The Risks and Rewards of Public Scholarship

Some thoughts ahead of our roundtable in San Francisco

It’s no exaggeration to say that when I learned Aeneas in Palestine had just gone live, I thought someone might burn my house down. The essay grew out of an idea I’d worked up some years before, and in that time virtually everyone I’d shared it with dissuaded me from going public with it. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is among the most emotional topics in the world, they pointed out, and there was no upside to expressing a view on it. At the least, they suggested, I’d lose friends over it.

They were wrong. My house didn’t burn down and I didn’t lose friends. Quite the opposite. I got fan email or friendly challenges from around the world, some of it from extraordinarily prominent intellectuals whose work I have followed since my undergraduate days.

Readers of many different backgrounds and levels of involvement in the conflict wrote to express private agreement and support for ideas in that essay. So did readers with strong opinions on the conflict, but no personal investment in it. A few people, including some friends of mine, did write to disagree with parts of the essay, but the tone was always courteous, friendly, and respectful. Rather than lose friends, I have gained many new ones.

What else happened? Within a week Temple University invited me to expand the essay into a talk in their Classics department. I accepted that invitation, and a few months ago I had the pleasure of presenting my ideas to a room packed with attentive listeners. Many of them had probably never read the Aeneid but some of them may, I hope, now want to read or finish it.

That’s not all. Last spring a colleague in Egypt wrote to tell me an Arabic translation of the essay was in the works. I don’t know if it ever materialized, but that email did lead me to begin corresponding with a number of Egyptian Classics students, students whose views on that issue are as unpredictable and varied as are those of any others.

The most unexpected outcome of that essay was an invitation from the magazine Foreign Affairs to review SPQR, Mary Beard’s terrific new history of Rome, and to use the space to highlight the continuing relevance of ancient Rome to our world today. When the review goes live next month, it will close a nice loop back to Eidolon’s founding mission of exploring how the ancient world relates to modern life.

For all these results, the credit really must go to Donna Zuckerberg. She didn’t hesitate for a second to accept my initial pitch on an explosive topic or to run the finished essay — and on the very first day of Eidolon’s existence, to boot. Had all the prophets been right, the title alone could have torpedoed the new journal on its birthday. That decision showed tremendous courage.

It also shows how Eidolon fills a real gap in our field. For years I’d sat on an idea I thought was genuinely helpful — namely, how a familiar conflict could make the second half of the Aeneid less strange or boring and more understandable for readers today. But when I went looking for a venue, I couldn’t find one. Newspapers didn’t want it for their op-ed pages (and one editor even confessed he was afraid to run it). Of course I esteem our peer-reviewed journals and I often write, referee, and edit for them, but few of them publish essays that adopt an explicitly moral or political stance toward a contemporary topic. And, of course, they all take a long time to publish.

If we want to weigh in on current events, the internet is the only way to go. That might encourage ephemerality, but it doesn’t have to. At Donna’s suggestion, I wrote a piece on gay marriage in ancient Rome. When Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn Jenner the day after it went live, I assumed the essay became instantly obsolete. To my surprise, though, that hasn’t stopped people from reading and sharing it; in fact, every day a few more readers are finding their way to it, and it still brings me the occasional email from someone who would like to find out more about Juvenal or Sporus. In a virtuous circle, some of those emails have pushed me in turn to ponder how Catullus’ poem 63 throws light on the experience of transgender individuals. (Stay tuned to Eidolon to see how those thoughts have developed!)

The private reception of Aeneas in Palestine was so favorable that the Paideia Institute initially hoped to sponsor a follow-up discussion panel at next month’s Society for Classical Studies meeting in San Francisco. Paideia even found funds to fly an Aeneid scholar out from the Middle East to come debate it. The plan failed when many colleagues in our field — even those who live amid or near the conflict — made it clear they would rather not get involved with that issue publicly.

I think that’s fine. There’s no reason to make anyone engage in public-facing scholarship if they don’t want to. But for those of us who think public scholarship is not just valuable but paramount, it surely explains why Eidolon is succeeding. The intensity of graduate school can make it easy to forget that in undergraduate classrooms, including the ones many of us first met Classics in, it is the relevance of ancient literature that sparks and feeds interest and engagement. That is what arrests the interest of students and fosters a commitment to humanistic study.

Therein also lies the risk. Unless we’re talking about just pots and pans, those kinds of connections entail a moral dimension. I am fortunate to write for Eidolon from the privileged perch of tenure. (I was tenured in 2010.) If you don’t have tenure, it may sound like a free pass to say anything you want, and from a purely labor point of view that may be true. But it certainly isn’t advisable; tenure is often challenged and sometimes fails when it’s needed most. Even when it succeeds, though, anyone who seeks advancement in any field soon learns that opening her mouth about some topics closes off opportunities for others. That is true both professionally and privately.

Still, I realize I am one of the fortunate ones, so I can only applaud and admire the many colleagues who write for Eidolon without that safeguard. It is when these individuals speak candidly about tough or taboo topics that they are at their most inspiring and, invariably, their most enlightening.

The risk of engaging in public scholarship is not that it’s scholarship but that it’s public. You cannot make everyone happy, so the further your ideas reach and the longer they stay out there, the greater the peril of being targeted for social destruction. And that’s true every time: as the investment counselors warn us, past performance is no guarantee of future results. So why do it?

One reason is that partaking in the luxury of self-expression is its own reward. A second reason is the pleasure of inviting someone to change his mind and see things in a new way. On that view, engaging in public scholarship is simply doing outside the classroom what many of us hope we’re doing inside it — inviting audiences to think for themselves. If that is seen as advocating this policy or that morality, then at least it is an appeal to change individually and voluntarily, rather than collectively and through coercion. In our increasingly tumultuous times, that is reward enough.

Michael Fontaine is Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on Latin literature and Roman society. His newest book is Joannes Burmeister: Aulularia and Other Inversions of Plautus. Read more of his work here.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.