Classics after Coronavirus
Prophesying the Future of Our Field
As the earth reawakens outside our closed doors and we livestream springtime rites of renewal, many of us are wondering: what will remain of Classics, what will we resurrect, when this plague recedes?
In the beginning, Ovid says, there was chaos. Then god and a better nature put the elements in their place; made waters, airs, lands, and creatures to inhabit them; then finally man — the only one that looks upward to the stars.
If only it could end there. But Ovid kept writing. Creations must keep happening. Innocent bliss gives way to hardship, greed, and strife. Carelessness here, cruelty there, call floods down on all our heads. Dolphins play in treetops, wolves swim with lambs, as we sink beneath the waves. When the waters recede, a few survive, wondering how to rebuild the world they lost.
We’re all underwater now. But someday, like Deucalion and Pyrrha, the lucky among us will survey the flotsam this pandemic leaves behind. And we’ll need to coax new, tougher life from our salt-soaked field.
We have no oracle of order to “help this drowned world” or tell us “how the damage can be repaired.” So I’ve consulted nine muses on their visions for the future of Classics, the humanities, and higher ed. Below are their thoughts and concerns, from where they stand at the moment; we welcome yours in the comments.
Should we, too, throw the bones of our great mother behind us?
Joy Connolly, President of the American Council of Learned Societies
A century from now, people will be writing books about the changes wreaked on academia this spring. How do we want to go down in history? I’ve spent my own career in the bifurcated state of 1) joyful love of humanists for keeping history and critical thinking alive, for insisting on tackling old and possibly unanswerable questions, for being curious about human endeavor with all its aspirations and follies — and 2) heartily wishing we could do a better job of embracing change.
The radical external shock to academic infrastructure we’re witnessing right now will reverberate for years because COVID-19 hasn’t so much created new systemic problems as it has exposed and exacerbated long-existing ones. Some schools in already financially precarious states will be forced to close. Some faculty, possibly many, will face intense pressure to take their classes permanently online. Schools whose undergraduates flood to STEM will ask or demand that humanists develop much more compelling accounts of themselves and their scholarship — and some schools, probably many, will stop hiring and cut graduate fellowship support in areas where undergraduate interest is low. All the traditional apparatus of scholarly community — the in-person conference, the society annual meeting, the visiting lecture — has been questioned for years by scholars who work in institutions that can’t afford travel funds, or who as contingent labor have no access to travel funds — and more recently by those concerned about climate change. In sum, COVID-19 will accelerate the pressure to rethink and redesign practices that many scholars have long taken for granted.
We should seize the moment, take a step back, look up and out, and ask some serious questions. Which of our academic traditions and habits are most valuable and why? What do we count as valuable scholarship, and why? In a world where wealthy institutions still call most of the shots when it comes to defining value, how can our conversations about the future include perspectives from the larger academic community? How can humanists and social scientists command public attention as we think collectively about humanity and our future?
Perhaps the toughest question of all: with well over 4000 two- and four-year colleges and universities in the US alone, how can we fight in a unified way to preserve what we most value without losing the benefits of institutional diversity? From the deep intellectual values and passions we share, I’m convinced we will overcome the disadvantages of fragmentation and the new gig economy. The big challenge is how to plan unified, inclusive action. A smaller but more realistic and meaningful bite at the work is local. Each of us can and must clearly articulate the value of our field to students and administrators and the local community. Ask undergraduates why they’re in the classroom and why their friends aren’t; talk with deans about your teaching and research and if they look skeptical, ask them what kind of answer would make a better impression. Listening and learning what matters to people will help change our culture.
Sarah Bond, Associate Professor of History, University of Iowa
As instructors are asked to migrate their courses online, I think many administrators are beginning to realize how important face-to-face pedagogy is not only to the humanities, but also to STEM. In addition to exploring the languages and material culture of the past, the humanities is (and has always been) about relating to each other. Even if digital platforms like Zoom or Skype can project the image of a person, it can often seem we are watching a reflection on a Platonic screen during a lecture. There is something gripping and to my mind much more effective when an individual is able to interact with students in the same collective space.
At the same time, professors are dealing with things they hadn’t anticipated. We moved online the Association of Ancient Historians (AAH) meeting that we had been planning for over two years and had two tenured white male professors complain about the decision, even though it was made out of safety concerns. Additionally, I had planned on transitioning to maternity leave for the last two weeks of classes. I had prepped them all for my TAs and fellow instructors, but now I am spending my days recording all lectures and will still be grading the course content and discussions until the end of the semester. They are inducing me two weeks early in case the hospital beds here in Iowa City fill past capacity and it is all hands on deck. When the baby comes home, I will now be juggling the fear of her exposure to COVID-19 with having to finish two classes up in mid-May. While I am trying to prep as much as I can before the induction date, it has been hard for me to concentrate or to write, if I am honest. I am supposed to be a rock for my students, and I really just feel like a mass of angst. All this nonsense of telling scholars on Twitter about how Newton and Shakespeare were so productive in writing during quarantine is gendered bullshit. Newton and Shakespeare had wives with them (or in Shakespeare’s case, ones they had abandoned) who were taking care of their kids so they could reach their writing goals.
