On the Future of the Classics
What a discipline's rapid collapse could mean if it is not stopped
First: my readers might want to know that my piece on AI necromancy is out from behind the paywall at The New Atlantis. I’ll try to publish updates about the stuff I’ve written in other places, but given the relative infrequency of this newsletter the news might arrive a bit late.
Whatever kind of critic you might call me, I’m first and foremost a classical philologist: my primary method is philological, and my area of expertise is the ancient Mediterranean world that was dominated by the languages and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. My career ambition was to teach in this area at the college level; it still is, in theory, but it is unlikely that I will be able to do this, because the field is in a state of rapid collapse. The Classics at Risk spreadsheet maintained by Prof. Evan Jewell paints a pretty awful picture: of seventeen departments that have been under threat in the past three years, nine have permanently closed, six remain vulnerable or endangered, and only two were saved (for now). The extinct departments include the department at Howard University, a founding department of the school and the only such department remaining at an HBCU. Of the vulnerable departments, one is at a center of Jesuit formation and another is at a flagship state university. Nine department closures in three years is disastrous enough; more on the horizon means that far worse could be ahead.
The discipline has gone through a great deal of self-critique in recent years, much of which I agree was necessary. Our public outreach has generally been poor, and attempts to explain the “use” of studying Greek and Roman antiquity are silly at best and frequently scandalous: valuing intellectual life by the terms of business is like seeing an exquisitely-made book—one with fine leather binding and handwritten text on sheets of thick, creamy vellum—and telling someone how marvelous it is to think that the book’s sale value could buy fifty thousand Happy Meals. It’s a category error so jarring that it crosses over into a kind of obscenity. I appreciate that a certain amount of marketing has become necessary, but students ought to be able to see how much we love these studies simply for themselves.
If they don’t see that, then we will win no converts: nobody ever gave their life for a syllogism. And if we cannot win converts—passionate, dedicated lifelong students of antiquity, whether they continue those studies formally or informally—then we will have no real public support, and the expert study of Greek and Latin literature, ancient philosophy, and ancient history will effectively end in American higher education, preserved in amber at a few of the wealthiest universities but without the vitality of a living and growing American scholarly community behind it: it would depend completely on the European community where, because of state support and/or local cultural importance, Classics is much less likely to go extinct. Importantly, these remnant departments will not be equal to the task of providing intellectual support to the rest of the humanities in this country.
Intellectual support has been one of the primary functions of Classics as a discipline for the past sixty or so years. The GI bill and the rapid growth in university enrollments meant a huge surge in students, but most lacked the background in Latin and Greek that university studies in Classics had historically required. John D’Arms at the University of Michigan helped to pioneer the “classics in translation” model, in which a department would offer courses with entirely English-language materials even on such topics as Greek and Latin literature, providing expert teaching on the subject to students who, though interested, could not take the time to learn the languages from scratch. The model eventually spread to every department in the country and remains the model for all such programs in the United States today. It allows departments to earn large tuition revenues from perennially popular courses like Greek mythology and Roman history in order to offset the smaller enrollments in language courses, especially the upper-level courses that might have only a handful of students. This provides financial stability and allows the department to continue fulfilling its major duty to other faculties: namely, providing sound language training for ancient and early modern historians, theologians, medievalists, philosophers, literary comparatists, and other people whose studies demand the ability to read Latin or Greek. That model has proven to be financially quite resilient, although naturally the courses offered will be limited by the number of faculty. But financial resilience is no longer enough: if an administration is determined to get rid of a department, they will invent performance metrics that will let them do so. The fact is, there is an ideological war on the humanities, and Classics is easy to put on the chopping block.
But its demise, if the worst predictions come true, will be much worse than many of us have thus far imagined. People have tried to imagine philosophy without Plato and Aristotle, but nobody seems to enjoy it very much. Medieval studies is a tiny field already, and most primary sources have not been translated; many do not even have reliable print editions. As my friend Ben Crosby, an early modern church historian, observes, a huge number of early modern writings, especially theological ones, remain available only in their original Latin. These fields rely on the existence of Classics departments to teach their graduate students, who will someday be scholars, to read their own particular disciplinary primary sources in the original. What would happen, then, if those departments were to be shuttered?
