(Published in Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Newsletter 2006-07.)

Confessions of a conference organiser

Michael Hand

Institute of Education, University of London

At the 2007 Annual General Meeting of the PESGB, I stepped down as the Society’s Conference Organiser, a role it has been my pleasure and privilege to occupy for the last four years. My successor is Carrie Winstanley, who worked alongside me on many aspects of the conference during my term of office and to whom I wish every success in the role.

In 2003, when I accepted the position of Conference Organiser, the PESGB Annual Conference was widely regarded as the premier conference on the international philosophy of education circuit, had been happily ensconced at New College, Oxford, for many years, and ran according to a proven and jealously-guarded formula. What was needed, people hastened to advise me, was a steady hand on the tiller, not a new broom. In many ways, this made the role an attractive one: better, certainly, to inherit a flourishing conference than a faltering one. But it did have the daunting implication that any changes I introduced, or failed to prevent, would almost certainly be seen as changes for the worse.

So the policy I adopted was to try to ensure that what had always happened continued to happen, as smoothly and effortlessly as possible. And for the most part I stuck to that, succumbing on only a few occasions to the temptation to meddle, and then in the most cosmetic of ways. But even these small changes proved controversial. Take, for example, the decision to introduce conference bags for delegates. ‘Tacky’, winced one member of the Executive Committee, while others felt there to be a measure of insanity in equipping two hundred people with identical bags then offering them alcohol. Or consider the decision to stop producing 400-page, spiral-bound tomes of parallel papers for every delegate and to make papers available online instead, a move which came as a bitter blow to the Society’s technophobes and flower-pressing enthusiasts alike. The relocation of plenary sessions to the Holywell Music Room was met with howls of protest, ostensibly because of the venue’s poor acoustics, but in reality, I suspect, because it exposes late arrivers and early departers to the full glare of the assembled delegates’ gaze. And most controversial of all - the change that brought me within a whisker of impeachment - was my nigh on sacrilegious decision to move the Saturday night party out of the Old Bursary. Deaf to the argument that it is problematic to hold a party for a hundred people in a room that holds forty, the guardians of this most venerable of conference traditions campaign to this day for the restoration of the party to its rightful home. 

Still, notwithstanding these questionable innovations, my aim, and I hope my achievement, was to keep a thriving conference on an even keel. I’m tremendously grateful to the many delegates who sought me out each year to thank me for my efforts - their appreciation made the headaches of the role a good deal less painful. I’m even grateful to the delegate who commented annually on my unfussy and quietly efficient style of conference organisation, contrasting this with the high profile, ‘big personality’ styles of some of my predecessors: I’m confident he meant this as a compliment, even if I couldn’t help finding it a little wounding.

Without doubt the thing I have enjoyed most about the role is getting to know members of the Society I might otherwise never have had occasion to speak to. There is something peculiarly bonding about dealing with people’s accommodation problems, helping them find their way to sessions and tracking down their missing conference bags, diaries and mobile phones. The last of these services, in particular, brought me into rather regular contact with some delegates, and into quasi-marital relationships with Professors Bridges and Conroy.

My organisational burdens were, of course, lightened very considerably by the untiring and capable efforts of Lynda Whitehead, the Society Administrator. Lynda worked closely with me on all four of the conferences I organised, handling bookings, responding to inquiries, staffing the conference office and managing payments. She was an enthusiastic participant in the social life of the conference and was invariably among the last delegates standing when the conference party wound down in the small hours of Sunday morning. It was not only her heart and soul she threw into the conference, but most of her family too: her parents were in charge of inserting leaflets and flyers into delegates’ conference bags, and her son gave his services as a DJ at the 2005 party. Lynda’s period of employment with the Society also came to end in 2007: she will be much missed by all.