I decided to post this in "state of the field". Never mind people who can't be bothered with description of changes on Wiki. Someone who put "new information" is the new evil. WHAT information??
ok, per the previously deleted conversation on the other board: can someone please tell me where all the racist uncles and MAGA hat wearing Chad Worthington types are, because I've never encountered them. All the Classicists I've ever known and worked with are quite vocally on the left. They are exactly what you would expect to find in any humanities department in the 21st century (sometimes irritatingly so). Most of the people I know voted for Bernie Sanders, watch Democracy Now! because MSNBC is too corporate, still read Marx and Chomsky, ground their own free-trade organic coffee beans, and healthy portion of them have never learned to drive a car. People here who keep characterizing Classics as some sort of conservative 19th century throwback are either being dishonestly hyperbolic or are not in the field. Or are deranged.
lol, yes grind. That was copied, pasted, and poorly edited. But I buy Folgers in big plastic tubs, so what do I know anyway. It is the older generation I am thinking about. But maybe I just haven't spent enough time with the really bigwigs at the super elite institutions (though I know a few...). Because we are not supposed to name names here I doubt my question can even be answered. It's just that all the accusations being flung at our field run against my experience and may be doing a great deal of harm, which bothers me because these accusations are mostly, if not totally, false. Outside religiously affiliated schools or Hillsdale, do you know a single tenured professor who is a MAGA white supremacist, or even just a conservative? I don't, and yet certain rabble rousers claim the field is hopelessly dominated and populated by these types.
Interesting. I was in his department back when he was a liberal Democrat, and once had an hour-plus political discussion with him during which I hid the fact that I was (moderately!) conservative, since I didn't want him to think ill of me.
ok, a professor at OSU is a conservative who writes for a conservative magazine. So what? He is certainly in the minority. Not even counting Eidolon, I can think of a dozen Classicists off the top of my head who write for far-left publications, or for books published by nambla, or who are literally members of the communist party. My point is, conservatives are a minority in the field, they do not dominate its leadership (hello, have you been paying attention to the SCS over the past few years?), they have little influence among us, and they do not set the tone. Classics is not a bastion of conservatism, let alone white supremacy; it is the exact opposite. One of the posters on the other thread accused classics of being a racist 19th-century throwback based solely on the fact that the classicist who attended a decolonization seminar-decolonization mind you-with her was white. This is a low bar indeed, but this sort of thing also seems to be fueling a very destructive narrative about our field. But I'll go even further and ask why the mere presence of a few conservatives bothers some people so much? And what if, instead of a tiny minority, half of all classicists were conservatives or members of the republican party? Half the country is conservative, shouldn't half the field be as well for purposes of equal representation? In some parts of the country, like Ohio, I would bet a majority of the students are conservative, so what's wrong with having conservatives in the field and in the classroom? It seems to me that some people are trying to purge Classics of those few remaining souls who are not ideologically pure, who are not sufficiently "progressive" or even overtly political, and this strikes me as Soviet-style authoritarian bs. It's certainly illiberal and undemocratic. It's also worth talking about because the SCS and many among us have politicized their positions/occupations in a major way (and in a single direction) and they now dominate the conversation (every SCS blogpost, for example, is shamelessly political these days). It's just giving conservative critics of higher education more ammunition, if not actually proving them right. So stop and think really hard about what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve.
Alright, let's assume that you're arguing in good faith here. Conservatism, at least the modern American sort championed by reptiles like William F. Buckley, for many years assumed a veneer of gentility and pretensions to intellectualism that masked what it really was, namely disdain for anyone who wasn't a WASP. They billed themselves as the adults in the room, the serious people who needed to be in charge to keep the blacks, the feminists, the hippies, the commies, the queers, and the Jews in line.
Democrats were wimps and sissies with questionable dedication to America. Sure, you couldn't say those things out loud, not like before, but you came up with the dog whistles, like "law and order" and "southern strategy" and "personal responsibility." Eventually conservatives made their proverbial deal with the devil in their marriage to the Religious Right, but the adults managed to keep their fundy allies in check with lip service to things like wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade, keeping mouthy women in check, promoting family and tradition, and whaling on the gays. During the Reagan years conservatives were abetted by USSR's slouch toward death, a distraction from their overseas shenanigans and ludicrous economic policies.
After the election of George Bush the Less Stupid, they were outmaneuvered by a slick, well-educated hillbilly who beat them at their own game and sold the electorate repackaged conservative policies with his charisma and saxophone-playing skills. Not even blowjobs and cigarfucking could be weaponized to bring Slick Willy down, despite the chicanery of odious hypocrites like Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr. The penultimate stage of modern conservatism in America was the much-maligned (and deservedly so) misrule of George Bush the Dumber, a mean and petty homunculus in addition to being a thoroughly stupid one. Add in a cast of supporting characters in his administration that were as greedy and depraved as any comic book villains but without any of the flair, a ruined economy, and a war that killed thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and birthed the Islamic State and you have one of the worst modern Presidencies on your hands. One would think the "reasonable" conservatives would have seen the light and said enough. Some of them made a lot of noise, but that's all it was--like good conservatives, they all fell in line. Whatever frustrations they might have had with Bush II were no match for their baser, gutter instincts, and for eight years they frothed at the mouth and spewed every sort of libelous and slanderous venom at Barack Obama. Barack Obama, like Clinton, was a barely left-of-center politician, yet all manner of vitriol was hurled at him; Obama had the added albatross of the whole black thing, so that compounded the rage.
Now, in the present environment the Trump kakistocracy, the mask has finally been ripped away. Out-and-out neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis run for office as Republicans. White supremacist policies are enacted from the Oval Office. Trump is the apotheosis of every ugly aspect of American conservatism revealed, the veneer gone--a revanchist strain of white privilege tempered by greed, sexism, racism, and xenophobia.
So, to answer your question about why the presence of conservatives bothers people, see above. Anyone who calls themself a conservative and has been a good soldier and voted R despite feeling bad about it or whatever, deserves nothing but contempt.
The conservatives I've met in the field -- and I can count, off the top of my head, at least 11 -- tend to be Catholics rather than MAGA people. Probably, most of them are never Trumpers, but also probably some of them did vote for Trump. I've also met a large number of conservative democrats, people who are misremembering history along with Joe Bindens or recycling fox news talking points along with Buttigieg and that nervous candidate from Minnesota. People who agree with everything but the disposition of the right's attacks on AOC. What's odd is that I've found more pro-Eidolon voices in the first group than in the second!
I think the strategy here is to force people in the first group to a choice: are they so bothered by the redistributive policies of Bernie et al, which in most advanced countries would be considered center-left, that they will vote for Trump, who has commandeered the GOP away from its long-held orthodoxies? Or, will they finally realize that the Republican party is not the bastion of common sense but a force for societal and global destruction? What's nice about many Catholics (and I say this as a hard left atheist) is that, unlike many Evangelicals, they tend to be genuinely troubled by things like Trumpism. They also tend to dislike capitalism, only they call it "modernity" or "secularism" ...but that's another story. (Side note: Leo XIII's rerum novarum should be required reading in civix classes)
I don't agree with your suggestion that the SCS blogs will accelerate the defunding of the humanities. If anything, the neoliberal identity politics of the professional managerial class(ics) can cause conservative legislatures to fund the classics, as has happened at Arizona State.
Moreover, if right-wing legislatures really defund the Western cannon, they will upset the conservatives who love that shit. Again, the strategy here is to make those on the center-right realize that the Republican party is incompatible with their values.
Eidolon exists to make people in classics feel as though they are contributing to a cause. That's fine by me; I doubt it has any real impact. If it accelerates the dissolution of the field as we know it, amen. If it simply allows some classicists to show the world how incredibly dull they are outside the parameters of their scholarly expertise, an even bigger amen. All of this stuff is done mainly to make classicists (overwhelmingly middle, upper-middle, and upper-class) feel like they aren't sitting on top of a pile of poor (black, brown, white) bodies. Look at the successful POC in the field; they all seem to have graduated from expensive private high schools and universities/colleges. That's excellent for them, and they deserve it! But getting more POC into the field, as excellent as it is, is unlikely to cause any structural change. I suspect that is the point, subconsciously, for many "progressives" in our field.
At this point the whole university system needs to be nationalized for anything like justice to happen.
What problem is that, 6:27? This particular talking point, which has polluted the news cycle over the past few days, is exceedingly irksome. It is also misleading to the point of being false. Are you saying that Democrats are racist and sexist, but not homophobic? Have you and everyone else forgotten that BARACK OBAMA won two presidential elections with comfortable margins? (I voted for him twice). I think Kamala Harris withdrew because she was a terrible candidate with a terrible record who was eviscerated by Tulsi Gabbard (a Samoan-American Hindu) on live television. Also, Kamala Harris had virtually no support among African American voters. Are you saying African American voters are racist and sexist? So in addition to Tulsi, there remains an African American candidate, Corey Booker, a Latino candidate, Julian Castro, an Asian candidate, Andrew Yang, a native American candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and a Jewish candidate, Bernie Sanders, who, according to twitter, isn't white because he is Jewish. So at least six POC are still in the race! (you see how tedious and absurd identity politics has gotten?)
To reiterate, Kamala Harris had virtually no support among black voters: "So far, though, polling shows Biden with a dominant share of black Democrats’ support. An average of two Quinnipiac polls of Democratic-leaning voters, one taken right after Biden declared his candidacy and another released in late May, found him well ahead of the other candidates, with 46 percent among African Americans nationally. Compare that with an average of 10 percent for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), 7 percent for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and 11 percent for the three black candidates combined." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-do-black-voters-support-biden-they-just-want-to-beat-trump/2019/05/31/74b37ca8-7b33-11e9-8ede-f4abf521ef17_story.html)
Also, Julian Castro has virtually no support among latino voters: "A poll released this week by Telemundo Noticias showed Castro in a three-way tie for fourth place among Latino voters, with only 2% support. Former Vice President Joe Biden (26%) and Sanders (18%) led the candidates among those voters." (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/09/election-2020-candidate-julian-castro-lacks-latino-voter-support/2528034001/)
Thank you 12:02 for answering my question so thoroughly. It seems you are contemptuous and intolerant of conservatives wherever they happen to be. Your own penchant for "libelous and slanderous venom" was especially illuminating ("reptiles," "the Less Stupid," "slick, well-educated hillbilly," etc.)
Also, 12:51, the states already have publicly funded state-controlled universities. I received a splendid education from a state school for next to nothing. I think the geographical dispersal of power and control across smaller bodies is more efficient and preferable to total control by the federal government. Imagine a nationalized university system under the control of the Trump administration or someone else like him.
For Pete's sake, the expression is "Hear, hear!" As in "Hear (what this person has to say), hear (what this person has to say)!" "Here, here" makes no sense at all, and yet I regularly see people writing it that way. Think, think!
13:26, yeah, I'm sure you're perfectly fine with sparsely populated states, almost exclusively white and right, receiving outsized representation thanks to the electoral college and severely outdated Senate model. Marginalizing and disenfranchising a bunch a people that happen to be less affluent and brown/black is just a random and unfortunate coincidence, right?
Yeah, that's systemic gaming and the House is gaming through gerrymandering. Just bc it's legal like legacy admissions or a modicum of plausible deniability exists doesn't mean it's right. But whatever lets you sleep at night.
Hubbard has long been known to be a creep. The best case scenario is that he is strongly encouraged to retire and does, since he isn't exactly young. Attempts to fire tenured professors always turn into nasty legal fights, and since UT is a public university this will also trigger the First Amendment issue given that the university is an extension of the government. At this point everything Hubbard has done is limited to his writings and courses, ergo they are protected speech. Now, if Hubbard is revealed to have been pulling a Daddy Cruel or worse, then at that point it merits termination. At that point I supposed the point would be moot, as he would likely go to jail. In general, though, I think firing tenured faculty is a bad thing.
It's not as if this is some shocking new revelation. He's been quite transparent about all of this stuff throughout his rather successful career. Just look at his CV. The question is, why did so few people think he was problematic up until now.
Something else to keep in mind about the infamous "Greek Love Reconsidered" book he edited: it contains other essays by upstanding scholars who are not known creeps, and who may not have known what they were getting themselves into.
I've been at the same panels as Hubbard a few times at CAMWS. He usually asks interesting questions and just seems like he has idiosyncratic mannerisms. But when I spoke to him at a reception, he was super creepy and turned the conversation to age of consent laws and sexual assault laws whenever possible. I was definitely left with the impression that he's a real NAMBLA ally. I wonder if gender dynamics when it comes to reporting sexual assault account for a reason why he seemingly has no allegations...
Does he advise students anymore? Just looking at the UT Austin faculty, though, they probably don't have many Greek lit students. Although he's certainly well-known, it seems like his name would be a real negative on the job market.
Okay, not really a state of the field question, but one that I've had for a while, and since this part of the blog is dead who would object to my raising the matter here?
I am curious if any of you have thoughts regarding why people look at C.V.'s on Academia.edu, when those people are not in the process of hiring someone. In my case, I've been out long enough that I have some publications that get a decent number of downloads, plus a book that was well reviewed, so I can see why people in my area will wander over to my webpage on occasion. And since they do, I've put my C.V. there, since that seems like a good idea. Academia.edu doesn't reveal who is looking at one's page or downloading things, but its Analytics screen does say WHERE they are, and I'd say that about 90% of the people who have looked at my C.V. are at places that are not hiring (especially those in other parts of the world), and more than a few are in areas without a university or college that has a classics program. So why do people look at C.V.'s? Idle curiosity? I find this rather puzzling, but long ago learned not to pay it any mind: in other words, just because someone in Cambridge, Mass. checks out my C.V. it doesn't mean that they are about to create a position just for me...
If I've ended up at your academia.edu page because I'm interested in something you wrote, I'm likely to check out your CV to see if you've done other things I might like that are not posted. If I'm seeing something written in my general research area by someone I don't know, I might look to see who they worked with or where they studied.
Original poster here. I see your point, of course, but the Analytics page doesn't always reflect that: sometimes people visit my page and look at an article and then check out my C.V., but there are quite a few who, if Analytics is to be trusted, just come to my page and look at nothing other than my C.V. And that perplexes me, since they're not looking to hire me. Perhaps they're interested in conference papers, to see what I might do next? To me this is odd behavior, since I rarely look at other people's C.V.'s. (And now that I think of it, about half the time I'm doing that it's because someone was mentioned on FV, either positively or negatively.)
Sometimes I look at CV's as a model for how to format something when I don't know what the conventions are (ie. certain archaeological fieldwork or disclosing the amount of fellowships). As a job seeker, I'm looking to emulate the best practices in the field so I look to the CV's of scholars I respect for inspiration
No, not paying. But you're only half-right, 15:35: information about institution and the "role" of each visitor is grayed-out and requires payment, but one gets to see for free which city or town he/she is from. And no chance I'm confusing looking at the C.V. with looking at the profile. This morning, for example, someone came to my page via Google and looked at the C.V. and then my profile three minutes later, with these being logged as distinct visits (or page-views). (And that person was logging in from a city with no connection to any job for which I've applied. And anyway, if I've applied for a job they already have my C.V., so this visit, like so many others, obviously is not from someone considering me for employment.)
Keep in mind too that the locations reported on Academia are probably mapped from IP addresses, which are not always very precise. This, I suspect, accounts for some of the seemingly random locations for search origins.
I'd been wondering whether some of the stranger locations might be attributed to a VPN, but why would someone use a VPN before viewing my scholarship? It's stimulating, sure, but not THAT kind of stimulating.
Hubbard update. There is an on-going undergraduate movement against UT's sexual misconduct policies, focused mainly on two non-classics professors who were found guilty of various things but seemingly not punished severely. A woman who had taken one of Hubbard's classes has been campaigning to get his cause wrapped into this, and she has apparently finally succeeded: there is video now circulating of a loud protest at his home last night. For better or for worse, the student protests are mainly focused on "pedophilia" rather than on the broader issues that have been documented within the classics community.
