Seminar power and willy-waving

When I go to a lecture or seminar paper, I expect it to end on time. If it is billed for 30 minutes, and Professor X is still talking at 45, I feel very itchy. Likewise if what Professor X says is plain wrong, then I expect to say so (politely enough) in the discussion session that follows.

All this seem to me to be quite “natural”. But actually, I’ve learnt, these reactions are distinctively British. Although at first glance academic seminars look much the same anywhere in the world (a group of people banging on about subjects that would leave most of humanity quite cold), they are in fact governed by all kinds of culturally specific rules.

When I first went to such gatherings in Italy, for example, I couldn’t understand why the chair didn’t just shut a speaker up when he (or occasionally she) was still in full flood 30 minutes after he should have stopped. And I couldn’t understand why the rest of the audience tolerated rambling responses from the audience lasting almost as long as the paper, and often on a quite different subject.

It took me years to see that in Italian terms this was the whole point of the occasion. For here academic power was calibrated precisely according to how much of the audience’s time you could grab for yourself. If your junior colleague spoke for 8 minutes, then you were losing out in status very publicly if you didn’t take at least 10 for yourself. And so on. Aggressive chairing and timekeeping would not only be breaking the implicit rules of the seminar; it would be disrupting the very roots of the academic power structure which the seminar supported.

In the UK (or at least in Cambridge, which may be a particularly extreme version of the British  case), things are much briefer and – to put it politely – punchy. How often have I heard my colleagues coming out of a seminar, one saying to the other “I thought you made a good point”? What “good” means in this context is, “a comment that in two witty sentences completely demolished the whole paper of the poor visiting speaker and showed how much cleverer you were than her”.

I confess that I am becoming increasingly ambivalent about this kind of display. On the one hand, I grew up with it and am still half attached to its style. I remember as a young lecturer thrilling to the displays of wit and smartness which the then professor of Ancient History would put into his responses to dull papers given by speakers. “I have three reactions to your talk and the first is boredom” is a direct, memorable and (as I now think) memorably nasty quote. And I am sure that I am sometimes guilty of playing such lines myself.

On the other, it’s fairly obvious  that what’s driving this kind of discussion is not an engagement with the topic of the lecture or paper delivered, but peacock-like preening. It’s very male set of responses (even when done by women). It is, as one of my female colleagues has aptly put it, an exercise in “willy-waving”. Power games in a non-Italian form.

That said, the seminar-style in the States leaves me feeling rather at sea too. There are (as I found at Stanford) some examples of the British mode, but by and large  everyone is seamlessly polite. It’s not that they don’t have strong views about the quality of the lectures they hear (as you discover when you talk about it afterwards), But round the seminar table, it’s flattery all the way: “Thank you so much for that masterly performance . . .”/ “I learned an enormous amount from your excellent paper. . .”

To start with, it makes you feel very warm. But then you think: how would I know if I had done a really lousy lecture? Would my best friend tell me? Or is there a subtle code among all this eulogy, that I just haven’t mastered yet?

Comments

[dr venables preller]

It has not been unknown for an overlong sermon to have an assisted
termination from a cipher discovered on a pedal stop by an organist in readiness for the final hymn.

sometimes, I understand, merely turning the blower on can concentrate an orator's mind.

an itinerant cleaner commencing hoover operations beneath the delegates feet might work in the seminar setting.

[Roy]

While at the American Academy in Rome I had the opportunity to observe several national seminar styles at work, and at odds. The American scholars were particularly wary of audiences with a large German contingent…it opened the possibility of what the termed a "shark attack." They even coined a phrase— tristedescophobia—fear of three or more Germans in the room.

[Michael Robinson]

things are much briefer and – to put it politely – punchy.

Resident in the US for near 30 years but having been educated in the UK, and growing up there in an 'academic' family, I agree completely; I grew up understanding that a concise dry wit was to be sought after - expressions of politesse that required parsing like UN resolutions were thought of as waffling hypocrisies. Having said that, intellectual disagreement was very rarely taken personally -- which I find in the US, sadly, almost inevitable however 'diplomaticaly' phrased.

