On Not Knowing (How to Pay for) Greek
Introducing The Sportula
The Sportula is a new collective of Classics graduate students who pool their resources to provide microgrants — petty cash of $5–300 — to economically marginalized undergraduates in Classics. Aiming to fill in the gaps left by traditional scholarship programs, our small grants help students who can’t afford $200 to attend a conference important for their research. Students who want to take a course on Magic in the Ancient World but can’t afford the $107 loss from changing their work schedule to do so. Students who struggle to afford a $50 Greek textbook that’s needed before their financial aid disburses (to reference just a few of The Sportula’s first microgrant recipients).
We also believe that one way to begin healing political fractures within our field is to “scale down” the conversation. Rather than, for example, debating Grace Bertelli’s Columbia Spectator article, we want to materially offer such students what they need — in that case, money for a summer Greek course.
In this article, The Sportula’s creator (Stefani Echeverría-Fenn) and artistic director (Djesika Bèl Watson) talk about why this organization is so needed with a view to their own lived experiences as classicists.
Djesika: When I was thirteen, a teacher at my middle school told me that Latin is the language of intellectuals. I didn’t know what an intellectual was, but I felt sure I wanted to be one. So I started studying Latin, and when I went to high school, I chose Latin as my foreign language, completing four years of study in the language and receiving awards for my work in the subject upon graduation. I love Latin, I have since I first came to know of its existence.
My mother and I lived in a car when I got accepted to a New England boarding school with a scholarship. It wasn’t a full ride — my mom still had a large portion to pay — but by the end of my sophomore year, because my grades were stellar and I gave speeches for the alumni committee, donors, and prospective students, grants and silent donors bridged the gap. My mom continued to live in the car while I lived in the dorms. None of my peers or teachers knew. It was bad enough to be one of only a handful of black students; I could at least pretend not to be poor.
Fast forward about ten years and I found myself a Classics major at Brooklyn College. I loved then—and to this very day still love—classical languages and culture. That said, the homelessness I faced as a child and teenager had prepped me for nothing if not more homelessness as an adult; I spent about half of my adult life couch-surfing, living with friends and family, and/or some other version of technical homelessness. Though I never slept on the street, a few nights I rode the F train back and forth between Coney Island and Flushing as a means of keeping my body out of the weather till sunrise, and both Stefani and I spent our fair share of nights sleeping on the couch in the Classics common room at Brooklyn College when there was no place to go.
I was a devoted student, a gifted linguist, a vigilant researcher, an eloquent writer, but…it’s not easy to keep up with a writing intensive courseload that involves learning two ancient languages when you don’t know where you’ll sleep. I withdrew from classes more times than I can count, amassing 130 credits between 2007 and the present, where I find myself newly readmitted to Brooklyn College to once again attempt to finish my undergraduate degree.
I am a single mother now, my son is two years old and we reside in a shelter for homeless families in Brooklyn. We’re really far out from any part of Brooklyn that counts as gentrified, as are most of the family shelters in the boroughs — it takes us about an hour to get to my son’s daycare and my campus for classes. Our room has mice and roaches, one of our fellow tenants smokes and the fumes were coming in through a vent in the bathroom until I sealed it with a grocery bag and about a third of a roll of masking tape. We have to go through metal detectors whenever we come home, our room is always subject to search. There are times when I feel like a prisoner here, but it keeps us off of the street, we have someplace to come home to every day and, more than anything, getting this room gave me the confidence to return to school once again.
So, when I say that marginalized classicists — those who are trauma survivors, of color, queer, disabled, dealing with mental/emotional health issues, self-harm, addiction, living below the poverty line or some combination of the above — need help beyond that which is generally acknowledged and offered by universities, I say so from a personal experience that is present and ongoing. Stefani and I used take turns stealing Doritos and Dr. Pepper from Target for each other, or treating one another to Burger King dinners when one of us was flush, and it was that support and understanding that made it possible for both of us to keep pushing through.
Imagine if we’d had a grant to feed us, or better, one to house us, so we didn’t have to hide from security throughout the nights we spent sleeping on the couches in our department commons. We excelled in lack — imagine what we’d have had to offer with our full attention committed to our studies instead of half consumed with worry about getting our basic needs met.
So many marginalized students are excelling right now, even though they face a life that lacks in one or more of the modes central to a student’s success. Imagine the quality and diversity of the outpour we would see in Classics if there were support to level the playing field between their experiences and those of students born into or existing in privilege. If classical philology is to exist as a body of thought that can walk sturdily into the modern age, it has to call on voices other than the living privileged studying the work of the dead privileged, and offer something more than more of the same. We need a platform through which marginalized classicists can thrive instead of simply surviving, and can pay tuition and rent, eat, buy books and still have some folding cash to support a full and healthy lifestyle. That will cultivate new ideas, nourish progressive thought and enrich not only the lives of the students who are themselves being aided, but also the whole of Classics.
