Tending Our Field and Our Future
Classics’ New COVID-19 Relief Fund
“Together, apart.” This phrase is like a seesaw. Which word will tip the balance today? In glass-half-full moods, I tell myself this pandemic could recalibrate our selves and our societies. But as news breaks with fresh evidence of our division, the depression ahead, the ever-receding day when things bend back toward normal, my spirits slam the ground.
Last week was different. Last week something real and good and extraordinary began. On Thursday April 23, the Society for Classical Studies and the Women’s Classical Caucus joined forces to announce $15,000 in emergency COVID-19 relief funds to Classics grad students and contingent faculty based in North America. (Full disclosure: I’m one of many helping to organize this effort, though I’m not writing in an official capacity here.)
The idea is very much indebted to the Sportula, a consortium of grad students that’s been gifting undergrads essential petty cash for years. The SCS/WCC COVID-19 Relief Fund is offering no-strings-attached microgrants of up to $500 to people who’ve pursued postgraduate training in classical subjects and need money now. We’re painfully aware that our resources will come nowhere near covering the needs this crisis has created. I wish we could give without geographical, educational, or monetary limits. But we hope that even this little will make a real difference to real people. Not just financially, but as an expression of our solidarity and care for the grad students and colleagues who’ve invested their lives in this field, but lack safety nets and job security on the tough road ahead.
We’ve all been thinking about the future of our field, our universities, our nations. But these big beautiful ideas depend on here-and-now individuals, people with needs and bills and rents to pay. We all know the saying:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
I spent the minutes and hours after the COVID-19 relief fund was announced wandering around my house in a state of disbelief, tears rolling down my cheek onto my smartphone. Because applications were piling in, thick as leaves, from people who need help making rent, buying groceries, paying bills. People like you and me, in need, each one telling a story that broke my heart. But alongside those applications rolled in donations, in tens or twenties or hundreds of dollars, from people like you and me: each one giving what they could to our collective aid, and astounding me with their generosity. People who know that for want of security, a scholar might be lost; for want of the scholars, a field might be lost; and all for the want of one month’s rent.
One former teacher of mine wrote, when I spotted his name among the incoming funds to the WCC’s PayPal account, “I feel so privileged to have had my career during the period and in the place that I, by good luck, had it. My heart goes out to the colleagues facing the grim prospects of the next several years for higher education institutions and to the grad students and younger scholars affected even more drastically by this situation.”
We now have double the applications we can fund, but we’re starting to disburse awards this week — and we’ll continue to do so as long as there’s money and need.
Please apply, or donate if you can, today.
Great oaks grow from small seeds. I hope our friends over at the Sportula see this new initiative as a tribute to their recognition that change can happen incrementally and from below, with material help from person to person. It is something, in these times that sap our sense of agency, to remember that we each retain the power to replant and water good ideas. And if enough of us work together, apart, we won’t need to wait years for them to grow into a sheltering canopy.
I was lucky to watch this COVID relief fund germinate during an April 13 Zoom meeting of the WCC Steering Committee. Suzanne Lye, an assistant professor of Classics at UNC-Chapel Hill, mentioned that her department had distributed small cash awards to grad students. She proposed that we try to scale the idea up. We all loved the idea and got to work. Within days, the SCS — who’d been contemplating a similar fund — stepped forward and joined forces, with double our seed money. The week after, on April 24, CAMWS pledged $5000 more, and we hope other societies will follow. Thanks to the swift and humane action of people at all these organizations, and the dozens who’ve donated individually, this idea has become a reality. I hope it’s only just begun sending down roots and pushing forth leaves.
I can’t tell you what a gift it’s been to me, amidst the isolation and anxiety I’ve spilled onto these pages, to play a small part in this collective effort. It’s also been a pleasure to get to know Suzanne: the most effective organizer I’ve ever met, and someone with whom I felt an instant kinship as a rare minority in the field. She’s “part of the Chinese diaspora who ended up in Jamaica,” she explains, and we bond as fellow “in-betweeners” whose ethnic identity rarely computes to others but brings us together with other immigrants across the world.
Suzanne also understands better than most what it’s like to cross disciplinary borders and gradations of financial security. Though she takes no personal credit for the SCS-WCC COVID-19 Relief Fund, I cajoled her into letting me interview her on April 23, thinking you too might like to meet the person who planted this seed. Here’s part of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. The impetus for this fund, she stresses, “was about both helping those in need with financial support during this rough patch and also about promoting a sense of community in our field.”
Nandini: Tell me a little about where the idea for these awards originated and how you hope they’ll help people.
Suzanne: Well, part of my whole life philosophy is service [and to give without thought of receiving]: so look around, be aware, how can you be a helper, how can you help people in all different ways large and small. I’m really into small gestures of helping people. Because none of us does anything through our own power, really. We do have to work hard, but there are so many people along the way who help us — named and unnamed, whether they’re family or friends or colleagues. People get all sorts of breaks, and they don’t even necessarily know. And not everybody knows when they’re doing that for you. … When I was in grad school, I had to pay for something that was kind of a lot, and one of my professors said, “Hey, I can just loan you the money out of my personal funds.” I didn’t end up needing to take him up on that, but that was such a kindness, you know? Because it was such a large amount to me, and such a small amount to him. For me, it would have been the difference of doing something I love or not … And so as much as I can, I want to model that and create a very rich community for us all to live in together.
Nandini: That’s really profound and you’ve anticipated my next questions, which were going to ask if there are any life experiences you’ve had that have made you especially aware of the need to cover basics and help people out.
