March 27 Purely Academic

Attending a Conference, Looking for an Exit

What would constitute a good example of the nadir of experience at an academic conference? Halfway through reading your paper, you get a coughing fit and can’t continue? Outside in the corridor you bump into someone and it’s your ex-spouse? (Or the ex-chair from your ex-university where you were denied tenure.) But these are exceptional, individual moments. Recently I experienced a more routine, structural one.

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It took place during am early-evening session of a large regional conference. From the point of view of a presenter who would hope for a decent audience, such an hour is never good; too many are already meeting in the lobby and going out to dinner. All the more reason for my wife and I to support friends assigned this unfortunate presentation time. In one sense, apart from meeting us, our couple had flown 2,000 miles to deliver respective papers. This night was his turn; she sat next to us.

Three presenters were scheduled. Three were in evidence at the front of the room. But wait: two were in fact a couple, from the same university. It wasn’t clear if both had written the paper. He said that she would read it, while he sat facing her. Neat trick, I thought; both were thereby guaranteed an audience, and probably each assured as well some travel funds from the same institution. Meanwhile, though, where was the session chair?

The three of us (or three and a half) who comprised the audience squirmed. Minutes passed. Our friend held his paper. The couple held theirs. What precisely was going to happen? The audience couldn’t very well leave. (Thereby dissolving the session.) The presenters couldn’t leave. Yet without a chair to begin the proceedings, all suffered a slippage into a conference version of No Exit: hell is not so much “other people” as other papers, only nobody shows up to introduce them and no one appears to hear them.

Suddenly, five minutes after the session was scheduled to begin, the door opened! Who could it be? Someone looking for another room would be too cruel. So would a custodian checking on the DVD player. Another member of, or rather for, the audience would be nice. Instead, even better it was. . . the chair! I don’t know about the others. I wanted to shout, hurray! She apologized for being late. We forgave her, silently.

Our friend read first, as scheduled. Good paper. I’d never heard of any of the writers he discussed. His isn’t my field. No matter. Some provocative questions were raised. The great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett was once asked about something he had written down. “I didn’t write it down,” Beckett replied. “I wrote it up.” For a conference, you somehow need to write it up, and allow your audience some larger, more expansive vantage.

Next, the couple. The wife never took her eyes from the paper as she read. My head sank. Terrible paper. It could have been written in 1968, and in fact probably was. Every larger question muffled, subjects not so much covered as plowed over. I squirmed. I writhed. Before the thing commenced, the companion of our friend who had presented had exited. Could I sneak out before the last paper, thereby abandoning my wife to sole occupancy of the role of The Audience?

Reader, I exited. But wait! Not without good reason. Once the second paper was over (and the year returned to 2008) the third presenter — also the session chair — announced that her paper was in Spanish. Blessedly in this instance, I don’t speak Spanish. Never mind that this paper might have been more pleasant to hear than the last one. I just got up out of my chair and scurried away, trying not to make eye contact with my wife, who might have been glaring at me. She speaks Spanish so had no excuse.

Later, I learned that the discussion had by the remaining five people wasn’t so bad. So it usually goes at conferences. Even the skimpiest occasions can somehow be redeemed. I had just experienced this at the session in which I read my own paper, alongside a man who was in fact an undergraduate. (The third presenter didn’t show.) My first undergraduate! The imperative to “professionalize” CV’s has lately made all but the most prestigious national conferences available to grad students. But now undergraduates? And yet the young man handled questions pretty well, and the discussion (emanating from an audience of nine souls) could have been much worse.

This particular conference consisted of 351 sessions. What exactly goes on in each of them? Who can say? It might well have been possible to have attended sessions in most of the time periods over the course of four days and to have found each one to be similar to the one I’ve described-muffled, interiorized, shrunken. Yet it might have been just as possible to have attended the same number during the same days and found each session comparable to the best ones at the national level — confident, resonant, expansive.

Who cares? Who cares, that is, as long all registrants get their discursive turn and all enjoy some institutional support. In this instance I’m pretty sure of the first condition; virtually every paper proposal in this particular organization’s annual conference is guaranteed to be accepted. But with respect to the second, not all participants are guaranteed some funding, and, indeed, many undoubtedly have to pay out of pocket for their plane fares, discounted hotel rates, and overpriced meals. My undergraduate, for example, told me he had to bear all costs himself, while back home his professors continued to work to extract some reimbursement from the local administration.

Finally, though, why attend such a conference? It’s a different question from the bottom than from the top. Of course nobody expects his or her session to take place at the bottom. But it seems to me naive not to fear the possibility, unless your session has an unusually good time period or features either a really sexy subject or a really sexy academic star. After all, today we academics live in an age of conferences: big ones, small ones, and all sizes in between. No matter their subject or focus — specialist to interdisciplinary. These conferences can’t all be worth having, although if there are enough sessions nobody need object, unless you happen to be part of a session that nobody else cares about but you.

