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Honoraria for Zoom talks?

Brian Leiter

Philosopher Peter Vallentyne (Missouri) writes:

In 2014, you had some useful discussion of the role of honoraria for philosophy talks. I’m now wondering about whether people think that honoraria (e.g., $100-$300) should be paid for non-recorded virtual (e.g., Zoom) philosophy talks to other, roughly peer, philosophy departments. On the one hand, there are no travel-time burdens (the hassles of getting from A to B, downtime in the host city, etc.). Of course, valuable informal discussion with members of the host department may be lost, but there will also (at least sometimes) be a gain of avoiding non-valuable informal discussion.  Overall, it seems to me that the burdens of giving a virtual talk are generally significantly lower than those for a live talk. A small honorarium would still be appropriate, but, given the hassles of filling out the forms to provide an honorarium, it may not be worth it. I’m interested in readers thoughts on this issue. I focus on non-recorded talks, since there are separate issues for recorded talks.

My own view is that honoraria for Zoom talks are not warranted, but comments are open!

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9 responses to “Honoraria for Zoom talks?”

  1. Jason Brennan

    If you are giving a seminar paper for a work in progress to other faculty, they are doing you a favor by helping you revise it. A nominal fee as a gesture of respect is fine, and it's also fine to pay nothing.

    Now, during the pandemic, some places tried having large virtual events with hundreds of attendees. Here, the point was to replace large public talks for lay audiences. In this case, I noted that the places that invited me for such things tended to offer about 2/3rds their normal speaking fees. I'm not saying 2/3rds is the right amount, but I do think it make sense to offer money here, because the point wasn't to give feedback on a work in progress, but to run a show on already published work for a crowd.

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  2. Justin

    Better to use that money and pay two grad students to be very thorough discussants. The small amount of money means more to them, and it ensures the person giving the talk gets the most valuable thing out of it, good (or at least extensive) comments on a work in progress.

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  3. Craig Larson

    I'm in a math department at an R1 state school and organizer of a weekly seminar. For in-person talks, the speaker usually comes for a day trip (no overnight) and may drive up to 2 hours each way. We pay miles and take the speaker out for a nice lunch or dinner. If the speaker come from a longer distance we'll pay for a hotel. We don't pay an honorarium, and haven't had an issue attracting speakers – they like to talk about their research, university chit-chat, fill their CV, etc (I'm also happy to go anywhere to do the same). The seminar has been on Zoom during covid, and we've used this opportunity to get speakers from all over the world. Again, most researchers are happy to give talks.

    We have a twice-per-semester with a "big name" speaker where we do (sometimes or usually?) pay an honorarium. I'm not sure actually why. But for these people giving talks is maybe differently-motivated and we want to express some more tangible "appreciation" for taking the time out to give these talks.

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  4. doris

    I'm guessing the typical departmental honorarium ifeels dispensable for many folks. As Peter mentions, there's paperwork — and it's taxable. I'm guessing the usual sum often does not figure into people's thinking about whether to accept an invitation or not.

    I'm not sure sure, however, that it is more reasonable to dispense with the honorarium for Zoom talks: they are a lot cheaper to put on, since the department saves the cost of travel, lodging, meals, reception, as well as the labor required to make all this happen. Forgoing travel etc. saves the speaker a lot of time, but there's still the labor of preparation and giving the talk itself. So some of the money Zoom saves over in person might be put to a more noticeable honorarium.

    Anyway, here's a proposal: the custom for departmental talks should should be no honorarium for either Zoom or in person. (If depts want to get spendy for endowed series and the like, that's another issue, although this might tend to compensate the speakers who least need it.)

    This proposal might fairly be objected to on the grounds that the usual honorarium might be very welcome for junior people, folks with young families, etc. Perhaps the proposed custom could be tweaked to (larger?) honoraria only for junior folks.

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  5. Assistant prof.

    Zoom talks are unpleasant and honoraria can compensate for their disutility. I’d be more likely to do an in-person thing without an honorarium (hey at least I get a change of scenery and a nice meal) than a zoom thing without one, all else equal. I found it weird that places reduced honoraria for events that went virtual. After all, the place is saving money (no hotel no travel no dinner). So I guess my sense here is a bit different than others’. (Though I agree that papers workshops are different than talks, I still think that if you would’ve given an honorarium for them to come in-person, you should give the honorarium for the virtual visit.

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  6. Matthew Kramer

    My attitude is precisely the opposite of that expressed by "Assistant prof" and is in line with what Peter Vallentyne suggests in the original post. I strongly dislike traveling, and I therefore vastly prefer delivering lectures through Zoom. (I've delivered far more lectures overseas through Zoom during the past two-and-a-half years than I would ever have been willing to deliver in person during a comparable period.) Because I find Zoom so much more convenient, I've waived nearly every honorarium that has been offered to me for a Zoom presentation; the one exception was an honorarium for a lecture delivered to a class in a summer-school program that is highly lucrative for the university concerned. By contrast, when an honorarium is offered for an in-person lecture or seminar, I almost always accept it — though I should add that honoraria are very seldom offered in the UK.

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  7. Max Khan Hayward

    I was invited to give a talk at the University of Toronto last fall – I had the choice of either giving it over zoom and getting a fairly generous honorarium, or being flown out, put up in a hotel and taken out for meals but with no honorarium. Unlike Mattthew Kramer, I love travelling to new places and meeting people, so I chose the later option! But I'm not sure it's really necessary to offer honoraria to people to give zoom talks – the effort to deliver one is fairly minimal, and the benefit to the host department is also much lower (for example, it's much harder for graduate students to establish new connections with a zoom speaker who logs off after their presentation than it is with someone who is visiting in person).

