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    Is there any consensus on the proper behavior of invited speakers?

    Earlier this year at the Translating Realism  conference I was pretty blown away by Adrian Johnston. Part of it was his talk (which, with the Q&A, lasted two hours but seemed like fifteen minutes), but a lot of it was just his behavior as an invited speaker. He went to every talk in the conference, participated helpfully in discussion throughout, and every single evening ate dinner with graduate students and other non-keynoters. 

    As I've been thinking about it these last few months, it occurred to me that maybe there's something wrong with a discipline where I and others found Johnston's behavior so surprising.


    I've been to so many conferences where the invited speakers' behaviors are somewhere on the gamut from not showing up for anything other than their own talk to showing up for some talks but studiously avoiding the grad. students in the evenings. Further along the line is one very well known philosopher who I will not name who makes a club of about 10% of the conference goers and excludes everyone else (people tell me that there are always two conferences with this person).

    At a recent conference I went to the two invited speakers skipped all of the other papers and then during theirs regaled the conference goers every day with tales of their shared culinary excess during the evenings where they'd together ditched the rest of us. I found this a little grating at first, but also had some sympathy. Academia is weird because it involves so much public performance, yet tends to attract so many introverts. As an introvert, I find just attending conferences to be almost unbearably exhausting; keynoting would reduce me to an Egon Schiele model. And the kind of people that keynote one conference are usually doing it at lots of them. This must be absolutely enervating for many of the personality types drawn to academia, so perhaps Johnston's behavior really is just supererogatory. 

    I don't know. Are there any disciplinary norms for this kind of thing? Any other ways that invited speakers might be routinely falling down on the job?

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    20 responses to “Is there any consensus on the proper behavior of invited speakers?”

    1. Joe Berendzen Avatar
      Joe Berendzen

      I would think that what you describe as Adrian Johnston’s behavior is above and beyond, but only slightly. Surely a person in that situation shouldn’t be expected to attend every session (although that obviously depends on how big/long the conference is), but in a smallish/narrowly-themed conference I think the keynote should be expected to attend lots of sessions/fully participate/attend conference dinners each night (though missing dinner one night might be cool if one participates fully in a dinner another night).
      Also, I am blown away by the idea that keynoting would reduce someone to being a Schiele model. That is a spectacularly weird idea…

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    2. TM Avatar
      TM

      It seems obvious that invited speakers or keynotes should try to participate and socialize with the rest of the group, especially when it is small. I cannot help but think that people who use their travel funds to give their own talk and spend the rest of the time as tourists are in the wrong too. If the administrators ever knew how common it was to blow off a conference whose travel expenses are covered, they would have a good excuse to enact more restrictions, etc., so it is a liability to everyone.
      Anyway, we all know that keynotes or invited speakers should be interacting with others and participating in the conference. But what can be done to make this happen? Are there any possible actions that would improve things in this respect in some useful way?

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    3. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Well, I meant fully clothed and not actually dying of influenza like his poor wife turning into smoke in those last few paintings, but you get the idea.
      When my kids sometimes tell our chihuahua and dachshund that they are stinky (and they are sometimes), I can reliably crack them up by responding “Thank you!” on behalf of the dogs (in Scooby Doo voice of course)*. But I can’t decide whether “spectacular weirdness” is or is not in fact a good-making feature of ideas. . .
      Seriously though, my impression about the proper standards are along the lines of yours, and I think that the size and nature of the conference is highly relevant. It’s most grating at themed conferences with no concurrent sessions. Of course, some of this is due to the fact that such conferences are the ones where everyone is likely to notice the behavior, but I think there’s more than just that as far as the normative point goes.
      [Notes:
      *Pace Wittgenstein on lions and whatnot, you really just need the right cartoonist to figure out what members of the species would sound like when talking.]

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    4. Jonathan Avatar
      Jonathan

      In English and related non-philosophy humanistic disciplines, the expectation is that a keynote speaker goes to papers throughout the conference and dines/socializes with the group. It’s also acceptable and routine for people to beg off at the edges with apologies etc. I’ve seen people violate these norms, but not without it going noticed.

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    5. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      As you say, behavior spans the gamut. (I have also been to non-philosophy humanities conferences where the keynotes behaved as badly as anything you mention, and it is not just one person in our discipline who forms the little club.)
      While I don’t think that such things are particularly high on the social crimes scale, and so have never campaigned against anything, I do find it to be bad behavior not to participate like everyone else. I have always made a point of doing so on the uncommon occasions in which I have been invited as a keynote. I try to go to sessions throughout, and make a point of socializing with the least privileged among them. (Though if I have old friends, I certainly might sneak off with them one evening.) There have been a couple occasions in which my schedule was crazy – mostly times when I was very involved in activist projects and getting lots of speaking offers around those – and I have had to leave. I always explain this to the organizers beforehand. This doesn’t strike me as particularly laudatory behavior, but rather just kind of minimally polite – as well as a living up to our pedagogical telos. But in addition to being a profession with lots of introverts, we are a profession with lots of pampered and unsocialized people. This is just one case in point.

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    6. Daniel Brunson Avatar
      Daniel Brunson

      An anecdote, in the interest in establishing parameters: A decade ago, I participated in a graduate conference at Emory, which had Rorty for the keynote. As I recall, he participated in at least 1 panel per session, the reception, and spent a couple hours in a graduate student’s apartment for an unofficial post-conference reception.

