Racism and the completely politically correct classics departments
Yesterday I read this article about how requirements of diversity and inclusion are now utterly and completely dominant in classics departments at the university level. This is, of course, not a surprise, because the takeover has been increasing at a seemingly exponential rate recently.
Nevertheless, even if you are prepared, it may give you a cold chill to read it. A sample:
More and more, it seems, the study of classics—like the study of the humanities generally—has fallen under the spell of grievance warriors who have injected an obsession with race and sexual exoticism into a discipline that, until recently, was mostly innocent of such politicized deformations—largely, we suspect, because of the inherent difficulty of mastering the subject. (In this sense, classics is different from pseudo-disciplines like women’s studies, black studies, lgbtq studies, and the like, because classics can never be entirely reduced to political posturing. You actually have to know something.)…
Consider the fate of Eidolon, an online journal that was started in 2015 to demonstrate the relevance of classics to modern life. It wasn’t long before Donna Zuckerberg, the sister of the personal data magus and surveillance guru Mark Zuckerberg, engineered a palace coup and declared that henceforth Eidolon would “err on the progressive side,” dedicating itself to “the spirit of bringing politics into Classics.” Because, you know, the humanities have not been sufficiently tainted by signing up for every trendy progressive cliché going. From now on, Zuckerberg said, Eidolon would forgo objectivity—“often nothing more than a cover for upholding the status quo, and to hell with the status quo”—in its quest to become “a progressive, feminist publication with a commitment to social justice.” And how was this goal to be achieved?
Well, this year, Zuckerberg noted, the magazine would aim to make sure that “at least [at least] 70 percent of our contributors be women and 20 percent of our writers be poc,” i.e., “people of color,” i.e., not white. (But isn’t race merely a “social construction”? No, silly, that was last year.) And just how are those percentages going to be achieved? Well, going forward, Eidolon will ask people pitching stories for “demographics,” i.e., are you black or white? Male or female? “I have no interest,” Zuckerberg sermonized, “in providing bland and false reassurances that we only care about good ideas and good writing and not who our authors are.” Who would doubt it? And what about merit? “[A]ppeals to merit,” she said, are “often . . . white supremacist dog-whistles.” So: “If you’re white and we publish you, you will know, for maybe the first time in your career, that it was because of the merit of your idea and not because you’re white.”
We’d like to know if there are any cases of anyone anywhere being published in a classics journal because he (or even she) was white…
But of course, all achievements of white people are presumed to be the result of favoritism because of their privileged whiteness. It’s baked in the cake, as it were. And the hour of redress is at hand.
I’m not using hyperbole, either. The article goes on to describe a talk given at a recent classics conference:
Decrying the “hegemony of whiteness,” [Padilla] called for strategies to “decenter and displace white privilege and supremacy from its position of preeminence and priority in the discipline’s self-image.” According to him, “the most fundamental question for the future of knowledge production in Classics is this: how do we recognize, honor, and repair the silencing of the knowledge that people of color carry?” In fact, of course, every classics journal and every classics program in the Western world is on high alert, scouring the landscape for “people of color” they might employ, publish, and advance.
But that is not enough for Dan-el Padilla Peralta. He wants “reparative epistemic justice,” i.e., the expulsion of whites from the discipline and (like Donna Zuckerberg) the end to colorblind assessment of merit. “[H]olders of privilege,” he intoned, “will need to surrender their privilege. In practical terms, this means that . . . white men will have to surrender the privilege they have of seeing their words printed and disseminated; they will have to take a backseat so that people of color—and women and gender-nonconforming scholars of color—benefit from the privilege of seeing their words on the page.” Should that not happen, he has said elsewhere, “all options for reparative intellectual justice—including the demolition of the discipline itself [our emphasis]”—should be kept open. In other words, institute a new regime of prejudice or we’ll destroy classics.
I would say it’s probably already very close to being destroyed, like so many other disciplines. The very idea of merit is highly suspect and to be condemned, according to the SJWs that seem to dominate these fields. And what happens to those who disagree? This article describes an incident that occurred at that very same conference, in which the author had an encounter with the afore-mentioned Padilla (but please read the whole thing, if you can stomach it):
Padilla said nothing about merit, the content of the article in question, or how it was reasoned. He said that articles by white men should be excluded from consideration, regardless of their merit, if members of other ethnic or racial groups submitted work for publication at the same time.
