did not appear to be enough to push back the deadline, there is only one remaining question:

And now you’re distracted…

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