The annual meeting.

With tongue in cheek and stiletto at the ready

IF WE CITIZENS could set up some worthy customs on grounds as firmly established as the national meetings of professional societies, some of our troubles would be over. Conventions and conferences run a close second, but the deliberate gatherings that best display man's eccentricities are the annual meetings of professional, usually also professorial, groups.

The annual meeting grows out of the Organizational Meeting. A small nucleus of profologists, having exchanged a few letters, gathers at a central point to form a Society of American Profologists. Automatically charter members and temporary officers, the handful of organizers makes plans for annual meetings. Meanwhile, there is much to be done.

One bold fellow I recall set up a First Annual Meeting single-handedly. I asked him how he could call it annual with no assurance of a second one, but he only smiled. He knew well the value of that slogan, The Annual Meeting. He staged his First Annual Meeting carefully, with the extraordinary financial, climatic, scenic, alcoholic, and theatric inducements, one speech on an amusing subject and, scheduled around the cocktail hour, one short business meeting to assure continuance.

Once organized, the next order of business deals with membership. Good strategists set attractive dues and begin by inviting celebrities, or at least persons who, if called celebrities, will believe it. There is a difference. For years encyclopedia salesmen found that professors were their best customers. To convince professors that the publishers were making special concessions to them so that the names of distinguished persons and their comments could be used in advertising was no trouble. The set was free, in fact, save for a few minor mailing charges and a small fee for royalties, editing, printing, and binding. The salesmen apparently donated their time.

The first ones "invited" to join the new Society of American Profologists are offered the special prestige of charter memberships at reduced rates, to set up the augmented second annual meeting. The newcomers will inevitably look up to the originators who so wisely chose them as new members. Accordingly, the majority will make official the officers set up as temporary by the originators of the now existent Society, familiarly known as the S.A.P. Members can now join hands to expand the membership without further concessions to the common herd.

The next move is to establish an official publication for the Society. This journal will be free with membership. That is, the yearly dues are raised to include the cost of the journal and members cannot join without subscribing to it. A member is appointed as editor, one who will accept the considerable burden because it helps his ego and his promotion at home. With expenses guaranteed and a warranted list of subscribers, the editor is also assured of plenty of manuscripts, with no worries about paying the writers. Commercial editors dream of such Paradise, a periodical in which popular appeal to subscribers is no factor.

The journal of an organization to which I belonged in my youth seemed so useless that I sought membership, a virtual professional necessity, without the journal. The official excuses for denying my request were many and varied. If the journal had to stand on its own merits to get subscribers, it would have to fold, an unfathomable consequence. The outcome was obvious. It was I that folded, of course. At the time, I resigned from the society with some regrets, but neither side ever felt the loss.

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In due time, a "newsletter," sent free, will keep members informed of the latest addresses and techniques in gamesmanship. After a fourth appearance, a questionnaire will ask if the newsletter is useful and if members would be willing to pay a nominal fee for its continuation.

By the third annual meeting a custom is firmly established. Having had its fun, the tribal elders give way to a new set of officers. This starts a process known as the Emergence of Leaders, a critical step. The election of officers may fall back on normal simplicity, with a popular and normal president put in as the chief. This prevents that favorite move, executive session, the trauma of the age-set ritual. Since the new leaders mean little to imperturbably normal officials, their ambitions are thus thwarted.

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The leaders, certain to be in control eventually, are political activists. On their own campuses they are so fond of organization that they often push quite aside the functions of the groups that they organize. They are busy men on committees, perpetrators of journal clubs, promoters of special lectures, caterers to visiting VIPs, and general disturbers of normal functions. To those who follow the leaders, attendance at a special lecture is a noble duty, but teaching in the classroom is for the birds, the inconsequential sparrows and pigeons. In civil life we call these leaders politicians and we make them run for their offices. Unless some of their colleagues appoint them they are elected under open competition.

The leaders always attend annual meetings, especially the business sessions and special luncheons. Catering to the right persons, they see to it that they are known. They keep at hand a few pet objections to the status quo, along with some alleged progressive ideas for the future, so that appropriate points are available for all occasions. In due time the names of the leaders will appear regularly on the lists of officers. They will take over. On their home campuses such success insures expense money for annual meetings, and mention of the offices held will appear in their requests for budget money, applications for sabbaticals, annual reports, biographies, bibliographies, campus bulletins, and so on.

In the formative years of annual meetings the cities in which the much anticipated gatherings are to be held become a moot question. Soon the choice of a place for next year becomes so awkward that schedules of cities are set three or four years in advance. No one can be much concerned about reserving a place for his town five or six years away. Leaders know these things. Before anyone gets too ambitious, they will have seen to it that a few more cities have been added to the list.

Competition for home cities is one of the strange phenomena of annual meetings. Apart from busybodies the only genuine interest comes from chambers of commerce, hotels, and restaurants. Half the hotels and eating places in the country would go out of business were it not for expense accounts. Though they dislike to say so, in a region under discussion most of the profologists would much prefer that the meeting be held elsewhere, the farther away the better. An annual meeting held locally means not only hard labor on the part of local members, but it also robs them of the joys of carefree travel. The compensation found in the fact that everyone stops them to tell them how splendidly they are doing is secondary.

