In response to the events in Chicago in 1968, several professional societies moved their annual meetings from Chicago to other cities, but the Association of Computing Machinery chose not to. In response, a group of computer scientists attempted to organize “The Counter-Conference,” a conference that would be held concurrently with the ACM’s 1971 meeting but would not be held in the Chicago area. The organizers’ choice to characterize the location of the ACM’s conference as a matter of professionalism in computer science reveals a vision for a socially-responsible computer science, while the failure of this conference to garner significant interest within the community of computer scientists reveals how computer scientists, like many academics in other disciplines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, rejected political engagement as an important aspect of academic professionalism.