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  8. Charles Pigden

    I am with doris and Matthew Kramer on this:
    I do not expect and certainly do not demand honoraria, (which, as in the UK, are not de rigueur in Australasia) though I don’t refuse them if offered. (There is always that expensive book that I might otherwise hesitate to buy.) In the days when I still travelled, I was perfectly happy with expenses, a decent hotel and a nice dinner. {The travel expenses were relatively local. My practice was to come to Europe under my own steam which made me an affordable good since it was only necessary to pay the fares from my British base to my European destinations and not from far-away New Zealand. ]
    Though it is, I suppose, a good thing of which there could be too much, I actively *enjoy* giving papers, whether to departmental seminars, conferences, mini-conference or workshops. The performance buzz is part of it, but I would not be in this business if I did not think that I often have true and/or interesting things to say, and I like to spread the word. Print is fine but you can often boost your readership (not to mention your profile) by an in-person performance. I owe at least one invitation-to-submit to a successful seminar presentation. And though discussion hasn’t often led to *major* revisions, there is often a lot to be learned from the Q&A. So although I don’t refuse it I would not think of demanding payment for an activity that for me is both useful and enjoyable.
    However, although I am not as averse to travel as Matthew Kramer, it seems to me that there is a MORAL objection to the common practice of academic globe-trotting for the sole purpose of giving papers whether at conferences, workshops or departmental seminars. Is the good that I can do for myself, for Philosophy or even the world at large, worth the damage that I am doing to the environment – and more specifically to future and indeed present-day PEOPLE – by pumping out all those GHGs as I fly around the world? It seems to me the answer is ‘No’. And this is not because I am modest about he quality of my papers or the quality of my performances (I think they are considerably above average.) I think that this is true of MOST academics, and certainly most philosophers:. The good that they do by giving papers in person is often outweighed by the harm that they do in travelling to give them. (I recommend in this connection John Nolt’s paper ‘How Harmful Are the Average American's Greenhouse Gas Emissions?’ He calculates that the average American, living an eighty year span, is likely responsible for between one and two future deaths. But the average American is not much of a traveller. The successful academic, on the other hand, is always on the gad and is therefore responsible for more GHGs and consequently more deaths.) There is a particular reason for curtailing academic travel if, like, me you have made a public stand on the necessity for drastic action to prevent, or at least mitigate, catastrophic climate change. To demand drastic action is to demand major sacrifices on the part of the many people whose livelihoods are dependent on the GHG-producing system. Your pronouncements demanding such sacrifices are not likely to cut much ice if you yourself are not prepared to make the minimal sacrifice of at least cutting down on conference travel. So after 2008 I gave up my biannual trip across the Tasman to attend Australian meetings of the AAP and limited myself to five more overseas trips for the rest of my academic career (regarding these as only justifiable because I could combine them with a visit my mother in England). I am still inclined to the view that I was being a lot more lenient to with myself than I ought to have been.
    But since Covid , it turns out that this sacrifice has been hardly any sacrifice at all. Like Matthew Kramer, but, I suspect, rather more so, during the past two-and-a-half years I have given, and have been invited to give, FAR more lectures and papers overseas via Zoom than I have ever delivered in person during any comparable period in my entire life. I have also attended many more international workshops and seminars including ones to which I did not offer a paper. I have visited virtually places I would never have expected to visit in person: for example the USA, Tasmania, China , Ireland and South Africa. I have even managed a return to Oz. This is partly because (honorarium or no honorarium) I am a much cheaper good via Zoom than I ever would have been in person, and partly because Covid has normalised the previously abnormal practice of virtual papers and meetings. Moreover, despite the occasional glitch, the experience has been almost entirely positive. I enjoy delivering papers via Zoom nearly as much as I enjoy giving the papers in person, more perhaps, if I deduct the time, worry and bodily stress involved in long-haul international travel . (Assistant prof who finds Zoom talks so unpleasant that honoraria are required to compensate for their disutility is obviously very different from me.) The big drawback of course, is that you don’t get the conviviality and the informal discussions afterwards. (There is sometimes a bit of a feeling of let-down after the adrenaline rush.) But all things considered, that is a very small price to pay for the enhanced opportunities for guilt-free conference travel.
    One more advantage of the Zoom-Boom that is worth mentioning. Philosophers who live on the cultural and geographical periphery are less likely to be noticed and read than those who live in or near the big metropolitan centres. (I speak from personal experience: I have papers that are now well-cited that went largely unnoticed for *years* partly, I suspect because not many people in the big centres knew me from a bar of soap and hence did not bother to read my stuff.) The zoom-boom has the potential to reduce metropolitan privilege or at least to diminish peripheral disadvantage. Indeed my recent successes are, perhaps, an example of this.

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  9. Mark van Roojen

    I can't see this as a deep issue or one for which general advice is in order. I've given talks and paid most of the cost of getting there because I like giving talks. I suspect I'm not atypical. A genuine honorarium (as opposed to a way of partly paying expenses) is nice but it is not needed to get most of us to give a talk. If your department has the money and pays honoraria (not just expenses) anyway then go ahead and pay an honorarium for a Zoom talk. If you don't, or if it would mean fewer talks for your department or less money for grad students, then don't. Most philosophers seem happy enough to give talks so long as it doesn't cost them a lot personally.

    That said, since in my department we pay expenses plus a modest honorarium, we have continued to do that for Zoom talks when the expenses are nonexistent.

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