In response to my post, "The Seminar Has No Clothes," a reader sends this fond reminiscence of a partially unclothed seminar she attended while in grad school. The irony: the seminar was about the phenomenon of how some forms of academic work have no clothes. She writes:

This puts me in mind of a hilarious (to me and those of the math dept) panel discussion.

You may have heard of the Sokal affair. I had the great luck to be a math grad student at NYU when the brou-ha-ha was in full roil. So the major players and some interested parties decided to have a panel discussion for the NYU community. Alan Sokal was there as was the guy who edited Social Text (or whatever it was called). I believe there was a journalism person there and somebody else.

But the beautiful part was the audience participation. I went with a bunch of math students decided for entertainment (and I had sat in on some seminars Sokal did on percolation theory, which I was interested in at the time.) The audience was mainly faculty and students, from all research departments. The language used by different groups was quite the study in contrasts.

When someone from the hard sciences spoke, they used plain English and would illustrate their points with concrete examples. This has been a while, so I can't remember the full details, but an example was something like an Indian post-doc explaining the difficulties women had in the sciences in other countries, and the blatant sexism in some countries. Some other science people mentioned that the subject of science itself wasn't chauvinistic (in that it was using a way of thinking that women or non-white people couldn't follow), but that the practice could be very discriminatory (in particular, the inflexible nature of the run for tenure.)

When the humanities majors decided to take the floor, well, it was painful. I actually fell out of my chair laughing at the inarticulateness of one particular grad student. He was so earnest, and so desirous of having the proper opinions, but for the life of me, I could not tell what he was saying. I believe the grammar didn't work, much less the vocabulary, a welling of the modern inkhorn. He wasn't the only one, but as we of the math department didn't care about our collegiality with those of the Social Sciences, we laughed at every dribble of gooble-de-gook.

An interesting epilogue -- from further reading of Sokal, I discovered that he was a Marxist who thought the pomo people were destroying the movement with their inanities. In reading his stuff on Marxism, though, he came across as illucid as those grad students I remember from way back. I'm sure none of his Marxist colleagues would dare point out such a shortcoming in their comrades... especially as they had the same shortcomings.