Also, apparently the department did try to get rid of him several years ago (not sure what grounds), but got shot down by the central administration.
I mean, whatever shitty thing he has done in the classics community, if he has abused a minor or even suggested that such abuse is licit, that is definitely reason #1 to get rid of him. If he had sex with a student over the age of 18 he should still go. If he harassed students or colleagues he should still go. But the dude has been a vocal advocate of pederasty in one form or another. That tops it.
And Derrida, and Deleuze/Guattari, and Lyotard, and all the other post-modern tards, because they were all advocates of paederasty who wanted to abolish age of consent laws:
No matter what, protesting at someone's house is pretty low (with the exception of the White House, for obvious reasons), and is a form of behavior that's only started in recent years. First time I've ever had any sympathy for Hubbard.
What has happened, and is happening right now, to TKH is truly frightening. However odious many of his views are, there is no justification whatsoever for the mob that recently attacked his home. They did more than just protest on his front lawn; they pummeled his door and issued threats while shining spotlights through his windows; he had to be escorted from his house by police in order to secure his safety; the protesters then vandalized his home and property, and left behind a spray-painted hammer and sickle on his driveway (in addition to other threatening messages throughout the neighborhood). If that doesn't tell you what sort of people they are, you can venture over to Twitter and watch a video the maenadic, emotionally incontinent, completely unhinged vandals proudly posted themselves. The sheer rage and hysteria they display is really quite shocking considering the fact that they are not even accusing him of harassing or abusing anyone, no, their accusations, or really just observations, are that he has written arguments against age of consent laws, that he taught a class they found offensive, and that he made sexist comments. Yes, his work has sort of make him nambla-adjacent, but I do stand with freedom of speech in this case and in opposition to these violent protestors.
What makes this situation even more interesting, utterly fascinating really, is that the rabble-rousers all appear to be marxist/communist activists. Of course, the communist party of Great Britain and some communist organizations in America include in their platform a demand to "abolish age-of-consent laws," and in fact it's not his position on consent laws that seem to bother them so much as his bourgeois attitude toward them. From the marxist "news" site "Incendiary," which is covering the story (you can't make this stuff up):
"Hubbard seeks to import the sexual practices and ideologies of aristocratic slave societies to present-day society, and has described age of consent laws, which prohibit sexual activity between adults and minors, as a “sad by-product” of a “self-righteous era.”
"While on the surface, bourgeois society prohibits sexual activity between adults and minors, in fact, youth are hyper sexualized and vulnerable to predators under modern day capitalism, putting Hubbard more in line with bourgeois exploiters than not."
No, its' not "me" again you oblivious prig. This is central to the unfolding story. The activists responsible for the protest and vandalism are self-described marxists/Leninists, as opposed to run-of-the-mill feminists or bored students in search of a cause, and they are using explicitly marxist language to describe the incident and indeed their motives on social media. And they are disseminating the story on twitter via the local Austin, TX Marxist "news" outlet cited above, which has posted two stories so far celebrating the harassment and vandalism. This is something unusual, in my experience, and worthy on note. If you took your head out of Bernie Sander's red ass long enough to take a look around, you might have noticed it too.
This Hubbard stuff is much ado about nothing, as I've heard that he is probably retiring in the next year or so. There's no way in hell that a public university would attempt to fire a tenured professor on the verge of retirement, since in all likelihood a protracted legal battle would be the result. Hubbard has also issued a response to the accusations being leveled against him, and it seems that he is a lot more cool-headed about the situation than the people screeching for his head on a platter.
A response where? Obviously he wasn't going to get fired; UT is a public institution. But there is nothing wrong with shaming people who declare or do shameful things. Free speech doesn't give anyone the freedom to be an asshole or a creep.
Umm, actually free speech does allow one to be an asshole and a creep, so long as nothing illegal has been done, and thus far everything that makes Hubbard a creep is tied to words and not illegal acts. If he worked for a private employer then they could fire him if they chose to do so based on speech alone. Hubbard, however, is employed by the state and the whole point of the first amendment is to prevent the state from infringing upon one's right to free speech. Moreover, he has the protection of tenure. What bothers me most about this is that people in the field, namely the extremely online Twitter folks, are calling for Hubbard's dismissal and showing their total disregard for tenure and the reasons it exists. Do we really want to encourage the firing of tenured faculty when the the field is in freefall? It's would be a bad idea even if it weren't.
The field is indeed in freefall, and I now see why: you just recapitulated my comment in about three times as many words. It isn't protected free speech for me to suggest that you are talking out of your ass, and saying so still makes me an asshole.
Read this for a simple explainer on the first amendment that even you should be able to grasp:
17:48's (also as 19:05) language is not the type of language we'd like to see used here. But we don't want to delete this thread, as it is a very valuable conversation to have. 17:48 you can still make your point without calling other posters names. We will delete such posts in the future.
“I have written many hundreds of pages on such topics, which you really need to examine carefully if you want to do responsible reporting,” he said. “You should not merely accept it on faith if some naive undergraduate student quotes something to you from an article they may not have even read fully or have the intellectual sophistication to understand.”
Ah the irony that he thinks those young students would not have the intellectual sophistication to understand....
Question: what happens if someone's first book is not received well? Does that have an actual impact on one's career? Obviously, it must be devastating for the writer, but does anyone else care? I have not even published my first project, but I'm going through a slump, so I'm trying to convince myself it will be fine one way or another.
Since no one's been posting, permit me to vent about something. I'm prepping for an interview in D.C. and in looking up what the search committee chair works on and teaches I've found that he has not updated his departmental webpage in about a decade. And I've seen this sort of thing elsewhere. How do departments (and deans, for that matter) not enforce the regular updating of webpages (especially at taxpayer-funded institutions)? It's such an obviously necessary thing to do, and it's not like it takes much effort.
Three thoughts (the last one not really relevant to your point): 1) I'm pretty scrupulous about keeping my own page up to date, but the institutional IT bureaucracy is such that it is a real effort to do so. 2) In practice a rule would be very hard to write and enforce. 3) Most public universities are only barely "taxpayer-funded" any more.
I'm presenting my first SCS paper next week and have fallen way behind on the paper... now sort of stressing out! Any tips on how to manage this? Do most of you finish your papers in advance or is it par for the course to be writing up to the day of the presentation?
I've had fellow grad students and professors who write papers right up to the presentation. Mine's presentable, but I'm still working on it. Ideally you'd have it done in advance, but procrastination seems to be endemic among academics, myself included.
Three days is plenty, assuming you're going on Friday. I'd write as much as you can, making your point as clear as possible, and get someone to look it over and give feedback asap.
Someone liked your argument enough to accept your paper, so take comfort in that. Don't feel the need to write extra to compensate either. No one will be mad at you for giving a clear 12-14 minute talk versus a meandering 20 minute talk.
10:59 is right on the money. One other thing I was taught by a mentor in philosophy: when nervous, always start with something a little informal (thanking people, a joke if you’re comfortable with that). It lets you relax into the talk, even though it’s just a second or two. Good luck!
Curious why the reality check blog post by the marginalized Latinx was grabbed by a venue hosted by two white dudes. Even if it's purely for selfless reasons, doubtful, it's tone deaf. I can think of a dozen better venues.
As one of the white dudes, this angle did occur to me. We have created a platform and we will share it. The author reached out on social media and we offered the space. I understand that this may seem "tone-deaf", as you put it, but we were aware of the dissonance.
Personally, I don't see any way out of such a potential quandary. If the outcome is that her post and experiences received a wide audience but we are open up to charges of hypocrisy etc, I can live with that.
How do we make our world more equitable, our spaces more inclusive, and our disciplines more just? If there are better ways, I am listening.
Academia stubbornly remains a tone deaf white space so it's par for the course. Where classics can help is to stop being the flagship discipline of this system but I have severe doubts it's fundamentally possible regardless of how many initiatives, diversity officers, etc are thrown into the mix. I think the solution is for the "west" to stop being the dominant cultural and economic narrative in the world but this will take generations.
I actually asked Joel to let me post my classics swan song on SA. I don't know him, but when I was thinking of classicists with platforms, his website has been a source of real pleasure to me for years, and I've especially appreciated previous blog posts he's hosted about classics and mental illness, always with a link at the end to a suicide prevention hotline that ended with "And if we can help you find some tether to the continuity of human experience through the Classics or a word, please don’t hesitate to ask." That to me summed up the best of what Classics can be, and was the core of the vision I had for sportula way more than any explicitly political posturing, and part of what I mourn sportula being forced to lose in the wake of SCS 19.
I feel bad for the Berkeley student who was forced to leave their program, esp. since I believe that Sportula is doing great work. That said, it sounds like it was all over some paperwork that wasn't filed? Pretty much everyone I know hates having to deal with all the assorted paperwork in academia, but is it really that much of a chore?
We all have foibles. The difference in my experience is the selective enforcement of policies in academia typically in line with explicit and implicit biases which result in negative consequences that are more frequent and devastating the farther one is from the white, male, straight ideal that our society subtly (and not so subtly) reinforces ceaselessly. Combined with all the other hurdles that the dominant group never encounters (and understandably can barely grasp), and you have the echo chamber of academia that just self-propagates its nonsense with its members scratching their heads in wonder why the status quo so stubbornly remains. These are all uniformly intelligent people but it shows you how dull and one-sided one's cultural perception can be when you're born and bred into this hidden caste system. It will never change with the underlying sentiment across society that the dominant group just does it better and deserves to be overwhelmingly in charge of powerful institutions such as academia, government, etc.
Yup, as I tell my students who don't fit the ideal yet insist on plowing ahead into the academic profession, go white or go home. 10x for classics. I would argue that there is no institution that channels white culture more fervently as a template and measure for success than academia, even more so than politics, and classics obviously is the standard bearer.
I'm sorry to hear about the Berkeley student and applaud her courage to share the gory details we've never seen recorded so clearly and publicly in the past, but I am not surprised one percent by the account. This is 2020. Can you imagine how many similar experiences have gone untold in the past and are now totally forgotten?
For Pete's sake. Does it really occur to none of you to share the link, since some of us out here don't follow whatever blog this is, and a subset of that group is interested enough to take a look?
https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2020/01/04/on-classics-madness-and-losing-everything/ As a lurker here for information and gossip, I just want to comment to indicate my utmost respect for everything this person has achieved in these circumstances. This field wears down and sometimes destroys even those with decent social and financial safety nets. I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to lack those support systems. It is made infinitely worse when fellow graduate students and faculty are hostile and indifferent. So kudos to her and everyone else struggling!
I realize this criticism is intended well, but let's not make ourselves right-wing parodies. The author certainly approached SA, SA didn't "grab" the piece. So what was Joel supposed to say, "sorry, only white dudes get to publish here?" You may not agree with the venue the author chose, but again, do we want a situation where POC are banished to their own, separate, websites?
1. author is reduced just to ethnicity, when she talks about a far more complex intersectional identity 2. blog hosts are credited as "selfless, doubtful" 3. "grabbed" is, as 3:32 notes, probably not the best verb
"Curious why the reality check blog post by the marginalized Latinx was grabbed by a venue hosted by two white dudes. Even if it's purely for selfless reasons, doubtful, it's tone deaf."
I received a Ph.D in Classics, and my experience in grad school was so good that I left the field after graduating. I now have a staff position in higher ed, and we help students like this all the time. What happened to this graduate student was completely unnecessary. It seems like a clear case of emotionally stunted faculty members who didn’t know how to/didn’t want to deal with the problem, so they used the excuse of lapsed paperwork to sweep it under the rug.
I cannot count the number of times I have had to summon both students and faculty members to my office to walk them through administrative processes in order to make sure everyone gets paid, reimbursed, registered, etc. or to provide one-time funds to remove a hold on an account. Or even just to explain how taxes work (again, also faculty members!). I don’t mind doing it, because many university systems are unnecessarily complicated, and our policies are so numerous that no one can possibly keep track of them all.
I have also found that, while no department is perfect, many are much more willing to support students like this, once you move beyond the suffocating elitism and dysfunction that I encountered so frequently in small humanities departments. I know of one large department that has a full-time staff member whose sole purpose is to help grad students complete paperwork and make sure they’re checking all of the necessary boxes on the way to graduation. Clearly, not all can afford that luxury, but the point is – they recognize that navigating the university bureaucracy is hard, and they don’t expect their students to do it all on their own. They’re also smart enough to realize that they’re wasting their own resources when someone falls through the cracks at this point. So why wasn’t someone helping this student? The world of Classics is indeed “small and cowardly”.
Classics=white people fetishising an astonishingly tiny bit of evidence from a small elite segment of the distant past to valorize their own imperialistic present
Plenty of well-intentioned practictioners but a fundamentally and deeply flawed enterprise that has stubbornly resisted all attempts at reimagining so shouldn't exist in the 21st century.
To be fair, 10:33, 90% of the discipline might revolve around this fetishization, but there is the 10% no matter how pathetic it might look. Point taken though.
Views like those voiced by 10:33 are incredibly myopic and, quite frankly, stupid. If you think that Classics is how you describe it then you haven't been paying attention for the last decade or more. The field is changing very quickly, and while it may not be up to speed with some other disciplines, the notion that a significant majority of scholars are out there reifying some 19th century colonialist zeitgeist is ludicrous. Moreover, since according to you Classics is so firmly entrenched in outmoded paradigms, what have YOU done to strike a new, innovative path forward? I'm guessing that the answer is nothing.
Again, you've offered nothing substantive as to what direction the field should take and what you have done to foster its movement in whatever direction that might be. I'll start listening to the indictments of Classics when the malcontents offer up more than nebulous and ill-defined criticisms.
yawwwwn. Nobody cares. Nobody cares anymore about the sad little woke dramas you people perform online and sometimes in real life. We left that behind in 2019. 14:40 is right, and others have made this point before: 10:33's characterization of the field is delusional, and one wonders why people (or the exact same person) keep coming here to express it, always the same thing, ad nauseam. But the thing is, nobody cares anymore. We fell for your bs and thought that perhaps you were sincerely trying to do good, but we've all moved on. Go seek attention somewhere else.
I'm sure a lot of you are disappointed that no events transpired at this year's SCS from which you could manufacture fresh outrage and spark a new moral panic thrusting the field into a frenzy yet again in order to push your weird ideologies and bizarre grievances, or to become the center of attention and feel like a star by being the the loudest most outraged voice of your own drama. So it looks like you've latched onto this blogpost in a desperate search for material to keep the drama alive...something something white dudes and fetishes, marginalized victims of something-or-other blah blah blah...but this single blogpost is hardly up to the task, especially if people actually take time to read it. Why so much fuss over a single person's situation? People drop out of programs and the field all the time for all kinds of reasons, and if you actually read this person's very public airing of the situation you will see that all of their problems, by this person's own admission, were self-made. But because it involves a "marginalized Latinx" everyone jumps on it and starts spewing all the usual woke nonsense, and carping about how horrible Classics is....but it's 2020 and nobody cares anymore. I suggest from now on we just ignore these dramas. And if you find the field so repugnant, then just leave it. Go do something else and stop coming here with your delusional complaints about it.
So glad I got out. It's not the vocal "westerners" that got to me but the fact that the vast majority is ultimately complicit by their silence and lip service when forced. If you're not all actively and vocally countering this bs, you don't deserve to exist. Not outside some utopian Aryan fantasy world.
