GIILBERT AND SULLIVAN MEMORIES

 

After many weeks of fevered preparation and long nights spent rehearsing my lectures while lying in bed, I went to Wilson Hall to deliver the first of my lecture series on The Use and Abuse of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy. I had arranged for a very helpful graduate student to videotape the lectures and post the slides that I had prepared to accompany them and I was ready to roll. I got there a bit early and the only person there when I arrived was the young graduate student. 3:15 PM came and drifted to 3:20 PM and only two people showed up – a senior philosophy major and a graduate student who took my course last semester. That was it, the total audience for my lectures. I delivered the lecture I had prepared, and was dutifully videotaped, but I will confess that my heart was not in it.  Later, I checked and the associate chair had indeed sent out a circular memo reminding people of the event. There was simply no interest.

 

I will freely admit that I was seriously bummed. I decided that like a slightly over the edge container of yogurt, I had passed my sell by date. This morning I formally canceled the lecture series.

 

One of the virtues of great age is that when you suffer a humiliating defeat, you can reach back to earlier days and remember other humiliating defeats, thereby giving you perspective if not solace. In 1962, I was a young assistant professor at the University of Chicago. I teamed up with Sylvain Bromberger, a wonderful man with whom I had been a graduate student at Harvard, to teach a graduate seminar on the philosophy of history. We chose a nice seminar room with a table that would hold 20 or so students and prepared for our first meeting. Two graduate students took the course, and for the remaining weeks of the quarter, the four of us huddled together at one end of the long table and whispered to one another in low tones about the philosophy of history.

 

Then there is the talk I was invited to give the University of Maryland Baltimore campus. When I arrived I was taken to a large impressive lecture hall in which there were perhaps 10 people scattered around the several hundred seats. During my talk one or two of them got up and left. Afterwards, when I commented on the disappointing turnout, I was told by the member of the department who had introduced me that he was impressed by the turnout. It seemed that at the very same time the Baltimore Colts were playing a vitally important game and he was surprised that anyone at all came to my talk. It was he said evidence of my great attractiveness to the philosophers there.  I remained silent.

 

And of course I will never forget the time during one of my first trips to South Africa when I was invited to speak to the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town.  The member of the faculty presiding over the affair introduced me as Richard Rorty.

 

As Pooh Bah says in the Mikado while holding a small bag of money in his hand, “another insult, and by the feel of it, a light one.”