Cootie alert!

This morning I walked into a room filled with chairs set up for more than 40 people and I was delighted to see many of my colleagues clustering together to chat over coffee. What a contrast to the meeting rooms I entered last week at MLA, where the rows of chairs fill up in a distinct pattern:

The first person to enter chooses a seat at the end of a row of chairs, and so do the next few people. When each row has exactly one person sitting in it, the next people who trickle in will sit at the extreme opposite end of an already occupied row, ensuring that anyone else who wants to sit will have to climb over someone else first.

Next, the interior seats start filling in, with at least one seat left empty between any two attendees. At really popular sessions, eventually someone will have to break down and sit right next to another attendee. That's when it gets uncomfortable.

A more efficient method is for attendees to fill rows starting from the center so that those who arrive later don't have to awkwardly climb over everyone else's feet, but that would never work at MLA because we all want to sit on the end of the row so we have an escape route in case the session stinks. So I can understand the desire to colonize the end of the row, but I have never understood why so many scholars attending MLA prefer to sit next to an empty seat rather than a human being. Would it kill you to sit down next to another scholar? I mean, it's not as if we all had cooties.

The problem is that at MLA, we're all strangers--and we act as if we want to stay that way. This morning at our campus meeting, on the other hand, there wasn't a stranger in the room. Even new faculty who may have come in knowing nobody certainly did stay strangers for long. The room didn't fill up entirely, but I didn't see anyone surrounding themselves with empty chairs.

Maybe that's because at our campus, we don't have cooties.