NYU Tax Policy Colloquium: Another year ends

 Yesterday was the last session of Year 26 (both for me and the institution) of the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium. Obviously, this was a bit of a different year, what with Zoom.

The Zoom experience wasn’t all bad. Starting with the classroom side, we had 16 students (usually it’s in the low to mid 20s), and I have never met any of them in person except for one whom I knew from a prior year. One does get to know them to a degree, albeit only as little square boxes on one’s laptop screen, although it’s obviously not entirely the same. But it may have had more of an adverse effect on their lateral interactions than at the professor-student level. For example, since everyone was a Monday class discussion leader once, we had preparatory Zooms with them all.

With a group of that relatively small size, I think there was a more widespread (although not universal) willingness to volunteer than one gets in an actual classroom. That’s a good thing, but on the other hand I think it made the conversations somewhat more lateral and less interactive than they would have been in person.

When one has information to convey in a lecture type of mode, as was required by the background needed to understand some of the papers more than others, a big downside is that it’s harder to read the audience without having them there in purpose. But using slides to make it easier to follow has less of a downside than in an actual classroom – albeit, perhaps because one has already lost what one loses in the live setting by using slides.

A number of the students were outside NYC due to the pandemic and the switch away from live classes. The one downside of this was that we had more people who were working full-time than we’d normally have with live  classes. This meant that they might have greater time constraints than we’ve expected in the past from live students. But on the other hand, it was better for us, and I hope for them, than their not being in the class at all.

The Tuesday public sessions benefited from Zoom meetings’ one great advantage: the fact that one can participate from out of town. We had occasional European visitors, along with a much larger number of people in the US from different parts of the country. I would guess that we averaged maybe 20 non-student attendees per week, which is more than we would typically get from live even in a non-COVID world. Plus, a number of them had lots to contribute but would never have been able to attend in person.

While we probably had more value (so to speak) flowing from the “floor” than one would typically get in a live session, it was also, like the Monday classes, less interactive within the group than what “live” might have yielded. So maybe a net benefit, albeit a tradeoff.

The main downside of this year’s sessions was not entirely the result of Zoom. The colloquium has evolved over time, and while on the main positively also with some lost value. Back in the day, we’d get less from the floor, so the conversation would be more for the front (ie., myself, my co-convenor, and the author). So we got to pursue things in much more depth. But the downside is that you lose audience involvement, and at a certain point why would people even want to come if they’re just sitting and listening, plus they do have worthwhile perspectives to add to ours.

I’ve been on the whole glad to take much more of a backseat than I used to, once I have offered my thoughts about the paper. But this does mean that the sessions might have too much of the following character. Either Lily Batchelder or I, whoever was the “lead” and went first in a given week, would offer a bunch of thoughts and ideas in reaction to the paper. Then the other of us would do the same. Then the author would respond, but briefly and not to each point since that would have taken too long. (Also, he or she might otherwise be responding to a bunch of things that were said a half hour ago) Then people in the audience take their turns, all generally having interesting and worthwhile things to say, but it becomes a bit scattershot.

E.g., I might have made a few points that I thought were interesting and that I was eager to discuss – I didn’t just want to orate my side but have a conversation about them. But this would never happen because all sorts of other things came up. Again, that doesn’t mean one should move back towards top-down and squelch all the valuable contributions from the floor (which would hardly encourage attendance by people with interesting things to say). But I felt as if there ought to be some way to get the balance better.

One way to have done this would have been to break down the discussion by topic. For a while in past years, we would discuss Topic 1 only, then Topic 2 only, and so forth. But this was problematic as well – later topics tended to get the shaft, plus I didn’t want to keep saying “Can you save that for Topic 2,” plus papers vary in the extent to which they invite this sort of rigid division.

So, with Zoom or not next year (and I am hoping not, although a hybrid option to bring in a few remote attendees might be intriguing if it could be done well enough), we’ll probably go on in much the same way, enjoying the improvements although regretting some of the lost virtues from past years.

Anyway, thanks to my co-convenor, Lily Batchelder, and to all of our presenting authors, and to our students, and to all of our remote attendees at the Tuesday sessions. I hope to see many of  you again next year.