The Conference
Completed August, 2024.
Take a good look around you. Notice how this convention center is a step beyond what you’ve come to expect. For one thing, it’s got its own uniformed and specialized event personnel: greeters, ushers, caterers, and desk attendants; instead of the usual hodgepodge of student assistants and all-purpose campus staff.
You’re now being led to the entrance of a big, high-ceilinged lobby connecting the conference halls. Stop a moment to take note of its chic, moody vibe, with neon lights that had their colors muted and their brightness dimmed. If a luxury discothèque were given a halal makeover, this would be it.
Dead-center in this lobby is an island coffee booth, which at 8:30 a.m. is bustling with somnambular conferencegoers. In its periphery is a scattering of empty display boards on which later will hang the lot of cookie-cutter posters that academic conferences are known for. What can I tell you about these posters that you don’t already know? They’re visual media the way eggplants are fruits - or eggs for that matter. The poster you brought along is barely different. Nevertheless, you pick a spot for it that’s highly visible. You need eyes on your work.
By the way, ‘your’ plural or ‘your’ singular? Singular, you decide, or maybe the royal kind. It’s every man for himself in this line of work.
You feel good about the poster and the board you’ve picked for it, like a dog under the sunlight having just pissed on a dry lamp post. Then, you shift your attention back to the coffee booth. You notice that it’s staffed by the kind of young people whom you imagine might have some reverence for you because of their false impression of your prestige and erudition - on account of you being a participant in this here academic conference, and them being just service staff. So you guiltily wish to disabuse them of such notions, by saying something like, “It’s actually youse guys that are cool and deserving of reverence, since you’re probably up to all manner of jovial, care-free fun after your shift is over, while this here conference is the only time I’m allowed to talk to strangers without lowering my gaze.” But you imagine yourself saying that in a suave and nonchalant way, so as to not fully debase yourself or come across as too eager.
Naturally, this happens in the confines of your mind, safe from any scrutiny but your own. Not just the part where your interaction with them exceeds “May I have a coffee, please? Yes, black”, but also, crucially, the part where these overworked and underpaid youths expend a joule of energy making the mistake that you (or any other dweeb badgering them for coffee) are cool by virtue of attending a conference.
What a sobering thought to start the day with. But you like the coffee and feel grateful to the youngins who made it.
Somewhere else in the hall an index finger slides down a list. It belongs, this finger, to a kindly aging face, whose skin had been patinated by sunlight and crow’s feet had formed at the corners of its eyes. The face smiles at you but all you can see is its skin folding slowly onto itself, like ripples forming at the surface of a quiet pond. Why? Have you become conscious of your own wrinkles lately? Did you wake up to the thought that you haven’t got enough to your name to look the way you do? Yes, you did. But it’s not right to think of others this way. It’s reductive, and it misses what matters. You rebuke yourself. Go ahead, say I’m a bad person. No, not out loud. Quietly.
The finger finds your name then hands you a name tag. You’re now registered. Look, at least some things never change, right? Except, you recall, when a pandemic shut the world down, and conferences were reduced to their bare essence, revealing in the most insipid ways that the frivolities of those gatherings were what truly made them bearable.
We’re back to pen-and-paper registration, physical name tags, and the all that jolly good fun. And it really is fun, isn’t it? Out of all the ways being an academic presents an instance of arrested development, a case of having never left school, conference registration is the most fun. Because it evokes classroom roll call in your mind, and you really liked the classroom. And the classroom liked you back.
The name tag you’ve been given is the kind that adheres rather than clips, or God forbid, pins to your shirt. Whether this is the best alternative depends on the type of shirt you’re wearing. A clip is the least damaging, but its problem is finding a place to hook it onto. If you’re not wearing a shirt with a pocket, then there’s no hooking point that wouldn’t create a sort of unfashionable asymmetry or cause the name tag to limp awkwardly sideways, making you look like a total dweeb. If it’s anything that pins into fabric, and you happen to be wearing something delicate, then you worry that repeated application of such name tags would eventually make the pin-sized holes visible. You’re wearing a corduroy shirt today, which is tufted and kind of fuzzy by design, so you’re convinced the additional micro-fuzz that will result from the tearing of the sticker will be negligible. Besides, a sticker obviates the need for recycling a plastic name tag holder.
Isn’t it things like these (the coffee being so darn nice in this large convention center with the young service staff that doesn’t think you’re cool but treats you cordially nonetheless, and the sticker with your name printed on it) that delude you into thinking that you’re part of the professional-managerial class? That you’ve claimed your meager slice of pie? That you’ve made it, so to speak?
Or maybe this is too nice, and deep inside you don’t feel you deserve it, that it’s too good to be true; the work autonomy, the generous paid leave, the honorifics, the free travel, even the name tag — that any moment you’ll wake up somewhere you truly belong, effaced and nameless.
