Reading the excellent articles on the intrepid wanderer, Socialist, ex-pat, Science Fiction writer, Mack Reynolds, in the latest issue of eI by Earl Kemp, and was amused by the anecdotes of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies, which was an organization of professional SF writers during the 1950s. Kemp mentioned that the Proceedings of the aforementioned society were collected and published by Advent, so that the PITFCS are preserved. Looking around on Google to see if a copy is extant anywhere, I discovered that there is also a Center for Twenty-First Century Studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, of all places, but it has nothing to do with Science Fiction, and proclaims as its focus (without irony!) as:

critical reflection in such areas as feminism, media theory, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, cultural and social theory, and lesbian and gay studies.

Well, I hope to dig up a rogue’s gallery of mug shots of the two identically named centers and compare them for my personal edification. I’m also curious to see what the level of discourse is in their proceedings, of course… what do some drunken, cantankerous SF writers look like when stacked up against our post-modern scholars?