The convention is a waste of time.  It's a great way to make enemies and not a very good place to make friends. 

Or, no, that isn't quite right.  Some people are managing to make friends very well.  It's some combination of... positioning, and personality.

Carme's positioning is totally wrong.  She isn't a foreigner here to play the role of the conquering hero and receive the adulation of the grateful pillaged.  She wasn't infamously diabolical enough to make a good show of fascination with the concept of kindness suitable for repentance propaganda; she wasn't downtrodden and wretched enough to make a good show of having yearned all her life for Heaven's touch and blossoming under its benevolent rule.  Her personality isn't right for the theatrical production going on here either where the rescuers patronize the rescued, where the saved demonstrate their worthiness to their saviors.  She is not affable and pleasant; she is not charismatic and commanding; she is not witty and persuasive.  There is nothing worthwhile for anyone about courting Carme Bonaventura's favor because she is not a lever that controls other votes.  Even on her committee where her vote might mathematically matter alone, there are always other places to spend the energy.

That doesn't actually mean that nothing she can do has any effects.  In theory Carme can get whatever she wants as long as no one wants its opposite and she doesn't get in anyone's way with it.  Which is a huge caveat about anything to do with the appropriation of funding, the disposition of students, the adoption or rejection of any policy that matters, the introduction of anything slightly complicated.  But no one wants the opposite of little wording tweaks for clarity.  No one is inconvenienced if Carme takes on some background reading for herself and processes it for the committee in the way that suits her.

It's just that she might have declined the honor if she'd known how minor a mark of respect it was, to ask for a representative from the academy.  It has not turned out that, in fact, anyone needed to hear the unique perspective of her particular university.  Maybe it could have; maybe there is a nearby possible universe known only to Nethys where she mattered immensely.  Maybe it was worth accepting for the sake of whatever she accomplished in that possibility.  Maybe it was not.  It is not for her to know.

She goes home at the end, on a boat, and Myrtle has to bite a sailor but he makes a full recovery and no one decides to escalate over it.  She goes back to the classes, and the more things change the more they stay the same, really.  The spells haven't changed.  The math is all the same.  Those are the things that matter in the world.  Carme lets a historian interview her for a book about the convention.  She keeps office hours, and brews a lot of tea to breathe the steam and sip to soothe her throat, and reads the paper every morning, and covers seminars in Draconic and special topics in fire magic and Introductory Spellcraft Section 5 when someone needs a substitute, knowing that sooner or later she will need coverage for the class on binding a familiar or the one on the properties of the protrusions of the shape of Air Bubble.

She has a couple of decades left in her before one of the winter flus seizes her by the lungs and won't let go, and then she goes to Hell.