I’m tired of hearing people refer to Latin as a dead language. They obviously haven’t become familiar enough with Vergil to read his lines in meter and feel the heartbeat of his story. My African American folklore professor recently asked my major. When I told him, and proudly at that, that I study the classics, he asked, maybe half jokingly, why I chose such a white field of study.
My field of study chose me, and it’s only “white” because no radical space has been carved into it such that it may more thoroughly and visibly represent something beyond that of status quo. The Sportula is changing that …
Stefani: Even though we’ve been friends for over a decade now, your story never stops knocking me out every time I hear it. Our stories are so similar — both of us lucky enough to attend a private high school under fraught and furtive circumstances. I spent the final months of my senior year living in the basement of my Catholic school with the help of my Latin teacher: a runaway from my still beloved but homophobic conservative Christian mother. I too spent the majority of my undergraduate career homeless in the NYC shelter system after my first apartment burned down freshman year of college.
And, our stories are so different. As a white-privileged mixed Latina, I was able to ask for help much more easily and loudly, I didn’t have to face the burden of being the symbol of all black people to our then all-white department. Didn’t have to face the inhumanity of a country where white people literally take black pain less seriously. We’ve talked before about how this is the only reason why I have been able to go on to my PhD at an elite institution and you have not yet, and why it feels vitally important for us to maintain our currently all-POC leadership of The Sportula as it grows. And yet even my loudness about the economic needs so many classicists are facing was concealed or flew under the radar of institutional awareness.
To illustrate: my first semester at Brooklyn College, I didn’t have enough money for my Greek textbook. I was too ashamed to tell my teacher this. The reserve copy in the library was always out on loan by other students in my class who also couldn’t afford the book. Luckily, the person who wrote my Greek textbook was also a BC faculty member, so there was a copy of the book in a special reading room on campus that was only open about two hours a day, and it was only the first edition of the book so some of the exercises were different, but it was workable. Until the pace ramped up and it wasn’t — so I did have to tell my Greek professor. She was kind enough to get me a copy from the department secretary by telling her that I had ordered my own copy off Amazon but it just hadn’t come yet.
I think this story is telling for two reasons. It illustrates 1) how we could use small amounts of money to prevent a massive waste of time and energy for Classics students and 2) how there are already economies of micro-help in play within Classics departments nationwide, but they fly under the radar of traditional scholarship and grant programs. The latter are generous enough to gift students huge tuition grants and aid but might not consider the $20 cost to the airport for the “full-ride” airfare grant or the $100 steel-toed boots required for the otherwise covered archaeology dig (shout-out to our first microgrant recipient!).
At multiple points throughout my career, the “microhelp” Brooklyn college professors offered me — the $300 in cash from my Roman History professor to pay my long overdue phone bill so I could finally actually call the “available for free 24 hours a day” teachers at the Latin and Greek Institute when I was taking the upper-level intensive Greek for example — was the only thing that allowed me to hang on until that wonderful end-of-semester big grant.
We started The Sportula this time of year because we assumed it’d be the slowest in terms of need. Another reason quick, readily available microgrants are needed is because many students may be flush this time of year — when financial aid first pays out. But it won’t pay out again for six months, so if you have an unexpected need in month five, you’re screwed. Despite this assumption, we have received and fulfilled over twenty microgrant requests and counting within two weeks of our site going live — which shows that the need is even greater than we realized. The requests we have fulfilled range from book needs to non-monetary requests like a desire for a classicist mentor from one’s own ethnic background to money for an overdue bill threatening electricity shut-off that “would hinder my sorely-needed review of negative purpose clauses.”
We have been so touched by the student request emails; the stories they have entrusted us with have often been emblematic of the way money struggles interact with other forms of oppression and culture like disability, the migrant experience, emotional health needs, and family issues. We have sensed from these students a real hunger for a safe place to discuss these issues with classicists like them. Thus, we have also started a private Facebook group, Tot Discrimina Rerum for students to vent, ask advice, or seek mentorship from others in our field. (This was the brainchild of collective member Ellen Lee.)
We believe microgrants are also a particularly cost-efficient way of confronting larger issues like rising tuition and a dwindling social safety net, heading off larger problems for students before they begin. For example, my final semester of college I was about $400 short of being able to afford a full course load. The only course that wasn’t required for my graduation was my Greek class — so I had to drop it. Yet I had already been accepted to Berkeley and didn’t feel confident heading there with a six-month gap in my Greek. Thus, once my tax return came and I was flusher, I spent that summer torturously completing the CUNY advanced Greek course while also working full-time — the very thing they advise definitely NOT to do. Opening the 28th Street Starbucks at 4:45 AM each morning while staying awake past midnight each night to finish my homework was a constant challenge, and one that could have been avoided by only a few hundred dollars in the first place.
Many of the student requests we’ve received mirror patterns like these — for example, we received a request from a first generation college student who had a plan for saving up for a summer program throughout the semester, but was unable to cover the $300 deposit needed to reserve their place NOW. I am glad to see that academics are beginning to recognize and talk about this issue on a larger scale in recent years.
