No argument: that was a great discussion group

The accent was on argument when Mark Ruff and fellow UB Honors Scholars formed "No Consensus" in 1987.

"In my freshman year, a number of us were complaining about the sad quality of intellectual life at the university," said Ruff, B.A. '91, now a Ph.D. candidate in German history at Brown University. "So we decided to form 'No Consensus' to discuss political and intellectual issues.

"These were people with fairly dominant personalities, and it was often more rambunctious than intellectual," Ruff admits.

"No Consensus" would hold forth in Ruff's dorm room in Roosevelt Hall, thrashing out such topics as abortion, Supreme Court appointments and the state of American conservatism. Faculty mentors in the Honors Program would show up, too. Classics professor Thomas Barry arrived for a discussion of Plato's Republic; Robert Daly of English attended a party in University Heights to celebrate one member's acceptance to medical school.

"Our meetings were typically chaotic and unpredictable, except for one that turned out to be quite formal," says Ruff. "We had asked President (Steven) Sample if he would like to come to my dorm room for a discussion of Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. He and Prof. Daly were co-teaching an honors seminar on science and literature. But Dr. Sample invited us to his house for what turned out to be a catered event. This meeting was far more reserved than the others."

Ruff, who considers the group part of his experience as an honors scholar, recently encountered his former mentor, Distinguished Professor of History Georg Iggers, while both were delivering papers at a conference in the Netherlands.