Thanks to Kevin Bochynski for taking action on the David Fears problem.
An occasional slip is excusable, but Mr. Fears' refusal to make any
concession to the prevalent standards and concerns was too extreme.  If
we continued to participate in a forum in which racial slurs and
personal insults were taken as acceptable, we'd all be functioning as
his co-conspirators.  

Thanks, too, to those who spoke up on behalf of Jocelyn Chadwick--a
distinguished Mark Twain scholar who feels deep concern about the damage
that can be done by insensitive references to ethnic stereotypes, and
who acts on that concern.  Mr. Fears' allusion to her as "someone [who]
even tearfully quit the forum" over such matters is intolerable.

Mr. Fears also suggested that some of us feel a "proprietary" relation
to the Mark Twain Forum.  As one of the small original group who signed
up for the Forum when Taylor Roberts first launched it somewhere back in
the dim reaches of the 1990s (and a continuous subscriber ever since), I
do have something of a proprietary feeling about it--and about Mark
Twain studies in general.  The Forum is one of a number of valuable
elements of Mark Twain scholarship--including the Mark Twain Circle (and
its publications, The Mark Twain Annual and the Mark Twain Circular),
The Mark Twain Journal, The Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, the Japan
Mark Twain Society (and its journal, Mark Twain Studies), the Mark Twain
sites (Elmira, Hartford, Hannibal, and the perhaps-emerging one at
Redding), and Mark Twain websites such as those maintained by Barbara
Schmidt and Steven Railton (though the excellent site formerly
maintained by Jim Zwick is now unfortunately dismantled)--all of which
blend together to yield a framework housing what feels like a true
community of scholars.  The Forum is, for day-to-day communication, the
glue that holds the framework together.

And so: a toast to Kevin and Pegge Bochynski and the Mark Twain Forum.
And if Taylor Roberts still reads the Forum (and since he's still
identified as Associate Administrator, I suppose he does), a toast to
him, too.  

--Jim Leonard