Just as the lack of small amounts of cash can spiral outwards into crisis, we who are already skilled at living on scraps can have immense internal resources for taking small things and flipping them into successes that ripple beyond us. If anyone reads Djesika’s call for Classics to be a field that is able to support student housing, health, and other needs as unrealistic or beyond the scope of the academy, consider the following.
In 2012 I experienced a minor crisis and fell behind in rent to the point where I had received a three-day eviction notice. My former Brooklyn Classics professor gave me a loan of $800 to stave off that eviction. It feels like no coincidence that this teacher was also the only Classics professor I have ever had who was herself vocal about her working-class background. Because of that loan, which I was able to pay back in three months, I am still living in that same apartment six years later. Because I received that loan, a third, formerly homeless BC classicist was able to escape the shelter system and come live with me. Because I was able to keep that rent-controlled place, I now have more ability than most low-income students to volunteer my time and skills as a teacher to programs like the wonderful Latinx-led educational organization Mission Graduates, teaching some of the students most victimized by our current administration’s xenophobia.
The poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes in a homage to disability rights ancestors, cripstory, that “We don’t know what we give birth to. We don’t know what just keeping breathing as disabled folks will give birth to.” The Sportula itself sprang from the stability that single $800 loan allowed me. I can’t wait to see what our own microgrant recipients give birth to in service of the revitalization of our field.
In a tripartite series for our Wordpress website, we will use our goals for The Sportula as a jumping off point to explore three major issues of class, trauma, and classics that we believe critical for the future of our field. In our first article, we will talk more about the intersections of race and class in classics and why the application-less, no-questions-asked, anonymous structure of our microgrants is an intentional intervention to make existing microeconomies of help within contemporary classical departments accessible to a broader range of students — especially students of color.
In our second, we will take on questions posed in the current “classical exceptionalism” debate from our own subject positions — what this imagining of Classics as especially “hard” meant for us and our attraction to the field as students experiencing “hard” lives. In our third, we will talk about the multiple members of The Sportula’s leadership collective who are artists working with the classical tradition — and what all classicists can gain from working-class and poor reception of the classics.
First and foremost however, our work as co-creators of The Sportula is to reach more needy students. I know this from experience, because my idea for this work springs from the failure of another project.
In 2014, Djesika and I wrote a presentation about working-class reception of the classics that was picked up for inclusion in the exciting new volume Classics in Extremis. Yet ultimately, I found myself unable to finish the piece and unprofessionally ghosted on our would-be editor even though he was nothing but extraordinarily supportive. The reason was that I found myself increasingly struggling with symptoms of my chronic mental health disabilities that I normally manage easily enough nowadays. I was interviewing homeless and economically traumatized students for this research, which not only brought up my own past intensely, but also created an anxiety that now that I have “made it” I was becoming one of the classicists I always complained about — bleeding heart white people who studied and talked a lot about diversity in Classics but seemed to be materially helping no one but their own resume and profile within the field. I feared that I was leaving behind people like my very own friends and was unworthy of the success of publication.
Simultaneously, I was struggling with my own housing insecurity as forces of gentrification in Oakland have led to a long-term battle against my landlord’s attempt to displace me as an eight-year tenant with rent control. As these traces of economic trauma and survivor’s guilt somatized themselves through increasing panic attacks and bouts of major depression, it became clear to me that before I can pursue any of this cultural/reception/artistic work, I need to be materially doing something to give back.
This is what The Sportula means by “solidarity not charity” — the recognition we are not starting The Sportula to help “those poor students” but to help ourselves and our field as well — because we are them and our liberation and psychic survival is thus inextricably bound up with the next generation’s. The recognition that neither we nor our microgrant recipients are perfect people — we are messy ones with sometimes messy needs that are illegible or unspeakable to more traditional scholarship programs.
We believe one of the most insidious ways that privilege works is that some students can mess up endlessly and have their parents or their wealth fix it enough to go on to success as a classicist; while some students must walk a knife’s edge of perfection — constantly cognizant that one misstep — accidentally overdrawing a bank account and bringing on $60 of overdraft fees, or accidentally oversleeping an alarm without money for a cab to work — can spiral into a much larger crisis for students without a safety net, and majorly delay or derail their career in classics.
The Sportula is here to be that safety net for the next generation of students, and to enrich our field by building a culture where economic need is normalized, unstigmatized, and confronted by a coalition of power led by those with lived experiences of poverty. We invite you all to join us.
Follow The Sportula on Facebook and Twitter. You can donate through their GoFundMe, Paypal, or Venmo (lustralsonnet@gmail.com), and become a recurring monthly patron starting at $1 at their Patreon.
Stefani Echeverría-Fenn and Djesika Bèl Watson are “the wrong side/of a new Brooklyn.” Stefani is a Classics PhD student at UC Berkeley, and adjunct lecturer of ecclesiastical Latin at Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. In her spare time, she writes creative nonfiction about “capitalism as felt experience.” Djes Bèl makes art, writes poetry and self-publishes books of the two while raising her son. She studies Classical Philology and Africana Studies at Brooklyn College. She blogs at djesikabel.tumblr.com and at her Instagram/Twitter handle: @djesikabel.