I do feel sympathy for the former Berkeley grad, who has suffered greatly and repeatedly from her ailment. However, from reading the blog post carefully it sure seems to me like this ailment was going to prevent her from being able to one day function as a faculty member - which involves lots of paperwork and all sorts of pressures great and small, from having to meet deadlines for student recommendations to the myriad tasks considered "service" that are required for tenure and promotion - and the Berkeley faculty found a merciful way to help her move on to other endeavors. It does sometimes happen that one has a brilliant and talented grad student who also has serious problems that make him or her unsuitable for a job as a professor, and it does no one any favors to let such students get their degrees and hit the market. From that blog post I think that the best from a bad set of options was chosen by the faculty members involved in the decision, who found a way to remove the student from their program, and hope that the individual involved will find happiness, and perhaps one day even see the professors' actions as merciful rather than malicious. And she can certainly derive satisfaction from knowing that while she was in the field she helped to establish an organization that will do much good for many years. (I write this not as a Berkeley professor, nor as one who knows any of the people involved, but as one who has had more than one grad student who knew and had a passion for the material but was not cut out for the academic life.)
That's bullshit as we have pedos and people much more incompetent in all ladder ranks of classics right now. The difference is that the whiter, maler, and privileges your background, the more passes and propped up you get through the journey.
19:51, it's 17:13 here. You might want to rethink your phrasing, since the only way to read that first sentence is that you are calling the former grad student "incompetent," but simply less so than some others in our field. There is a world of difference between incompetence and having difficulty performing a task because of something in one's brain chemistry that one cannot control.
I think we should keep in mind that we do not know everything that happened. Certainly graduate programs can give students an unfairly rough ride, we've all seen that happen. There are also students who aren't in fact cut out for the academic life, and an inability to deal with paperwork, if it isn't a resolvable anxiety, could well be one reason (see: job market, grade submission, abstract deadlines, etc.).
Well, for all the lip service by the left, it's clear even if you dismiss the comments by the Paideia leadership types on here that the discipline does not value a diversity of viewpoints and believes plenty is provided by the present demographic. It's not from things shaking out naturally any more than skull sizes predetermining intelligence. It's a convenient excuse to blame the pipeline or the abilities of a student but in my experience the people who overwhelmingly represent the discipline now are afforded resources and assistance not given others. Cute and blonde? You get the patriarchy falling all over you to defend and help. Brown and trans? Classified as a charity case for needing the same assistance. Death by a thousand cuts. It's disgusting and I'm ashamed to be a tenured faculty member in this discipline. Not what I signed up for.
Jesus, the grad student has a disability; Berkeley should have accommodated it, as should any faculty job she might have ended up in. Most faculty jobs involve a lot of walking up and down stairs, but we don't eject students from grad programs because they use a wheelchair. The faculty knew she had trouble with paperwork and instead of helping their student took the excuse to fire her. That's cruelty, not fucking mercy.
Opportunities are key. I've seen lots of reactions on here that take a questioning of privilege as a dismissal of their hard work. I'm an old Michigan PhD so excuse the analogy, but most would admit Tom Brady is one of the hardest working NFLers in history. It doesn't dismiss the fact that he would have never been drafted let alone patiently brought along if he was black. Lamar Jackson would have been forced to switch to wide receiver as was still almost forced upon him in. It's the nature of the QB position and the biases that have traditionally existed. Classics is this for academia times ten.
I've found this dynamic is rarely understood by admins and faculty bc they're results of the system themselves. The privileged are given more training and opportunities to learn on the job. Others typically don't have the training and in the rare cases that they do, there's an inherent zero tolerance policy in place to learn on the job. We fall prey to our most vicious biases, I'm afraid.
I call bullshit re: the former Berkeley grad student. She was capable of organizing and running the Sportula as well as a homeless camp? But a bit paperwork was a source of crippling anxiety? Also, let's be honest. The sort of "paperwork" that this student had to complete was probably an online form that involved clicking a few boxes and agreeing to some terms, or at worst some forms to sign in some dean's office. Moreover, if processing requests for Sportula grants isn't itself just digital "paperwork," then I'm the Queen of England.
I think your comment is uncharitable, detached from the realities of team activities like those of the Sportula, and downright ignorant about anxiety and disability.
Yeah, the idea that professors need to be able to do paperwork and be socially adept refers only to minorities in academia. Take Dirk Obbink, for example. According to the Guardian, "In the early 2000s, he held the chair of papyrology at the University of Michigan – a full-time job – but failed to resign from Oxford". Paperwork, paperwork. How about being neurodivergent (I dislike this term, but it will do for now)? If you fit the Dirk Obbink frame, you are "an eccentric figure, even by Oxford standards." Or " a standard-issue Oxford don – head in a book, limited social skills, “an absent-minded professor type”, as one collector called him." You see, 19:13 and 12:54, where is it going or should I spell it out for you?
Quotes from: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/09/a-scandal-in-oxford-the-curious-case-of-the-stolen-gospel . Published yesterday.
I don't even know what to say at this point, if graduate students can't be expected to complete rather basic paperwork. That the field is home to the occasional bumbling forgetful professor isn't really an excuse. When I was a graduate student and I had finished my coursework, I received regular automatic email reminders that if I did not sign up for the empty "independent study" credits that I would no long be a student at the university. This was not something to fool around with. Moreover, if one has such major mental issues triggered by such simple tasks, there are almost always resources available on a university campus's outside of one's department that will advocate on a student's behalf. What I would like to know is this: at what point do we stop blaming the discipline for every little thing that goes wrong?
When the discipline stops being so Biff and Buffy Johnson in culture or at least stops whining about getting shut down when even the neolib admins can't justify how out of touch it is even for an institution that has always stacked the deck in favor of the privileged caste.
After everything that went down at Oxford/EES that is directly connected to the guy, you still call him a "bumbling forgetful professor", kind of proving my point even further. There is a sea of forgiveness for white people in our discipline, and none for anyone else. For example, I'm white and during my grad studies I attended a course, but forgot to officially sign in. It was a requirement. I did not receive any reminders, or maybe I did, but forgot. Guess what, I was allowed to graduate without anyone ever mentioning this. Does this reflect my worth as a scholar? I would like to think not. Does it reflect my privilege? Absolutely yes.
If you can't fill out paperwork or complete basic administrivia because it gives you extreme anxiety, you should seek professional help. But you also shouldn't blame the field/the profession of teaching. If you can't manage that, how can you publish? How can you teach future generations of students without our worrying that you might not be a colleague we can consistently rely on? I wouldn't trust a surgeon who becomes destabilized over paperwork to operate on me. I apply that same principle to every other profession including ours.
If you're severely handicapped from empathising with 50%+ of your student body (and growing) bc you're severely overrepresented in your discipline to the point of said discipline becoming critically irrelevant, you should resign and make way for others. This is obviously not happening since "handicaps" are so subjectively defined and applied.
The story related in 10:08's link is just as ludicrous. Somebody's husband died and they acquired a crippling inability to fill out paperwork? The assertion that led to their expulsion is correct; if you can't do some basic fucking paperwork, then how the hell can you expect to be a successful academic? Abstracts, grant applications, signing up for insurance--all paperwork. If you somehow ended up being a professor and advising students, then you'd have grades, recommendations, book ordering, etc--all paperwork. So, can someone tell me how we're supposed to make academia more inclusive in this regard? By eliminating all paperwork? Jesus Christ. Get a grip, people, if you can't fill out some (probably electronic! Don't even to have actually write anything!) forms, you probably can't handle being an academic.
There once was a man named Hewett who's name happened to rhyme with "sue it" When people complained he said they defamed considered the law and said "screw it"
This only made sense once I made a visit to Twitter and saw what the outrage of the day was among our Extremely Online colleagues. It would be amusing if some ridiculous Italian show trial were the result. The characters from Paideia and Sportula deserve each other, quite frankly.
"Classics=white people fetishising an astonishingly tiny bit of evidence from a small elite segment of the distant past to valorize their own imperialistic present"
Indeed, I too thought it was a frightfully dumb comment. More of the same hackneyed nonsense that offers nothing constructive but meets the criteria set forth by the Wokescold cabal.
Thoughts re: that tweet from scs president-elect? I get her annoyance that someone is crowding her out, but isn't it, um, anti-Semitic?
"For two days I have been suppressing anger about how one WW Jewish classicist shifted attention away from my interview with calls for a blog post on another Jewish WW. This woman always does this to me. Sick and tired of it."
Just stop it. The only thing cheaper than the angry brown/black characterization is the objective merit delusion. This is beneath even the incredibly know bar for classics.
Death by a thousand cuts. So much worse than the smattering of Trumpsters in the discipline is the unified and amplified bias that results from the discipline being so uniformly white and culturally monotone. It's the background hum that never goes away. The president elect is 100x the person most of us will ever be and we need her more than she needs the discipline. This is Diversity 101 and classics still abjectly fails the test and probably always will.
Rather than the putting the burden of proof on the students and general population - the ridiculous and rightfully ridiculed why-don't-we-just-ask-them approach - I think it's about time the burden is placed on us to prove that we're not a white supremacy group. Sure looks like it to outsiders. If programs can't demonstrate this with tangible proof and metrics, we should be shut down, especially at public universities. This was clearly demonstrated when we got a peek behind the curtain from someone who had nothing to lose yet many within our midst still have the audacity to claim her testimony is irrelevant or worse. I don't care about the hidden fascists in our midsts. I'm more worried that what's staring at us in the face barely registers and scarcely illicits a response outside hollow initiatives that we all know will change nothing. The way we change this and thrive is by being the leading edge of institutional reform rather than bringing up the rear begrudgingly. It's a terrible look. Shame on academia but even more so on us.
What a bore. The President of the SCS, i.e. the person who is basically the titular head of the discipline, is annoyed because people aren't paying enough attention to her. Maybe untwist those knickers and actually focus on what matters, like the fact that the field is in freefall, instead of silly idpol arglebargle.
Yawn. Entertain me, Wokescold! It's the least you could do if you're going to bloviate constantly using attacks that were already tired by the end of the debates following the Black Athena brouhaha.
She’s trying to walk back the problematic tweet now, but it’s not going very well.
As for the original tweet, it certainly smells of antisemitism, but through the magic of intersectionality the respective identities of the people involved “complicate” the situation and allow for a great deal of obfuscation, which is what’s happening now among the few people who have dared enter the fray. It’s really something to behold— I assume amid the crickets that everyone else has been desperately ignoring the situation in the hope that it will just go away if they spend enough time pretending like it never happened. Haley’s political bona fides provide her with a great deal of plausible deniability, so she will probably weather the storm. But consider what she said: she accused a fellow classicist of slighting her, of being in some way hostile, of treating her unjustly, and she calls out her perceived antagonists by specifying that they are Jewish, as if this has something to do with their behavior. Besides that, the basic complaint of the tweet makes her look petty and insecure. So either way, it’s a bad look and an embarrassment for the SCS. I won’t speculate at this time why so many people felt she was the best-qualified person for the presidency, but it’s becoming clear that perhaps she wasn’t.
Her second tweet is in some ways more bizarre. She accuses her WW Jewish antagonist of playing “Oppression Olympics,” which is a right-wing talking point, and says antisemitism is pervasive in the field, which would be news to me. The mental gymnastics of the people now playing defense for her are truly amazing: Haley denies being anti-semitic. Phew! they cry. Glad to hear you deny it (sort of), guess it’s all ok then. Nothing to see here anymore. Move along….
"Oppression Olympics" isn't a right-wing talking point; it arose largely out of scholarship in intersectional feminism. I think Haley has been pretty open about the fact that she sees white women as hijacking social justice movements to replicate their own privilege, so instead of an "Old Boys' club," we have an "Old Girls' club." She sees this as a problem within Classics. To her, this obviously includes Jewish women who want to promote other Jewish women (in her opinion at her own expense). Was it politically savvy? No. Is it entirely consistent with her previous statements? Yes.
I just find it incredible that you and she and a cadre of twitterati are claiming that she, a tenured professor who was elected president of the SCS, lacks privilege and exists on the margins because white Jewish women keep centering themselves. None of these "WW Jewish classicists" are at the center right now. Nobody even really knows who they are or what they did to make Professor Haley so angry.
Also "oppression olympics" did arise from the feminist movement in the 90s but even in activist circles it is most often used pejoratively and it has indeed become a derogatory right-wing talking point akin to "wokeness." Both terms are used almost exclusively now by right-wing commentators in order to ridicule.
Yep, context matters and the thread makes her point actually. People, especially Jews, immediately piled on which demonstrates the privileged status of anti-semitism in the US whenever bias is discussed. The person the OP cites has a history of trotting out "Jewish lives matter too!" whenever bias is discussed in the discipline. One of the accusers even quickly trotted out that jews are particularly persecuted by being framed as people who only care about their plight, which ironically proved the original point that was missed by most. Well, as a Latina in an elite graduate program in a cosmopolitan metro, I had blacks, asians, and latinx faculty and staff members mentor and defend me. The Jews who comfortably outnumbered all these other groups combined? Never once and some were even perps. You never got a sense of empathy or social justice outside the white norm except perhaps when they caught of whiff of anti-semitism.
I have a good friend writing about this phenomenon for the NYT. She once overheard a room full of medical division heads, mostly Jews, complain that it was first the Asians and now Blacks/Latinx were overrunning the profession. She ran it through the channels and it was quickly buried.
This is old news. The exact same thing has been going on in other sectors of society like symphonies and cinema for decades now. I suspect classics fits into these groups quite comfortably now.
The OP was obviously triggered based on decades of abuse in the discipline. I'm embarrassed that we are so oblivious to it and that we are still at this infantile stage of cultural sensitivity in 2020. It will be a difficult lesson but her presidency is a long overdue window into a world that we as a whole are totally ignorant of bc scholars if her background haven't been able to speak their mind in safety. The last thing we need is for her to say we aren't worth it as so many who never made it to her position have done.
The fact remains that classics is one of the most hostile places for black and brown folks. Can you imagine any other discipline getting away with saying it's our white (and Ashkenazi) space and if you don't like it take a hike as people have repeatedly voiced on here? It's ludicrous.
Classics needs to be dispersed into other departments - history, lit, anthropology, etc. It would dilute the assholeness and you couldn't get away with the white supremacy narrative. I suppose it could be kept at Trump U and the fundamentalist schools.
@10:51 that never happened and this is what you sound like: "a friend of mine overheard some crafty jews plotting to undermine the goyim..yak yak yak." Stop.
@10:59 just retiring the others' antisemitism
@11:29 no one here or anywhere else in the field ever said " it's our white (and Ashkenazi) space and if you don't like it take a hike". We just elected a black woman president of the SCS for fuck's sake. The most prominent voices on our blogs and all the people being "centered" now are not white or Jewish. Did you even glance at this year's SCS program? Nearly half of it was dedicated to issues of race and inclusivity. Were you at the 2019 meeting when a scholar of similar background spoke his mind and became an academic celebrity for it? Stop being so fucking delusional. Haley published an unfortunate tweet that has created a lot of problems because it undeniably contained a whiff of antisemitism, and her response has been even worse. But now it has exposed the ugly underbelly of the so-called progressive social-justice types among us who have gone full Corbynista it seems, and that should frighten us all.
Once again, people are discussing a tweet, Facebook post, etc. without bothering to provide a link. Some of us don't spend oodles of time on social media, and would consider it a courtesy (or, at least, a time-saver) if from now on when people comment on something happening out there in social media they help the rest of us know where to go. (In this case, of course, it's relatively easy, but often references are made to some ongoing Twitter debate without even a hint of where to look.)
12:22 here. I posted too soon: I found Haley's tweet easily enough, and a few uninteresting responses to it (https://twitter.com/reginalatinae/status/1217449390719324160), but have no idea where to find the post that got under her skin, or related threads. Anyone want to help out here?
Uninteresting? She basically pointed out that she's tired of "but Jewish lives matter too" and then she got swiftly branded an anti-semite with people then going on and on about the trials and tribulation of a group that makes up a huge part of the discipline, proving her original point.
12:34, thanks for your quick response. I see just nine replies there, none by a name I recognize (and most not by people tweeting under their real names), and none going "on and on." So I assume that's happening in other threads, and don't know where to look.
If our sensitivities and responses for biases against non-whites were 1% as swift and viscious as the response we just witnessed, we wouldn't be on the wrong side of inclusivity as we are now.
