I had to laugh at the recent media coverage of "Conference Sex," a panel at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, held in San Francisco this year during Christmas Week. Although the session was, apparently, a nuanced look at how sex is handled and discussed at academic conferences, the easy soundbite is that professors were talking about hooking up away from home. Now, let us get the obvious jokes out of the way: I am a pasty, middle-aged academic who wonders what happened to all the hair he had in graduate school. So, if I tell you that walking an attractive colleague home after drinks at a meeting at Bishop's University in 1999 is as close as I have ever come to scholarly romance, you might claim that this fact has more to do with the specific case than the general principle. (Interestingly, I was assigned a room at that conference that was located below my hotel's honeymoon suite, and so I am aware of the practical demonstration of the wider phenomenon here under discussion.)
In spite of all the stories, all the innuendo, I am oblivious to the apparent buffet of carnal delights available at the Modern Language Association. I have only attended a handful of times, myself. Because of the MLA's chronic political correctness, the location is seldom anywhere that might qualify as exotic, even by North American standards, and travel in the last days of the year is not what I would call an aphrodisiac. You are likely to encounter there old professors and old friends who have aged no better than have you, and the stereotypically nubile young colleagues are, themselves, stressed to distraction by their attempts to network and interview for the relatively few jobs available in the academy. I am more likely to be found in May at the Canadian equivalent, what we used to call "The Learneds." Its name for the past decade, "The Congress Of The Humanities And Social Sciences," has never fully caught on, but this recent angle does give an obvious new sense to the phrase "The Congress." All the hiring has been done by the time we meet in late May, and so there is no whiff of desperation in the air. Neither is there love, but again this is just my impression.
What troubles me about the commentary on "Conference Sex," though, are those people who see this as another waste of time in higher learning. As you know, I do not see it that way. From what I have read, some of the material dealt, for example, with trends in how people discuss risque matters, and by framing this valuable general argument with provocative examples -- or at least with examples of things that would interest a broader audience -- we extend the important work of our public intellectuals. I am in no way advocating for the "dumbing down" of scholarship, nor am I a fan of trendy topics with little inherent interest beyond the present moment, but I think we should challenge ourselves to engage as many people as we can with our ideas, and more often than we will allow can these ideas be filtered through material of a more general interest.
So, "Conference Sex"? I say "yes," as long as people watch!
