A cademic conferences advertise themselves in many ways. One near-universal is listing a prominent scholar’s name as the keynote (or plenary, invited, or featured) speaker. The promise of hearing a well-known “sage on the stage” is meant to induce people to come to the conference.
Keynote speakers provide what we might think of as mood lighting for a meeting. Their talks are meant to build community, gathering attendees in one big room to see themselves as part of a collective enterprise. Keynote lectures promise quasi-celebrity spectacle and cutting-edge intellectual enrichment.
Why, then, are they so often such disasters?
In my experience, a third of keynote speeches at academic conferences are calamitous — the opposite of inspiring TED talks. Another third are unmemorable snoozefests. The final third are galvanizing and energizing.
Reasonable colleagues may disagree about what makes a great keynote. One person’s snooze may be another’s stimulant, yet there are so many ways to fail. At a recent lively conference, I reminisced with some veteran professors about keynotes of yore. Perhaps predictably, our conversation turned into a contest: “Describe the worst keynote you’ve ever seen.” One-upmanship was certainly involved, but because some of us had sat through these disasters together, we could keep in check our worst tendencies to exaggerate for effect.
These were the finalists (with certain details withheld to protect the guilty):
- The keynoter whose lagging lecture was delivered in an inaudible monotone, seemingly made up only of quotations from one inscrutable theorist’s work. Although the speaker punctuated one word in particular — a howler of a word — people in the audience described wishing the fire alarm would go off. In fact, they reported feeling the urge, for the first time since high school, to pull the alarm themselves.
- Then there was the keynoter who stood up, admitted having not bothered to write a speech at all, mumbled a few apologetic words, and filibustered through the time slot. The stunned audience didn’t know whether to clap, demand a refund, or invoke cloture.
- Finally, there was the keynoter who spoke at an amazing clip for an hour and a half straight, until another scholar, in the back of the room, stood up suddenly from his chair, pounded on his chest, and screamed, “Aaaarrrrrggghh!!” like a Wookiee. The rest of the room burst out into applause. The keynoter then said, to wide disbelief, “I’d like to make just one more point.” The brave Wookiee said, “No! We’re going to Q&A right now!” — once again to applause.
The last story provoked the most glee among my reminiscing colleagues because, even if the protracted talk itself was business as usual, the dramatic ending was so blissfully cathartic. Academics spend far too much time being punished at academic conferences by lousy keynotes. What follows is advice for speakers on how to avoid delivering a dud talk, for conference organizers on how to avoid facilitating one, and for meeting attendees on how to navigate one of these keynote train wrecks.
Thoughtless speakers give the genre a bad name. All of us could stand to remind ourselves that when it comes to conference presentations, longer is not better. Abstruse is not smarter. Longer and more abstruse is no proof of intellectual heft. Remarkably few keynotes prompt the response, “Man, that was way too short!”
Keynoter, please don’t rest on your laurels. Do the audience the favor of making your talk a talk, not the oral delivery of something written to be read silently. Get rid of long dependent clauses and endless parentheticals. Be declarative. Choose a topic with wide appeal for the assembled group. If you must speak on a subject few in the room will readily understand or be immediately interested in, find ways to show all of us why we should care. Point to larger issues at stake. Do this right away and throughout the talk, not just in its last 30 seconds.
Finally, keynoter, although you’re ostensibly being asked to deliver one supersized lecture, you’ve also been invited to the conference to be omnipresent, not to zip in, be brilliant, and zip out. Have informal conversations. Go to receptions, panels, and poster sessions. Ask engaged questions. Listen to other people. Be a good honored citizen.
If you are a conference organizer, you are in a prime position to spare us any more painful keynotes. Shortlist academics you’ve actually heard speak effectively before large groups. Barring that, ask around about scholars’ reputations as speakers before you issue the invite.
Sometimes organizers see little need for such inquiries because their first-choice for the keynote is their mentor. But be forewarned: That’s led to many a conference disaster. Tread carefully.
Regardless of your personal connections, vet the would-be keynoter by asking others a few probing questions on deep background. Does the prospective speaker have a reputation for last-minute cancellation? How well does the scholar connect with listeners, formally and informally? Is this person a force who will get audiences excited — negatively or positively? What tone is the speaker’s current scholarly work likely to set, and is that the tone you want for the conference?
Choosing a scholar who is actively engaged in visible work in your field is a smart move. Consistent productivity provides organizers with a solid indicator that crafting a new talk for the conference will be neither an obstacle nor a novelty.
After an invitation is accepted, organizers can do a few more things to nudge the keynoter into better behavior.
- Be clear with expectations. “We’d like you to lecture for at most X minutes.” Or, “We plan for X minutes of Q&A.” Or, “If you go over, we’ll wave to you to wrap it up (or whatever the signal will be), because we know our audience will want as much time as possible for an exchange with you.”
- Ask in advance for a paragraph-long description of the talk, for publicity purposes. That may help keep the speaker on track with completion prior to arrival.
- On the day of the lecture, schedule a tech run with the keynoter present. Make sure to build in time for all introductions, which should be brief. (Post the long version of the speaker’s bio on the conference website, and point people there.)
- Start on time.
This is very straightforward stuff in event management, but many academic conference organizers are beleaguered faculty volunteers. They are trying to keep their teaching-research-service balls in the air, while readying for — and then spending an uncompensated long weekend — babysitting visiting scholars, more than a few of whom turn out to be cranks and whiners. (That’s why it’s crucial that the rest of us thank organizers for their labor on our behalf, as I’ve suggested previously.)
What should audience members stuck in a bad keynote do?
You could sit in the back of the room, fearing the worst, and walk out if nightmare becomes reality. Nothing tells a speaker “This is a failure” better than voting with your feet, except of course for that extraordinary, heroic Wookiee move. I would never recommend either move, however, to job seekers or to the job insecure. Too risky.
What does one do, then, while enduring a ruinous keynoter’s remarks? You could take the time-honored route of daydreaming or the newfangled one of pretending to tweet while checking your email. Or you could actually find positive things to tweet out — bits of the talk that strike you as the most salvageable to publicize. (Whatever you tweet, keep it positive or keep it offline.) You might be clever enough to pretend to be taking furious notes on your laptop while paying your bills.
But I’d recommend instead approaching the crummy keynote as a learning opportunity. Imagine yourself as the failed speaker’s adviser. (This is a thought exercise, not an actual assignment.) What could be done to improve the performance? What fixes would you make in content, organization, or delivery? Try to pinpoint what, specifically, would work best with this audience. You could even turn it into a parlor game with your closest, trusted academic peers, exchanging notes afterward in a friendly competition called “Renovate That Keynote.”
Whether or not you engage in such sport, you should also weigh any advice you’d want to give the speaker for its “Physician, Heal Thyself” potential. Does your own conference talk stay within the time limit? How fluid is your mode of delivery? Do you lead with your argument and your why-it-matters talking points, weaving them back in as you go along? You might attend, too, to anything exemplary or anti-exemplary in the keynote that could be transformed into advice for current or future students, as they deliver their first work aloud to a public audience.
Surely we can fix our conference keynote problems. And if we can’t fix them, then we should seriously consider doing away with the custom and putting that chunk of the registration monies to different, better uses.