P.S. 12:34, I'm Jewish, not too long ago I had a VAP/Lecturer position and was not reappointed by a chair whom two more senior Jewish colleagues suspected of antisemitism, and it is possible that this played a role in that decision. So I object to your implication that having more Jews than African-Americans in our field somehow means that Jews can't face discrimination and other obstacles, since I myself may be one data-point arguing the opposite.
Who said Jews let alone whites can't have biases directed against them? Despite your one anecdotal story the discipline remains overwhelmingly white with a healthy proportion of Jews that greatly exceeds the general populace. Whatever biases whites and Jews face, it's not hurting the bottom line and I dare you to say it's merit and excellence.
What I see here is that Jews by and large are not a part of the solution for making the discipline more interesting and intersectional, which explains the status quo.
Because of the bizarre nature of whiteness, Jewish people are one group that can be marginalized and othered by it or benefit from it depending on the situation. Shit's fucked up and bullshit.
I know, right? Kinda like how George Zimmerman is a racist white man who got away with murder because of white privilege while Sonia Sotomayor is a stunning and brave Latinx POC who struggles against the structural oppression of brown bodies.
We must remain vigilant against the malignant machinations of demonic whiteness whenever it rears its ugly white head and tosses its blond hair back in the wind like Farrah Fawcett.
The reason so many people are having trouble locating the context, is that Haley's tweet is not in response to a social media post but an email (email exchange?). Therefore, despite the certainty expressed by 10:40 and 12:34 (and some others), it's not clear "Jewish lives matter, too" is a fair paraphrase. It might be, but I bet no one here on NF2019 actually knows.
Someone overheard medical heads spouting off clearly prejudiced statements against black/brown physicians and the best retort was a classics VAP *might* not have been reappointed bc s/he was Jewish. Yeah, I would say we are clearly balanced in assessing and reacting to bias. **massiveeyeroll**
Every dean should read this forum to understand how disgustingly insular, privileged, and white supremacist classics is as a discipline and administrative unit. It doesn't matter how many of us are good ones as it's clear that there are plenty of bad apples and the discipline is stubbornly unseeing and unchanging. Paideia anyone? Berkeley Classics? These aren't obscure outlying programs - pretty damning.
9:28, that's one of my favorite posts ever, and I've been around for all incarnations of FV. I hope that in the outside world we know each other and are friends.
So the distinguished professor emeritus of Greek Archaeology in the most Asian city outside Asia just write on FB about Parasite, "A good film but not deserving the best picture Oscar..."
I can't think of a better recent example of why classics is whacked.
It's the echo chamber of classics. The best way to save classics, which I doubt is even possible, is to combine it with other depts. The most feasible is probably languages/lit as is happening at Miami Ohio but even this is a stretch for classics as it doesn't play nice with others while on its high horse.
We would logically fit better with other Mediterranean or "Old World" programs but the way Classics is traditionally constructed makes it fare even worse in this setting.
GL to the young uns coming up through the system now as you're being left a poopoo platter and trained to tackle it like it's 1899.
Yeah, the current spectrum of those defining the field on top are benign, sometimes helpful, Joe Biden types to malignant, white supremacists who shield their outlook in public just enough to maintain plausible deniability to the rest of the constituency.
11:50, I think I know the department of the close-minded, there-is-no-bias-when-it's-white-bias archaeologist referenced by 05:33 and it's one of the Mediterranean type programs. I'm actually an alumna. The situation has been stable for a generation but it's still very much a situation where classics believes it's the privileged first among equals if not the crown jewel of the dept and remains separate as much as possible - a shotgun marriage of convenience and necessity.
Like any similar situation, it works because the other divisions eat a lot of shite. If they were to refuse to do so, it would implode as seen elsewhere. It's how someone gets away with such a small worldview with impunity regardless of whether classics is stand alone or not.
Yeah, if "real classicists" aren't dictating terms, it rarely works. Look at Cincinnati. It's only on the map bc of its archaeology and the philologists seethe about the power dynamic viewing it as a perversion of the natural order.
Thanks for the insights, 15:18. Yeah, if that's the best case scenario then it doesn't look good. Classics is too hyper-focused to survive on its own and too elitist and insular to play well with others. I wish I could say it's changing but I don't see much difference in outlook with subsequent generations so it's rinse and repeat until we go extinct. Classics seems to generally attract two types - well-intentioned Hufflepuff nerds who can't effect change long term or right-leaning Slytherin elitists who don't truly give a shit outside getting theirs.
Where are all the Gryffindors and Ravenclaws? I suppose conervative nerdy classics doesn't tolerate those who substantively challenge the status quo so they either don't survive or have smartly chosen other fields.
Oddly enough I think the best analogy to save classics from itself is professional sports and how desegregation was a necessity to survive. Right now classics has a monopoly in the academy when it comes to the ancient world despite it focusing on a small elite sliver of its people and cultures and doing it from and almost exclusively philological, white perspective. It sounds counterintuitive, but encourage and help scholars to develop and thrive outside this system and it will light a fire under the gatekeepers to adopt change. The question is whether it can be done before the discipline collapses as academics increasingly don't give two shits about classics.
Here's the problem with that notion: Classics searches will always take safe candidates. You're seen as edgy in this field if you apply a post-1965 theory to canonical texts. You're seen as threatening (or superfluous) if you actually know more languages than Latin and Greek.
Is it possible/legal for a department to create a TT position and immediately offer it to a VAP in their department without advertising the position or interviewing other people for it?
This happens from time to time when a department can make a case for why they want to keep their current VAP without the hassle of a search.
In case you're talking about Indiana (who just did this), their recent history of hiring their own PhDs and current VAPs (a few years ago and they're probably about to do this again), coupled with the fact that their faculty keep leaving for greener pastures and there will soon be a huge gender disparity in the department, should tell you all you need to know about the department.
This is why target of opportunity hires (or any interdepartmental or pan-Medit hire) involving classics doesn't work.
Hey admins, we desperately need to hire someone who can contextualize classics within the Mediterranean. Result: hire the papyrologist who works in Ptolemaic Egypt or the BA archaeologist who once thought about Egypt.
Hey admins, we desperately need to hire someone who will diversify classics. Result: hire the white person who once co-chaired a session with a POC.
Hey admins, are VAP is great and we really want to TT them. Admins: what about the three female VAPs you had previous years?
15:34 you can't expect admins to force inclusive practices. I know of multiple instances over the past twenty years when small and cowardly classicists passively marginalized or even actively kicked out four classicists of colour. They just didn't get them or felt they were threats to the survival of classics ideology/orthodoxy or their own aspirations in an era of austerity. Best case they didn't see value in their presence outside some tokenized ideal where they could center themselves as SJWs. This would make a great SCS-AIA roundtable if we could somehow get these PoC to return literally if not figuratively to the table.
Yeah, the chair of another department recently joked with me that the job of classics is to police all the other disciplines, keep departments like African Studies in line. Not a good look if you understand the terrifying role and origins of police forces in the 20th century.
My God, you Wokescolds are tiresome. Go join an anthropology department where your grievance mongering and multicolored hair will be welcomed with open arms.
The Unwokescolds, obviously one person on here or perhaps several at most based on the repetitive Trumpian attempts at nicknames, are not being forced to read anything on here.
So which is it, 1) there's only one or several "Trumpian" posters on NFV or 2) Classics is a thoroughly regressive discipline populated by people who traffic in outmoded, racist, and colonialist attitudes? Your cognitive dissonance is showing.
There are more than two possibilities. I myself have never used the word "wokescold" in a sentence before this one, so I'm not the above poster, but I can tell you that our field has quite a few woke people who strongly dislike the "wokescolds."
If I understand the terms correctly, I've yet to see a person directly scolding anyone for not being woke enough here. Sure plenty of terrible experiences shared but who's woke scolding? What I do see is the repeated and direct scolding and ranting on an arrogant and childish level by the the person who keeps using the term wokescold to directly criticize and try to silence those sharing experiences. This unwokescold and adds nothing to the dialogue, just scolding which is both ironic and hypocritical. I'm guessing this person doesn't realize that his privilege in classics circles does not translate online where people cannot discern his artificially exalted status through typed words no matter how eloquent and clever he thinks he is.
13:04, I will now use the word "wokescold" for the second time ever -- gee, whiz, this sure is addicting! -- to point out that our field is not the only one with such people. Did you catch the story this week about how Natalie Portman wore a dress to the Oscars that featured the names of several female directors in order to make a statement and then Rose McGowan rather viciously attacked her for doing so (to which Portman responded with class)? Both of them believe there should be more female directors, so they're on the same side, but McGowan's way of advancing her cause was to be needlessly obnoxious. So, too, does the world of classical studies have a lot of well-meaning people, a small number of whom are obnoxious about the causes they believe in.
I love how classics programs have splashy photos of material culture, including objects of marginal interest and priority to the discipline like the Giza Pyramids, on their websites and brochures yet mostly have adjunct archaeologists or dabbling historians at best on faculty. C'mon guys. To be honest, show off your splashy images of Loebs and perhaps some papyri.
Yeah, always a surprise to learn that most classicists see no necessity in visiting the original locales of their research topics and such experiences are never factored into evaluating suitability for faculty positions. I suspect much if it has to do with notions that the present inhabitants aren't their Romans and Greeks. Yet they're advising study abroad opps for students despite an utter lack of qualifications.
In weak defense of the discipline, millennials have had to consider what's considered important by the discipline and tailor their pursuits accordingly in order to compete. Hate the system, not the players. It's a major reason why I'm on the cusp of getting my PhD and will immediately go alt ac. I woke up one day a number of months ago and realized I'm nowhere in the vicinity of pursuing what originally ignited my passion for the field. I've slowly drifted according to pragmatics drilled into me by well intentioned advisors so it's now just a job that's more than ever guaranteed to be attached to a terrible lifestyle.
Yes, because everyone has the financial capability to spend extended amounts of time in Greece, Italy, or assorted others places relevant to Greco-Roman antiquity. I love this topic in particular because it invariably traps the Woke when they start wondering very loudly how one can even claim to be a classicist without ever having been to Greece or Italy. Rebecca Futo Kennedy pulled this elitist bullshit on Twitter awhile back and was rightfully shut down. The only reason I get to spend 1.5 months in Greece every year is because I work for an excavation that pays for my flight and room and board. When I was a graduate student the only reason I got to spend a year in Greece was because I got a fellowship.
I'm relatively fortunate to be on my third decent VAP but this is it for me despite how coveted a full-time VAP is these days. Speaks volumes. I finally came to the realization that I don't like the majority of academics and the super majority of classicists who have made it. It certainly in no way resembles my previous interactions with grad students. The jump from student to faculty apparently culls the loveliest and most interesting ones from academia.
The process surprisingly (at least for me) resembles the presidential race. You get a bunch of candidates who hold a diversity of perspectives and platforms throwing their hats into the ring and you're excited about the possibilities.
In the end, thanks to the entrenched system that includes external influences putting their finger on the scale, you end up with Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Warren, and Biden. People then ask how TF did we ended up here but it's a question that Classics never seems to recognize let alone ask for some reason. Then you have the random undeserving dude from the right who somehow gets a free pass all the way to the finals unsullied and he promptly mops the floor with someone from a harried group, but it's considered a victory in itself bc you have two white women who made it that far.
Now imagine it ten times worse and you have Classics.
I decided to post this in "state of the field". Never mind people who can't be bothered with description of changes on Wiki. Someone who put "new information" is the new evil. WHAT information??
ReplyDeleteEven worse, the multiple times that people have added something with NO COMMENT!
DeleteNot sure why the first two comments were deleted, they weren't even directed at anyone in particular...
ReplyDeleteok, per the previously deleted conversation on the other board: can someone please tell me where all the racist uncles and MAGA hat wearing Chad Worthington types are, because I've never encountered them. All the Classicists I've ever known and worked with are quite vocally on the left. They are exactly what you would expect to find in any humanities department in the 21st century (sometimes irritatingly so). Most of the people I know voted for Bernie Sanders, watch Democracy Now! because MSNBC is too corporate, still read Marx and Chomsky, ground their own free-trade organic coffee beans, and healthy portion of them have never learned to drive a car. People here who keep characterizing Classics as some sort of conservative 19th century throwback are either being dishonestly hyperbolic or are not in the field. Or are deranged.
ReplyDeleteGrind, not ground, what do you take us for, a bunch of food waste composters too? Also, you may be overlooking the generation at the top, at least...
Deletelol, yes grind. That was copied, pasted, and poorly edited. But I buy Folgers in big plastic tubs, so what do I know anyway. It is the older generation I am thinking about. But maybe I just haven't spent enough time with the really bigwigs at the super elite institutions (though I know a few...). Because we are not supposed to name names here I doubt my question can even be answered. It's just that all the accusations being flung at our field run against my experience and may be doing a great deal of harm, which bothers me because these accusations are mostly, if not totally, false. Outside religiously affiliated schools or Hillsdale, do you know a single tenured professor who is a MAGA white supremacist, or even just a conservative? I don't, and yet certain rabble rousers claim the field is hopelessly dominated and populated by these types.
Deletehttps://amgreatness.com/author/bruce-heiden/. The other people who come to mind don't write for publications like AG, but they're out there.
DeleteInteresting. I was in his department back when he was a liberal Democrat, and once had an hour-plus political discussion with him during which I hid the fact that I was (moderately!) conservative, since I didn't want him to think ill of me.
Deleteok, a professor at OSU is a conservative who writes for a conservative magazine. So what? He is certainly in the minority. Not even counting Eidolon, I can think of a dozen Classicists off the top of my head who write for far-left publications, or for books published by nambla, or who are literally members of the communist party. My point is, conservatives are a minority in the field, they do not dominate its leadership (hello, have you been paying attention to the SCS over the past few years?), they have little influence among us, and they do not set the tone. Classics is not a bastion of conservatism, let alone white supremacy; it is the exact opposite. One of the posters on the other thread accused classics of being a racist 19th-century throwback based solely on the fact that the classicist who attended a decolonization seminar-decolonization mind you-with her was white. This is a low bar indeed, but this sort of thing also seems to be fueling a very destructive narrative about our field. But I'll go even further and ask why the mere presence of a few conservatives bothers some people so much? And what if, instead of a tiny minority, half of all classicists were conservatives or members of the republican party? Half the country is conservative, shouldn't half the field be as well for purposes of equal representation? In some parts of the country, like Ohio, I would bet a majority of the students are conservative, so what's wrong with having conservatives in the field and in the classroom? It seems to me that some people are trying to purge Classics of those few remaining souls who are not ideologically pure, who are not sufficiently "progressive" or even overtly political, and this strikes me as Soviet-style authoritarian bs. It's certainly illiberal and undemocratic. It's also worth talking about because the SCS and many among us have politicized their positions/occupations in a major way (and in a single direction) and they now dominate the conversation (every SCS blogpost, for example, is shamelessly political these days). It's just giving conservative critics of higher education more ammunition, if not actually proving them right. So stop and think really hard about what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve.
ReplyDeleteAlright, let's assume that you're arguing in good faith here. Conservatism, at least the modern American sort championed by reptiles like William F. Buckley, for many years assumed a veneer of gentility and pretensions to intellectualism that masked what it really was, namely disdain for anyone who wasn't a WASP. They billed themselves as the adults in the room, the serious people who needed to be in charge to keep the blacks, the feminists, the hippies, the commies, the queers, and the Jews in line.
DeleteDemocrats were wimps and sissies with questionable dedication to America. Sure, you couldn't say those things out loud, not like before, but you came up with the dog whistles, like "law and order" and "southern strategy" and "personal responsibility." Eventually conservatives made their proverbial deal with the devil in their marriage to the Religious Right, but the adults managed to keep their fundy allies in check with lip service to things like wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade, keeping mouthy women in check, promoting family and tradition, and whaling on the gays. During the Reagan years conservatives were abetted by USSR's slouch toward death, a distraction from their overseas shenanigans and ludicrous economic policies.