Surely, this is just straightforward racism? Yet in response to these remarks, the entire audience of classicists applauded…[T]he conference program indicated that everyone in the audience was invited to speak as part of a discussion about “the future of classics,” [so] I decided to contribute a few sentences on the stated topic…
I only wanted to make four very brief points:
1) It is important to stand up for Classics as a discipline, and promote it as the political, literary, historical, philosophical, rhetorical, and artistic foundation of Western Civilization, and the basis of European history, tradition, culture, and religion. It gave us the concepts of liberty, equality, and democracy, which we should teach and promote. We should not apologize for our field;
2) It is important to go back to teaching undergraduates about the great classical authors—Cicero, the Athenian dramatists, Homer, Demosthenes, the Greek and Roman historians, Plato, and Aristotle—in English translation in introductory courses;
3) One way of promoting Classics is to offer more survey courses that cover many subject areas (epic, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric, philosophy, history, political theory, and art history), or to concentrate on one area such as in Freshmen seminars, or through western civilization classes;
4) It should help with securing funding from administrators to argue that such survey courses are highly cost-effective…
Unfortunately, I was interrupted in the middle of my first point by Sarah Bond, who forcefully insisted: “We are not Western Civilization!”
…I then attempted to move on and make my second point, [and] I was interrupted by her and others, and not permitted to finish what I had hoped would be four very brief statements. A member of the audience with no connection to the panel, Michael Gagarin (University of Texas Emeritus) rose, came over to me, and told me I wasn’t allowed to speak…
In the hope of making my position clearer—that race should not be a determining factor when it comes to assessing the value of scholarship—I said to Padilla, “You may have got your job because you’re black, but I’d prefer to think you got your job because of merit.” Admittedly, I was under stress and did not express myself as clearly as I might have done, but what I was trying to convey is that the principle he was advocating clearly didn’t apply to hiring decisions—and nor should it—because he had got his job on merit, not because he’s black. Indeed, if I thought the opposite, and I imagined there was a chance of him saying, “You’re right, I was only hired because I’m black,” that would have contradicted the point I was trying to make, which is that it would have been wrong to hire him based only on his race, just as it would be wrong for an academic journal to publish an article based on the race of its author.
Padilla did not respond to my point directly. Instead, he let out a whoop of what sounded like triumph. He then made the following statement:
“I did not interrupt you once, so you are going to let me talk. You are going to let someone who has been historically marginalized from the production of knowledge in the Classics, talk. And here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you’ve outlined: If that is in fact a vision that affirms you in your white supremacy, I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies, that you’ve outlined [sic], dies, and that it dies as swiftly as possible!”
The following day, Helen Cullyer, the SCS Director, sent me an email in which she forbade my attendance at the meeting on Sunday, the last day of the conference…
Her stated reason for expelling me was “harassment”: the SCS executive had unilaterally introduced a new measure about two months previously, stating that any people could have scholars kicked out of the annual general meeting for “stalking, queer/trans bullying, or hostility or abuse based on age, disability, religion, race or ethnicity.”
Cullyer gave me no chance to explain or defend myself, and since she was present in the audience, she knew what had happened. In her view, I had violated SCS policy by disagreeing with Padilla. A grown man with a position at Princeton was apparently unable to endure the trauma caused by a woman disagreeing with him and by asking rhetorically if he got his job based on his race. Yet it was fine with the SCS Director (a woman) for a man (Michael Gagarin) to try and prevent a woman from speaking—that’s not harassment, apparently.
Much much more at the link.
The rot is wide and the rot is deep. The banning occurred because it sounded as though she was saying Padilla got his job because of race, not because she actually had thought he had or that she actually was asserting that he had. Furthermore, Padilla himself seemed to actually be saying that people in minority groups should get jobs based on race, and that white people (and especially white men) should be banned because of race.
So, who is the real racist here? It’s completely obvious. But since the left decides who is a racist and who isn’t, and because the left also claims that people of color cannot be racists (unless, I suppose, they’re self-hating racists who are prejudiced against fellow people of color, or unless they are Republicans), academics are not allowed to answer that the real racist is Padilla, although it’s glaringly obvious.
As I said, this sort of thing has been going on at universities and in academia for a long, long time. But I think that during the last couple of years it’s become more extreme or at the very least more openly stated by more people.
I’ve noticed something else lately, too. I get a couple of alumni magazines regularly, and they’ve all become completely saturated with articles full of boilerplate jargon about inclusion and diversity. Not just the occasional article, but piece after piece, until now whole issues are devoted to nothing but that topic and how to implement it.
These are highly-educated people. Do they really believe what they say? And make no mistake, what they say is stupid. Or is it all a con, a #metoo attempt to be on the “right side of history”? Whatever it is, do they not understand that the day is coming when those of us who disagree with their idiocy, and idiocy it is, they hold no defensible intellectual ground, when this leads to violence? The talking part is all but over over. Does the left understand this? All those little girl college professors? They’re going to fight?
This is a truly horrible trend, of course, but in my personal experience there are areas in the humanities that are holding up pretty well. My area is music and I graduated from and later taught at McGill University in Montreal. It is an English-speaking university and has likely the best and largest music department in Canada. A very good friend of mine is a musicologist there, past head of the theory department and over lunch recently we talked a bit about the situation in academia. From what he said, the standards and quality of musicology and music theory at McGill is as good as ever. Students are still learning the challenging disciplines: ear training, interpreting historical notations, the details of music history. I attended a performance of the McGill Symphony Orchestra and its standards were also very high. I think that in music it is pretty much impossible to diminish the idea of merit. Poor quality performance and scholarship is embarassingly obvious. If you play a sub-standard recital at McGill as a performance major you will have to go before a committee to explain why you should even be given a second chance.
