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Today’s post is an excerpt from a script for a department faculty skit performed at the MIT Graduate Economics Association’s “Shawmut Follies” of 1967. The “skitwrights” were Duncan Foley and Peter Temin who adapted the lyrics from tunes taken from the popular musical Camelot (based on the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round-Table) to departmental happenings.
The backstory of this scene is that the future 2010 Nobel prize winner Peter Diamond left the University of California (Berkeley) to join the M.I.T. economics faculty in 1966. I suppose one could imagine the scene opening with the two long-haired peasants as West coast hippies speaking in a Greenwich Village beatnik-ese dialect. The casting problem for having a “chick” in a faculty solely made up of men was solved by employing the departmental administrator Del Tapley rather than by an Elizabethan substitution of male actors in female roles (We are talking Cambridge Massachusetts in the 1960’s and not Berlin in the early 1930’s!).
For those not familiar with the show-tune “C’est moi!” from Camelot, here the Robert Goulet version in the original Broadway Cast Recording at YouTube.
Dramatis Personae of Scene 2
Herald: Richard Eckaus
First Peasant: E. Cary Brown
Second Peasant: Del Tapley
Lancelot: Peter Diamond
Scene 2
(A provincial city named after an English philosopher)
A Herald: Hear ye, hear ye. Come one, come all to hearken to the Grand Proclamation of King Arthur.
First Peasant: Man, what’s his bag?
Second Peasant: Something about King Arthur.
First Peasant: Who’s this King Arthur cat?
Second Peasant: It’s some weird kick they got out East.
First Peasant: Do you know I hear there aren’t any chicks at all out there?
Second Peasant: Groovy.
First Peasant: Groovy? What’s your bag, man?
Second Peasant: I am a chick, man. No shut up and listen to the proclamation.
Herald: If you’re ready.
First Peasant: Oh, we’re ready. Don’t stand on your fancy Eastern ways out here.
Herald: King Arthur of M.I.T. offers to all young knights of intellectual errantry the opportunity to join the select long Corridor of economists sworn to uphold true theory, to rescue theorems from rape and pillage at the brutal hands of Midwestern Ph.D.’s, to form a fellowship of intellectual excellence and as much good cheer as can coexist with it.
Second Peasant: “With it” is a pretty weak way to end a sentence, if you ask me.
Herald: Admission to the Long Corridor will be by open combat in a faculty seminar, jousting with mathematical, graphical, and verbal reasoning. Come one, come all. That’s it. Break it up.
First Peasant: Gee whiz.
Second Peasant: What’s that slang jargon you’re talking, man?
First Peasant: Who’s going to go and compete with those fierce Eastern minds?
Second Peasant: Not me, man.
First Peasant: I hope somebody goes out here.
Lancelot: I will.
Second Peasant: You? Who are you?
Lancelot: I am Lancelot du Bay, academic fencer par excellence. I will go.
First Peasant: To M.I.T.? Think twice, man.
Lancelot: (sings)
M.I.T….
M.I.T….
On the West Coast I heard your call.
M.I.T….
M.I.T….
And here am I to give my all.
I know in my soul
What you expect of me
And all that and more I shall be.
A prof of the Corridor Long should be unstoppable
A mind on which less fantastic minds can lean:
Teach a class no one else can teach
Prove a theorem that’s out of reach
Run regressions without the help of a machine.
His logic and argument should be unstoppable
His papers of course always beyond compare.
But where in the world
Is there in the world
A man so extraordinaire?
C’est moi, c’est moi
I’m forced to admit
‘Tis I, I humbly reply
That Ph.D. who
These marvels can do
C’est moi, c’est moi, ‘tis I.
The students say
My lectures are keen
My proofs are fit for a king.
I’ll show a way
Through Pontryagin
To prove most any thing.
C’est moi, c’est moi
My colleagues have fits
Because I never am wrong.
Where will they find brains better than mine
Theoretically wise
Empirically fine
To serve in the Corridor Long? C’est moi.
Source: MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Department of Economics Records, Box 2, Folder “GEA 1961-67”.
Image Source: Robert Goulet as Lancelot in the 1960 Broadway Musical Camelot at Fanpix.net. [A google search did not find an image of Peter Diamond in chain mail and a tunic]