After the election of George Bush the Less Stupid, they were outmaneuvered by a slick, well-educated hillbilly who beat them at their own game and sold the electorate repackaged conservative policies with his charisma and saxophone-playing skills. Not even blowjobs and cigarfucking could be weaponized to bring Slick Willy down, despite the chicanery of odious hypocrites like Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr. The penultimate stage of modern conservatism in America was the much-maligned (and deservedly so) misrule of George Bush the Dumber, a mean and petty homunculus in addition to being a thoroughly stupid one. Add in a cast of supporting characters in his administration that were as greedy and depraved as any comic book villains but without any of the flair, a ruined economy, and a war that killed thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and birthed the Islamic State and you have one of the worst modern Presidencies on your hands. One would think the "reasonable" conservatives would have seen the light and said enough. Some of them made a lot of noise, but that's all it was--like good conservatives, they all fell in line.
Whatever frustrations they might have had with Bush II were no match for their baser, gutter instincts, and for eight years they frothed at the mouth and spewed every sort of libelous and slanderous venom at Barack Obama. Barack Obama, like Clinton, was a barely left-of-center politician, yet all manner of vitriol was hurled at him; Obama had the added albatross of the whole black thing, so that compounded the rage.
Now, in the present environment the Trump kakistocracy, the mask has finally been ripped away. Out-and-out neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis run for office as Republicans. White supremacist policies are enacted from the Oval Office. Trump is the apotheosis of every ugly aspect of American conservatism revealed, the veneer gone--a revanchist strain of white privilege tempered by greed, sexism, racism, and xenophobia.
So, to answer your question about why the presence of conservatives bothers people, see above. Anyone who calls themself a conservative and has been a good soldier and voted R despite feeling bad about it or whatever, deserves nothing but contempt.
The conservatives I've met in the field -- and I can count, off the top of my head, at least 11 -- tend to be Catholics rather than MAGA people. Probably, most of them are never Trumpers, but also probably some of them did vote for Trump. I've also met a large number of conservative democrats, people who are misremembering history along with Joe Bindens or recycling fox news talking points along with Buttigieg and that nervous candidate from Minnesota. People who agree with everything but the disposition of the right's attacks on AOC. What's odd is that I've found more pro-Eidolon voices in the first group than in the second!
DeleteI think the strategy here is to force people in the first group to a choice: are they so bothered by the redistributive policies of Bernie et al, which in most advanced countries would be considered center-left, that they will vote for Trump, who has commandeered the GOP away from its long-held orthodoxies? Or, will they finally realize that the Republican party is not the bastion of common sense but a force for societal and global destruction? What's nice about many Catholics (and I say this as a hard left atheist) is that, unlike many Evangelicals, they tend to be genuinely troubled by things like Trumpism. They also tend to dislike capitalism, only they call it "modernity" or "secularism" ...but that's another story. (Side note: Leo XIII's rerum novarum should be required reading in civix classes)
I don't agree with your suggestion that the SCS blogs will accelerate the defunding of the humanities. If anything, the neoliberal identity politics of the professional managerial class(ics) can cause conservative legislatures to fund the classics, as has happened at Arizona State.
Moreover, if right-wing legislatures really defund the Western cannon, they will upset the conservatives who love that shit. Again, the strategy here is to make those on the center-right realize that the Republican party is incompatible with their values.
In conclusion, Bernie 2020.
Eidolon exists to make people in classics feel as though they are contributing to a cause. That's fine by me; I doubt it has any real impact. If it accelerates the dissolution of the field as we know it, amen. If it simply allows some classicists to show the world how incredibly dull they are outside the parameters of their scholarly expertise, an even bigger amen. All of this stuff is done mainly to make classicists (overwhelmingly middle, upper-middle, and upper-class) feel like they aren't sitting on top of a pile of poor (black, brown, white) bodies. Look at the successful POC in the field; they all seem to have graduated from expensive private high schools and universities/colleges. That's excellent for them, and they deserve it! But getting more POC into the field, as excellent as it is, is unlikely to cause any structural change. I suspect that is the point, subconsciously, for many "progressives" in our field.
DeleteAt this point the whole university system needs to be nationalized for anything like justice to happen.
Classics has the same problem that the Dem party has that every other disciplines seems to have overcome.
Deletehttps://www.cnn.com/2019/12/04/opinions/kamala-harris-withdraws-pete-buttigieg-remains-zakaria/index.html
What problem is that, 6:27? This particular talking point, which has polluted the news cycle over the past few days, is exceedingly irksome. It is also misleading to the point of being false. Are you saying that Democrats are racist and sexist, but not homophobic? Have you and everyone else forgotten that BARACK OBAMA won two presidential elections with comfortable margins? (I voted for him twice). I think Kamala Harris withdrew because she was a terrible candidate with a terrible record who was eviscerated by Tulsi Gabbard (a Samoan-American Hindu) on live television. Also, Kamala Harris had virtually no support among African American voters. Are you saying African American voters are racist and sexist? So in addition to Tulsi, there remains an African American candidate, Corey Booker, a Latino candidate, Julian Castro, an Asian candidate, Andrew Yang, a native American candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and a Jewish candidate, Bernie Sanders, who, according to twitter, isn't white because he is Jewish. So at least six POC are still in the race! (you see how tedious and absurd identity politics has gotten?)
DeleteTo reiterate, Kamala Harris had virtually no support among black voters:
"So far, though, polling shows Biden with a dominant share of black Democrats’ support. An average of two Quinnipiac polls of Democratic-leaning voters, one taken right after Biden declared his candidacy and another released in late May, found him well ahead of the other candidates, with 46 percent among African Americans nationally. Compare that with an average of 10 percent for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), 7 percent for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and 11 percent for the three black candidates combined." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-do-black-voters-support-biden-they-just-want-to-beat-trump/2019/05/31/74b37ca8-7b33-11e9-8ede-f4abf521ef17_story.html)
Also, Julian Castro has virtually no support among latino voters:
"A poll released this week by Telemundo Noticias showed Castro in a three-way tie for fourth place among Latino voters, with only 2% support. Former Vice President Joe Biden (26%) and Sanders (18%) led the candidates among those voters."
(https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/09/election-2020-candidate-julian-castro-lacks-latino-voter-support/2528034001/)
https://twitter.com/kacaliendo/status/1202597127567925248?s=19
Delete12:17 here: I failed to see your comment, 12:02. Apologies to the readers for the repetition, but also, here here!
ReplyDeleteThank you 12:02 for answering my question so thoroughly. It seems you are contemptuous and intolerant of conservatives wherever they happen to be. Your own penchant for "libelous and slanderous venom" was especially illuminating ("reptiles," "the Less Stupid," "slick, well-educated hillbilly," etc.)
ReplyDeleteAlso, 12:51, the states already have publicly funded state-controlled universities. I received a splendid education from a state school for next to nothing. I think the geographical dispersal of power and control across smaller bodies is more efficient and preferable to total control by the federal government. Imagine a nationalized university system under the control of the Trump administration or someone else like him.
For Pete's sake, the expression is "Hear, hear!" As in "Hear (what this person has to say), hear (what this person has to say)!" "Here, here" makes no sense at all, and yet I regularly see people writing it that way. Think, think!
Deleteit's a clever: like, there's (at least) two of us here
Delete(when roll is taken, people typically say "here!")
Also, pretty sure Bill Clinton would take "slick, well-educated hillbilly" as a point of pride. It's hardly venomous slander in this instance.
DeleteYou can trust me on this: I too am a slick, well-educated hillbilly.
13:26, yeah, I'm sure you're perfectly fine with sparsely populated states, almost exclusively white and right, receiving outsized representation thanks to the electoral college and severely outdated Senate model. Marginalizing and disenfranchising a bunch a people that happen to be less affluent and brown/black is just a random and unfortunate coincidence, right?
DeleteYeah, that's systemic gaming and the House is gaming through gerrymandering. Just bc it's legal like legacy admissions or a modicum of plausible deniability exists doesn't mean it's right. But whatever lets you sleep at night.
DeleteI heard that UT Austin is finally trying to get rid of Thomas Hubbard. Does anyone have information on this? My only source is a friend of a friend.
ReplyDeleteI saw something on Twitter about that-it looked like a petition campaign spearheaded by students, but I do not have all of the facts.
DeleteHubbard has long been known to be a creep. The best case scenario is that he is strongly encouraged to retire and does, since he isn't exactly young. Attempts to fire tenured professors always turn into nasty legal fights, and since UT is a public university this will also trigger the First Amendment issue given that the university is an extension of the government. At this point everything Hubbard has done is limited to his writings and courses, ergo they are protected speech. Now, if Hubbard is revealed to have been pulling a Daddy Cruel or worse, then at that point it merits termination. At that point I supposed the point would be moot, as he would likely go to jail. In general, though, I think firing tenured faculty is a bad thing.
DeleteIt's not as if this is some shocking new revelation. He's been quite transparent about all of this stuff throughout his rather successful career. Just look at his CV. The question is, why did so few people think he was problematic up until now.
DeleteSomething else to keep in mind about the infamous "Greek Love Reconsidered" book he edited: it contains other essays by upstanding scholars who are not known creeps, and who may not have known what they were getting themselves into.
I've been at the same panels as Hubbard a few times at CAMWS. He usually asks interesting questions and just seems like he has idiosyncratic mannerisms. But when I spoke to him at a reception, he was super creepy and turned the conversation to age of consent laws and sexual assault laws whenever possible. I was definitely left with the impression that he's a real NAMBLA ally. I wonder if gender dynamics when it comes to reporting sexual assault account for a reason why he seemingly has no allegations...
ReplyDeleteDoes he advise students anymore? Just looking at the UT Austin faculty, though, they probably don't have many Greek lit students. Although he's certainly well-known, it seems like his name would be a real negative on the job market.
Okay, not really a state of the field question, but one that I've had for a while, and since this part of the blog is dead who would object to my raising the matter here?
ReplyDeleteI am curious if any of you have thoughts regarding why people look at C.V.'s on Academia.edu, when those people are not in the process of hiring someone. In my case, I've been out long enough that I have some publications that get a decent number of downloads, plus a book that was well reviewed, so I can see why people in my area will wander over to my webpage on occasion. And since they do, I've put my C.V. there, since that seems like a good idea. Academia.edu doesn't reveal who is looking at one's page or downloading things, but its Analytics screen does say WHERE they are, and I'd say that about 90% of the people who have looked at my C.V. are at places that are not hiring (especially those in other parts of the world), and more than a few are in areas without a university or college that has a classics program. So why do people look at C.V.'s? Idle curiosity? I find this rather puzzling, but long ago learned not to pay it any mind: in other words, just because someone in Cambridge, Mass. checks out my C.V. it doesn't mean that they are about to create a position just for me...
If I've ended up at your academia.edu page because I'm interested in something you wrote, I'm likely to check out your CV to see if you've done other things I might like that are not posted. If I'm seeing something written in my general research area by someone I don't know, I might look to see who they worked with or where they studied.
DeleteOriginal poster here. I see your point, of course, but the Analytics page doesn't always reflect that: sometimes people visit my page and look at an article and then check out my C.V., but there are quite a few who, if Analytics is to be trusted, just come to my page and look at nothing other than my C.V. And that perplexes me, since they're not looking to hire me. Perhaps they're interested in conference papers, to see what I might do next? To me this is odd behavior, since I rarely look at other people's C.V.'s. (And now that I think of it, about half the time I'm doing that it's because someone was mentioned on FV, either positively or negatively.)
DeleteSometimes I look at CV's as a model for how to format something when I don't know what the conventions are (ie. certain archaeological fieldwork or disclosing the amount of fellowships). As a job seeker, I'm looking to emulate the best practices in the field so I look to the CV's of scholars I respect for inspiration
DeleteDo you pay for academia? Because the analytics for you CV are behind a paywall... you're not confusing it with people just looking at your profile?
DeleteNo, not paying. But you're only half-right, 15:35: information about institution and the "role" of each visitor is grayed-out and requires payment, but one gets to see for free which city or town he/she is from. And no chance I'm confusing looking at the C.V. with looking at the profile. This morning, for example, someone came to my page via Google and looked at the C.V. and then my profile three minutes later, with these being logged as distinct visits (or page-views). (And that person was logging in from a city with no connection to any job for which I've applied. And anyway, if I've applied for a job they already have my C.V., so this visit, like so many others, obviously is not from someone considering me for employment.)
Deletewell, what can I say, you're either very popular or your name is the same as of someone who is popular. keeps those numbers up!
DeleteKeep in mind too that the locations reported on Academia are probably mapped from IP addresses, which are not always very precise. This, I suspect, accounts for some of the seemingly random locations for search origins.
DeleteI'd been wondering whether some of the stranger locations might be attributed to a VPN, but why would someone use a VPN before viewing my scholarship? It's stimulating, sure, but not THAT kind of stimulating.
DeleteHubbard update. There is an on-going undergraduate movement against UT's sexual misconduct policies, focused mainly on two non-classics professors who were found guilty of various things but seemingly not punished severely. A woman who had taken one of Hubbard's classes has been campaigning to get his cause wrapped into this, and she has apparently finally succeeded: there is video now circulating of a loud protest at his home last night. For better or for worse, the student protests are mainly focused on "pedophilia" rather than on the broader issues that have been documented within the classics community.
ReplyDeleteAlso, apparently the department did try to get rid of him several years ago (not sure what grounds), but got shot down by the central administration.
I mean, whatever shitty thing he has done in the classics community, if he has abused a minor or even suggested that such abuse is licit, that is definitely reason #1 to get rid of him. If he had sex with a student over the age of 18 he should still go. If he harassed students or colleagues he should still go. But the dude has been a vocal advocate of pederasty in one form or another. That tops it.
ReplyDeleteDoes this mean we finally get to cancel Foucault?
ReplyDeleteAnd Derrida, and Deleuze/Guattari, and Lyotard, and all the other post-modern tards, because they were all advocates of paederasty who wanted to abolish age of consent laws:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws
I'll hang up and take my answer off the air.
Yes, and I will not rest until they've stopped teaching.
ReplyDeleteNo matter what, protesting at someone's house is pretty low (with the exception of the White House, for obvious reasons), and is a form of behavior that's only started in recent years. First time I've ever had any sympathy for Hubbard.
ReplyDeleteWhat has happened, and is happening right now, to TKH is truly frightening. However odious many of his views are, there is no justification whatsoever for the mob that recently attacked his home. They did more than just protest on his front lawn; they pummeled his door and issued threats while shining spotlights through his windows; he had to be escorted from his house by police in order to secure his safety; the protesters then vandalized his home and property, and left behind a spray-painted hammer and sickle on his driveway (in addition to other threatening messages throughout the neighborhood). If that doesn't tell you what sort of people they are, you can venture over to Twitter and watch a video the maenadic, emotionally incontinent, completely unhinged vandals proudly posted themselves. The sheer rage and hysteria they display is really quite shocking considering the fact that they are not even accusing him of harassing or abusing anyone, no, their accusations, or really just observations, are that he has written arguments against age of consent laws, that he taught a class they found offensive, and that he made sexist comments. Yes, his work has sort of make him nambla-adjacent, but I do stand with freedom of speech in this case and in opposition to these violent protestors.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes this situation even more interesting, utterly fascinating really, is that the rabble-rousers all appear to be marxist/communist activists. Of course, the communist party of Great Britain and some communist organizations in America include in their platform a demand to "abolish age-of-consent laws," and in fact it's not his position on consent laws that seem to bother them so much as his bourgeois attitude toward them. From the marxist "news" site "Incendiary," which is covering the story (you can't make this stuff up):
"Hubbard seeks to import the sexual practices and ideologies of aristocratic slave societies to present-day society, and has described age of consent laws, which prohibit sexual activity between adults and minors, as a “sad by-product” of a “self-righteous era.”