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    7. David Chalmers Avatar
      David Chalmers

      speaking as someone who’s been on both sides of this a fair amount (organizer and invitee): i’d have thought that rorty and johnston’s behavior is pretty much the norm for keynote speakers at a graduate conference — the norm in the sense of what is expected and what one should do, and also in the sense of what most (certainly not all) speakers actually do. for invited speakers at small-ish nongraduate conferences, i’d say it’s still the norm in the all three of these senses — except perhaps for the part about hanging out with graduate students outside the sessions (which is nice but isn’t quite a norm). at larger conferences the norms are weaker, though i think there’s still a prima facie norm of not just attending one’s own session. perhaps all this varies between different parts of the discipline, in which case it would be interesting to establish what the differering parts are.

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    8. Neil Sinhababu Avatar
      Neil Sinhababu

      As an extrovert, not doing what Johnston does strikes me as an inexplicable waste. There are so many fun philosophers there! Presumably, they invited you because they want you to talk to them. What a missed opportunity if you don’t talk with them until you fall over! I see how this would be exhausting for introverted people, though.

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    9. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      It is also worth noting how valuable such informal participation is. Just to give one related example, not a conference, David Chalmers was out at GU a couple years ago for a colloquium. That evening, he went to dinner with two of us and a bunch of grad students. About an hour in, he started asking the grad students about their work, offering suggestions, suggesting people to contact, etc. This went on for maybe three hours. The students were talking about how wonderful this was for months – a real inspiration for them. I think it is important to note such “best practices” and to remind everyone just how much positive influence we can have.

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    10. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      O.K.
      [Sorry to do this, but you raised it.] A couple of years ago Mark Lance came to give a talk at LSU. He also taught a philosophy of language class, sat in on a thesis proposal defense (and helped the project a lot), and went out to dinner with the graduate students doing what he describes Chalmers as doing. The student with the defense is now in a very good PhD program.
      Chalmers blows me away with just how many papers he goes to at APAs and how helpful and charitable are his questions. It’s a concrete thing to which I’ve long aspired.

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    11. Neal Hebert Avatar
      Neal Hebert

      While we’re praising Mark Lance, Mark also went to breakfast with me – a graduate student in another Department doing interdisciplinary philosophy work -talked to me about my research, gave me advice about the job market and how to succeed in the academcy, and was an all-around exemplary guest at LSU. In my Department, we’ve brought in numerous people from other schools and none of them have been as generally-awesome as Mark.
      So yeah, he’s definitely my role model on how to behave when I’m in that position, too.

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    12. David Chalmers Avatar
      David Chalmers

      another benefit of that georgetown dinner was that i learned about the kukla/lance book “yo and lo”, on which we subsequently had a terrific session at NYU with rebecca and mark. so there are all sorts of benefits to this sort of thing. i don’t think i’m especially atypical. at least among the under-50 crowd in M&E, my impression is that this sort of behavior is fairly standard.

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    13. John Smith Avatar
      John Smith

      it is atypical. important too.
      you are a star in philosophy of mind, everybody wants to talk to you.

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    14. John Smith Avatar
      John Smith

      since you came on this blog and I know your main interest is consciousness, I would like to ask you if you believe that non-human consciousness exists?
      among the easy problems of consciousness you mention “the ability of a system to access its own internal states”.
      and what makes you believe that we are not “philosophical zombies” ?
      how do you know that you are not a “philosophical zombie”?

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    15. John Smith Avatar
      John Smith

      According to Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness ) “Chalmers argues that a ‘rich inner life’ is not logically reducible to the functional properties of physical processes.”
      You also talk about a fundamental ingredient that is capable of explaining certain functions of the world. Is this fundamental ingredient the consciousness itself or something that is specific to consciousness?
      what do you really mean by the “the ability of a system to access its own internal states” ?
      internal states would mean mental states, right?
      do the mental states have an important role here? some mental states as being more fruitful than others? some subjects being more capable of a good, fruitful mental states, let alone being aware of them, as needed?

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    16. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      John,
      I’m sorry, but as an old hand at thread-jacking, I’m good at recognizing instances of it. Please, please, please give it a rest. There’s no way he could answer all of these questions in a bloggy thing like this, and it would be a major abuse of his kindness to expect him to.
      If Mohan wants to start a thread on Chalmers’ views and how they relate to animals, then we can discuss those there. If you want to do a guest post (albeit not anonymously) on the philosophy of mind, run it by me in an e-mail.*
      Best,
      Jon
      [*Just to be clear, we don’t accept the majority of such proposals, but then again, most of them are from commercial concerns seeking fee advertizing.]

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    17. John Smith Avatar
      John Smith

      Hi Jon,
      thank you for your reply.
      I am not doing what you mentioned. Even if it looks like it.
      I apologize if this is what it looked like.
      It is my second time posting on this blog, the first time was on criminal issues ( not that long ago ), and the author of that threat asked for comments on that particular subject, which I did.
      My opinions are important too.
      I just saw Chalmers posting on this blog and could not resist asking him. That is all.
      For what is worth, it is not that impossible to assume that he could actually answer me.
      If Mohan wants to start a threat on Chalmers views, that would be very nice. I would comment there as well.

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    18. mm Avatar
      mm

      I have a fantastic recipe for Christmas cookies if anyone is interested.

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    19. David Chalmers Avatar
      David Chalmers

      john: please send me an email (mylastname@anu.edu.au) and i’ll be happy to reply.

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    20. John Smith Avatar
      John Smith

      thank you very much! I will most certainly do that.

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