Alas, in my experience there are few like the late Columbia don Sidney Morgenbesser:

"A famous Morgenbesser anecdote arose during a lecture by J. L. Austin in Oxford. Austin said it was peculiar that although there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, no example existed where two positives expressed a negative. In a dismissive voice, Morgenbesser replied from the audience, “Yeah, yeah . . .”
For a link to the full Times obituary:-
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article479591.ece

[anthony alcock]

There's a seminary joke in a David Lodge story. Two cleaning women going home after a morning shift. One comments on how stiff the sheets are, and the other says, "I suppose that's why it's called a seminary."

[Xjy]

The question to ask is probably who are the Scribes, and who is Jesus?

"And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes."

Hint: the Scribes are usually the ones with the big stake (heh) and the firewood...

[Evan]

U.S. seminar style appears to vary by discipline and geography.

Given the importance of the seminar in academic life it would be an appropriate topic for someone to actually study. People spend money and time on these things, so you'd hope they actually advance the quality of scholarship. "Interesting" and "Different" are not specific enough criticisms to be helpful to anyone.

[Sarah Hague]

My ex-husband, a surgeon, goes to many international congresses. He told me how, in the US, going over your allotted time was not tolerated, and the chairperson would just switch off the microphone.

[SW Foska]

Presumably if you are the speaker and you suspect your host/audience of flattery, you can then start grilling them on precisely how they think your paper improves on the existing state of knowledge. Or is that to be eschewed for fear of being labelled a c*nt-flasher?

[Gelfling]

Mary, have you ever given a joint seminar? I'm really enjoying your collaboration with K. Hopkins on the 'Colosseum' at present and wondered whether you both braved an audience together. If so, does that feel better, more secure with safety in numbers? Reading this tome has also intrigued me about the writing of a book with another academic. Perhaps this could be a future blog as I'd love to know your thoughts on it. I often sit and read and ponder over who wrote which bit (I'm presuming the statistical bits are K.H's just because they feel more masculiney and turn me off slightly); did you argue much about who would write different sections; did you sit in the same room often and squabble or rack your brains over metaphors and expression? What did you do if you both diasagreed on the interpretation of something? Not finished said text yet but I'm sure more questions will continue to captivate so will fire more off very soon. Gelfling

[Mary]

Sure: I was too sweeping (but I still think there is something in my basic cultural stereotyping, actually). Underneath, I am predictably ambivalent. On the one hand, it is dishonourable to let off someone who comes and gives a shoddy performance, when basic academic professionalism demands that you keep the standards up ... and publicly (else how do the young get a sense of what passes muster or not...if everyone who gives a paper, however dreadful, gets a pat on the back, why bother to be good?). In fact, one would say that Keith Hopkins's scare tactics on his speakers did have the effect of raising standards at least in the micro environment. On the other, it is hard not to sense blokeish 'rutting' (better than 'preening', probably) in some of the scenes I have witnessed. Invite an innocent 'foreigner', then demolish them, then move on to the pub... When I hear the 'boys' joking about how they used to make the visiting speakers cry, joke or not, I want to cry too (well know, I want to do something a lot nastier)... Cui bono? as we might once have said...Answer's obvious, M

[tony grafton]

It is very hard to generalize accurately about the US. At Cornell, where I had my first post, Lisa Jardine and I were scolded for asking sharp questions of a distinguished visitor who had given a shoddy lecture. At Princeton, the Davis Center under Lawrence Stone was the scene of many a public disemboweling. At Chicago, where I studied, there is also a tradition of critical questions, but quite different in style from those at Princeton. I'm sure the UK shows similar variations.

[Anastasia]

I think there is a code in the polite responses, though I have to think it varies by department. You get used to what people say, what phrases mean what. Among my faculty, for example, being told you've made an elegant argument is a very bad thing. Elegant means you've said something that sounds clever on the surface but for which there is no evidence. I can't think of any further examples just now but that one came to mind as something that sounds really polite but is actually a pretty serious critique.

[Tony Francis]

Oliver is on to something. The movie "Fargo" is just what those people in Minnesota sound like. It isn't an exaggeration. I went to Minneapolis looking for a residency in 1976. I left Kansas in 75 degree weather in October. It was 25 degrees in Minnesota. I was walking around town, freezing to death in a light jacket. I saw a sign that stated "Communist Worker's Party Headquarters of Minnesota". I couldn't believe I was still in the USA. One could walk all through the Unversity of Minnesota (it is a big place) and never go outside. I knew I wouldn't fit in there. They kindly wished me "the best of luck, where ever you end up." Sounded just like Fargo-talk. It would have been a great place to spend the winter, with a case of gin.

