On Classism in Classics
“It is very strange that almost any other scholar’s background & influences can be discussed here without vituperation, but VDH brings out the worst in people. Every single time he is mentioned.” Thus did Diana Wright, in a post from 2006 on Classics-L, an Internet discussion board for classical scholars, sum up the site’s many acrimonious debates on the work of Victor Davis Hanson.
Hanson, as many undoubtedly recall, became the bête noir of numerous classicists in large part due to his co-authorship with John Heath of Who Killed Homer? (1998), a polemic on the demise of classical studies in American academia. Who Killed Homer? contended that ever since the late 1960s, classical scholars in America had helped murder their subject matter by failing to act as stewards of ancient learning. Instead of sharing “Greek wisdom” with their students and an interested general public, these pedants gloried in obscurantism, publishing either esoteric exercises in philological minutiae or jargon-laden, politicized boilerplate that unfairly belittled the Hellenic legacy.
Hence, Hanson and Heath argued, classical studies in the US were on the verge of collapse. Moreover, they contended that this was all taking place at a perverse point in history: just as the world was embracing Western values, America was forgetting the Greeks, the founders of the West.
In the book’s most contentious chapter, Hanson and Heath offer a merciless whirlwind tour of recent classical scholarship, quoting and ridiculing snippets of writings on Homer. The authors, in keeping with traditionalistic tracts from the academic culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, complain that “Classicists now ‘privilege,’ ‘uncover,’ ‘cruise,’ ‘queer,’ ‘subvert,’ and ‘deconstruct’ the ‘text’” (p. 137).
Although some esteem the book, Who Killed Homer?’s take-no-prisoners approach earned the wrath of many in the field, who denounced it as simplistic, reductive, and even jingoistic. In a review for the Times Literary Supplement, for example, James Davidson averred that Who Killed Homer? is a prime example of “the late twentieth-century phenomenon of irresponsible rage.” Peter Green, writing in Arion, expressed similar distaste for the book, deeming it “a bizarre, and often ugly, exercise in wishful thinking.” “Waving a populist banner, snarling about egalitarianism and what they term, with occasional upper-case emphasis, Greek Wisdom,” Green averred, Hanson and Heath “take aim at just about every aspect of the classical professoriate except (very classical, this) the corner of it that they see themselves representing: an outpost in the Philistine wilderness where devoted Hellenists (Latin is definitely second-class in this world), teaching six, eight, ten, even thirteen courses (no mention of quality control), devote all their time and energy to classroom betterment of multiracial and educationally deprived undergraduates.”
As Green’s disparaging assessment hints, Hanson and Heath promoted a self-styled populist vision for classical studies. This element of their book preemptively turned the tables on many of their critics. The authors praised the efforts of those Heath elsewhere called “working classicists” — the sorts of professors too busy with their onerous course loads to spend much time padding their CV’s through the creation of reader-proof articles. Many left-wing scholars so heavily criticized in the book now found themselves in an uncomfortable position: Who Killed Homer? portrayed them as the elitists. According to Hanson and Heath, although they claimed to care about the oppressed, such scholars really aimed to climb the totem pole of the profession.
Given the tone and message of Who Killed Homer?, it’s not a surprise that Hanson and Heath wound up causing a ruckus. The hard feelings inspired by the jeremiad, moreover, never seem to have disappeared completely — in part because the book helped Hanson transition from a well regarded scholar of Greek military history to a conservative pundit and public intellectual. Almost two decades later, Who Killed Homer? is a book that can still provoke fistfights.
And yet, when conducting research for my new monograph, Classics, the Culture Wars, and Beyond, I found a surprising amount of agreement with a few of the arguments Hanson and Heath offered in their otherwise contentious volume. In their original reviews or in later interviews with me, many classical scholars — whatever their overall impressions of Who Killed Homer? — thought that Hanson and Heath were correct to lament the elitism in American classical studies. Charles Rowan Beye, for instance, who published a faultfinding assessment of Who Killed Homer? in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, informed me that he sympathized with Hanson and Heath’s distaste for the Ivy League monopoly in the field. Judith Hallett agreed and told me that the authors’ criticisms of the discipline’s elitism amounted to the most valuable part of an otherwise problematic volume.
Has enough time gone by, then, to revisit Who Killed Homer?, to conclude that the book’s excoriation of classism in Classics makes some sense and warrants more attention? The last few decades have witnessed an exciting broadening of research on the classical world, to include subjects of study not previously deemed an appropriate focus of scholarship. In keeping with American identity politics and the laudable desire of classical studies to be inclusive, classicists now produce much work on slaves, women, foreigners, and other marginalized groups.
It seems a shame that this revolution in scholarship has occurred without a serious examination of the ways in which the field itself marginalizes many of its practitioners and devotees.
Take, for example, the annual meetings of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS), the chief scholarly organization for North American classical scholars. Despite the more egalitarian approach to research on display at these conferences, it is hard to imagine a more un-egalitarian environment.
Attendees walk around SCS meetings bedecked with official nametags, which provide them access to the scholarly papers and other events. These badges include two pieces of information: the wearer’s name and — more importantly — university affiliation. For many at the SCS, it appears, the latter datum serves to sum up the value of the person wearing the nametag, so potential interlocutors can quickly determine whether he or she is worth approaching. Friends and colleagues have assured me, sometimes with mirth and occasionally with horror, that they have witnessed scholars stare intently at their name badges, only to dart away, lest they waste their time schmoozing with a nobody.
