Everything in Moderation

Recently our school put on a conference highlighting our undergraduate's research. It's a nice affair that probably says as much about what the interests of professors are here as anything. My department usually puts up a pretty good showing, though this year we've tried taking students out of the barnyard a bit.

As part of all of this, I was asked to moderate a panel of, shall we say, eclectic papers (including one by my Honors student). Glad to do it. But it seems I might've stepped on a toe in the midst of it.

There are different schools of thought to moderating panels, even when undergraduates aren't involved. Under normal circumstances - when the panel is one composed of seasoned academics or graduate students - I see the job as having the following responsibilities:

• introducing folks and setting expectations
• keeping time and attempting - but only attempting - to ensure that time expectations are kept
• drawing parallels/themes/etc between presentations
  
• throwing out a question or two - sometimes the first question - to make sure there's some discussion

In a situation where the job is expressly about moderating student presentations, I'd say there's an additional duty

• to offer instruction along the way (gently, of course)

In exchange for these duties, I think the moderator gets some small right of editorial comment - if only to generate thought and conversation (unless there's a specifically named respondent, I suppose).

In the panel I was moderating, one of the papers was from history, and in the midst of it, a couple of things happened that I felt needed comment. First, the student referenced doing a Google search for a historical figure who interacted with the focus of their study (say, around 1917). The student said, and I quote, "According to Google, he was also a hockey player in the 1960s, which is pretty cool." Now simple math will tell you this is an embarrassing mistake for a historian to make, but it seemed like one that I could mention after in a more lighthearted manner.

But the other thing that the student said was essentially "It seems like there could be some parallels between my event and current events. But I don't want to make them."

This seemed a much bigger issue to me, and worth a comment because it was a research conference. And when there was a moment for me to speak after the presentations, I said, "I'd hope that if there are parallels between history and today that we'd point them out - isn't that a goal of history, after all? We want to hear your thoughts."

To my way of thinking, a college history paper that doesn't analyze and suggest isn't really a college level work. If you're just going to describe when events happened and who was involved, then you're doing the sort of work I did in fifth grade social studies. It'd be like being asked to look at a text and merely summarizing the plot. It's shallow. And maybe it's even fin for some classes, but for a conference about research, it's shallow.

So imagine my surprise when the student's sponsoring professor from the history department pulled me aside at the end to tell me in a tone that didn't seem happy to me that - and I'm paraphrasing - he didn't understand or appreciate my comment to his student.

And so now I'm in my office, doing a little of this and a little of that, wondering if my question was somehow unfair. Did I torpedo a student presentation? I don't think I did. And yet I can't help thinking maybe I've just made some bad blood.