[Oliver Nicholson]

Howard Mohr's essential study "How to Talk Minnesotan", shows that the good people of Lake Wobegon have the true word David Ganz wants for disposing of such phenomena as inferior seminar papers. It is: "That's different", with appropriately Scandinavian pitch accent on the initial word.
OPN

[Xjy]

The laugh is that the word means "breeding ground, plant nursery", for priests and women in an educational setting from the 1580s, and for students with a prof from the late 19th century. "Meeting to discuss a subject" recorded apparently from 1944, a great year...

Breed what? Which plants? Why? Plant a seed in minds? Or inject semen?

Me, the only seminars I can remember (and the only ones that gave me any thrill) were hatchet jobs. Some gory, some clean and clinical.

A higher form of the art is the public defence of a PhD dissertation, eg as practised here in Sweden. Allies and enemies are there in force to file through the lobbies so to speak.

I think the motto over the entrance to Uppsala University actually says it all: "To think free is a great thing, to think right is a greater".

Formally the Swedes are very good, but this is just to avoid open conflict. The French combine formality with duelling. The English mix apparent informality with cunning and unfathomable malice. It's great sport to watch an English saboteur (especially an aristo) try his tricks with a Swede wielding the gavel. But this is not as likely in the hallowed groves as in the sewers of international politics.

Maybe I've just gone to seed, but I have no memory of any seminar providing constructive delight or enlightenment or stimulation. Grudging admiration for industry in the service of pedantry, perhaps.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

My personal experience leads me to believe that it is easier to give a lecture or read a paper critical of, say, the achievement of T.S. Eliot in England than in the United States, where someone in the audience specializing in Eliot will shake his head vigorously or get angry and mutter imprecations all through the lecture. I once saw an American graduate student extend this kind of treatment to an Oxford don lecturing on Virginia Woolf, to his angry dismay. That said, I take the point of the earlier poster that England is no more homogeneous than the United States. Yvor Winters (1900-68), a Professor influential in English studies at Stanford for many years, was very crtitical of Modernism, of which Eliot is an essential part.

[Tony Francis]

When I was a medical student and resident, we had to give lectures all the time. There was never any deference shown to the poor fool who said something that was wrong! I know because I was in that position frequently; one could even be correct, and if someone in the audience used a different method, everyone would get an earful. Now that's peacock preening. Visiting professors were treated like royalty. But they had no qualms slaughtering the students and residents. In grad school, everyone was polite to a point, but if they disagreed with something, they weren't shy about mentioning it. We were trying to solve the Schrodinger equation using computers. One of my advisors proudly proclaimed "No one has ever proven Schrodinger to be wrong." But the retort was, "Yes, but no one has proven him to be correct." Our results were always off by 5% or 7%. I started reading physics books, and found that one of the great unsolved mysteries was n-body problem. If there are more than 3 or 4 interacting bodies, the math is too difficult to solve. It doesn't matter if you are working on stars in a galaxy, or atomic particles. It's the n-body problem. Schrodinger is really an n-body problem. I pointed this out to my advisors, and even wrote my thesis on what a waste of time trying to do this on a computer was. Also, the mathematical space (Hilbert space) has no relationship to the real world. In fact, the ancient Greeks discovered quantum mechanics. It had to do with Zeno's paradox: There can be no motion, because one has to travel half the distance, then a quarter of the distance, etc. This led to the concept of the "atomus", a particle that was ultimately small. Same thing applied to space: atoms go from one state to another, without anything inbetween. This was in contrast to the Pythagoreans who thought the world was reducible to numbers.

[Sophia]

I can't match the spunky texture of many of the previous comments.

Perhaps that is the point. What has any of this discussion about seminar styles, learning and teaching, to do with men's willies?

Critical feedback at a seminar can flop into adulation at one end of the scale, or into barbaric criticism at the other end of the scale. That spectrum of human behaviour, or misbehaviour, is not restricted to university seminars.

Different communities, as we know from Goffman et al, adopt different standards of normative behaviour. That might group around maleness, Cambridge-ness, MIT-ness, street fighting-ness and so on. I suspect we know that and that some of these groupings overlap.

To reduce seminar rudeness or flashiness to willy-waving is dreadful sexism. If a man claimed that my teaching style was c*nt flashing, I would be stunned and insulted. What exactly is the difference?

