At the start of this new academic year, Union inaugurated a new President, David Harris, formerly of Tufts. At the ceremony, his inaugural address was framed around the college’s motto (“Under the laws of Minerva we all become brothers and sisters,” in French), and he had a big thing about needing to be made uncomfortable as an essential part of the process of learning wisdom. He turned this idea into a community challenge, asking people at the college to publicly commit to doing something uncomfortable for them that will make them a better person. And also to share the process on social media.

Now, to be sure, this is a little cornball, but I basically agree with and admire the impulse, so I’ll make an effort to play along. It’s a little tricky to come up with something feasible that I could commit to, though. After a bit, I half-seriously suggested that I would make an effort to go to seminar talks in departments outside the sciences and engineering that define my comfort zone.

By coincidence, this past weekend I was tasked with taking a group of Union students to the annual Undergraduate Research Conference run by the New York Six consortium of liberal arts colleges. A pretty good share of these were by non-scientists, so I backed into doing at least the baby version of the thing I said I would do. Which leaves just the “talk about it on social media” part, thus this blog post…

In many ways, the “talk about it on social media” part is the most uncomfortable bit, because it’s the part most likely to get me in trouble with strangers on Twitter, and more importantly colleagues on campus. A lot of my discomfort with the idea stems from being an academic accustomed to the ways of the sciences, and there’s a high risk of coming off as a stereotypical arrogant physicist telling people from other disciplines that they’re Doing It Wrong. So let me offer a disclaimer up front that that’s not my intent– I recognize that the customs of my people, as it were, are just a reflection of the standards of a particular community, and other ways of approaching the whole academic enterprise are perfectly valid.

That said, a lot of my discomfort with presentations coming out of the more literary side of academia is, at bottom, a reflection of the fact that their customs and practices just seem bizarre to me. One of the presentations I saw was in the classic form of presenting a paper– that is, a presenter standing at a podium reading a pre-written text, with minimal visual aids. That’s just never going to not seem weird to me.

The issue I have with this is not just that this isn’t the way science presentations traditionally work (though that’s a lot of it), but that as someone who makes a living stringing words together to explain complicated subjects in a variety of media, the whole business is just painfully awkward. When I write text to be read on a screen or on a page that’s a very different process than writing text to be spoken out loud– the rhythms of spoken language are very different than the rhythms of formal writing, and stuff that works well on the page can be painfully awkward when read out loud.

And that’s what happens with a lot of the paper-reading presentations I’ve been to– its a paper written to be read, but the words are being said out loud, and the result is weird and stilted in a way that’s enormously distracting to me. I also find it positively bizarre that this is the general practice in fields that are, at their core, devoted to the careful parsing of language– presentations where the language is so at odds with the medium of its delivery seem to actively impede communication.

The other thing that I find uncomfortable about a lot of talks from the other side of academia is a matter of absence, rather than presence. The world of science that I inhabit is very much a cumulative and forward-driving enterprise, and one of the ways that is reflected is that most presentations include an explicit call to action. Somewhere toward the end of any presentation in the STEM fields is a “Future Work” section, explaining some of the implications of the findings and sketching out what comes next. Whether it’s a paper or a talk, there’s almost always an explicit “We have shown X, and therefore we should do Y.”

One of the disorienting things about non-science academic presentations, for me, is the absence of that “…and therefore.” I’ve written about this before, and it crops up all over the place. The undergrad presentations I saw this past weekend were another example– one of the speakers went so far as to actively disclaim any intent, saying “we went into this project without any goal or plan.” That really threw me.

Now, of course, there’s a sense in which that claim is disingenuous– the specific project whose presenter claimed not to have a goal was amassing a big collection of material in a variety of media, which is a valuable goal in its own right. There is, in fact, a point to collecting stuff and making it available, namely that future researchers can mine that content for insights. But the fact that they felt it was sensible and even useful to say they had no plan speaks to a worldview that’s very much at odds with my own.

I think there’s also a disconnect here between what academics in these fields say and what they do– that is, a lot of people in this community clearly feel very passionately that the phenomena they describe in their research calls for very specific actions to address problems in society. Which makes it all the more strange to me that they don’t spell that out more. I think this contributes to the sense of these fields as “useless,” and the anger that engenders. People used to more explicit projection into the future find purely descriptive presentations lacking in a way that’s almost disorienting, while people accustomed to the norms of these fields think the implication is perfectly obvious, and people asking for that “…and therefore” to be spelled out explicitly are engaged in some sort of bad-faith argument.

As for the actual content of these presentations… I’m going to keep away from that, because these were undergraduate speakers, and I don’t think it would be right to go too deeply into the specifics of what they did or didn’t say, and what I found more or less congenial about their material. While they were generally quite impressive and accomplished presentations, some of the things I might call out as deficiencies in the content of their work might just reflect their inexperience and the necessarily limited scope of an undergraduate research project compared to a more professional presentation. I’ll save that for some time when I hear a distinguished professor talk about a project that spans multiple years. Also, this post is already longer than many people will bother to read…

So, that’s a bit on some presentations I found uncomfortable, and why I don’t often seek these out. Going forward with this (to the extent that my schedule permits me to get to these sorts of talks), I’ll make an effort to keep these factors in mind, and adjust my expectations for the presentation in a way that will allow more focus on content than delivery. And we’ll see where that goes…