Amy Pistone, Assistant Professor of Classical Civilizations, Gonzaga University
By and large, this pandemic has only exacerbated the problems with precarity in the academic job market. Job searches have been canceled, which has meant that a lot of people who were planning for their campus visits were crushed and a lot more people have no idea what next year holds. People in contingent positions aren’t sure if they’ll be renewed. Much like what we’re seeing in our healthcare system, these aren’t new problems, but the COVID-19 crisis has really shone a harsh light on the glaring holes and vulnerabilities in this system.
I think this pandemic has disrupted things in a way that could offer some silver linings to this tragedy, but only if we learn and grow from the things that this situation has revealed. There’s been a lot of talk about how we need to change conversations around productivity and maybe we can take the lessons of those conversations into the post-pandemic world. We’re learning to do virtual conferences, which is a more accessible, affordable, and environmentally responsible option. We’re forming communities online to support one another through this isolation — I hope we’ll remember the value of this community when this is all over.
Del A. Maticic, Classics PhD Candidate at NYU and Co-Chair of the SCS Graduate Student Committee
In my view, the pandemic is going to force Classics departments, as well as those of other humanities disciplines, to reckon with the unsustainability of the current model of PhD training, which rewards and is rewarded for the singular focus on the training of future professors. While no one could have predicted the pandemic, it should come as less of a surprise that the already fragile and inflexible academic job market has suddenly become even more uncertain. Both graduate and undergraduate enrollments will continue to shrink if departments and universities continue to resist rethinking the objectives of PhD education in order to ensure the continued production of new scholars and scholarship while also empowering graduate students to have both Plan Bs and Plan As that are actually likely to succeed. I believe that in the wake of COVID-19 the best-case scenario where the professional training of PhDs is concerned is that Classics departments will take some of the many practical steps available to begin to address this. For example, the number of traditional seminars required can be reduced while course credit is offered for professional development programs, dissertation prospectus research, and exam preparation. Directors of graduate studies and advisors can educate themselves on bridge fellowships and applicable internships for graduates like the ACLS Public Fellows Competition, and can design strategies to help students be competitive for them. And most importantly, graduate programs can actively listen to their graduate students and take their input seriously as they continually improve their programs.
Scott Lepisto, Host of “Itinera” and Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Grand Valley State University
Especially if there is an expansion of services and a universal basic income, I think a lot of people can participate in classics and the humanities more broadly in non-professional ways or as one gig among many others. If the social safety net is strong, I think there will be a lot of innovation outside of academia. I hope that podcasts and YouTube videos begin to undergo a process of peer review as there will be (as there always has been) intense ideological competition over visions of the classical past. As people make more free content online, aggregate that content, and improve it, I think programs will need to work hard to figure out ways of ensuring that the education they offer is worth a price tag that so many Americans cannot afford. It seems to me that academia is overdue for some sort of disruption given that costs of education have risen dramatically and a college education no longer offers the earning power it once did.
Michelle Bayouth, Latin Teacher at Madison West High School
Most high school seniors are looking forward to the freedom that an on-campus college experience provides. With their eyes on that prize, I am seeing disheartened, privileged students discussing deferrals and gap years. The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on less fortunate students will likely prevent many from attending at all, or dropping out if they do. Imagine the stressors on a first-generation college student without the critical support that comes from face time with professors. If that student’s family is also dealing with illness, unemployment, and food and housing insecurity, their college plans are likely to be shelved.
Were college enrollments to drop significantly, smaller colleges without endowments may shudder. Well-endowed private schools will carry on, but underfunded state schools, already reliant on tuition revenues, will have to cut programs, faculty, and enrollments. The University of Wisconsin system, for example, may be forced to revisit plans developed under Scott Walker to cut the liberal arts as part of his reimagining of what an education should be. Spoiler alert: It isn’t the Classics. It isn’t training the mind to think critically or the soul to seek truth and hold it dear. In Walker’s view, it’s about providing job-ready human fodder for industry, graduates with skills but not an education.
Classicists have not explained their value to capitalists that view gold as wealth. Perhaps this is a unique moment to springboard a few heroes and heroines into the spotlight. We are unsurprised to learn that Dr Anthony Fauci is a classicist. We know that a foundational education produces outstanding researchers, physicians, and leaders with a moral compass. When we emerge from this contagion, we must have this message to share. If we don’t, much more will be lost than millions of lives.
Mira Seo, Associate Professor and Co-Founder of the “Global Antiquity” Program at Yale-National University of Singapore
What might happen to the distribution of undergraduate majors if college finally becomes free in the US? What better way to cope with the vast inequalities that this pandemic is revealing than to level at least one financial playing field?
