By Peter Wood
Saturday, March 09, 2019
What would Livy think? The ancient historian had a high
regard for facts. The field in which Livy now lives, however — classics — is
finding facts more and more of a nuisance.
In January, a classicist named Mary Frances Williams
stood up at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies and asked
about the strange views that several panelists had promulgated on “the future
of Classics.” One of the panelists, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an assistant
professor at Princeton’s classics departments, inveighed that the whole
discipline was guilty of “the systemic marginalization of people of color in
the credentialed and accredited knowledge production of the discipline.”
Professor Padilla said much more in this patois of “critical race theory” all
to the effect that white people should shut up and get out of the way.
Williams, an independent scholar with a Ph.D. from the
University of Texas, decided to speak up for the merit of teaching students
works by the great authors of the past. Thrown off stride by one of the
panelists, Williams responded, pointing to Padilla, “You may have got your job
because you’re black, but I’d prefer to think you got your job because of
merit.”
It was a maladroit sentence, though perhaps not a great
deal more maladroit than Padilla’s response, “I hope the field dies, that
you’ve outlined [sic], dies, and that
it dies as swiftly as possible!”
The outcome of this exchange is that Williams was ejected
from the meeting and the Association of Ancient Historians fired her as an editor
of its newsletter. Padilla, by contrast, received a public “affirmation of his
value to our department and the future of classics” from the chairman of the
Princeton department.
The story has gotten some play, and Williams herself
wrote a thorough self-vindication in the online journal Quillette. The larger story, however, is that the field of classics
is in the midst of a slow-motion surrender to the forces of faddishness. Figures
such as Williams, who uphold the classic authors on the basis of their
intrinsic “merit,” are receding like that melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
Matthew Arnold heard on Dover Beach. Arnold, of course, is the epitome of the
dead white maleness that Padilla and his fellow panelists intend to bury in
that field they hope will die.
What if anything do we stand to lose if they get their
way? No one, after all, is standing in the way of our reading the Penguin
Classics if we have a mind to, or the Loeb Classics if we have bothered to
learn Latin or Greek. University classics departments are already few and far
between and spend much of their time teaching courses on books in translation
and ancient mythology. The disappearance of such departments or their transformation
into outposts of multicultural ressentiment
would be barely noticed in the on-going catastrophe of American higher
education.
That said, we do stand to lose something important. Our
nation was founded by men who read the classics and who could say, like
Terence, “Nothing human is alien to me.” The classics teach us about the
breadth of human experience and the ideals of the civilizations that gave birth
to our own. They also teach us how fragile a republic can be and the importance
of cultivating civic virtue. The books that survived the collapse of ancient
civilization are not the only ways we can learn these things, but they are
incomparably the finest.
Of course the field of classics is now inhabited by
teachers such as one of the other panelists Williams faced at that conference.
University of Iowa professor Sarah Bond erupted with indignation at Williams’s
mention of Western civilization, saying, “We are not Western civilization!”
Saying so is indeed a kind of exit visa, for Bond and
perhaps her discipline. Padilla, who boasts about his status as an illegal
immigrant when he is not inveighing against classics for perpetrating
“epistemic and hermeneutic injustice,” embodies the future she welcomes.
The race and gender hustlers may prevail, not least
because the senior people in the field seem unable to mount much resistance.
Perhaps it is up to those who love the classics but are not beholden to
university departments to preserve ancient learning through the impending dark
age of these “reformers.” I have in mind figures such as Robert Strassler, who
has given us the beautiful Landmark editions of Herodotus, Thucydides,
Xenophon, and others. I know several such independent scholars, and then there
is Williams herself, recently emancipated from her job because of her excess of
candor.
The classics, freed from their captivity in the dungeons
of Princeton and Iowa, might even thrive again. “Fortune assists the brave,”
says Terence.
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