So you’re liable to be more popular at an SCS conference if your badge reads “Harvard University” rather than “The University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople” or (perish the thought!) “Independent Scholar.” And if your badge does read “Harvard,” you’re still not in the clear: academic elitists will have to attempt to get an accurate estimate of your age, to determine whether you’re old enough to be a faculty member (and thus worth approaching) or you’re merely a graduate student (and thus not worth their time).
The SCS’s move to accept more panels (and, hence, fewer stand-alone submissions) for its annual meetings amounts to another example of the field’s exclusivity. Although it’s useful to attend a session dedicated to a particular theme, such panels favor the more established and well connected among us, who can more easily rustle up some friends to work on a project with them. If you’re a graduate student or you’ve been the lone classicist at your institution for decades, you’re far less likely to be able to propose a panel for an SCS meeting. In fact, many such scholars are less likely to attend an SCS annual gathering in the first place, since their institutions may not boast hefty travel budgets to fund their trips.
Is this the best way for an organization to seem welcoming? Shouldn’t our more inclusive approach to classical scholarship come hand in hand with more social inclusivity?
It is praiseworthy that the SCS has made some attempts (none of which, sadly, has borne much fruit so far) to attract more underrepresented minorities to the profession. Recently Roger Bagnall, the current SCS president, sent a letter to the organization’s members, detailing the leadership’s current efforts to increase the percentages of minorities in classical studies. This is all to the good. But such efforts may ring hollow in an environment that fosters (and turns a blind eye to) rampant academic snobbery.
Nor is the social milieu at a typical SCS annual meeting the lone example of the field’s elitism. Since 1982, which in my book I call the “putative commencement of the American academic culture wars,” only three presidents of the SCS have been affiliated with non-Ph.D.-granting departments, and even these three had pedagogical links to such programs. The vast majority of classics departments in the US do not offer a Ph.D., and thus the leadership of North American classical studies comes from one elite class alone.
This implicitly signals to SCS members that there is one — and only one — mark of a successful classical scholar: the production of peer-reviewed research. Great teaching, fabulous mentoring, and fruitful program development may be all fine and good, but they’re highly unlikely to earn you the honor of the SCS presidency.
It is no wonder that many scholars, especially younger ones, feel disillusioned with this state of affairs. Although assuredly the lousy job market is chiefly to blame, the field’s perceived elitism surely cannot help our seemingly flagging morale. Thus Famae Volent, the anonymous blog for classics job-seekers, includes many angry denunciations of the field. For instance, one commenter from 2014 opined: “I really do love to study ancient Greece and Rome, but I hope this field dies a horrible death.”
Nor is Famae Volent immune to elitism. Interspersed with substantive criticisms of the field, anonymous posters offer various assessments and rankings of classics graduate programs, pontificating about the “good” and the “bad” among them. To such posters, “good” is a synonym for “prestigious”: They don’t have the means to measure the actual quality of various departments (which naturally would require first-hand experience with them all). Instead they plump for those whose names will look fanciest on their SCS nametags.
How can we improve affairs? How can we make classical studies a more welcoming discipline in America?
Removing the institutional affiliation from scholars’ conference nametags would be a nice — albeit admittedly less-than-radical — start. If we did, we might find that conference attendees were encouraged to foster meaningful conversations with a variety of colleagues, rather than to seek out the high-powered elites among us.
It would also be helpful if only professors from non-Ph.D.-granting departments were eligible to serve as SCS presidents in alternating years. That would help connect the discipline more strongly to the field as a whole and signal to members that a robust research record is not the sole mark of a successful classical scholar.
Access to scholarly publishing can also be made more egalitarian. One of the first grand successes of the Women’s Classical Caucus was to demand the anonymous submission of abstracts and papers at SCS meetings. Prior to that time, female classicists experienced much higher rates of rejection than did their male colleagues, undoubtedly because the gatekeepers presumed that women were inherently less serious scholars.
The SCS’s move to require anonymous submissions (in 1974) encouraged classical journals to commit to double-blind peer-review, if they hadn’t already done so. Although peer-review is not always a beacon of fairness, surely the movement toward anonymous review was a step in favor of a more egalitarian discipline.
Why, then, do scholars raise no hackles about the less robust commitment to anonymity on the part of scholarly presses? More than four decades after the SCS moved to double-blind review, it is still par for the course for academic publishers to let their reviewers know the identities of prospective authors.
Such outlets already favor the well-connected: their acquisitions editors are more likely to take seriously a book proposal from a scholar with a prestigious institutional affiliation. At the very least, scholars in the field should ask that the review process be double-blind, so the privileged among us don’t receive the benefit of the doubt that is not granted to hoi polloi.
The first step toward expunging elitism from American classical studies, though, would be to drop our defensiveness. Whatever its faults, Who Killed Homer? was right to conclude that the egalitarian political commitments of many in the field sit poorly with the rigidly hierarchical nature of the discipline (and of academia as a whole).
In an article in Classical World from 1995 that adumbrates some of the arguments that would appear in Who Killed Homer? a few years later, John Heath contended that a “significant vertical gap between classicists has always been present in academia, but it is growing at an alarming pace, and classics — especially classics — can no longer afford it.”
Especially with the adjunctification of academia continuing apace, this “vertical gap” — the chasm of the modern day collegiate patricians and plebians — is surely growing all the more. Although there’s a limited amount that classicists can accomplish to fix American academia as a whole, we should at least do all we can to allow the field to reflect the growing inclusivity of its scholarship.
Eric Adler’s new book, Classics, the Culture Wars, and Beyond, has just been released from the University of Michigan Press.