Or worse, maybe this triggers your grass-on-the-other-side thinking, making you wonder what type of people usually convene in such a place. What kinds of houses do they live in? Would they scuff at you for having a kitchenette that’s at arm’s length from where you sleep? Would their children call you uncle? What kinds of lives does one relinquish when they self-isolate in a university? You decide it’s better not to know.
You make your way to the main conference hall and find a seat far enough from the front row that your forthcoming yawns wouldn’t get noticed. The session chair steps onto the stage to begin the day’s program, dressed like someone whose spouse holds the key to their wardrobe. That is to say, like an academic. “Our keynote speaker today needs no introduction,” they announce right before - what else? - launching into a long introduction. You wonder if this contradiction results from the same brain defect that makes it impossible not to think of a pink elephant right now.
A whole herd, hot pink, amaranth and fuchsia, runs gleefully through your mind, until the sound of applause welcomes to the podium the needs-no-introduction-but-introduced-all-the-same keynote speaker. You’d just heard over the elephantine daydream that they’re the distinguished professor of pharmacology at the three or four letter acronym institute, and a world-leading expert of drug discovery, so you reflexively sit more upright.
You identify among the crowd a group of this speaker’s professorial peers - the equally learned and distinguished - marked by their consanguineous resemblance to the speaker and to one another. Also present is a large group of students and junior scholars, whom you observe to be marked not so much by their age as (once again) their wardrobe choices, which are virtually the same as the senior academics but more off-brand.
Like many scientific keynotes, this one begins with a drawn-out and self-absorbed retrospective of the field’s preceding decades. Maybe it’s out of convenience, rather than egotism, that this highly learned scholar’s keynote, is also in some ways, their autobiography. They have been, after all - this renowned authority on toxicology - a key player in the developments they’re now recounting to a battalion-sized audience.
As the keynote drags on, you scan the crowd hoping to spot faces that look as bored as you’re starting to feel. The professors seem indifferent to the talk’s content and unbothered by its self-referential tone. Some of them are nodding in agreement with their colleagues’s recycling of orthodoxy, or so it seems, for why else would they look like dashboard bobbleheads in slow motion? Others are smiling the way one does at their reflection after a restful night’s sleep.
Some junior members of the audience are ogling their charismatic elder. Those are the ones with a twinkle in their eyes: the first-year students, the honeymooners, the ones who still have their innocence. The rest of the audience is difficult to gauge, but self-flattery and mild boredom are dominant.
Near the end of the talk, while revealing the field’s recent breakthroughs, the speaker - board certified doctor of pharmaceutical sciences and professor emeritus of biotechnology - claims that a major pharmaceutical company has developed a drug; one that can cure anything.
Suddenly, the room’s apathy turns to a kerfuffle. The session chair, now back on stage, is visibly nervous, eyebrows soaked in sweat. Some members of the audience, evidently in shock, walk out in silent, chair-rattling protest; others impatiently queue up for the Q&A session, which becomes filled with polemical questioning of what the highly learned speaker has just said.
The professors are speaking out of turn and on behalf of their speaker friend. They explain to the indignant crowd that they’re assuming in good faith that the highly esteemed professor is performing a practical joke. It’s uncharacteristic of their stoical, old-guard, person-of-letters nature, but they refuse to take their words at face value. It is unfathomable to them (this cohort of bespectacled learned peers); in fact, it’s an outright assault on their sensibilities, that they (their esteemed professor colleague keynote speaker) should make such a claim and mean it.
Dissatisfied with the rectifying power of the Q&A sesh, the crowd’s disgruntled murmurs grow in volume and get interjected with ominous hissing and laughter. People demand that the speaker is removed from the stage. Academic etiquette is quickly abandoned, with something primal taking its place.
Two angry mobs form on either side of the conference hall. You feel the urge to pick a side because the neutral middle is where all the makeshift projectiles are now landing. But it’s not an easy choice when both sides look equally rabid. Their disagreement, it seems, pertains to the nature of punishment that should befall the baslphemer, who has thus far remained on stage and in shell shock. One group favors a burning at the stake, or baptizing the speaker in a vat of lye. The other group, safety conscious and sentimental, prefers a crucifixion.
Pitchforks make a first appearance (a farming equipment trade show is held in the next hall over). Someone on one side of the hall shouts, ‘snake oil salesman!’ and on the other, a manic shriek, ‘Panacea peddler!’
“And that was the moment,” a bandaged eyewitness later recalled, “when shit hit the fan.”
The camera dollies away, revealing a computer screen. On it is the distraught eyewitness standing in the parking lot of the convention center. Both he and the reporter interviewing him look a lot like you. A quick eye rub reveals what’s really on the screen: a show about nothing. You switch to another tab to answer some emails.