Trip Report E. W. Dijkstra, ECI-Conference 9–12 August 1976, Amsterdam

Abstract

It was the kind of conference from which one returns with a glorious headache. It had been organized by the European Cooperation in Informatics, a joint enterprise of the Information Processing Societies of the various European countries. The response to the Call for Papers had been very low: only 36 papers had been submitted. Instead of cancelling the conference, the organizers decided that, by abolishing parallel sessions and selecting 12 of the submitted papers, the conference could still be held. (After all, they had six invited papers in addition to the submitted ones!) In spite of the meagre program, they still managed to collect about 250 participants. It is very questionable whether, with those 250 participants, they reached the break-even point; if they didn’t, I just cannot have pity with them. It would serve them right, for organizing a bad conference is a worse crime than not organizing a conference at all. (Besides that, they had been warned.) The organizers committed what I would like to describe as “Contempt of Audience”. It saddened me to see the extent to which the degrading circumstances at the European universities have broken the spirits of my colleagues, and it saddened me to observe their apathy and indifference, in which they have “learned” to accept the junk as if it were the real thing. The most frightening aspect of it all is that most of them present their abolishment of all norms and (time-honoured!) quality standards as an act of great wisdom.