Approaching History
The Seminar Mistake

The passage below is borrowed from the E-mail section, where it defines the ideal of the interactive scholarly seminar. The mistake is mentioned toward the end.

Cooperation is all very well; it is good to have that resource. An especially intense and organized form of cooperation is the thematic seminar, where people working on different but related topics come together in real time, precisely to criticize each other's work. At the University of Washington, sometime around the mid 20th century, there existed a research unit called the Han Project, which steadily focused on clarifying little understood aspects of the Han Dynasty. Since no aspects of the Han Dynasty were well understood, that mandate offered a lot of room. The Han Project held a weekly Seminar, whose topic was publicly posted in advance. Apart from the regular research staff who formed the core of the Seminar, all graduate students and faculty had a standing invitation to attend, when the topic of the week was one that interested them, or one on which they had something to contribute.

Those present at any one meeting were thus always changing, but the atmosphere of the meetings was constant: both professional and egalitarian. Students and teachers took part as equals, according to what they could contribute. Teachers knew that it was not a place to pontificate; students knew not to ask elementary questions. Within these limits, much of value to the topic of the week got asked, suggested, considered, criticized, defended, and sometimes decided. It was an excellent example of how to run a mixed scholarly conversation, with members of different abilities cooperating toward a common end. The Seminar operated under the gentle guidance of Hellmut Wilhelm, who had a positive genius for getting the best out of sometimes conflicting opinions.

Sometimes the Seminar ventured beyond the Han Dynasty. On one such occasion Leon Hurvitz predistributed a draft review of a then recent Japanese translation of the Dau/Dv Jing. The meeting that week included the usual suspects, plus a good number of Chinese Literature students. These were not regulars at the Seminar, but in their own work they had been exposed to, or were engaged with, the Dau/Dv Jing. The Seminar took up Leon's predistributed draft, and went through it page by page. Criticisms were offered, misunderstandings were pointed out, eccentric translations of Leon's own (so like Leon: he had translated the whole of the DDJ in the course of his review) were identified.

At the end of the session, the Seminar had been through much of the DDJ text and its problems of interpretation. Much of value (along with some stuff of less value) had been contributed.

It would be a pleasure to record that Leon went home and rewrote his review, giving full credit to the helpful input of the Seminar. Instead, he had already mailed his draft off to the journal. He had regarded his paper as a model for the young, not as a channel for comment from young and old alike. This attitude toward one's own work is the Seminar Mistake. The Seminar Mistake is not to make use of the Seminar.

Some of us still wince to read the unameliorated gaucheries, the undeterred eccentricities, in that review. The discussion was devoid of benefit to the review. But it was of great benefit to everyone else present, including those who attended the Seminar on just that one occasion.

Except for Leon himself, then, we cite this case as a sample of How To Do It.

17 Mar 2006 / Contact The Project / Exit to Outline Index Page