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Kaprow taught art history in the men’s college of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from 1953 to 1961. During this time, he intersected frequently with the Fluxus artist Robert Watts, who taught across campus in the women’s college—Douglass College—from 1953 to 1984. Asked to organize an interdisciplinary lecture series at Douglass in 1958, Watts decided on the broad topic of “communication.” Thus it came to pass that, in between conventional lectures by various experts in the fields of chemistry, psychology, and literature, both John Cage and Allan Kaprow delivered untitled experimental lectures in the Voorhees Chapel (11 March and 22 April 1958, respectively). For Cage’s lecture, he read a series of questions and quotations that he determined via chance operations, while, simultaneously, David Tudor played the piano. For Kaprow’s lecture, he enlisted a few of his current students to perform a series of tasks and games, like dragging a tin can and unfurling banners from the balcony. Kaprow meanwhile sat in silence at the lectern while a lecture of his on the virtues of failed communication played back in a garbled polyphony of unsynchronized tape recorders. Kaprow later titled this lecture Communication and referred to it in his notes as his “first public happening.”