Conferences in Search of Audience

 

The idea of the whole campus conference has caught on in Kerala. Many HEIs, irrespective of their size and popularity, have taken to organising conferences / seminars which are apparently big and days long. These conferences call for long planning for effective execution. Any such serious event starts with the idea, then the find of the focus theme, dates, speaker selection, literature like brochures and posters, marketing and the logistics of actual execution. All these are time consuming and energy sapping. It consumes a lot of meetings, work hours and some unproductive labour too. Hence it is time that the HEIs went for an introspection as to how fruitful these events are in terms of efforts invested and actual outcomes. 

There is no denying that such events always offer plenty of take homes. From the initial brainstorming to find the right theme, through the compilation of speaker lists to the actual experience of listening to and interacting with the invited scholars, the benefits are plenty. The advantages vary too. What a research scholar or an undergraduate student takes away from such an exercise will be different from the leadership lessons, publication opportunities and networking possibilities. If it further leads to book publications, MoUs or projects, the level still rises. What will make the difference is the level of quality of the outcomes. 

But let us admit that there is a surfeit now. With lots of conferences around, organised by campuses and other organisations, not to speak of the literary festivals and the like, there are clearly visible signs of fatigue and boredom. The novelty and rarity have worn off. When we add this to the general lethargy in the air in the tech-tuned, handset-confined audience, the picture is not looking bright. Long gone are the days when participants will rush in the moment they hear of a conference, irrespective of the speaker quality. Now the one area in which conferences struggle is here: the audience part. In the majority of the colleges, the compelled students of the host college are the audience. In the past it used to be the crowd of students and faculty from other institutions who would flock to listen. These days, getting hold of a bunch of interested listeners from even the host HEI is a bit of a challenge. 

This has its impact on the speakers too. The ensuing reality is that when you are invited to talk in a so-called International Conference, more often than not, you can't pitch your talk where you wanted to, planned to. Because the crowd for whom you have prepared the talk is not what you will face at the venue. Instead, you need to scale it down to connect to the often undergraduate or occasionally the postgraduate group of students of the host college who are there, who are made to sit through! Any group who is interested in the topic is fine for sure, but, interest is the key issue here. One can be caught between the faces of the organising team which swing between anger towards the audience behaviour and the apology to the invited speaker. 

Another issue is, a good number of paper presenters these days prefer to do it online. A large number of requests come close to the day of the conference requesting to switch to the online mode. What's interesting is many of these paper presenters are not from far way, but could be from the next town or the next district not far away. Many of those who turn up, will turn up often on the allotted day and time to present their paper and leave! They will not come early enough to listen to a plenary talk, or stay back to listen to other paper presenters before leaving. 

This is not to deny that there are some takeaways from the exercise. For instance the paper presentation opportunity it provides to the home crowd, the organising experience, the sense of having arrived which small colleges can feel and the like. To see the other side of the story, we must honestly revisit the time, energy, labour and money invested in the exercise. Hundreds of hours are spent planning the event and later in running the show. The whole academic and administrative machinery of an HEI is made to sync with the show. Often it involves lakhs of rupees too, if it is a multi-day event, with renowned speakers and large audience.When the focus shifts from quality to quantity, when the parameter is the number of papers, irrespective of whether they are from the host institution itself or not, sense of triumph can easily be arrived at. Similar is the exhilaration the organisers can derive from the count of speakers, count of sessions and count of days. I mean, if we conveniently ignore the case of paper duplications and papers which travel from one conference to another with reworked titles. 

A true, impartial post-conference assessment will make us wonder whether the HEIs need to go ahead with the idea. As one who helped popularise the idea of whole campus conferences, I think it is time the whole concept is rethought. It is time we went back to the small, rather than the made-up big. In fact, we need more regular, quality teaching sessions I feel, or more invited talks. Conferences which morph into festivals often end up being that, just a fest. Not con-fests but fests. The actual outcomes of these conferences and festivals are different, however we turn information into entertainment. 

I recall a recent article which urges us to rethink the role of universities in a world where intelligence is everywhere. For similar reasons, we need to rethink the scale, rethink the spend, rethink the objective, rethink the returns from whole campus conferences too.

Babu. P. K., Ph D.