Relatively few profologists really want to go to the annual meeting as such. They pretend to be interested. They like to make a preliminary and subsequent fuss about it and to be granted a leave for it. They are delighted to get away from their regular duties, especially when they can boast of the reason instead of apologizing. A skeleton crew of the department of profology has to struggle to hold classes together during the week of the annual meeting, especially when it is desirably distant.

There are people to see and new entertainments, and boasts are much easier away from home. With a little organization in advance, a special lecture as a VIP with an honorarium can be arranged en route. The trip becomes a pleasant defection from duty, a delightful socially oriented bit of travel, and even a moonlighting experience with a profit. These things are not possible in the home town, so at an annual meeting the attendance from a given campus may well include more delegates from distant towns than from the local area.

Rationalizing foibles into virtues, the leaders arrange the annual meeting accordingly. Hotels are selected by their offerings of free rooms for gatherings, help is asked from the local government, offers are demanded for entertainment for the ladies, and the availability of local golf courses is weighed. These factors and more enter into the selection of cities. I once arranged for a banquet. The maitre d'hotel took me aside and graciously asked me to come around for dinner sometime on the house, but I never went. Leaders will wonder about this.

Programs are necessary for the annual meeting of the S.A.P., since the gathering is supposed to be a scholarly endeavor. Programs include a banquet speech by the retiring president, a VIP speech read laboriously by someone with a thick accent, and a formidable battery of purportedly scholarly papers.

Everybody is eligible for the program, especially anyone who knows the program chairman, since the only requirement is membership. Those who attend need some official connection with the annual meeting in order to get their home campuses to pay their expenses or, an easier task, in order to justify the excursion when they make reports of their grants. Young members are impressed by the meeting and they need experience. Three or four profologists may ride in on the crest of some wave of paper. The one who has the greatest trouble in getting travel expenses appears on the program with an asterisk before his name, showing that he is the one who will read the paper. Large societies accumulate so many papers that they have to divide up into sections which meet all over town, baffling conscientious members whose home team will hold a special two-hour coffee break to hear a report of the annual meeting.

Even small societies have to limit talks to a few minutes. The result is that batteries of papers remotely related are presented in rapid succession. The noisy turnover in the audience is no help, as members shuffle from one panel to the next, picking up a quotable phrase in each. Given usually by inexperienced speakers working under pressure, reports begin in the middle and end before speakers are finished. The inspiration is indeed limited. The presentation of papers is the presumed heart of the annual meeting, but the experienced old hands stay away from them. Having left their classes to attend the meeting, they leave the meeting to attend the bar, look at exhibits, talk to old friends, or go elsewhere.

The annual meeting becomes a routine. The leaders have taken over. Programs pack the available hours with titles sent in and then add ways to avoid listening to the papers. Pages are devoted to where to get mail, the banquet, directions around town, tours for wives or husbands of members, special accommodations for graduate students, places to eat, and the exhibits which parade as educational advertising for such commerce as may be related to profology. The advertising is free to the Society and to the exhibitors, at least until the company sees the expense accounts for the three or four men sent as representatives, and until it gets a letter of appreciation which suggests that supporting members are welcome.

Let us now attend the annual meeting as members. We have filled out blanks and have reservations at our hotel, where we sign in as would any tourist, putting down our institution with a bold flourish on the line that says: Representing _______. A few fellow profologists are standing or sitting around the lobby, but none of them looks familiar. Once settled in, we seek signs which lead to the registration desk, of the meeting, that is, not of the hotel. To register at the hotel is easy, though it starts a complicated chain of events. To register at the meeting is more complex, though the meeting is simple enough.

Members who have already registered mill around the registration desk, asking questions. Volunteers supposed to man the desks are leaving for coffee breaks and are talking to their puzzled successors. Prospective recruiting members hang around the edges, looking over the crop. Old-timers sit in the only seats available and watch indulgently. Friends and enemies greet one another effusively and indistinguishably, and lost young souls who do not know quite how to act stand in corners.

Eventually some ultrafriendly member of the local community thrusts a registration card your way and holds out his hand for a fee, but you took advantage of the special reduced rate and paid in advance. The registrar, after some search, is delighted to find your name on the list. He tries to sell you a twelve-dollar ticket to the banquet, entrance to a cold two-dollar meal with a boresome speech. An effusive lady moves in on you to pin a name card on your lapel. This will allow you to attend meetings of sections, most of which welcome any kind of attendance which makes them look busy.

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The program shows that the only two papers you want to hear are scheduled two blocks apart at approximately the same time, so you shrug and choose the more distant one, provided it does not rain. The choice does not matter because you will miss both. Someone who wants to talk with you will buttonhole you and say that he heard that the paper you decided to hear is only going to be "read by title" anyway. The author's institution failed to come through with expense money.