"While on the surface, bourgeois society prohibits sexual activity between adults and minors, in fact, youth are hyper sexualized and vulnerable to predators under modern day capitalism, putting Hubbard more in line with bourgeois exploiters than not."
oh it's you again, here to bloviate about communism...
DeleteNo, its' not "me" again you oblivious prig. This is central to the unfolding story. The activists responsible for the protest and vandalism are self-described marxists/Leninists, as opposed to run-of-the-mill feminists or bored students in search of a cause, and they are using explicitly marxist language to describe the incident and indeed their motives on social media. And they are disseminating the story on twitter via the local Austin, TX Marxist "news" outlet cited above, which has posted two stories so far celebrating the harassment and vandalism. This is something unusual, in my experience, and worthy on note. If you took your head out of Bernie Sander's red ass long enough to take a look around, you might have noticed it too.
DeleteHe's not 'sort of NAMBLA adjacent'; he published a book with NAMBLA's press.
DeleteThis Hubbard stuff is much ado about nothing, as I've heard that he is probably retiring in the next year or so. There's no way in hell that a public university would attempt to fire a tenured professor on the verge of retirement, since in all likelihood a protracted legal battle would be the result. Hubbard has also issued a response to the accusations being leveled against him, and it seems that he is a lot more cool-headed about the situation than the people screeching for his head on a platter.
DeleteA response where? Obviously he wasn't going to get fired; UT is a public institution. But there is nothing wrong with shaming people who declare or do shameful things. Free speech doesn't give anyone the freedom to be an asshole or a creep.
DeleteUmm, actually free speech does allow one to be an asshole and a creep, so long as nothing illegal has been done, and thus far everything that makes Hubbard a creep is tied to words and not illegal acts. If he worked for a private employer then they could fire him if they chose to do so based on speech alone. Hubbard, however, is employed by the state and the whole point of the first amendment is to prevent the state from infringing upon one's right to free speech. Moreover, he has the protection of tenure. What bothers me most about this is that people in the field, namely the extremely online Twitter folks, are calling for Hubbard's dismissal and showing their total disregard for tenure and the reasons it exists. Do we really want to encourage the firing of tenured faculty when the the field is in freefall? It's would be a bad idea even if it weren't.
DeleteThe field is indeed in freefall, and I now see why: you just recapitulated my comment in about three times as many words. It isn't protected free speech for me to suggest that you are talking out of your ass, and saying so still makes me an asshole.
DeleteRead this for a simple explainer on the first amendment that even you should be able to grasp:
https://www.popehat.com/2018/04/25/a-first-amendment-issue-vs-absolutely-protected-by-the-first-amendment-a-common-free-speech-misunderstanding/
What scares me most about Classics is not the appearance of drunk-uncle-at-Thanksgiving syndrome or the frequency of it, which is somewhat alarming, but the general blasé response to it by the discipline. It truly is frightening shit. By DUAT syndrome, I'm referencing Paideia, SCS, Cruel Daddy, the enormously influential Weinstein dudes at Columbia/Brown/etc. What a shit show. For all the claims of being moderate Eisenhower/Nixon/Reagan Rs, I beginning to think that leading with "I'm not a Trumpster" likely means that you are in fact one.
Delete17:48's (also as 19:05) language is not the type of language we'd like to see used here. But we don't want to delete this thread, as it is a very valuable conversation to have. 17:48 you can still make your point without calling other posters names. We will delete such posts in the future.
DeleteFor anyone who cares, Hubbard's response is linked in an article from one of the newspapers in Texas that is covering the situation. Links to both:
Deletehttps://www.statesman.com/news/20191204/austin-students-want-professor-fired-for-writings-on-age-of-consent-ut-says-itrsquos-protected-speech
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wGGrODNSdwudrF1G4uerU2DsRxcSx3DR1Nbn6JOd7ho/edit
In the article linked here, TH says:
Delete“I have written many hundreds of pages on such topics, which you really need to examine carefully if you want to do responsible reporting,” he said. “You should not merely accept it on faith if some naive undergraduate student quotes something to you from an article they may not have even read fully or have the intellectual sophistication to understand.”
Ah the irony that he thinks those young students would not have the intellectual sophistication to understand....
Question: what happens if someone's first book is not received well? Does that have an actual impact on one's career? Obviously, it must be devastating for the writer, but does anyone else care? I have not even published my first project, but I'm going through a slump, so I'm trying to convince myself it will be fine one way or another.
ReplyDeleteYes, it matters, if you are at an institution that cares about that sort of thing.
DeleteI know someone who was denied tenure for it. Book was not liked.
ReplyDeleteWell, I feel for this person. I won't really worry about this now, as I can't even get a TT position.
DeleteAnyone know what was said on the LCC listserv about Hubbard that has the Extremely Online twitter brigade up in arms?
ReplyDeleteSince no one's been posting, permit me to vent about something. I'm prepping for an interview in D.C. and in looking up what the search committee chair works on and teaches I've found that he has not updated his departmental webpage in about a decade. And I've seen this sort of thing elsewhere. How do departments (and deans, for that matter) not enforce the regular updating of webpages (especially at taxpayer-funded institutions)? It's such an obviously necessary thing to do, and it's not like it takes much effort.
ReplyDeleteThree thoughts (the last one not really relevant to your point):
Delete1) I'm pretty scrupulous about keeping my own page up to date, but the institutional IT bureaucracy is such that it is a real effort to do so.
2) In practice a rule would be very hard to write and enforce.
3) Most public universities are only barely "taxpayer-funded" any more.
I'm presenting my first SCS paper next week and have fallen way behind on the paper... now sort of stressing out! Any tips on how to manage this? Do most of you finish your papers in advance or is it par for the course to be writing up to the day of the presentation?
ReplyDeleteI've had fellow grad students and professors who write papers right up to the presentation. Mine's presentable, but I'm still working on it. Ideally you'd have it done in advance, but procrastination seems to be endemic among academics, myself included.
DeleteThree days is plenty, assuming you're going on Friday. I'd write as much as you can, making your point as clear as possible, and get someone to look it over and give feedback asap.
Someone liked your argument enough to accept your paper, so take comfort in that. Don't feel the need to write extra to compensate either. No one will be mad at you for giving a clear 12-14 minute talk versus a meandering 20 minute talk.
10:59 is right on the money. One other thing I was taught by a mentor in philosophy: when nervous, always start with something a little informal (thanking people, a joke if you’re comfortable with that). It lets you relax into the talk, even though it’s just a second or two. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteCurious why the reality check blog post by the marginalized Latinx was grabbed by a venue hosted by two white dudes. Even if it's purely for selfless reasons, doubtful, it's tone deaf. I can think of a dozen better venues.
ReplyDeleteAs one of the white dudes, this angle did occur to me. We have created a platform and we will share it. The author reached out on social media and we offered the space. I understand that this may seem "tone-deaf", as you put it, but we were aware of the dissonance.
DeletePersonally, I don't see any way out of such a potential quandary. If the outcome is that her post and experiences received a wide audience but we are open up to charges of hypocrisy etc, I can live with that.
How do we make our world more equitable, our spaces more inclusive, and our disciplines more just? If there are better ways, I am listening.
Academia stubbornly remains a tone deaf white space so it's par for the course. Where classics can help is to stop being the flagship discipline of this system but I have severe doubts it's fundamentally possible regardless of how many initiatives, diversity officers, etc are thrown into the mix. I think the solution is for the "west" to stop being the dominant cultural and economic narrative in the world but this will take generations.
DeleteI actually asked Joel to let me post my classics swan song on SA. I don't know him, but when I was thinking of classicists with platforms, his website has been a source of real pleasure to me for years, and I've especially appreciated previous blog posts he's hosted about classics and mental illness, always with a link at the end to a suicide prevention hotline that ended with "And if we can help you find some tether to the continuity of human experience through the Classics or a word, please don’t hesitate to ask." That to me summed up the best of what Classics can be, and was the core of the vision I had for sportula way more than any explicitly political posturing, and part of what I mourn sportula being forced to lose in the wake of SCS 19.
DeleteI feel bad for the Berkeley student who was forced to leave their program, esp. since I believe that Sportula is doing great work. That said, it sounds like it was all over some paperwork that wasn't filed? Pretty much everyone I know hates having to deal with all the assorted paperwork in academia, but is it really that much of a chore?
DeleteWe all have foibles. The difference in my experience is the selective enforcement of policies in academia typically in line with explicit and implicit biases which result in negative consequences that are more frequent and devastating the farther one is from the white, male, straight ideal that our society subtly (and not so subtly) reinforces ceaselessly. Combined with all the other hurdles that the dominant group never encounters (and understandably can barely grasp), and you have the echo chamber of academia that just self-propagates its nonsense with its members scratching their heads in wonder why the status quo so stubbornly remains. These are all uniformly intelligent people but it shows you how dull and one-sided one's cultural perception can be when you're born and bred into this hidden caste system. It will never change with the underlying sentiment across society that the dominant group just does it better and deserves to be overwhelmingly in charge of powerful institutions such as academia, government, etc.
DeleteYup, as I tell my students who don't fit the ideal yet insist on plowing ahead into the academic profession, go white or go home. 10x for classics. I would argue that there is no institution that channels white culture more fervently as a template and measure for success than academia, even more so than politics, and classics obviously is the standard bearer.
DeleteI'm sorry to hear about the Berkeley student and applaud her courage to share the gory details we've never seen recorded so clearly and publicly in the past, but I am not surprised one percent by the account. This is 2020. Can you imagine how many similar experiences have gone untold in the past and are now totally forgotten?
For Pete's sake. Does it really occur to none of you to share the link, since some of us out here don't follow whatever blog this is, and a subset of that group is interested enough to take a look?
Deletehttps://sententiaeantiquae.com/2020/01/04/on-classics-madness-and-losing-everything/ As a lurker here for information and gossip, I just want to comment to indicate my utmost respect for everything this person has achieved in these circumstances. This field wears down and sometimes destroys even those with decent social and financial safety nets. I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to lack those support systems. It is made infinitely worse when fellow graduate students and faculty are hostile and indifferent. So kudos to her and everyone else struggling!
DeleteI realize this criticism is intended well, but let's not make ourselves right-wing parodies. The author certainly approached SA, SA didn't "grab" the piece. So what was Joel supposed to say, "sorry, only white dudes get to publish here?" You may not agree with the venue the author chose, but again, do we want a situation where POC are banished to their own, separate, websites?
DeleteNot sure that this was intended well:
Delete1. author is reduced just to ethnicity, when she talks about a far more complex intersectional identity
2. blog hosts are credited as "selfless, doubtful"
3. "grabbed" is, as 3:32 notes, probably not the best verb
"Curious why the reality check blog post by the marginalized Latinx was grabbed by a venue hosted by two white dudes. Even if it's purely for selfless reasons, doubtful, it's tone deaf."
I received a Ph.D in Classics, and my experience in grad school was so good that I left the field after graduating. I now have a staff position in higher ed, and we help students like this all the time. What happened to this graduate student was completely unnecessary. It seems like a clear case of emotionally stunted faculty members who didn’t know how to/didn’t want to deal with the problem, so they used the excuse of lapsed paperwork to sweep it under the rug.
DeleteI cannot count the number of times I have had to summon both students and faculty members to my office to walk them through administrative processes in order to make sure everyone gets paid, reimbursed, registered, etc. or to provide one-time funds to remove a hold on an account. Or even just to explain how taxes work (again, also faculty members!). I don’t mind doing it, because many university systems are unnecessarily complicated, and our policies are so numerous that no one can possibly keep track of them all.
I have also found that, while no department is perfect, many are much more willing to support students like this, once you move beyond the suffocating elitism and dysfunction that I encountered so frequently in small humanities departments. I know of one large department that has a full-time staff member whose sole purpose is to help grad students complete paperwork and make sure they’re checking all of the necessary boxes on the way to graduation. Clearly, not all can afford that luxury, but the point is – they recognize that navigating the university bureaucracy is hard, and they don’t expect their students to do it all on their own. They’re also smart enough to realize that they’re wasting their own resources when someone falls through the cracks at this point. So why wasn’t someone helping this student? The world of Classics is indeed “small and cowardly”.
Glad you got out.
DeleteClassics=white people fetishising an astonishingly tiny bit of evidence from a small elite segment of the distant past to valorize their own imperialistic present
Plenty of well-intentioned practictioners but a fundamentally and deeply flawed enterprise that has stubbornly resisted all attempts at reimagining so shouldn't exist in the 21st century.
To be fair, 10:33, 90% of the discipline might revolve around this fetishization, but there is the 10% no matter how pathetic it might look. Point taken though.
DeleteViews like those voiced by 10:33 are incredibly myopic and, quite frankly, stupid. If you think that Classics is how you describe it then you haven't been paying attention for the last decade or more. The field is changing very quickly, and while it may not be up to speed with some other disciplines, the notion that a significant majority of scholars are out there reifying some 19th century colonialist zeitgeist is ludicrous. Moreover, since according to you Classics is so firmly entrenched in outmoded paradigms, what have YOU done to strike a new, innovative path forward? I'm guessing that the answer is nothing.
DeleteTruth hurts, eh? Get some therapy by firing your crusader gun down on the range and repeating your enlightened fantasy until you believe it again.
DeleteAgain, you've offered nothing substantive as to what direction the field should take and what you have done to foster its movement in whatever direction that might be. I'll start listening to the indictments of Classics when the malcontents offer up more than nebulous and ill-defined criticisms.
DeleteWhy don't you just ASK them what direction it should take.
Deleteyawwwwn. Nobody cares. Nobody cares anymore about the sad little woke dramas you people perform online and sometimes in real life. We left that behind in 2019. 14:40 is right, and others have made this point before: 10:33's characterization of the field is delusional, and one wonders why people (or the exact same person) keep coming here to express it, always the same thing, ad nauseam. But the thing is, nobody cares anymore. We fell for your bs and thought that perhaps you were sincerely trying to do good, but we've all moved on. Go seek attention somewhere else.
DeleteI'm sure a lot of you are disappointed that no events transpired at this year's SCS from which you could manufacture fresh outrage and spark a new moral panic thrusting the field into a frenzy yet again in order to push your weird ideologies and bizarre grievances, or to become the center of attention and feel like a star by being the the loudest most outraged voice of your own drama. So it looks like you've latched onto this blogpost in a desperate search for material to keep the drama alive...something something white dudes and fetishes, marginalized victims of something-or-other blah blah blah...but this single blogpost is hardly up to the task, especially if people actually take time to read it. Why so much fuss over a single person's situation? People drop out of programs and the field all the time for all kinds of reasons, and if you actually read this person's very public airing of the situation you will see that all of their problems, by this person's own admission, were self-made. But because it involves a "marginalized Latinx" everyone jumps on it and starts spewing all the usual woke nonsense, and carping about how horrible Classics is....but it's 2020 and nobody cares anymore. I suggest from now on we just ignore these dramas. And if you find the field so repugnant, then just leave it. Go do something else and stop coming here with your delusional complaints about it.
Yuge
DeleteSo glad I got out. It's not the vocal "westerners" that got to me but the fact that the vast majority is ultimately complicit by their silence and lip service when forced. If you're not all actively and vocally countering this bs, you don't deserve to exist. Not outside some utopian Aryan fantasy world.
DeleteIf you're going to come here to troll maybe do better than trot out tired nonsense. Spice it up! Not only are you bad at trolling, you're also a bore.
DeleteI'm beginning to think there is one schizophrenic person on here who is an independent scholar...