Well, the straightforward answer is: those dependent areas of study would collapse. Philosophy would probably try to carry on, because Anglophone philosophy departments seem quite certain that the Adamic tongue was English, but if you have ever heard analytic philosophers discussing Plato, you know that no sensible person can listen to that for more than about five minutes, and in any case, to presume to discuss what an author thought without being able to read what they wrote is sufficiently absurd that even analytic philosophers are bound to realize how silly it looks. Other fields will not bother with a pretense: at best they will simply go extinct. If they do not go extinct, we will have something even worse on our hands: we will have a kind of fraud.
The point of higher education is to be in a place where it is possible to learn a subject down to its foundations, from experts with firsthand knowledge. Many people’s first encounter with the Odyssey comes from a high school English teacher, and that is a very good thing in itself. But if you want to know more, you need to learn from someone who not only can read the original with ease but who has learned all about the culture that gave rise to that poem. Someone who doesn’t have that, who can’t even read the original words of the poem, cannot teach it in a complete way: they must always rely on the authority of others rather than on their own judgment. In college, one’s teachers are—or should be—authorities in themselves, people with firsthand knowledge who can, if you want, lead you toward firsthand knowledge as well. Someone who teaches in that capacity—that is, as an expert in the subject—but without that firsthand knowledge is deceiving you in an important way. For entire fields, having lost firsthand access to primary sources, to teach in a secondhand way while pretending to real expertise would be a catastrophe.
So far I have talked only about loss of the language expertise that Classics departments contain, but the loss of technical knowledge would be almost as devastating. Already, many university linguistics programs no longer employ experts in historical linguistics; the knowledge of how to do that work, if it remains at all, is mostly likely to rest with a classical philologist. Prosopography, the study of a socially-connected group of people whose individual lives are insufficiently documented, is bread and butter for ancient historians, and the loss of their methodological expertise just as big data is opening up new horizons for this method would do tremendous harm to future research. And then there is philology itself, both the mode of reading and the skills of linguistic and textual criticism: it is all but extinct in English departments, except for a few tenacious Old Anglicists and Chaucerians, and among the modern European languages, only Germanic departments devote significant resources to preserving it. These skill losses are not irrecoverable—after all, they had to be developed from scratch in the first place—but they have taken centuries to reach their current refinement, and would take centuries more to restore.
Finally, and I think most importantly, there is the loss to literature and to literary studies. There are many roads to the good life, and a life without access to Homer or Pindar can be rich in many other ways, but I have to believe that a life without access to these poems, or to Thucydides and Tacitus or to Plato and Augustine, is in some way worse than it might be. It’s difficult to communicate the experience of reading the Iliad: it has a terrible, all-consuming beauty that feels like looking into the sun, so that life for a while afterward is washed out and faint. What the “use” of such an experience is I cannot say, but I and countless others can testify to its worth, and as a socialist I am committed to real equality of access. Everyone, if they choose to, should be able to lose themselves in Homer and catch the poetic bug and pursue their study of ancient poetry and ancient peoples to whatever depth they desire—for the rest of their lives, if necessary.
The collapse may yet be forestalled: it is not too late. But it will require real labor solidarity: not letter campaigns, not panel discussions at the SCS or the MLA, but colleagues throughout the university willing to threaten and carry out strike actions on behalf of anyone in a threatened department. The “safer” you are, the greater your obligation to hit the picket lines. A genuine faculty strike that reclaims governing powers would be the beginning of a proper revolution in higher education: many jobs would be saved, and many young scholars would be afforded time and space to do good work. The events at West Virginia University are coming for everyone, and the collapse of Classics will endanger the entire edifice of the humanities. There is no bad time to start organizing, and the only way we will survive is together.
I agree with you totally Dan. Great writing here. The demise of humanities departments across the nation is scary. So many universities are eliminating needed programs for their students in the name of the bottom line. The concept of learning for the sake of learning seems to be a thing of the past. Now learning seems to be only to support our capitalistic society. Very sad. Thanks for writing this. I is great to hear your voice in your writing. You are missed already in Ann Arbor!