You can’t spell Classicist without Classist

I’m editing this to add that this is (as people have pointed out to me, and was an unintentional oversight!) a specifically US problem in some ways. I don’t know enough about foreign education systems to speak to these questions — I should have qualified my comments accordingly!

I’ve spent a long time mulling over these thoughts, in part because I really don’t like to write things that are directly taking issue with particular people and in (much larger) part because I was really very angry in the immediate wake of this conversation opening up, and I didn’t want to write a hasty screed. So I’ve had a few weeks to make this a carefully thought out screed — I’m hoping it’s better for the time spent percolating, and not simply stale.

Because good pedagogy practices remind us not to assume that everyone has the same background knowledge, allow me to lay out the relevant background here:

1. Grace Bertelli, first year student at Columbia, wrote an op-ed titled “The Classics Major is Classist.” This spread like wildfire across my social media circles. People started having good conversations.
2. Palaiophron published a response on Sententiae Antiquae, titled “Classics [Itself] Is Not Classist.” It too spread quickly around Facebook and Twitter.
3. Meanwhile, during and after these posts, a conversation was taking place on Twitter (and probably elsewhere) about some of the issues raised by these pieces.

Bertelli’s and Palaiophron’s posts both address important points, and both are voices we don’t always hear in the field — Bertelli is a low-income undergraduate student and Palaiophron teaches Latin at a public high school. Neither are well-represented in discussions about the “state of the field.” And both voices can be valued without necessarily agreeing 100% with their positions. And I do want to take respectful issue with a few points.

Palaiophron’s post suggests that the problems that Bertelli pointed to aren’t unique to Classics, but rather that they are features of an America with an increasing wealth gap. Yes and no. I went to a public high school in a small, rural area and we didn’t have a lot of the course offerings you might find at an elite prep school. By the time I graduated, we had one language offered (Spanish) despite vigorous student-led attempts to keep French and add Latin. We still had all the “normal” math, science, and English offerings. Languages are often placed in the “luxuries” category (along with the arts) and are some of the first programs to get cut, if they ever existed in the first place.

Math (and science, but I would argue that it’s not as extreme with science as with math) is a more fair comparison for languages, in that the courses build off of one another. For math classes that are meant to be taken in a series, you simply can’t make up for lost time by taking 3 courses at once. The same holds true for languages — you can’t take Greek 1, 2, and an intermediate reading course at the same time. At most you can take an intensive language course (though, especially if you have to wait until the summer to take these courses, that gets into issues of cost — both financial and opportunity cost, things that Bertelli addresses in her piece). Still, this isn’t an entirely apt comparison. I ran out of math classes I could take at my high school, but there were readily available math classes I could take online, because the market is bigger for math. It makes sense to develop low-cost (or even free) online math instruction because everyone more or less agrees that math education is important. It is not exactly a truth universally acknowledged that languages are important (especially in the case of dead languages), so the infrastructure isn’t there. Yes, there are wonderful programs being developed now, but Telepaideia runs you $1000 for intensive Greek or Latin and is a fundamentally different model (at least for the time being) than something like Khan Academy.

My main issue here is with what took place in item #3 above though. The question of “Are languages necessary for a Classics major?” came up in several different social media forums, and a lot of people expressed some variation of the idea that “You can’t do Classics without the languages.” I was pretty shocked at this idea, because the only institutions I attended (UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan) have a Classical Civilizations major and a Classical Languages major, and I sort of assumed that most institutions operated the same way. If you loved languages, had grad school aspirations, or had some other motivation for taking both Greek and Latin, you majored in Classical Languages. A much larger number of students majored in Classical Civilizations. To my mind, of course you can study Classics without the languages.

Those who disagree often bring up the word “rigor,” which is one of my least favorite words to hear, because it almost always stands in for something else (in case you were curious what else is on this list, “quality” is up near the top. As in “I’m all for diversity but I just don’t want us to sacrifice quality”). There’s a lot to unpack though — we equate rigor with the languages, and languages are the heart of a classical education. Well, one could just as easily say “You can’t possibly do Classics without material culture” and insist that no Classics major is sufficiently rigorous if it doesn’t include a certain number of archaeology or art history classes. But we don’t say that. We could insist that an understanding of literary theory or critical race theory or economic theory or queer theory is integral to our field. In my experience, they are all thoroughly challenging bodies of scholarship, and they all have a great deal to say to the field of Classics as a whole. They would certainly inject some rigor into a course of study. But we don’t push for any of these things. We insist on the languages as the sole source of rigor.

