Reader Responses to Classics: Dead or Alive?

I urge Brown classics to consider the subtle prejudice of low expectations.

Please retain classics at Brown and even expand the department and course offerings. Classics is needed more than ever as our society deteriorates and falls prey to morons like Donald Trump. The historic perspective of the ages Classics provides is essential.

It’s been more than 50 years since I took John Rowe Workman’s class, but I do recall that his course began with Egyptian culture and how much Greek culture evolved from it, followed by the Romans. So why not punch up the Egyptian component? Personally, Workman’s class served as a fine springboard for me as I dove into Southeast Asian culture and quickly picked up on how much it was influenced by ancient Indian Hindu and Buddhist culture passed down in the Sanskrit and Pali languages.

In 1967, after four years of public high school Latin and one at graduate level with Professor John Rowe Workman (see entry from Martha Mitchell’s Encyclopedia Brunoniana), I can honestly say racism and slavery never crossed my mind. Classical Latin is the basis for so many current languages and should be evaluated in that respect rather than otherwise. I’m sure that if you delve deeply into any field of science, literature, philosophy, music, sports, and so forth that you will find some unwelcome connections that should finally be addressed, but to disparage or eliminate entire fields of study seems counterproductive. I understand professor Padilla Peralta’s reasoning for change, but I believe better education for all economic levels and all races and sexes will have a more profound impact on our civilization than simply abandoning several thousand years of history.

Sounds like the old parameters no longer work. If the University no longer wants to offer a study of this specific period geographically and historically, it deserves a new name. This is not your grandfather’s Classics and calling it thus could be considered false advertising. Perhaps incorporating one survey course to address changes in the old curriculum would be beneficial.

I understood two main concerns have grown up in the Classics Department: whether the language requirement for a Classics degree is elitist, and whether the Classics faculty has worked hard enough at listening to students. Two related observations; First, I would urge Brown Classics to consider the subtle prejudice of low expectations. Not all Classics concentrators arrive on College Hill with the benefit of many years of Greek or Latin. I did not. I worked my tail off only to drop Greek Survey my senior year—what was both a humiliating and life changing experience, for which I will always thank God. I would encourage the Classics faculty to give some thought as to why that might be. Second, without dismissing the need for professors to listen to their students, I submit that the purpose of a Classical education is to teach the students to listen. We should assume that the faculty can and do listen. We do not assume that students have learned how to listen. The Classics is nothing if not a field of study devoted to listening well and reading closely. It turns out that understanding someone from a different time and place is incredibly difficult. You must learn their language. It is an act of love, as well as an act of humility which presumes you have something to learn. “Speak to the past and it shall teach thee.” As we all grapple with political polarization heightened by our social media echo chambers—Classics has much to offer university students today. Especially with the language requirement. Listening is hard. Understanding another person is hard. There are not always easy answers or shortcuts. If nothing else can get that lesson into a student’s head, perhaps Greek Survey will do the trick.

Tell me this article is a comic one. The many illogical statements and poor arguments indicates that surely, neither the author nor the quotes used of professionals are to be taken as serious. As a student in the late 1950s with professors in the Classics such as Couch and Robinson, I can find nothing in this article except a display of ignorance. Where are the thoughts such as “realize that the highest reward in ancient society was the right to vote. It is usually given at an older age. Therefore, if America were to give the right to vote to 18 year olds, how can it refuse any other rights due to age?” Or, the final exam question: Discuss the effect Julius Caesar has on the modern world? You need other discussion subjects? How about: if given the right to vote at 18 and the right to privacy at the same age, what right does the University have to ask for payment from parents and refuse a parent the student’s grade? What need of financial statement’s from parents for any student? By what right does law impose insurance of parents upon youth to the age of 25? Drinking at 21? As for the basis of the article, the writer appears not to understand ancient society. The definition of “Classics” is very muddled. Does he think the Egyptians worried about color? As for Greece and Rome etc, status was firstly your state, In Greece it was city, then country. Status among different peoples was place in society. Color had no place! A statesman or warrior or wealthy merchant etc. had status over ‘common people.’ The statement on ‘statues’ is similarly ridiculous. Should Japanese not raise statues to famous Japanese? Chinese to famous Chinese? Individual European states to famous citizens of their state and so on? Statues in America to its founding fathers and many of its presidents and other famous persons? What do we do for the statues in the Capitol building? The thoughts postulated by this article are puerile to say the least. I hope the writer understands this last sentence.

After reading “Classics: Dead or Alive?” I must conclude that Brown is indeed one of the “evil bulges” in Dante’s hell. What the devil is going on? All I see are ambitious academics seeking to climb the ladder of professional success on the backs of dumb white kids who, though not racist themselves, feel terribly guilty about the ambiguities of their forebears. Indoctrination tells us what the past means, monolithically; education gives us the wherewithal to decide on our own what was good and what was bad. It would seem that Brown wants to dismantle the idea of a “classical” education, and thus to dismantle Western Civilization, which it deems to be “white supremacist.” In short, do you guys have any fun?  Do you read any love poetry beside the sparkling brook?  Or do you sit around the dormitory all day, bored out of your heads, engaged in Stalinist “self-criticism,” thinking of ways to dismantle the “Christian West” and in the name of “diversity and inclusion” to establish Mayan fertility rituals of human sacrifice in the affluent Connecticut suburbs? Sadly to say, Brown is yet another island of lost children, intellectual and spiritual orphans sitting naked and unwashed in the midst of bad teaching, starving to death on the latest bad food to come out of the graduate schools—the blind leading the blind. Where is the wisdom of the great professors? At Brown, the lunatics are indeed running the asylum.

It is dishonest to attribute the motives of neo-Nazis who have appropriated selective aspects of classics to the field of study or to its professionals. It is even more ludicrous to look for exemplars of so-called “white culture” in the many peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world. It is ironic that many of the Tiki-Torch crowd have Hispanic, Slavic, Middle Eastern and Asian names. I suppose that slamming the gate comes with their assimilation. The very heart of the Iliad is sympathy for the conquered, and disgust for the conqueror. The classics studied in the late 20th century refreshed ideas of enslavement, queer culture, powerful women, diverse peoples, oral culture, diplomacy, federation, alliance, and manufacture [sic] throughout the broader ancient world. Critics take note, a world where folks do not hasten to throw the baby out with the bathwater would be that which advocates seek, a better world.