And then if you are part of such a session, venerable professional reasons for the conference itself ring rather hollow. Yes, yes, the conference as a whole is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge, the fruits of research, and so on. Furthermore, who is to say that your own paper is not as good as any other’s, or at least doesn’t deserve its public moment? Trouble is, though, from within the energies of the actual conference your own colleagues will in fact judge, by voting with their feet, and from within the confines of each individual session, its claims to knowledge will still have to be made good, or not.

Once, it might have been the burden of a conference is prevent a session such as I have described from appearing on the program. Now it’s the burden of the conference to include it. The easiest explanation for our present age of conferences is that each one — the more slight, the better — comes stricken with all manner of professional imperatives, in which students and faculty, undergrads and grads, adjuncts and full professors are now all mixed up alongside each other, trying to build a better CV or meet a friend. Few have any interest in distinguishing among these reasons or any others, because everybody knows that a conference is, when all is said and done (which it never is) a fine thing, especially if the department can fund your travel or if the dean came up with a last-minute sum that enables you to cover at least the first night of your hotel.

People attend conferences for two basic kinds of reasons: professional and personal. But when even the most casual conversation at the cash bar can be (or become) an example of “networking,” how to keep these two reasons apart in lived conference experience? You may as well try, on some intellectual or performative basis, to separate the heights of one session from the lows of another. I lately experienced the separation. (Who hasn’t?) But it’s much harder to justify, or even explain it, especially when you worry about whose interest is being served in the process. After all, each of us wants nothing more, at bottom, than merely the opportunity to “contribute” something, same as anyone else.

Once at a conference I was scheduled in a session to read a paper along with the usual two others. In fact, one of these two was also a couple: two colleagues (so they said) from the same institution who had devised an elaborate slide presentation. When no audience appeared — not one person — these two insisted upon presenting anyway “because it cost so much to fly here.” So we wound up becoming our own audience, first reading our papers to each other, then having a little discussion about them, and finally agreeing that the session wasn’t so bad, even if, alas, no one else could ever attest to the fact but us.

Sudden question: could conference lows — at least on the level of performance, like theater — be as varied as the heights? I know a woman who counts it as one of her finest conference achievements to have convinced her fellow presenters not to read their session papers to each other, once it was clear no one was going to show up. One of my own fondest rememberances of conferences past is a time when the audience at a session consisted of one person, me, only there because I knew one of the presenters; when it was clear I just couldn’t leave, everybody relaxed, all three papers were duly read, the audience had questions about each, and no great harm to the discipline was done.

However, speaking for myself anyway, such experiences are not ones that I would wish to be repeated — even if they had better be anticipated, possibly never more than now, in today’s expanded, don’t ask-don’t tell, come-one come-all phase of conference history. Or at least some conferences, some histories. The heights (we might add) will be able to take care of themselves; that’s why they are the heights: big-name appearances, cutting-edge perspectives, institutionally-supported investigations. The lows, on the other hand, will never be able to take care of themselves. That’s why we should at least recognize their sessions too, even if we can’t honestly say that at any particular session we enjoyed more than one paper, and never stopped looking around the room for an exit.

— Terry Caesar

Terry Caesar’s last column was about dealing with students who want to find out early about their grades.

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Comments

A friend, now deceased, was an eminent Harvard scholar. As his son loves to retell this story, I shall here. The scholar went to give a paper and found a huge room with no one it. He went to the podium and waited. One person arrived. That was it. The scholar felt his duty to truth was the same for an audience of one or one thousand. He delivered the paper in top form to the audience of one. The scholar then went down and thanked the audience member profusely for attending. The audience of one replied, “I’m not here for your talk. I’m the next speaker.”

Wick Sloane, at 9:45 am EDT on March 27, 2008

This column, expressed as musings, seems unwilling to take any sort of stand on what a conference should be. I’ve presented posters that absolutely no one read, partly because of the session schedule and partly because there were literally hundreds of psoters. But mostly because people attending the conference apparently place higher priority on “networking” than on seeing what’s new in their field. More typically, the folks who come by are students. I’ve been to talks by grad students too green to answer even the routine Q&A softballs, much less discuss implications of their own results. I had to ask myself why their advisors let them embarrass themselves in public that way, but when no one in the audience cares, perhaps it is not an embarrassment. As long as conferences serve career-related goals instead of taking seriously their knowledge dissemination function, they will be a major bore and waste of time to people uninterested in networking. The requirement to continue attending these things is one of the major benefits of attaining tenure. Those who suggest abolishing tenure should bear that in mind.

Perry, at 12:10 pm EDT on March 27, 2008

No Chair

“Yet without a chair to begin the proceedings, all suffered a slippage into a conference version of No Exit: hell is not so much “other people” as other papers, only nobody shows up to introduce them and no one appears to hear them.”

You and your friends can’t speak because there’s no one to introduce you? Come on, show some initiative. Improvise! Introduce yourselves. Introduce each other. Draft one of the three and a half audience members as the chair. There are always options. The other presenters and I once ran an entire session when the chair failed to show up.