[Eileen]

I have noticed that expressions of power can be noticed in who chooses to sit where.

In a small format seminar where 10-12 people are seated around the usual configuration of tables (as in the photo) the person who sits to the first left or right of the speaker often wishes to dominate the event. Interestingly, in a graduate student seminar setting, it is often the weakest student in the room who also will choose to sit next to the professor. I guess you could call it power siphoning...

The person who sits the farthest away from the speaker, at the opposite end of the table, wishes to establish a rival center of power as he or she considers himself to be a higher authority than the speaker and will, of course, talk incessantly...

I've observed these seating choices for years, and it applies to males and females equally.

[Gelfling]

Do you think that there are actually academics which go to seminars with the sole purpose of doing a demolition job? And have you ever seen a speaker clearly groan at the sight of yourself turning up at their ‘show’ as they fear you’re there for a good stoning? The mention of 'peacock-like preening' reminds me of academics more concerned with sounding clever and being the wit than engaging their audience in a clear and concise style. I once knew a PhD student who spent half an hour poring over 3 words in a paper she was writing and 3 hours to construct a small paragraph (I may exaggerate slightly). Her main motive was not whether she was arguing her case convincingly but whether her language was 'dressy' enough as if she was fighting for the Booker prize. What about female speakers getting a more polite reception than males, especially if they are what society deems as physically attractive women ( I’m thinking of upteen comments passed on the ‘lovely Brittany Hughes’ here and what she has done for reviving interest amongst the general public in the ancient world)? Maybe the world of academia is not even free from superficial prejudices.

[SW Foska]

30 minutes is nothing for an 'intervento' - in Malagasy they can last for four hours (see Postill, Social Anthropology 11 (2003)).
On seminars as a masculinized forum see Bonnie Smith, American Historical Review, 1995 (cit. infra, including also some interesting geocultural slanders on the professors of Stanford & Berkeley, likened to 'Huns' and 'Slavs')
American vs. British academia is much like American vs. British Rock & Pop: higher average quality in America, fewer risks means fewer totally weird & embarrassing morons but also fewer world-beaters.
But is willy-waving the correct term? I don't think displaying their genitals in public is really what men secretly are trying to do on these occasions. More literal terms like 'being a complete dickhead/wanker' are probably closer to the mark. I believe 'asshole' is the American translation.

[anthony alcock]

Italians asking questions: I can't remember if you were there at the time, but Gilbert and George turned up one lunchtime at the BSR to actually talk. At the end a guy from the Messagero made a longish rambling point (c.10 minutes), more or less in the form of a question. At the end George murmured "Interesting".
The first seminar I went to (in the late sixties) was given by Peter Brown, who even then was grooming himself to be a guru. There was no discussion or questions (how could there be ?). Since I did not know what a seminar was I assumed that it was simply a lecture with a smaller audience

[Kate]

I'm an undergraduate in the Classics in the US, and have been going to undergraduate conferences (to present) and regular conferences (to listen) during the past two years. The problem you describe with US conferences gets even worse at undergrad conferences, where many profs seem to feel that they need to protect our delicate egos when we could really use some serious corrections and academic advice. However, I have seen some professors deliver memorable criticisms of others' work-- it just doesn't happen as often as it perhaps should.

[David Ganz]

A colleague has a wonderful account of a Department Meeting where a woman faculty member said 'OK chaps, dicks on the table.' which may be what Mary is refering to. But there is a serious problem here: how does one react to a lousy paper? The UK 'Interesting' is a helpful usage, and I once got mileage from confusing Merkwurdig with Bemerkenswert in German, though I lost all standing. Can we invent an international gesture (probably already to be found on Greek vases and in Terence mss) for 'Could do better?' Must we resort to the exquisite politness of Jerzy Linderski or Fritz Solmsen, who could remove the backbone from a weak argument so deftly that the speaker would fail to notice? Or, in a democracy ruled by the RAE and its collaborators, must all seminar papers be equal?

[Tim Lacy]

In my experience, this varies widely across the U.S.: it'd be exceedingly difficult to generalize about "a" homogeneous U.S. seminar experience. I can say that at U.S. conferences you get a closer approximation of the seminar style you desire: time enforcement, substantial topic engagement, disagreement, etc. It's not that conferences lack politeness, but rather that politeness is not served on the altar of admiration. - TL