As at all conventions, this one has a vendor showcase area. They call it the Idea Marketplace, although I always thought of the marketplace of ideas as more a metaphor than a specific location.

The exhibitors are the usual suspects -- architects, engineers, campus planning consultants, furniture and equipment vendors. As I observed at last year's conference, it's enough to convince a person that "college and university planning" is limited largely to campus planning. From SCUP's mission statement, however, it's clear that that's not the case.

Or at least it's not the case on an aspirational level. SCUP wants to be the nexus where academic planning, facilities planning, financial planning, sustainability planning, pretty much any kind of planning you can name all come together.

What I learned in a conversation this afternoon, however, is that it's not just the vendor/conference sponsor mix which emphasizes campus planning. It's also the organization's membership. More members of SCUP are associated with vendors than with colleges and universities. That's bad for SCUP, and it's worse for college and university planning.

I can see how it would happen. To promote association membership, an organization has to know who's a prospect -- who'd likely be interested. At the architectural firms, etc., that's pretty easy. On college campuses, it's not. Campus planning staff might be pretty easy to locate, but all the other forms of planning and especially any central office interested in strategic or integrated planning can be hard to find. They can be organized in as many different ways as there are campuses. At some schools, they may not exist at all.

In terms of the future of college and university planning, this isn't a plus. It's as if the role of institutional planning had been abdicated or outsourced to another continent. Think how you'd feel about the AMA if most of its members were health insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms. Not a good deal.

And not good for SCUP, itself. The vendors need a seat at the table, but the more seats vendors occupy the less reason there is for vendors to want to sit there. Schools are the clients, and vendors seek client contact and credibility through organizations like SCUP.