Chris, at 12:10 pm EDT on March 27, 2008

Back In The Day ...

Many, many years ago – just after I wrote a dissertation in mathematics (probability) with considerable “applied” content — I “hung out” for a few years with individuals in the Society for Public Choice. In those days it was a very incestuous little organization in which who you knew seemed to matter as much as anything else when getting papers accepted for publication. One would write a paper, distribute it to 20 or 30 “pals” (a.k.a. intellectuals colleagues) and then submit it for the “blind review” that was a complete charade. It was a very clubby little group whose “intellectual output” reflected that fact to a very large degree.

One year I presented a paper at the Society’s annual meeting in which my co-author and I critiqued an entire area of research whose authors unknowingly (we thought) created models that admitted “interpersonal comparisons of utility,” a no-no in those days. As it was, we were first on the program, I presented our paper (it was mathematics, so there was no debating our results), and the next three presenters delivered papers in which, you guessed it, they defined models that, without their knowing it, embraced interpersonal comparison of utility. Not a word about their work vis-a-vis our results.

When, at the conclusion of the presentations, the reviewer commented on the papers – and how could I ever forget this – he said, “I don’t know what to say about the Manley-Gottlieb paper except that some people are not only reading the work of others; they are apparently reading it very carefully.” That was it. Then he focused the rest of his time responding to the other papers, as if he were oblivious to our results. I was not long for that organization.

Not only that, but as much as I enjoy personal and collegial interaction, I have always hated professional meetings and, more often than not, inexplicably, feel uncomfortable at them. My primary complaint is the posturing. I think if you took the proverbial “man on the street” with you to your favorite professional meeting, say, the American Political Science Association or the American Economic Association, s/he would come away scratching hir head about the experience. “How could so many people invest so much of their time and my money creating so many results that any plumber or electrician could have told them in a morning while working at a Habitat for Humanity site?”

Thank god for the Internet. I have not been to a professional meeting in fifteen years. and, unless I’m mistaken, except for a tremendous amount of professional posturing, I have not missed a damned thing.

Frizbane Manley, at 5:10 am EDT on March 28, 2008

Squirm!

Thanx for a most interesting contribution, Dr Caesar, and thanx to the other contributors for their comments. At least Dr Caesar has escaped the ignomy of posting a column about having no audience which stimulates no comment!

Conferences can either be highly selective which excludes some presenters, normally the less well established researchers, or they can be more open and risk small audiences for sessions. I support and attend both types of conferences because I and hopefully the rest of the community get different benefits from each type of meeting.

If one submits to a more open conference one should prepare for the possibility of a ’select’ audience. On these occassions I sit with the other participants in the floor of the venue, p’raps re-arrange the seating a little, and lead a seminar on some of the issues I was planning to raise in my paper. I make a few opening remarks to give the participants some material to work with and then invite contributions. If the discussion flags a little I add some more material from my paper to provoke more discussion, and so on until either the scheduled end of my session or until it becomes clear that most participants have got all that they want from the session.

Gavin Moodie, Principal Policy Adviser at Griffith University, Australia, at 9:25 pm EDT on March 28, 2008

If your university is paying your way, then perhaps it doesn’t matter how your time is used in a conference session, but when you pay your own way it is a different matter. I recently spent over $700.00 to attend a one-day preconference where one person appeared twice on the schedule and was unprepared for both appearances. She attempted to laugh it off and tried to wing it, but wound up embarrassing herself, although I doubt she felt any shame about wasting other people’s time and money that way. Treating a conference session as if it were a classroom doesn’t show how important you are — it shows how inconsiderate you are.

Perry, at 11:55 am EDT on March 29, 2008

If you are sorely disappointed because there isn’t a cheering crowd attending your conference presentation, maybe it all depends on what you want from the conference. Some of us who work with less taught subjects, and are in a relatively small group, can have a pretty satisfying conference with small numbers. I am embarrassed to give a personal example, but recently I went to a conference and the only people in our 8:00 am session were the presenters, some of whom had flown in from a far away country for that occasion. As the chair of the session, I greeted all of them, introduced them briefly, and we proceeded to have one of the best conference sessions I have ever had. Every presenter had time to speak, answer and make questions. After the session, we met for coffee. Two of the participants discussed a joint project, and I have since invited two of them to my university to speak about their research.

Granted: we didn’t have a standing ovation from the crowd, but the purpose of the conference was fully achieved...

Eva, at 2:50 pm EDT on March 30, 2008

I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Caesar’s thoughts on conferences. At the same time I must say I have been in similar situations! What to do when no one shows up for a session?! Not to worry. The key is to make sure that your institution is paying your way, then if no one shows, what the hell, do or don’t do your paper! Very few people care anyway. On the other hand even if no one shows, as Eva mentioned good things can be achieved. Ain’t life a lark(the brand of cigarette I used to smoke until I reformed).

Vincent Spina, at 8:35 am EDT on April 1, 2008

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