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The Conference Scene

A distraught reader writes to Ms. Mentor:

I gave a paper—my first—at our major professional conference. It's very prestigious, and hardly any graduate students' papers are ever accepted. Yet not one of my professors attended my session. I was crushed. Is there any explanation for their behavior?

Indeed there is, and this was the start of Ms. Mentor's reply:

Ms. Mentor hopes that you did not spend any time crying into your pillow. Mourning for boors is a waste of one's time, faculties, and tear ducts.

Ms. Mentor also deplores the absence of your professors at your début—the understudy becomes a star!—although she is not surprised. Ms. Mentor is a venerable and jaded soul, who knows that too many entrenched senior professors see the younger generation not as followers in the pursuit of pure knowledge, but as upstarts who need to be humiliated or ignored. Especially among academic men, it is an Oedipal drama, in which the fathers and sons try to crush each other.

Women, though, need not act in that play, and it is a far, far better thing to learn to work the conference scene for your own knowledge and pleasure.

Still, you may ask yourself, or Ms. Mentor: Why do senior professors so rarely attend other people's conference presentations? Do they know it all? Do they have back trouble, so that they cannot bear more than a few minutes in the spindly, grotesquely uncomfortable chairs that pass for furniture in most convention hotels?

Ms. Mentor suspects it's something else: that senior professors are playing their own version of Scarlett O'Hara's Approach to Life. As Margaret Mitchell notes early in Gone with the Wind, when her heroine is just sixteen: “Scarlett O'Hara could never long endure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject.” Similarly, many a full professor cannot bear any presentation in which he and his work are not at the center.

(Here Ms. Mentor murmurs to her astute readers that this is the same behavior exhibited by the famous Hollywood director who reportedly spent several hours—well, forty-five minutes—in a monologue about his own greatness, only to turn to his hapless audience of one and say, “Well, enough about me. What do you think of my latest picture?”)

Most senior professors would rather be stars—either as presenters or as subjects of the admiring papers of young graduate students. Such adoration being hard to come by, most wind up opting out of the big national conferences in favor of smaller, invitational ones. Those are also valuable for another reason: they're more apt to pay their speakers, since the honor is not sufficient reward.

What are the rewards for attending an academic conference?

There is intellectual stimulation. Academics go to conferences to share their research findings, compare notes on what they've discovered, and ask pointed and useful questions about the research of other scholars. This goal is usually achieved among scientists, for whom conference papers have standard formats (such as poster sessions) and visual aids (especially slides) that cannot help but produce a coherent, well-organized presentation.

Ms. Mentor has, in fact, often been enlightened at the conferences orchestrated by scientists, who even provide entertainment for “the wives” (although they no longer make the purpose so obvious). At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in New Orleans, for instance, a session on the Scoville Scale for the hotness of peppers inspired hordes of conference-goers to try to outmacho each other at local restaurants. (Only one actually managed to finish a habañero pepper, 300,000 on the Scoville Scale. An ordinary bell pepper is zero; a tabasco pepper is 9,000 to 12,000.)

But enough of Ms. Mentor and her bite—although with the proliferation of regional cuisines in the U.S., new taste treats are another good motive for attending academic conferences in faraway places. Many wise organizations do make a point of meeting in cities that offer good eating and good touring, such as New Orleans, San Antonio, and San Francisco.

Ms. Mentor also reminds fledgling scholars that conferences are your professional orientation, and you must attend them. Yes, she knows that many a graduate student or new faculty member will say, “I can't afford to pay my own way,” but in truth, you cannot afford not to. Conferences are the places where you make a professional name.

The fortunate graduate student will have a mentor to teach her the ropes, but even without one, she can learn the protocol from the major academic journals in her field, as well as the weekly Chronicle of Higher Education. She should get into the habit of reading “the Chronicle” regularly, and preferably in public.

For every conference that is not thoroughly invitational, there are calls for papers and proposals issued months (sometimes years) ahead of time—in journals, in flyers posted on graduate school bulletin boards, in targeted mailings, and more recently on the Net. The deadlines and procedures for paper proposals must be taken seriously and literally: if they want an abstract, send an abstract; if they want the complete paper, send a complete paper. Follow directions carefully, be neat, use good white paper and dark print, and you will not be summarily weeded out.

What else separates the rejects from the accepted papers?

Ideally, all accepted papers are well organized, with new but solid information that's presentable within twenty to thirty minutes. Solid papers do not rely on snoozers, those vague platitudes and blowhard generalities that make your eyes glaze over, such as: “The new Computer Age technologies present challenges for us all…,” or “We live in a time of transition in which our political system must evolve to meet the challenges of global…,” or “Brazil (or anywhere) is a land of contrasts…,” or “We must stop this carnage on our nation's highways.”

How can you guarantee that your paper's accepted?

Sometimes, yes, it is a matter of politics—of who knows whom—and you can only get to know the Big People by attending conferences, or by insinuating yourself into their vision via a mentor.