A few words on language education at the college level. If you did not go to college with the intention of majoring in Classics, you perhaps didn’t even discover that it was an option until, say, your sophomore year (or later). Maybe, as I did, you took a breadth requirement course — Greek Myth — and then decided that you wanted to major in this stuff. I was lucky that when I asked my GSI (Mont Allen) what I needed to do if I wanted to major in Classics, he told me that if I wanted to go to grad school, I needed to learn Greek and Latin, and instead of asking what on earth made him think I wanted to go to grad school, I just signed up for Greek 1. I could easily have instead looked into the Classical Civilizations major (I have never been particularly good at learning languages) and only decided a year or so later that maybe I did in fact want to go to grad school. If you don’t start early on a Classical Languages major, you might well have to stay an extra year to meet the requirements. If you do, your scholarships don’t always continue to fund you — lots of scholarships only cover 4 years. Odds are, you’ve already been working part-time jobs throughout school, if you’re not from a wealthy background. But now, you’re taking an intensive summer language program while working to be able to pay for another year of school with less financial aid. And if you’re doing this because you want to go to grad school in Classics, you’re competing against people who had the money that allowed for leisure — the leisure to spend more time on their studies of Greek and Latin (perpetuating the idea of Classics as something that belongs to “the leisure class”). Are we really shocked that Classics is still an awfully homogeneous group? There’s a very high barrier to entry for people who don’t come from a privileged background.

But to the question of whether you can study Classics without the languages — OF COURSE YOU CAN. And I say this as someone with a pretty traditional, philological background who really does think that learning Greek allows you access to things about these texts that you really can’t get in a translation. But what do we think the point of an undergraduate Classics major is? It can’t just be to prepare people for graduate school — surely (from the articles I see shared on social media) we all think that a Classics degree gives students a wide range of benefits that aren’t entirely dependent on pursuing graduate studies. If the point of a Classics major is to gain a deeper understanding of the ancient world, then why on earth can’t people do that effectively in English translations? There will always be deeper modes of engagement with Classics that people aren’t taking full advantage of — more or better language learning, better social and cultural history, better engagement with material culture, etc. Making Greek and Latin the single most important element of a Classics major means making the field more and more inaccessible. We can’t say that we want Classics to be a more inclusive place while simultaneously erecting structural barriers to entry for huge swaths of potential Classics majors.

This doesn’t even touch on how classism plays out in grad school or in the field as a whole. About how alienating it is for people to be scolded for using library books instead of buying all the books for a course or for “giving up” on a academic career because they literally cannot afford to try another year. About all the horror stories everyone has about that one professor who made them feel like they didn’t belong in this field. About all the little ways that the field of Classics still flaunts its pedigree and reminds so many people that this has never been their field. And — a huge, glaring issue — I haven’t even touched on how all of this intersects with race (though nothing I could write would even come close to Yung In Chae’s White People Explain Classics to Us piece).

So, yes, Classics is classist and elitist (I know, I know, #notallclassicists). It doesn’t have to be, though. There are more voices every day working to make this field more equitable and accessible. But actually making changes means that more people need to take concrete steps to remove structural barriers and to push back when people are being gatekeepers. More of us need to swallow our imposter syndrome and start piping up to say “no, sorry, I actually don’t know what [insert obscure ancient or modern author] says about that” so no one else (especially not our students) has to feel inferior for not knowing everything.

To end, here are a few things that I think are really promising:

The Latin/Greek Institute (Brooklyn College and the City University Graduate Center) is really committed to financial aid for students to defray the cost of a summer language program.

The University of Michigan has started a Bridge MA program that offers full funding for students who don’t have the languages they would need to go directly to a PhD program.

The Sportula, started by UC Berkeley grad students and others, is offering microgrants to Classics students who need them.