For those not familiar with this seminar series, it is famous for robust but civil discourse. The *very* occasional blowups, like the two referenced in this thread, are remembered forever as much because of their rarity as for their ferocity.

I’m off in the morning, Historiann, to try to scare up some good copy. But we might have to settle for something as bland and mundane as that poor Brit guy in Atlanta two years ago who got taken to the pavement for jaywalking.

I can’t believe how placid and uncontentious my life in Colorado is now by comparison!

And I was definitely at the second one, sitting a couple of rows in front of the skirmish. When the protestor sat down hir partner stood up and continued the filibuster. The almost brand new fellows at that seminar huddled before the wine and cheese social hour and came up with a new rule: Never cite anybody who might still be alive. So far as I know, this one has been honored only in the breach.

The Moose almost came down from over the fireplace and got into the scrum that day…

Now I shall have to dig into the records to see if I can figure out whose paper got so publicly shredded at the old PCEAS. I have witnessed one seminar session at the Center that had a moment almost as dramatic. At one session a scholar who felt her work had been misappropriated by the author of the seminar paper stood and read passages from the offending paper, followed by relevant passages from two of her articles. (And, indeed, the author had twisted the meaning of her articles around in order to make his point and criticize her work.) This was the opening question of a two hour discussion period. The odd thing was that the presenter had personally invited the aggrieved scholar to attend; presumably he did not anticipate this response.

The tensest moment I have ever seen at a scholarly paper was a silent protest that occurred at a presentation on violence in early America. The presenter argued that we can see the value that early Americans placed on human life by examining changing rates of homicide, infanticide, and “feticide”–i.e., abortion. When asked to clarify this point, he reiterated that yes, cultures with higher rates of abortion place a lesser value on human life, hence his desire to track “feticide” to examine morality throughout American history. Much of the audience stood up at that point and silently walked out.

Memories indeed…

I do recall a tenured faculty person in the audience rising to dramatically tear a grad student’s paper in two at the conclusion of an old Philadelphia Center friday seminar back in 1992 or so, and doing it in front of the paper’s author so that he could see it. (You may remember this Indyanna.)

No one actually used the word C*&^ucker, although it may have been running through their minds.

Ahhh, memories…

Since this was probably no more than six months before the iconic first issue of Ms. hit the stands, with Gloria Steinem on the cover, I’m guessing that just before I walked into the room he said something like… Well, this takes us back to the problem that the cultural left had with gender issues coming out of Vietnam and into the Watergate era.

In any case, for those of you who are just passing through: I’ve been reliably informed by one of my Urban Cowboys that the lobby of the main conference hotel has free wifi, so there’s no excuse NOT to report back to Historiann!

Hentoff, by the way, just got laid off by the _Village Voice_. Maybe he wasn’t even on the program that year?! I guess, as another New York Intellectual (Yogi Berra) once said, “you could look it up…”