$ 0 0 The New York Times reports: The event, attended by perhaps a few hundred people over the course of the day, was split into four sessions, with multiple presentations in each, and spread out over the first floor of the University of Chicago’s Ida Noyes Hall. Upstairs in the same building you could attend a conference on “Ethics and the Place of Philosophy: The Legacy of Bernard Williams’s Critique,” a similar event with less tanning.The “Jersey Shore” conference was organized by David Showalter, a supremely self-possessed senior who secured financing for the conference outside the aegis of any particular academic department. During his opening speech he described the series — one of MTV’s most visible and contentious — as a personal obsession and tried to make some lighthearted links between the fishbowl of the show and the fishbowl of the academy. “Jersey Shore,” he said, was “exceptionally good to think with.”Of the approximately 50 abstract submissions he received, Mr. Showalter selected about half for the conference, from professors, graduate and undergraduate students, and unaffiliated scholars with a variety of approaches and varying levels of theoretical sophistication.