But where the competition's open, as it usually is, papers that are accepted in the sciences are ones that show methodological rigor and present significantly new information.

In the humanities and social sciences, some fields reward the creation of new jargon. But at the most intellectually stimulating and entertaining conferences, the most-favored papers are those containing at least two of Ms. Mentor's Three Major Requirements: Gossip, Humor, and New Information.

Some organizations even change, wisely, to suit Ms. Mentor's requirements. For instance, the Modern Language Association, once noted for stuffiness and pomposity, has now become notorious and lewd, with such papers as “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” and “Emily Dickinson's Clitoral Imagery.” At other literary conferences, scandalous and rediscovered gossip about the long-dead and formerly respectable has become especially welcome (sometimes it's called “The New Historicism”). “Why Did George Eliot's New Young Husband Throw Himself into the Venetian Grand Canal?” is a crowd-pleaser; and so is “Would Kate Chopin Get Tenure at LSU?” Secrets always sell.

If you are an entertaining and enlightening presenter, conference and panel organizers—and audiences—will love you. They may hire you. And you may, within a couple of years, even get paid for speaking.

Conference presentations are significant. Especially among grad students, they're often the subject of great interest and debate.

But the major purpose of academic conferences is to network, gossip, and conspire with one's peers. Always wear your name tag at a conference, and have business cards made and ready to share. Out of conference meetings come jobs, recommendations, knowledge, and (yes!) more conferences. For each year a few of the luckiest or most tenacious graduate students do manage to meet the big stars in their fields and impress the Great Ones with the youngsters' devotion and possible future importance.

But returning to the original query: Ms. Mentor thinks it would be kind and gratifying if professors did attend the presentations of their graduate students. Some do. Some even offer warm praise, not just gruff critiques.

After all, professors should know that the graduate students at Hometown University are not competition. They are not after the jobs of the Hometown faculty.

They're after everyone else's.

Fashionable in Academia?

Q: My first big-time academic conference is coming up this year. What should I wear?

A: Ms. Mentor knows that many readers will consider this question frivolous, not in keeping with the high dignity of the scholarly calling. But they will be wrong.

Presentation of self is vital in academia, and it is still possible to dress for success—or for failure. (Interested scholars are referred to Susan Faludi's Backlash for the ways in which the “dress for success” suit was replaced by the little-girl look, to the great detriment of women.) The best clothes for a professional woman to wear to a big-time academic conference are dresses or skirts that no one will notice or remember: not too tight, not too short, not too colorful.

Ms. Mentor sympathizes with a not-uncommon urge to be acutely fashionable or flamboyant, but she advises young women in particular to resist that urge. It is difficult for many academic men, who do the hiring and judging, to take young women seriously. It is impossible if the young women are not dressed in a mature, even slightly frumpy manner.

A Polite Rejoinder

After Ms. Mentor published the above answer in Concerns in 1992, she received the following response from a reader whose missive was signed “Chic in Canada”:

Reader's Reply

I cannot resist commenting from my particularly anti-ageist perspective that your otherwise delightful advice in the “Ms. Mentor” column about how the prospective job candidate should dress is inappropriate, and perhaps positively risky, for the female candidate who actually is “mature.” The middle-aged female job candidate should, in my opinion, avoid looking “frumpy” at all costs—or should I say, even to the tune of considerable “cost.” A frumpy-looking, middle-aged candidate is almost sure to be immediately typed as frumpy-dumpy in her politics and scholarship as well.

My advice is that any candidate past the age of thirty should abide by the three “E's” when dressing for interviews: she should appear earthy, ethnic, or elegant, whichever style she thinks she can carry off the best. The earthy and ethnic styles tend to create an excellent impression these days, but if, say, the candidate happens to be small, blond (perhaps even streaked with gray!), and Caucasian, they may not work for her.

In any case, I advise her to strive for a quietly—and not too obviously expensive—elegance of style. Her outfit should be dignified, chic, reasonably “with it,” but not ostentatious or attention-grabbing in any way. But not frumpy or, horrors, really mature. Her “outward” appearance should, on the contrary, represent her “inward” youthfulness of mind….

The Conclusion

Following the above communication, Ms. Mentor and “Chic in Canada” had a tête-à-tête (an international fashion summit) and reached a rapprochement on the subject of the proper attire for academic conference interviews.

They agree that understated elegance can be valuable; that miniskirts are always incorrect, because they look childish; that pants can be risky, for conservative schools; and that dressing as a Wall Street banker (gray flannel, little tie) will seem too powerful, and therefore out of place, in academia. Ms. Mentor retains some skepticism about “earthy” and “ethnic,” especially if “ethnic” means turbans and swirling fringe, but she and “Chic in Canada” agree that colorful scarves are tasteful and welcome accessories.

Ms. Mentor and “Chic in Canada” also welcome additions to their dialogue.

Squelched

Q: I've been gagged! The paper I proposed for a literary convention was accepted, and the organizers put me on a panel of four people, scheduled between 1 : 30 and 3 on the second afternoon of the conference.