WHAT DO ACADEMICS DO AT CONFERENCES?
Ivory tower of love
Sex at academic conferences was the open secret of the professorial class — at least until it made the agenda at an academic conference
Sarah Treleaven, National Post
Published: Friday, January 09, 2009
Sex at academic conferences was the open secret of the professorial class — at least until it made the agenda at an academic conference
The Modern Language Association’s annual conference brings together professors and graduate students to attend hundreds of panels, strut their specialization, meet up with old friends, schmooze with the big names and network for future career opportunities. But at this year’s conference, wedged between Christmas and New Year’s, one tongue-in-cheek round-table discussion about Conference Sex shed new light on the potential double meaning of “delivering a paper”.
Ricardo Ortiz, a professor at Georgetown University who organized the panel on Conference Sex, says that the idea emerged from a larger discussion of the cultural and sexual mystique around MLA.
“It was less about the things going on in people’s hotel rooms and more about the quality and innovativeness of the sexual discourse and sexual theory being presented at MLA,” he says. “There was a time when there was more willingness to go further out there in the topics covered and the language used to cover it.”
The Conference Sex discussion’s time slot was early morning, which Ortiz acknowledges was far from ideal. After all, if you’re been out putting theory into practice the night before, it’s hard to sober up, figure out which tweed blazer is yours, apologize to a wallet-size picture of your wife and still make it to the panel by 8:30 a.m.
Five panellists presented on the subject, drawing on broad themes of sexuality, professional conduct and literary theory. Jennifer Drouin (Allegheny College) outlined different types of conference sex, such as career-building sex and bi-curious sex; Ann Pellegrini (New York University), discussed literature as a first love; Milton Wendland (University of Kansas) discussed sexualized conference jargon; Israel Reyes (Dartmouth College) covered sexual harassment; and Daniel Contreras (Fordham University) lamented the lack of intellectual risk-taking at recent conferences. Pellegrini presented while wearing a bathrobe.
Drouin, who was raised in Nova Scotia and received her PhD at McGill University, offered a cheeky taxonomy, but her underlying point – that the academic job market makes it incredibly difficult for people to choose where they live, and therefore who they live with, and can interfere with sexual relationships – was extremely earnest. “There are a lot of long-distance couples in academia, and often monogamous couples are kept apart,” Drouin says.
Drouin also discussed the benefits of anonymity at a conference like MLA, held in San Francisco this year, where more than 9,000 participants and more than 800 panels increased the odds for a one-night stand. Drouin, a Shakespearean, added that smaller, field-specific conferences such as the Shakespeare Association of America, are better suited to ongoing flirtations as you see the same group of people every year. (Also, any costumes involved in boudoir role-playing are probably more impressive.)
“With MLA, there are so many people it’s hard to just bump into people unless you pre-arrange it,” she says.
But plenty of people do appear to be bumping in one form or another – and not everyone’s thrilled about a formal discussion of it. The Conference Sex panel has drawn light-hearted coverage from both the Huffington Post and Inside Higher Ed, but the latter piece generated significant chatter about the purpose of such a panel topic.
Some commenters labelled the panel a waste of resources. “Is this what students, their parents and taxpayers are subsidizing instead of classroom instruction? What a disgrace!” says David Smythe. “Dr. RingDing” accused the presenters of employing an academic strategy similar to the career tactics of Britney Spears: “If you can’t sing well, wear skimpy clothing.” And still others challenged the academic value of the presentations. Jerry Pattengale, assistant provost at Indiana Wesleyan University, inquired about empirical evidence versus anecdotal information and assumptions.
Drouin, who says that the panel audience of about 20 appeared supportive of the discussion, believes that many of the comments are over the top. “Everyone talks about what a waste of time and money it is, but it’s one [panel] out of 806.”
Without a doubt, sex sells – even in academia. “I wrote about serious reform of the foreign language curriculum and, of course, that doesn’t get picked up by the Huffington Post,” laughs Scott Jaschik, who wrote the Inside Higher Ed story. “You write about sex and all of a sudden you get calls from Canadian newspapers.”
People may come to the MLA and occasionally find themselves fumbling with someone else’s buttons in between discussions about specific literary genres, but Ortiz emphasizes that the Conference Sex panel did not consist of people anecdotally sharing aspects of their sexual history at the MLA. “It was a really serious, responsible, professional and thoughtful series of presentations and discussion. It was really about the passion that the people at the table have for books and reading, which is what the MLA is primarily about.”
Jaschik confirms that the MLA “is not one big orgy.” He did, however, see evidence of people being hit on and does believe that occurs at the annual conference. “But I could not attest to its quantity or quality.”