DeleteI do feel sympathy for the former Berkeley grad, who has suffered greatly and repeatedly from her ailment. However, from reading the blog post carefully it sure seems to me like this ailment was going to prevent her from being able to one day function as a faculty member - which involves lots of paperwork and all sorts of pressures great and small, from having to meet deadlines for student recommendations to the myriad tasks considered "service" that are required for tenure and promotion - and the Berkeley faculty found a merciful way to help her move on to other endeavors. It does sometimes happen that one has a brilliant and talented grad student who also has serious problems that make him or her unsuitable for a job as a professor, and it does no one any favors to let such students get their degrees and hit the market. From that blog post I think that the best from a bad set of options was chosen by the faculty members involved in the decision, who found a way to remove the student from their program, and hope that the individual involved will find happiness, and perhaps one day even see the professors' actions as merciful rather than malicious. And she can certainly derive satisfaction from knowing that while she was in the field she helped to establish an organization that will do much good for many years. (I write this not as a Berkeley professor, nor as one who knows any of the people involved, but as one who has had more than one grad student who knew and had a passion for the material but was not cut out for the academic life.)
DeleteThat's bullshit as we have pedos and people much more incompetent in all ladder ranks of classics right now. The difference is that the whiter, maler, and privileges your background, the more passes and propped up you get through the journey.
Delete19:51, it's 17:13 here. You might want to rethink your phrasing, since the only way to read that first sentence is that you are calling the former grad student "incompetent," but simply less so than some others in our field. There is a world of difference between incompetence and having difficulty performing a task because of something in one's brain chemistry that one cannot control.
DeleteMake that 19:13. Typo. I guess there's a lot of incompetence going around these days.
DeleteI think we should keep in mind that we do not know everything that happened. Certainly graduate programs can give students an unfairly rough ride, we've all seen that happen. There are also students who aren't in fact cut out for the academic life, and an inability to deal with paperwork, if it isn't a resolvable anxiety, could well be one reason (see: job market, grade submission, abstract deadlines, etc.).
DeleteWell, for all the lip service by the left, it's clear even if you dismiss the comments by the Paideia leadership types on here that the discipline does not value a diversity of viewpoints and believes plenty is provided by the present demographic. It's not from things shaking out naturally any more than skull sizes predetermining intelligence. It's a convenient
Deleteexcuse to blame the pipeline or the abilities of a student but in my experience the people who overwhelmingly represent the discipline now are afforded resources and assistance not given others. Cute and blonde? You get the patriarchy falling all over you to defend and help. Brown and trans? Classified as a charity case for needing the same assistance. Death by a thousand cuts. It's disgusting and I'm ashamed to be a tenured faculty member in this discipline. Not what I signed up for.
Jesus, the grad student has a disability; Berkeley should have accommodated it, as should any faculty job she might have ended up in. Most faculty jobs involve a lot of walking up and down stairs, but we don't eject students from grad programs because they use a wheelchair. The faculty knew she had trouble with paperwork and instead of helping their student took the excuse to fire her. That's cruelty, not fucking mercy.
DeleteOpportunities are key. I've seen lots of reactions on here that take a questioning of privilege as a dismissal of their hard work. I'm an old Michigan PhD so excuse the analogy, but most would admit Tom Brady is one of the hardest working NFLers in history. It doesn't dismiss the fact that he would have never been drafted let alone patiently brought along if he was black. Lamar Jackson would have been forced to switch to wide receiver as was still almost forced upon him in. It's the nature of the QB position and the biases that have traditionally existed. Classics is this for academia times ten.
DeleteYeah but in classics for every Tom Brady there are a couple dozen Christian Ponders inexplicably tenured.
DeleteI've found this dynamic is rarely understood by admins and faculty bc they're results of the system themselves. The privileged are given more training and opportunities to learn on the job. Others typically don't have the training and in the rare cases that they do, there's an inherent zero tolerance policy in place to learn on the job. We fall prey to our most vicious biases, I'm afraid.
DeleteAcademia taking on inclusion and diversity.
Deletehttps://media.giphy.com/media/dTuuLmlLe5KDrf6mtm/source.gif
I call bullshit re: the former Berkeley grad student. She was capable of organizing and running the Sportula as well as a homeless camp? But a bit paperwork was a source of crippling anxiety? Also, let's be honest. The sort of "paperwork" that this student had to complete was probably an online form that involved clicking a few boxes and agreeing to some terms, or at worst some forms to sign in some dean's office. Moreover, if processing requests for Sportula grants isn't itself just digital "paperwork," then I'm the Queen of England.
Delete12:54
DeleteI think your comment is uncharitable, detached from the realities of team activities like those of the Sportula, and downright ignorant about anxiety and disability.
Yeah, the idea that professors need to be able to do paperwork and be socially adept refers only to minorities in academia. Take Dirk Obbink, for example. According to the Guardian, "In the early 2000s, he held the chair of papyrology at the University of Michigan – a full-time job – but failed to resign from Oxford". Paperwork, paperwork. How about being neurodivergent (I dislike this term, but it will do for now)? If you fit the Dirk Obbink frame, you are "an eccentric figure, even by Oxford standards." Or " a standard-issue Oxford don – head in a book, limited social skills, “an absent-minded professor type”, as one collector called him." You see, 19:13 and 12:54, where is it going or should I spell it out for you?
DeleteQuotes from: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/09/a-scandal-in-oxford-the-curious-case-of-the-stolen-gospel . Published yesterday.
I don't even know what to say at this point, if graduate students can't be expected to complete rather basic paperwork. That the field is home to the occasional bumbling forgetful professor isn't really an excuse. When I was a graduate student and I had finished my coursework, I received regular automatic email reminders that if I did not sign up for the empty "independent study" credits that I would no long be a student at the university. This was not something to fool around with. Moreover, if one has such major mental issues triggered by such simple tasks, there are almost always resources available on a university campus's outside of one's department that will advocate on a student's behalf. What I would like to know is this: at what point do we stop blaming the discipline for every little thing that goes wrong?
DeleteWhen the discipline stops being so Biff and Buffy Johnson in culture or at least stops whining about getting shut down when even the neolib admins can't justify how out of touch it is even for an institution that has always stacked the deck in favor of the privileged caste.
DeleteAfter everything that went down at Oxford/EES that is directly connected to the guy, you still call him a "bumbling forgetful professor", kind of proving my point even further. There is a sea of forgiveness for white people in our discipline, and none for anyone else. For example, I'm white and during my grad studies I attended a course, but forgot to officially sign in. It was a requirement. I did not receive any reminders, or maybe I did, but forgot. Guess what, I was allowed to graduate without anyone ever mentioning this. Does this reflect my worth as a scholar? I would like to think not. Does it reflect my privilege? Absolutely yes.
DeleteIf you can't fill out paperwork or complete basic administrivia because it gives you extreme anxiety, you should seek professional help. But you also shouldn't blame the field/the profession of teaching. If you can't manage that, how can you publish? How can you teach future generations of students without our worrying that you might not be a colleague we can consistently rely on? I wouldn't trust a surgeon who becomes destabilized over paperwork to operate on me. I apply that same principle to every other profession including ours.
DeleteIf you're severely handicapped from empathising with 50%+ of your student body (and growing) bc you're severely overrepresented in your discipline to the point of said discipline becoming critically irrelevant, you should resign and make way for others. This is obviously not happening since "handicaps" are so subjectively defined and applied.
Deletehttps://i.ibb.co/rxtDXbv/image.png
DeleteThe story related in 10:08's link is just as ludicrous. Somebody's husband died and they acquired a crippling inability to fill out paperwork? The assertion that led to their expulsion is correct; if you can't do some basic fucking paperwork, then how the hell can you expect to be a successful academic? Abstracts, grant applications, signing up for insurance--all paperwork. If you somehow ended up being a professor and advising students, then you'd have grades, recommendations, book ordering, etc--all paperwork. So, can someone tell me how we're supposed to make academia more inclusive in this regard? By eliminating all paperwork? Jesus Christ. Get a grip, people, if you can't fill out some (probably electronic! Don't even to have actually write anything!) forms, you probably can't handle being an academic.
Deletehttps://twitter.com/pgorski/status/1212767716169392130?s=19
ReplyDeleteThere once was a man named Hewett
ReplyDeletewho's name happened to rhyme with "sue it"
When people complained
he said they defamed
considered the law and said "screw it"
This only made sense once I made a visit to Twitter and saw what the outrage of the day was among our Extremely Online colleagues. It would be amusing if some ridiculous Italian show trial were the result. The characters from Paideia and Sportula deserve each other, quite frankly.
DeleteMaking the members of Sportula and Paideia even roughly equivalent demonstrates how little you understand of the mission and impact of the former.
Delete"Classics=white people fetishising an astonishingly tiny bit of evidence from a small elite segment of the distant past to valorize their own imperialistic present"
ReplyDeleteDamn
Indeed, I too thought it was a frightfully dumb comment. More of the same hackneyed nonsense that offers nothing constructive but meets the criteria set forth by the Wokescold cabal.
DeleteFake news?
DeleteThoughts re: that tweet from scs president-elect? I get her annoyance that someone is crowding her out, but isn't it, um, anti-Semitic?
ReplyDelete"For two days I have been suppressing anger about how one WW Jewish classicist shifted attention away from my interview with calls for a blog post on another Jewish WW. This woman always does this to me. Sick and tired of it."
Just stop it. The only thing cheaper than the angry brown/black characterization is the objective merit delusion. This is beneath even the incredibly know bar for classics.
DeleteDeath by a thousand cuts. So much worse than the smattering of Trumpsters in the discipline is the unified and amplified bias that results from the discipline being so uniformly white and culturally monotone. It's the background hum that never goes away. The president elect is 100x the person most of us will ever be and we need her more than she needs the discipline. This is Diversity 101 and classics still abjectly fails the test and probably always will.
DeleteRather than the putting the burden of proof on the students and general population - the ridiculous and rightfully ridiculed why-don't-we-just-ask-them approach - I think it's about time the burden is placed on us to prove that we're not a white supremacy group. Sure looks like it to outsiders. If programs can't demonstrate this with tangible proof and metrics, we should be shut down, especially at public universities. This was clearly demonstrated when we got a peek behind the curtain from someone who had nothing to lose yet many within our midst still have the audacity to claim her testimony is irrelevant or worse. I don't care about the hidden fascists in our midsts. I'm more worried that what's staring at us in the face barely registers and scarcely illicits a response outside hollow initiatives that we all know will change nothing. The way we change this and thrive is by being the leading edge of institutional reform rather than bringing up the rear begrudgingly. It's a terrible look. Shame on academia but even more so on us.
DeleteWhat a bore. The President of the SCS, i.e. the person who is basically the titular head of the discipline, is annoyed because people aren't paying enough attention to her. Maybe untwist those knickers and actually focus on what matters, like the fact that the field is in freefall, instead of silly idpol arglebargle.
Delete49% killing 1% while the last 50% watches (or flails ineffectually when feeling motivated enough)
DeleteSmall and cowardly
DeleteThe classics cultural climate should bore anyone with a pulse. It's an Aryan's wet dream.
Yawn. Entertain me, Wokescold! It's the least you could do if you're going to bloviate constantly using attacks that were already tired by the end of the debates following the Black Athena brouhaha.
Deleteis someone using a random shibboleth generator? what are any of the above comments saying?
DeleteOMG, I also feel like we're talking to a not very smart AI. The one that mistakes sand dunes for naked women.
DeleteAre we supposed to know what the tweet is referencing?
ReplyDeleteShe’s trying to walk back the problematic tweet now, but it’s not going very well.
ReplyDeleteAs for the original tweet, it certainly smells of antisemitism, but through the magic of intersectionality the respective identities of the people involved “complicate” the situation and allow for a great deal of obfuscation, which is what’s happening now among the few people who have dared enter the fray. It’s really something to behold— I assume amid the crickets that everyone else has been desperately ignoring the situation in the hope that it will just go away if they spend enough time pretending like it never happened. Haley’s political bona fides provide her with a great deal of plausible deniability, so she will probably weather the storm. But consider what she said: she accused a fellow classicist of slighting her, of being in some way hostile, of treating her unjustly, and she calls out her perceived antagonists by specifying that they are Jewish, as if this has something to do with their behavior. Besides that, the basic complaint of the tweet makes her look petty and insecure. So either way, it’s a bad look and an embarrassment for the SCS. I won’t speculate at this time why so many people felt she was the best-qualified person for the presidency, but it’s becoming clear that perhaps she wasn’t.
Her second tweet is in some ways more bizarre. She accuses her WW Jewish antagonist of playing “Oppression Olympics,” which is a right-wing talking point, and says antisemitism is pervasive in the field, which would be news to me. The mental gymnastics of the people now playing defense for her are truly amazing: Haley denies being anti-semitic. Phew! they cry. Glad to hear you deny it (sort of), guess it’s all ok then. Nothing to see here anymore. Move along….
She has not yet deleted the original tweet
I for one find the whole mess absolutely delicious. It's always amusing when the aggressively Woke turn on each other.
DeleteYou can literally see the smoke coming out of their ears as their brains short-circuit over this.
DeleteThe term Woke is thoughtless. You have nothing to contribute and no insight.
Delete"Oppression Olympics" isn't a right-wing talking point; it arose largely out of scholarship in intersectional feminism. I think Haley has been pretty open about the fact that she sees white women as hijacking social justice movements to replicate their own privilege, so instead of an "Old Boys' club," we have an "Old Girls' club." She sees this as a problem within Classics. To her, this obviously includes Jewish women who want to promote other Jewish women (in her opinion at her own expense). Was it politically savvy? No. Is it entirely consistent with her previous statements? Yes.
ReplyDeleteI just find it incredible that you and she and a cadre of twitterati are claiming that she, a tenured professor who was elected president of the SCS, lacks privilege and exists on the margins because white Jewish women keep centering themselves. None of these "WW Jewish classicists" are at the center right now. Nobody even really knows who they are or what they did to make Professor Haley so angry.
DeleteAlso "oppression olympics" did arise from the feminist movement in the 90s but even in activist circles it is most often used pejoratively and it has indeed become a derogatory right-wing talking point akin to "wokeness." Both terms are used almost exclusively now by right-wing commentators in order to ridicule.
Yep, context matters and the thread makes her point actually. People, especially Jews, immediately piled on which demonstrates the privileged status of anti-semitism in the US whenever bias is discussed. The person the OP cites has a history of trotting out "Jewish lives matter too!" whenever bias is discussed in the discipline. One of the accusers even quickly trotted out that jews are particularly persecuted by being framed as people who only care about their plight, which ironically proved the original point that was missed by most. Well, as a Latina in an elite graduate program in a cosmopolitan metro, I had blacks, asians, and latinx faculty and staff members mentor and defend me. The Jews who comfortably outnumbered all these other groups combined? Never once and some were even perps. You never got a sense of empathy or social justice outside the white norm except perhaps when they caught of whiff of anti-semitism.
DeleteI have a good friend writing about this phenomenon for the NYT. She once overheard a room full of medical division heads, mostly Jews, complain that it was first the Asians and now Blacks/Latinx were overrunning the profession. She ran it through the channels and it was quickly buried.
DeleteThis is old news. The exact same thing has been going on in other sectors of society like symphonies and cinema for decades now. I suspect classics fits into these groups quite comfortably now.
Delete@10:35 keep trying
DeleteThe OP was obviously triggered based on decades of abuse in the discipline. I'm embarrassed that we are so oblivious to it and that we are still at this infantile stage of cultural sensitivity in 2020. It will be a difficult lesson but her presidency is a long overdue window into a world that we as a whole are totally ignorant of bc scholars if her background haven't been able to speak their mind in safety. The last thing we need is for her to say we aren't worth it as so many who never made it to her position have done.
DeleteThe fact remains that classics is one of the most hostile places for black and brown folks. Can you imagine any other discipline getting away with saying it's our white (and Ashkenazi) space and if you don't like it take a hike as people have repeatedly voiced on here? It's ludicrous.
Classics needs to be dispersed into other departments - history, lit, anthropology, etc. It would dilute the assholeness and you couldn't get away with the white supremacy narrative. I suppose it could be kept at Trump U and the fundamentalist schools.
