I’ve never actually been to a state library association conference. Going to TXLA next month will be my first. It looks as though WAAL rather than the larger WLA will be my native state conference, but I won’t make it this year for the obvious reason that I’ll just be coming back from TXLA.
Of course I haven’t helped organize a state library association conference either. It could happen, but it hasn’t.
Despite my inexperience in these matters, I have repeatedly run into a common and rather unfortunate paradox: library associations treat imported speakers like imported caviare, but they treat in-state or in-organization speakers like dirt. Not good wholesome rich-in-organics farm dirt, either—contaminated worn-out landfill dirt, more like.
As I mentioned before, I’m getting a lovely deal from TXLA. Native Texan and fellow Five Weeks organizer Michelle, however, is getting the shaft. Or she would be, if she weren’t smart enough to tell ’em where to stick it.
Let me make the math super-explicit here. I am on tap for a 45 to 50-minute talk plus ten or fifteen minutes of q-and-a. In return, I am being flown to San Antonio, housed and fed for three days, comped registration fees, and paid a $400 honorarium. (I didn’t sign any NDAs about the honorarium that I’m aware.) Michelle has been preparing a full-day preconference tutorial, six or seven hours of material. She is getting no reimbursement, no honorarium, and not so much as a conference-fee rebate.
The idea lurking behind this lunacy was expressed to me by Meredith in IM a few weeks ago. “I don’t mind presenting for free at a conference I’d be going to anyway,” she said. So state-conference and org-conference planners high-handedly assume that every librarian in the state or the org is going to their conference. Why should they comp these people, much less pay them? They’d be coming even if they weren’t presenting (even if they’re not members!), and after all, conferences cost money. The outsiders won’t tell the insiders anything about the inequitable compensation, and librarians are used to martyring themselves for their organizations anyway, so where’s the problem?
Look, y’all, the Internet just outed you. Rachel and Walt and Meredith and Michelle and Jenny and Michael and I (and others), we’re on this thing like bloodhounds, and we aren’t letting it go. I don’t care what the current conference financial model is, it must change, or conferences are going to just plain run out of talent. Would I have taken the TXLA gig if I’d known Michelle was getting screwed? No. Hell no. Will I take an insider gig for free if I learn that outsiders are getting caviare? I will not.
In fact, after this mess I’m a-gonna start asking about conferences’ general reimbursement structure before I agree to speak. I’m kinda cranky about TXLA placing me at embarrassing sixes and sevens with a colleague I value. (And no, this wasn’t Necia Wolff’s fault and shouldn’t be laid at her doorstep; I didn’t know what to ask, and so I didn’t.)
Methinks there are dozens of ways to be reasonably fair about this. There are categories of conference speakers: keynoter versus featured speaker versus invited speaker versus accepted speaker. (No fair making the distinction if everybody in a given segment is in the same category, though; calling preconference-tutorial presenters “accepted speakers” and paying them less than regular-conference speakers just because standard operating procedure is that all preconferences are submitted for approval is mean.) Length of presentation is another issue to address; seven hours of material ought to be worth more than 45 minutes. And if you’re making a specific pool of money off a given set of events (like preconferences), it’s insane not to set aside some of that money for the presenters.
Should there be any difference between compensation for your insiders and outsiders? Maybe there should. For a state conference, your outsiders may well be travelling further. But, honestly? I’d rather discard the entire insider/outsider criterion. If some speaker’s getting in free, every speaker gets in free. If some speaker’s getting an honorarium for a presentation of a given length, every speaker gets paid. The accounting can’t get that much more complicated for most conferences, I shouldn’t think, because speakers are such a small percentage of attendees.
So you make the table or the spreadsheet and you twiddle it until you’ve got the compensation that works and seems fair given your resources. Then you make that information public. Transparency—what a concept. Okay, maybe you have to hide some honoraria, especially on the top end, because everybody knows those are negotiated. But aside from that, everybody ought to know what everybody’s getting, and for heaven’s sake, everybody ought to know that no speakers were financially harmed in the making of a given conference!
Call it keeping yourselves honest. If you publish your table and hear vivid outrage in return, it had better not be from your insiders. They don’t just come to your conference. They don’t just present at it. They are your conference. As for us outsiders, what are the odds that we’re going to pitch a fit because we’re not being treated better than insiders? That’s absurd.
I’m hearing an objection already. Won’t this system mean that the conference is flooded with craptastic talk proposals from insiders wanting to get comped? Sure, could be. What the hell is your program committee for, anyway? It’s their damn job to weed through that stuff, and to keep records of who phoned it in at a given conference so that the guilty parties don’t waste folks’ time in future. This is a self-limiting problem, honestly. There are easier ways to freeload!
What’s more, comping (or at least rebating) your insiders will bring excellent speakers out of the woodwork that you’d never have known to invite, in all likelihood cutting way down on the number of outsiders you have to (expensively) invite. It will add to the socioeconomic diversity of your conference in general and your speaker list in particular, as people come who couldn’t otherwise have afforded to. Folks like Michelle might even join your association if they’re decently treated at your conference. These are wins. Take them!
But the bottom line is, if you can’t run a conference without screwing over some of your talent, then you’ve got no business running a conference. Go be a librarian or something.
And since I really ought to put my money where my mouth is, I expand upon the off-the-cuff offer I made in Michelle’s comments: if she ends up teaching this thing and TXLA still can’t see its way clear to treating her decently, I’ll sign over my honorarium to her. She deserves it more than I do, and I’m getting plenty from TXLA already.
My question to library associations is this: Who’s going to be the first to step up and do the right thing, the transparent thing? I’ll celebrate you here. Heck, we’ll all celebrate you. Because the current system, he is broken.