From an international perspective here in Singapore, I am thinking about the importance of a different kind of access as we’re all shut up inside our homes. Academics, and especially humanists, love to pretend that we’ve been “socially isolating” for our whole lives, but I think this moment shows the importance of reaching out and making ourselves more accessible intellectually so that we can be more resilient as a field. As university endowments crumble and administrators start cutting vulnerable Humanities programs even more ruthlessly than ever, we Classicists need to show that we are not hermetically sealed inside of our own intellectual and disciplinary “borders,” but that we are actively collaborating in our research, contributing to trans-disciplinary scholarly dialogues, and making a case for relevance to students at all levels.
After this crisis, we will all certainly be trying to do more with less funding, fewer graduate positions, less generous leave policies. This is going to have a massive impact on younger scholars who are trying to establish themselves in the field. What can tenured people like us do to help support enrollments and keep our majors alive so our younger colleagues will still have positions? Maybe we senior people need to do some more of the heavy lifting: teach the beginning language courses to share our intellectual and pedagogical experience, retool and refresh our “service” classes so that they ask demanding questions that expand all students’ horizons, not just reaffirm a sense that Classics is for people of a certain class, color, or ethnicity. I’ve had to do this myself at a small liberal arts college in Singapore for the last seven years, and it is possible to grow programs from zero, but only senior people have the security and (if we’re lucky) the resources to take risks in our research programs to try new kinds of collaboration and invest time in rethinking our pedagogy. Senior faculty also have the influence to set a stronger direction for hiring younger colleagues who might be doing something not exactly “straight” Classics, but more interdisciplinary, trans-regional, even experimental, that might better reflect the interests and concerns of the current generation of globalizing students.
Joel Christensen, Associate Professor and Chair of Classical Studies, Brandeis University
I have spent a lot of time over the past year talking about projections for higher education as Chair of the Brandeis Faculty Senate and ex officio member of the Board of Trustees. The pandemic has accelerated five major threats to education, including a massive “baby bust,” extreme income inequality, the influence of technology on work and education, demographic shifts, and climate change. Higher education was already going to be radically changed by these forces in the next decade, with a possible “shrinkage” of 30% of institutions.
Classical Studies as most of us know it exists within the framework of the larger higher educational system, with graduate departments setting standards that impact curricula all the way down to primary education. But the disciplines explored within Classical Studies have existed inside and outside institutions for many centuries. In the best-case scenario, there will be a quantitative shift in available opportunities for conventional work as researchers and teachers in Classics. There will be fewer permanent jobs in academia; there will be fewer positions in graduate programs.
But none of this is new: anyone who got their PhD after 2007 knows the story. If I have a hope about how our disciplines will be transformed, it’s that we have a generation of students and teachers who are prepared to create spaces outside of conventional settings for their work. We have networks opening our traditionally closed boundaries to new voices. We have grass-roots organizations supporting one another. And we have the beginning of non-hierarchical efforts to think about the place of classical materials in all classrooms.
The fact is that we need a robust Humanities informed by the past to meet the challenges we will face in the future. Zeus says at the beginning of the Odyssey that human beings make their fate worse than it needs to be thanks to our recklessness. My sincere hope is that the inverse is true: we can make our lives together better, with learning and care.
Shelley P. Haley, Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College and SCS President-Elect
First, in general, the Humanities has become the stepchild of higher education and has done, in my opinion, an insipidly dull job of pushing back against the alleged “neutrality” of STEM fields. This pandemic could be the opportunity for the Humanities to correct that.
Certainly, this is not the first pandemic Classics has been through. In the ages past there was the plague in Athens, plagues of locusts in Judaea and Egypt. As a field Classics has survived major societal disruptions from the bubonic plague to the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 to World Wars I and II. I really believed that the student revolutions of the 1970s would do Classics, in particular, in. And there were closures of Classics departments around the country at the demand of student groups. However, a decade later they were back. So, yes, I think the pandemic has the potential to reshape the future of Classics but that reshaping has to be done with intentionality and intersectionality. When Classics came back in the 1980s, it was because the underlying white supremacist discourse of “Western Civilization” never died; it went dormant until a nurturing political environment revived it. Classics is at a moment in its history where it seems to want to open up, to be more inclusive not just of different people but also different subfields like Reception Studies and Environmental Studies. But we should not fool ourselves that we have rendered white supremacist discourse and attitudes powerless. I asked my daughter, a Black feminist — I wonder where she got that — digital humanities librarian about the prompt for this opinion piece and her answer sums up my feelings: “Maybe Classics has more to worry about than COVID-19.” Indeed.
Nandini Pandey feels grateful to be in this together with people like these. Check out her previous Eidolon posts on Classics in a time of coronavirus, and say hello now that she’s finally on Twitter, @global_classics.
