The hard thing about writing about the news is that it there is so much of it, and you can’t stop and rewind it in real time. This newsletter promised to strive for both hot takes and long views, and getting the balance right is part of the challenge and the fun. But not only for me: that’s the tense that we all live in.
Speaking of tense, these past couple of weeks I have been consumed by the violence in the Middle East and the surge of anti-Semitism around the world. I have written about this a bit, but I think it is a huge and still unfolding story, one with consequences for not only Israel and Jewish communities everywhere but also for American culture and politics. A country and a world that is less safe for Jews is more dangerous for everyone else, too. I’ll be writing lots more about this in the weeks, months, and years to come.
But one story that caught my eye and has been nagging at me for a while is the decision by Howard University, perhaps the flagship Historically Black College/University (HBCU) in the country, to do away with its Classics major. This might not seem like the biggest deal in the world: Classics refers to the study of the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, which were once the foundation of what it meant to be an educated person, but have seen precipitous drops in enrollment. What was once the core of any curriculum worth its name has become a boutique department of academics toiling in near hushed obscurity, teaching the occasional undergraduate who is just as likely to work for McKinsey as write a dissertation on Cato the Elder.
Even if this is lamentable, it can’t really come as too much of a shock. Learning ancient languages is really hard (trust me- I’ve tried, and still sound like I’m from Great Neck, no matter what the words are supposed to sound like) and the centrality of Greece and Rome has ebbed in the era of Twitter and TikTok. We are farther from the dramas and debates of that long ago age, and the Church that for so long was the vehicle for so much of this knowledge has other things to worry about: all but the most hardcore traditionalists now recite Mass in languages other than Latin.
All of this is to say that Classics were in trouble anyway, for reasons all their own and because the situation of the humanities more broadly (think English, history, art history, comp lit) is a bloodbath, replete with plummeting enrollment numbers, identity crises, impenetrable jargon, and ridiculous politics. And that isn’t even taking into account the rout of coders over writers, and programming over poetry.
The tenured professors who came of age in academic boom times when doctoral dissertations came with a tenure job attached are now being retrained as managers of decline. The days when academic superstars like Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, and Michel Foucault bestrode the landscape and regularly appeared on television are a distant memory. Computer science classes can’t find enough seats. Literature seminars can’t fill the room, or even come close.
It is against this dire backdrop that Howard’s announcement set off alarm bells. Howard was the last HBCU with a full fledged Classics Department. It was founded in 1867: it as old as the University. Howard has promised that courses will still be available in other tracks of study, but it is hard to have too much confidence in such a dispersed and nebulous plan. Reacting to widespread criticisms, two Howard professors responded via an op-ed in the New York Times that “Departments aren’t free. The decision to eliminate the department was the result of an intensive to determine how to best allocate the university’s limited resources.” Not exactly an inspiring rallying cry.
Nearly 5,000 people have signed a petition to preserve Classics at Howard, and Cornel West penned a powerful opinion piece in the Washington Post drawing the link between the study of the Classical world and the luminaries of the civil rights movement and affirming that “engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.” He called cutting the Classics a “spiritual catastrophe.”
Not everyone agrees. The same illiberalism that has made inroads in lower school curricula and captured the citadels and quads of academia has found a natural target in the Classics. If everything is about race and power and oppression, then there are few juicier targets than the oldest and most alabaster of all our cultural monuments: Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Virgil. If there is a canon, they are its patriarchy. If there is a cultural Establishment, they have the C suite.
As Dan-el Padilla, a Classics professor at Princeton put it, “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.” This historian of Rome has condemned the field as “equal parts vampire and cannibal.” He believes that it is “a tool of the production of whiteness.”
Padilla’s perspective is gaining traction, at least at his own bucolic university in New Jersey. A new policy has gone into effect: Classics majors will no longer have to read the classical languages. As John McWhorter writes in The Atlantic, The department had considered the policy change before but saw it as taking on a “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer. The department’s website includes a proclamation that the “history of our own department bears witness to the place of Classics in the long arc of systemic racism.”
Classics, then is doubly in the crosshairs. I don’t have an answer to its financial woes, besides worrying that a culture that can’t pay to deepen its soul and study the best that has been thought and written will enjoy neither the pleasure that such encounters bring nor benefit from the resilience and guidance that they provide.
I do know that the attack on the Classics in the name of anti-racism serves no one and hurts us all. As McWhorter put it in The Atlantic, “when students get a degree in classics, they should know Latin or Greek. Even if they are Black. Note how offensive that even is. But the Princeton classics department’s decision forces me to phrase it that way. How is it anti-racist to exempt Black students from challenges?”
They answer is that it’s not. It doesn’t take much Latin to know that radical comes from the word radix, or root. We are boldest and most imaginative when we tap the fuel of the past to make a better future. To be original, we have to have some relation, however fraught, with our origins. The whiteness of the statutes at the Met or the British Museum is an illusion: they would have been painted in vivid and vibrant colors when they were first erected.
These writers were patricians and peasants, Mediterranean and Africans, olive toned and lined with hot sun of what is now Turkey and Macedonia. They thought about sex and power and politics in ways that resonate and ways that don’t, but their imagination was broad and wide enough to hold much of the world we live in. Because here is the thing: these books aren’t actually that powerful. They have no armies to command, no Twitter mobs to mobilize. They are just words on a page, written in a long ago time, offering wisdom and beauty that cuts against the grain. They can’t do anything to you, but they might do everything for you.
How lucky we are to have them, and how small they make our current moment. The best way to deserve them is to read them.
A
P.S. I’ll be hosting an event this Monday: tune in if you can. Information below.