You look around and observe the varied groups talking and laughing around the halls. Somebody must be attending so-called scholarly talks. You give up and decide to visit the local brewery with your wife on the "special tour for wives and members" and to pick up theater tickets for the evening. With tickets you can at least avoid the banquet.

In the next two or three days you encounter the members: the job-hunters and recruiters, gregarious and effusive types, busy leaders and politicians, strutters impressed by the annual meeting, gleeful or bored escapers; the young, the braggarts, the naive, and the close-mouthed who fear that someone will steal their ideas; bustling committeemen and officers of the S.A.P., harassed local committeemen, stiff chairmen of section meetings stuck with engineering a whole morning or afternoon of programs, friendly advertisers, and self-conscious speakers who, despite the maelstrom about them, feel responsibilities for the spots assigned to them on the program. It becomes a little difficult to take profology seriously.

You wander into a section and listen to a paper or two out of curiosity, for want of a better occupation, and so you can say you did. The congestion of papers virtually precludes the touted give and take of discussions. Restraint in risking one's reputation among a lot of strangers further cuts down discussion which, with a crowd, is unmanageable anyway.

Like television and radio, the annual meeting gears itself to bustle and activity, with no breaks. Given a semblance of a gap in the program, for example, in comes a cautiously labeled session to protest some move of the Society. The protest is destined to failure because to jeopardize the Society's splendid reputation would be unthinkable. Or perhaps Alumnus College will call its own together for a special jovial session. Graduate students eventually plant themselves around the country, so a gathering is part of a form of dynasty building.

As soon as diversion from home duties is accomplished and the meeting is reached, diversions from the meeting itself are in order. Evidently to tackle the task at hand, on campus or off, is an error. Another way to divert attention at the annual meeting is for some group, perhaps an advertiser, to step in with an Annual Award. Managed with great secrecy, this carries with it the popular dramatic trick of announcing the winner. If the winner has to make a speech later, you discover with no surprise that the basis for the award was not performance on the lecture platform.

Eventually, as the Society of American Profologists attains impressive size, certain members are sure to decide that they are lost in the numbers. Membership in the S.A.P. has ceased to afford the distinction to which they are entitled. By a previous arrangement, which included the current president of the Society, these members meet in a private room at the annual meeting and quietly establish an Academy of Profologists. Carefully in mind but not mentioned, the keynote is distinction and exclusiveness. Having picked one another, they concede that they are the cream of the crop, though how many would qualify by standards later to appear might be questioned. It would be immodest not to enlarge the group somewhat, however, since it needs adequate power.

Accordingly, they plan to reach out to invite strategically selected brethren to participate with them, modestly indicating the honor of being a charter member. Feeling greatly flattered, those invited thus strengthen the numbers while maintaining exclusiveness as the keynote. Those not invited are allowed to feel envious.

One way to bolster the Academy without expansion is to call on the principle of accreditation. Accreditation protects insiders. Though rarely admitted, the beauty of its strategy is certainly not hidden. Those who accredit hold threats over those who are not accredited, forcing the latter to beg for approval. Every approval brings newcomers who add power to the accrediting group, thereby exerting still more force upon those on the outside. Accreditation is an unbeatable system as a strategic move for power, just what kind of power, with its possible uses, is not clearly foreseen. Easy to reject at first, later only those on the outside with enough authority, courage, quality, and judgment can afford to turn up their noses at accreditation, ignoring its existence.

The S.A.P. eventually becomes a functioning organization, with the annual meeting the center of its existence. The Academy of Profologists is under way, feeling more important every year, and declining to consider or mention profologists who have not sought its certification. Merit is secondary to recognition of one's betters.

An equilibrium is reached. Programs become mechanized. Abstracts of papers are demanded so early that the work to be reported may not even be completed. Abstracts are published, in this way invalidating the primary excuse for the meeting, but no one mentions this. The total succinct accomplishments of the annual meeting might fill a nickel postal card, but the S.A.P. has increased its prestige. The attendance of many hundreds at the annual meeting means publicity, a pleasant interlude, and great good fellowship, not to mention new enmities. It means the needless expenditure of several hundred thousand dollars, of which a major share comes directly but unwittingly from the pockets of the taxpayers, with a less hidden share from the pockets of members from smaller institutions, members impelled by conscience or by demands of departmental bosses.

Mark April 16-22 on your calendars, profologists. The meeting will be in Las Vegas. Reservation blanks are at the end of this notice. "Are you going to the meeting this year, Jim?" "I'm not sure yet. I don't get much out of them, but I suppose we ought to put in an appearance. I've got a bid to give a lecture along the route. That would give me a couple of extra days and some extra expense money. My graduate student has a little job that would do for a paper. My wife reminds me that we have relatives living only a couple of hundred miles from there. By the way, I hear that the meeting is here next year. Thank the Lord that is my sabbatical year and I won't be around."

MAX S. MARSHALL was professor emeritus of microbiology at the University of California Medical Center at San Francisco. This article first appeared in Liberal Education, Volume 54, Number 3, 1968.