Boring Conference Papers: A Pet Peeve

[Diane Cline]

This weekend I attended a day-long conference open to the public on the Pompeii show at the Smithsonian's National Gallery of Art. Five academic papers were given in a small auditorium on aspects of Roman art and life. It was really my first academic Classics conference in quite a few years. I looked at it through the lens of a cultural anthropologist. Here are my observations on the aesthetics of the academic talk taken from notes I made during the lectures.

"Always bury the lead, giving your audience no hint of what the point of your talk is. Say "I'd like to offer my observations on X" and make sure that you never ask why we should care; you should assume we care or we wouldn't be in the room.

Make sure your talk is completely written out, using carefully constructed arguments with excessive detail, and frequent references to obscure comparanda. Read expressively but within a very narrow range. Make sure the lights are dimmed so low that you cannot have eye contact with your audience. Expect them to be silent with a titter of laughter only occasionally.

Try to have trouble with the microphone and slides so that you maintain the appearance of being a Luddite.

Use false modesty "I leave this question to others..." and "I do not pretend to know the answer to this, but could posit that..."


Use archaic language in a written literary style for your lecture, as in "...at the behest of King Alexander " Prove you've done your research by including the phrase "scholars refer to...." and drop Latin and Italian terms wherever possible. Make sure to divide insiders from outsiders by using the phrase, "of course," e.g. "Alexandria, which was of course founded by Alexander in 331 BCE..."

Always include a quote attributed to a colleague who is sitting in the room. Address your remarks to your colleagues seated up front; ignore and never attempt to appeal to the rest of the audience. When taking questions, you need not repeat the question into the microphone so that the public can also hear; you need only address the answer to the front rows. If you are asked a question by a colleague, try to use only their first name when you answer, so that the outsiders won't be able to nod with recognition like the insiders."

I felt like I was watching some kind of boring play, with everyone staying in character. It was as socially constructed an event as there can be. It is 2009. What could we do differently to actually communicate our ideas in ways that leave the public more engaged and more excited about our research? After all, the public, by and large, funds academics -- either through public government subsidies and grants, private donations, or tuition dollars. Do we have to perpetuate the rituals of our ancestors because that's the way it always has been in academia? Is it still, or was it ever, an effective means of communicating ideas?

For examples of brilliant talks under 20 minutes, see TED http://www.ted.com/index.php/ and for the most up-to-date thinking on PowerPoint and slides, see the books Slide:ology and

Presentation Zen.

Pardon my snarkitude. I don't mean to pick on them. I just believe that human beings are most amazing when they step out of the ordinary and dare to be original. Courage!