Suzanne: I’m not really from a privileged background [but I have been privileged in having a family committed to education and hard work]. I’m an immigrant in this country and I’ve worked a lot of jobs, starting when I was still living at home … and my parents worked lots of jobs, and when you come to a country and you don’t have much … you [meet] all sorts of people: people who help you and people who take advantage of you or whatever. And so you have to decide what type of person you’re going to be for those who come in behind you and those who’re around you. And … for me, it was fairly easy to make that decision. My goal is to support people in ways that they need. That isn’t just always giving away stuff; sometimes that’s having a high standard for them to do their work and not just giving them a pass that has no meaning, right? But challenging people to be better, work harder, just even see their capabilities. Because I think my early challenges in life and even continued challenges — a lot of those are defining for me and they’ve helped me become a better person. And I do feel that in some ways I’m fortunate that I’ve had to struggle at various points in my life, because if I didn’t, then I wouldn’t know what I’m capable of. And I hope people realize their sometimes untapped potential, to be better than what they think they can be.
Nandini: That’s wonderful. Speaking of struggle — I couldn’t help but notice you did your first degree in organic chemistry and the history of antibiotics. … It’s interesting because so many people in the humanities often feel ourselves in competition with STEM fields. But I’m curious, what motivated your move from science to Classics, and what kind of insights do each of those backgrounds give you right now?
Suzanne: I love science and I loved being in a lab and doing basic research, and looking at and discovering the nature of things, the nature of the world, the nature of interactions, things like that. The reason I left wasn’t because of the material as much as it was the environment. It’s not a friendly environment to be a woman, to be a minority. And also the culture — you’re stuck in a lab most of the time, and I just didn’t feel like I could have the impact I wanted and live the range of life I wanted if I were in a lab. … [But] I’ve found as a [Classics professor] that the people who come into my classes who are in science classes ... are often almost the better humanists in some ways; they work hard in our classes, they ask big questions and they know how to pursue and drill at little details and little questions, and I think you need [the ability to do] both.
So I feel what the scientific training gave me was an experimental, can-do mindset and [the idea that] there is a whole world to discover but you need to do it in small steps. You need to try everything and throw everything at a problem and keep looking at it from a different perspective — because that’s when discovery happens. I’ve taken that experimental training into classics and a lot of other aspects of my life. [For example, in teaching, I often] say, OK, how do I teach this in a different way, so that somebody who’s coming from a different place can understand it? Then I experiment with all sorts of different activities in class, but also all sorts of different constructs … you’re training [students] to look around and see [methodological] tools and then cross-apply them.
Nandini: And in this age when there’s so much hope being vested in the tools that science can give us to figure out a vaccine or track people’s contacts, what kinds of tools do you think Classics can give us in getting through this?
Suzanne: Well, Dr Fauci, the head of the epidemic response, was a Classics major. And I think what Classics and the humanities give you are frameworks for approaching and thinking about problems that are big-picture questions. The best scientists that I’ve ever met are ones that can think about the big picture as well as do the drudgery work that needs to be done to move knowledge forward. So you have to have a balance and I think that’s what Classics can give to the world. We have modes and systems of inquiry that are proven over millennia, right? So we may not use some of those frameworks because we’ve chosen different paradigms, but other paradigms that Classics [has engaged with over time] lasted longer than the scientific paradigms, so … we might find use out of them in solving new problems. [Laymen may think] of science that everything is very mechanical and linear. But frankly a lot of scientific discovery happens through creative thinking and making creative connections. And I think that Classics training actually helps spark those connections between neurons and things in your brain … because if you think about it, when you’re [reading] something in Greek or Latin, it can be very mechanical — what tense is that verb, what meter, et cetera — but then you step back and you think, wait a second, this is an echo of another line that we read earlier in the book, and there’s a meaning here that’s larger than the mechanics. And so you’re constantly thinking on a very detailed level and a grand level, and I think being able to balance those two ways of thinking in a continuous way — being able to live within that space between those two sides — is the training that Classics gives you right from the start, which is harder to find in the earlier levels of science courses.
Nandini: That’s fascinating. So much of our sense of reality is about scale and perspective: zooming [from] our little experiences and brains and houses out to our states and countries and the environment we’re part of. It occurs to me that all our actions in the world have an effect, and everything we do is a kind of communication. What message do you want these awards and this initiative to send to all those classicists out there who might be struggling?
Suzanne: Just that we’re a community; we look out for each other. … John Donne says no man is an island unto himself. I think as scholars sometimes we feel like we are individuals and we are islands. [But] I’m really aware when I’m doing my research of all the voices in my head, all the experiences that I’ve had and how they’re informing every reading that I do — I still have my advisors’ voices in my head! …. And so I would hope with these awards that people realize they’re connected to a community and there are people that care about them, even if they don’t know them. And also, on the flip side, for those who would think about contributing to the fund, remember the impact of small things, right? The impact of small gestures. I feel like American society in general [exalts] the idea of “the hero” who does big things. But it’s brick by brick that you build a pyramid. And everybody matters. Both from the perspective of giving and the perspective of receiving.
I want to thank Suzanne and our colleagues across multiple organizations who are sharing the collective labor behind this joint COVID-19 relief fund. I want to thank all the unsung heroes who’ve donated already, and all who plan to pitch in when they can. Above all, I want to thank everyone who’s invested time and labor and love in the study and teaching of Classics without a sure return. I hope that in your hour of need we’ll continue to come together, apart, to invest back in you.
Nandini Pandey is paying honoraria forward to the future of the hive. Follow her @global_classics and check out her other Eidolon posts on Classics in a time of coronavirus. Next up: a snapshot of our community during this pandemic, thanks to #ClassicsTwitter.