DeleteThe asshats would just join medieval studies and make uber asshole depts.
Delete@10:40 antisemitism is not privileged
ReplyDelete@10:51 that never happened and this is what you sound like: "a friend of mine overheard some crafty jews plotting to undermine the goyim..yak yak yak." Stop.
@10:59 just retiring the others' antisemitism
@11:29 no one here or anywhere else in the field ever said " it's our white (and Ashkenazi) space and if you don't like it take a hike". We just elected a black woman president of the SCS for fuck's sake. The most prominent voices on our blogs and all the people being "centered" now are not white or Jewish. Did you even glance at this year's SCS program? Nearly half of it was dedicated to issues of race and inclusivity. Were you at the 2019 meeting when a scholar of similar background spoke his mind and became an academic celebrity for it? Stop being so fucking delusional. Haley published an unfortunate tweet that has created a lot of problems because it undeniably contained a whiff of antisemitism, and her response has been even worse. But now it has exposed the ugly underbelly of the so-called progressive social-justice types among us who have gone full Corbynista it seems, and that should frighten us all.
Lol, love the lalalalala tantrum
DeleteMore like...I know you are but what am I
DeleteOnce again, people are discussing a tweet, Facebook post, etc. without bothering to provide a link. Some of us don't spend oodles of time on social media, and would consider it a courtesy (or, at least, a time-saver) if from now on when people comment on something happening out there in social media they help the rest of us know where to go. (In this case, of course, it's relatively easy, but often references are made to some ongoing Twitter debate without even a hint of where to look.)
ReplyDelete12:22 here. I posted too soon: I found Haley's tweet easily enough, and a few uninteresting responses to it (https://twitter.com/reginalatinae/status/1217449390719324160), but have no idea where to find the post that got under her skin, or related threads. Anyone want to help out here?
ReplyDeleteUninteresting? She basically pointed out that she's tired of "but Jewish lives matter too" and then she got swiftly branded an anti-semite with people then going on and on about the trials and tribulation of a group that makes up a huge part of the discipline, proving her original point.
Delete12:34, thanks for your quick response. I see just nine replies there, none by a name I recognize (and most not by people tweeting under their real names), and none going "on and on." So I assume that's happening in other threads, and don't know where to look.
DeleteIf our sensitivities and responses for biases against non-whites were 1% as swift and viscious as the response we just witnessed, we wouldn't be on the wrong side of inclusivity as we are now.
DeleteP.S. 12:34, I'm Jewish, not too long ago I had a VAP/Lecturer position and was not reappointed by a chair whom two more senior Jewish colleagues suspected of antisemitism, and it is possible that this played a role in that decision. So I object to your implication that having more Jews than African-Americans in our field somehow means that Jews can't face discrimination and other obstacles, since I myself may be one data-point arguing the opposite.
Deleteapart from the comments on the original tweet, is it possible to know about the "Jewish WW" who is being targeted?
Deletesomeone above said "The person the OP cites has a history of trotting out "Jewish lives matter too!" whenever bias is discussed in the discipline."
(*OP = original poster?)
does SH name this person anywhere? Or is this just common knowledge that remains unknowable to me?
Ack, someone posted before I got my p.s. up. I'm 12:22, not 12:51.
DeleteWho said Jews let alone whites can't have biases directed against them? Despite your one anecdotal story the discipline remains overwhelmingly white with a healthy proportion of Jews that greatly exceeds the general populace. Whatever biases whites and Jews face, it's not hurting the bottom line and I dare you to say it's merit and excellence.
ReplyDeleteWell, I can't speak for most whites, but as for Jews... OF COURSE it's merit and excellence. Haven't you ever met any of us?
DeleteYup, the blacks and browns are just too dumb with wrong cranial measurements to succeed at classics. Case closed.
DeleteWith that post, 13:25, you've just betrayed your own approximate cranial measurements.
DeleteWhat I see here is that Jews by and large are not a part of the solution for making the discipline more interesting and intersectional, which explains the status quo.
DeleteWhat you talking about? It's we Jewish intellectuals who come up with a lot of the buzzwords like "intersectional"!
DeleteBecause of the bizarre nature of whiteness, Jewish people are one group that can be marginalized and othered by it or benefit from it depending on the situation. Shit's fucked up and bullshit.
DeleteI know, right? Kinda like how George Zimmerman is a racist white man who got away with murder because of white privilege while Sonia Sotomayor is a stunning and brave Latinx POC who struggles against the structural oppression of brown bodies.
DeleteWe must remain vigilant against the malignant machinations of demonic whiteness whenever it rears its ugly white head and tosses its blond hair back in the wind like Farrah Fawcett.
It's probably for the best that you're teaching classics, and not creative writing. That second paragraph is truly awful verbiage.
DeleteHey, I recognize that smug condescending tone. You're Reader A aren't you!
DeleteAlso, your conception of "whiteness" is just an imaginary social construct.
There needs to be a comma after "smug."
DeleteThe reason so many people are having trouble locating the context, is that Haley's tweet is not in response to a social media post but an email (email exchange?).
ReplyDeleteTherefore, despite the certainty expressed by 10:40 and 12:34 (and some others), it's not clear "Jewish lives matter, too" is a fair paraphrase. It might be, but I bet no one here on NF2019 actually knows.
Plausible deniability is how this mess perpetuates for generations unabated.
DeleteSomeone overheard medical heads spouting off clearly prejudiced statements against black/brown physicians and the best retort was a classics VAP *might* not have been reappointed bc s/he was Jewish. Yeah, I would say we are clearly balanced in assessing and reacting to bias. **massiveeyeroll**
DeleteEvery dean should read this forum to understand how disgustingly insular, privileged, and white supremacist classics is as a discipline and administrative unit. It doesn't matter how many of us are good ones as it's clear that there are plenty of bad apples and the discipline is stubbornly unseeing and unchanging. Paideia anyone? Berkeley Classics? These aren't obscure outlying programs - pretty damning.
ReplyDeleteShow us on the doll where Classics hurt you.
Delete9:28, that's one of my favorite posts ever, and I've been around for all incarnations of FV. I hope that in the outside world we know each other and are friends.
DeleteSo the distinguished professor emeritus of Greek Archaeology in the most Asian city outside Asia just write on FB about Parasite, "A good film but not deserving the best picture Oscar..."
ReplyDeleteI can't think of a better recent example of why classics is whacked.
Sounds about right. "Color blind" indeed.
Delete#ClassicsEvenWhiter #HollywoodHoldOurBeer
DeleteIt's the echo chamber of classics. The best way to save classics, which I doubt is even possible, is to combine it with other depts. The most feasible is probably languages/lit as is happening at Miami Ohio but even this is a stretch for classics as it doesn't play nice with others while on its high horse.
DeleteWe would logically fit better with other Mediterranean or "Old World" programs but the way Classics is traditionally constructed makes it fare even worse in this setting.
GL to the young uns coming up through the system now as you're being left a poopoo platter and trained to tackle it like it's 1899.
Yeah, the current spectrum of those defining the field on top are benign, sometimes helpful, Joe Biden types to malignant, white supremacists who shield their outlook in public just enough to maintain plausible deniability to the rest of the constituency.
Delete11:50, I think I know the department of the close-minded, there-is-no-bias-when-it's-white-bias archaeologist referenced by 05:33 and it's one of the Mediterranean type programs. I'm actually an alumna. The situation has been stable for a generation but it's still very much a situation where classics believes it's the privileged first among equals if not the crown jewel of the dept and remains separate as much as possible - a shotgun marriage of convenience and necessity.
DeleteLike any similar situation, it works because the other divisions eat a lot of shite. If they were to refuse to do so, it would implode as seen elsewhere. It's how someone gets away with such a small worldview with impunity regardless of whether classics is stand alone or not.
Yeah, if "real classicists" aren't dictating terms, it rarely works. Look at Cincinnati. It's only on the map bc of its archaeology and the philologists seethe about the power dynamic viewing it as a perversion of the natural order.
DeleteThanks for the insights, 15:18. Yeah, if that's the best case scenario then it doesn't look good. Classics is too hyper-focused to survive on its own and too elitist and insular to play well with others. I wish I could say it's changing but I don't see much difference in outlook with subsequent generations so it's rinse and repeat until we go extinct. Classics seems to generally attract two types - well-intentioned Hufflepuff nerds who can't effect change long term or right-leaning Slytherin elitists who don't truly give a shit outside getting theirs.
DeleteWhere are all the Gryffindors and Ravenclaws? I suppose conervative nerdy classics doesn't tolerate those who substantively challenge the status quo so they either don't survive or have smartly chosen other fields.
DeleteOddly enough I think the best analogy to save classics from itself is professional sports and how desegregation was a necessity to survive. Right now classics has a monopoly in the academy when it comes to the ancient world despite it focusing on a small elite sliver of its people and cultures and doing it from and almost exclusively philological, white perspective. It sounds counterintuitive, but encourage and help scholars to develop and thrive outside this system and it will light a fire under the gatekeepers to adopt change. The question is whether it can be done before the discipline collapses as academics increasingly don't give two shits about classics.
DeleteHere's the problem with that notion: Classics searches will always take safe candidates. You're seen as edgy in this field if you apply a post-1965 theory to canonical texts. You're seen as threatening (or superfluous) if you actually know more languages than Latin and Greek.
DeleteIs it possible/legal for a department to create a TT position and immediately offer it to a VAP in their department without advertising the position or interviewing other people for it?
ReplyDeleteThis happens from time to time when a department can make a case for why they want to keep their current VAP without the hassle of a search.
DeleteIn case you're talking about Indiana (who just did this), their recent history of hiring their own PhDs and current VAPs (a few years ago and they're probably about to do this again), coupled with the fact that their faculty keep leaving for greener pastures and there will soon be a huge gender disparity in the department, should tell you all you need to know about the department.
Yes.
DeleteYup, doubling down on caucasity and the patriarchy. IU classics is by no means an outlier. Making classics great again...
DeleteThis is why target of opportunity hires (or any interdepartmental or pan-Medit hire) involving classics doesn't work.
DeleteHey admins, we desperately need to hire someone who can contextualize classics within the Mediterranean. Result: hire the papyrologist who works in Ptolemaic Egypt or the BA archaeologist who once thought about Egypt.
Hey admins, we desperately need to hire someone who will diversify classics. Result: hire the white person who once co-chaired a session with a POC.
Hey admins, are VAP is great and we really want to TT them. Admins: what about the three female VAPs you had previous years?
13:51, that's what the administrators SHOULD have asked but rarely catch until much later if at all.
Delete15:34 you can't expect admins to force inclusive practices. I know of multiple instances over the past twenty years when small and cowardly classicists passively marginalized or even actively kicked out four classicists of colour. They just didn't get them or felt they were threats to the survival of classics ideology/orthodoxy or their own aspirations in an era of austerity. Best case they didn't see value in their presence outside some tokenized ideal where they could center themselves as SJWs. This would make a great SCS-AIA roundtable if we could somehow get these PoC to return literally if not figuratively to the table.
DeletePerhaps the AIA. I've found that PoC increasingly want nothing to do with a discipline that's channeling white supremacy, whether intended or not.
DeleteYeah, the chair of another department recently joked with me that the job of classics is to police all the other disciplines, keep departments like African Studies in line. Not a good look if you understand the terrifying role and origins of police forces in the 20th century.
DeleteMy God, you Wokescolds are tiresome. Go join an anthropology department where your grievance mongering and multicolored hair will be welcomed with open arms.
ReplyDeleteThe Unwokescolds, obviously one person on here or perhaps several at most based on the repetitive Trumpian attempts at nicknames, are not being forced to read anything on here.
DeleteSo which is it, 1) there's only one or several "Trumpian" posters on NFV or 2) Classics is a thoroughly regressive discipline populated by people who traffic in outmoded, racist, and colonialist attitudes? Your cognitive dissonance is showing.
DeleteThere are more than two possibilities. I myself have never used the word "wokescold" in a sentence before this one, so I'm not the above poster, but I can tell you that our field has quite a few woke people who strongly dislike the "wokescolds."
DeleteIf I understand the terms correctly, I've yet to see a person directly scolding anyone for not being woke enough here. Sure plenty of terrible experiences shared but who's woke scolding? What I do see is the repeated and direct scolding and ranting on an arrogant and childish level by the the person who keeps using the term wokescold to directly criticize and try to silence those sharing experiences. This unwokescold and adds nothing to the dialogue, just scolding which is both ironic and hypocritical. I'm guessing this person doesn't realize that his privilege in classics circles does not translate online where people cannot discern his artificially exalted status through typed words no matter how eloquent and clever he thinks he is.
Delete13:04, I will now use the word "wokescold" for the second time ever -- gee, whiz, this sure is addicting! -- to point out that our field is not the only one with such people. Did you catch the story this week about how Natalie Portman wore a dress to the Oscars that featured the names of several female directors in order to make a statement and then Rose McGowan rather viciously attacked her for doing so (to which Portman responded with class)? Both of them believe there should be more female directors, so they're on the same side, but McGowan's way of advancing her cause was to be needlessly obnoxious. So, too, does the world of classical studies have a lot of well-meaning people, a small number of whom are obnoxious about the causes they believe in.
DeleteI love how classics programs have splashy photos of material culture, including objects of marginal interest and priority to the discipline like the Giza Pyramids, on their websites and brochures yet mostly have adjunct archaeologists or dabbling historians at best on faculty. C'mon guys. To be honest, show off your splashy images of Loebs and perhaps some papyri.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the coins.
DeleteOr a transcribed inscription from some CIL volume for a place you've never been.
DeleteYeah, always a surprise to learn that most classicists see no necessity in visiting the original locales of their research topics and such experiences are never factored into evaluating suitability for faculty positions. I suspect much if it has to do with notions that the present inhabitants aren't their Romans and Greeks. Yet they're advising study abroad opps for students despite an utter lack of qualifications.
DeleteIn weak defense of the discipline, millennials have had to consider what's considered important by the discipline and tailor their pursuits accordingly in order to compete. Hate the system, not the players. It's a major reason why I'm on the cusp of getting my PhD and will immediately go alt ac. I woke up one day a number of months ago and realized I'm nowhere in the vicinity of pursuing what originally ignited my passion for the field. I've slowly drifted according to pragmatics drilled into me by well intentioned advisors so it's now just a job that's more than ever guaranteed to be attached to a terrible lifestyle.
DeleteYes, because everyone has the financial capability to spend extended amounts of time in Greece, Italy, or assorted others places relevant to Greco-Roman antiquity. I love this topic in particular because it invariably traps the Woke when they start wondering very loudly how one can even claim to be a classicist without ever having been to Greece or Italy. Rebecca Futo Kennedy pulled this elitist bullshit on Twitter awhile back and was rightfully shut down. The only reason I get to spend 1.5 months in Greece every year is because I work for an excavation that pays for my flight and room and board. When I was a graduate student the only reason I got to spend a year in Greece was because I got a fellowship.
DeleteI'm relatively fortunate to be on my third decent VAP but this is it for me despite how coveted a full-time VAP is these days. Speaks volumes. I finally came to the realization that I don't like the majority of academics and the super majority of classicists who have made it. It certainly in no way resembles my previous interactions with grad students. The jump from student to faculty apparently culls the loveliest and most interesting ones from academia.
ReplyDeleteThe process surprisingly (at least for me) resembles the presidential race. You get a bunch of candidates who hold a diversity of perspectives and platforms throwing their hats into the ring and you're excited about the possibilities.
DeleteIn the end, thanks to the entrenched system that includes external influences putting their finger on the scale, you end up with Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Warren, and Biden. People then ask how TF did we ended up here but it's a question that Classics never seems to recognize let alone ask for some reason. Then you have the random undeserving dude from the right who somehow gets a free pass all the way to the finals unsullied and he promptly mops the floor with someone from a harried group, but it's considered a victory in itself bc you have two white women who made it that far.
Now imagine it ten times worse and you have Classics.