So, not every school and every discipline is plunging into the abyss.
titan28:
I think some people disagree but are very afraid of the repercussions if they speak up. They have observed what happens to those who do.
“These are highly-educated people. Do they really believe what they say?”
Absolutely, they do. They have joined the “I am saving the world cult”. The humanities are a lost cause; i.e. the left has totally taken over there, so the next,and final, step is STEM. This year at my school there has been a year-long program in how STEM, that is “old white guys”, have discriminated against POC and women. And STEM needs to “hear” those other voices. At least at my school, biology is 70% of the way down the PC path. I don’t know how STEM is faring at other schools, but once it falls, all is lost. The Dark Ages return as who will actually do science and technology if all the work must pass social justice muster.
On Twitter I used to follow a lot of classics professors/scholars/etc. When the event happened as you quoted above, the outrage tweets were fast, furious, and misrepresentative of what was actually said. I have since deleted my Twitter account (for other reasons), but it does make me wonder what else these classics “leaders” misrepresent.
I may be an autodidact when it comes to ancient Greece and Rome, but I’m feeling better that I’m getting to explore these classics without the filters these “leaders” impose on their students.
I may be an autodidact when it comes to ancient Greece and Rome,
Victor Davis Hanson spent decades teaching Classics, including Greek and Latin, to Fresno State students, many of whom are Hispanic. He has commented on the fact that the discipline is collapsing as an academic subject,
I've seen this in medical school where I was teaching students for 15 years. There has been a real feminization of medical school. Not just because 60% of medical students are now female but because the curriculum has been softened considerably. Much of instruction is now about what we used to call “The Doctor Patient Relationship.”; It was called that when I was a student but it seems to be taking over Anatomy and Pharmacology, as well. Students no longer have microscopes. They no longer make slides of their own blood to study. It is all photos and laptops.
The science is losing. Certainly there is a lot to teach. I started studying Molecular Biology and Genetics to keep up. I was obviously a dinosaur teaching physical diagnosis and medical history taking but the students I had seemed to like it. One student got mad at me because I chewed him out for not doing his work. He was very charming and thought he could slide by, I wonder if a younger instructor would have let slide?
Doctors these days are judged by patient evaluations, the way college instructors are.
While I genuinely feel empathy for Mary Frances Williams (she has published her own account on Quillette, here: https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting/) at a certain level I find this quite hilarious.
Who was it who said battles in academia are so fierce because the stakes are so low?
Rufus T. Firefly:
The second half of my post is based on Williams’ article in Quillette, and the quotes are from it.
In many ways, the stakes may be low in academia. But there are other stakes involved: the control and shaping of young people’s minds. Pretty high stakes there, actually.
Why do we even bother to pretend that one can reason with gleefully unreasoning bags of malevolent appetites? Their resentments cannot be assuaged with syllogisms; any more than normal amounts of love, and expressions of goodwill can cure their moral dementia.
It is also clear that a plurality, at least, of the human race is just fine with the abandonment of right reason; and, perhaps with all reasoning but the basest forms of urge-fulfilling instrumental reason too. That is why it has gotten to this point: the apathetic, malleable, go-along, main-chance seeking middle.
Certainly these Zuckerbergian Maenads and Furies (obligatory classic reference) disdain any type of discourse that refers to reason as the arbitrator of human values according to a categorical developmental standard; or imagines as George Washington awkwardly but accurately described the standard as: “the rights of human nature”. [Consider how well this phrasing/formulation works in terms of clarity in comparison with “Natural Rights” or “the rights of man”]
Anyway, it’s obvious that these entities intend never to relent until they have scoured the surface of the earth in order to hunt out and destroy whatever retreats there might be in which vestiges of logocentric and essentialist cultural practices, values, or mindsets, have sought refuge.
I suppose that their uninhibited ravings ought to be considered a kind of gift: As they make it clear by these ravings that this is indeed [and sorry about employing what has become a cliched phrase] an existential conflict. The only question being how hot and open the conflict will be.
Making room, sharing space, retreating to refuges, and even formally surrendering with terms, are never enough as experiences with all previous totalitarian regimes have amply demonstrated. Throaty voicing of the party line, self-abasement and accusation, and perhaps active complicity in one’s own extinction are all required.
When the morally deconstructed appetite entities of the left label you as a Neanderthal, you [as all here probably already do] need to take what these self-described vanguardists of human evolution and “liberation” are implying pretty literally.
They are implying that you need to make way and die, and to leave the keys to the front door on the stoop while you are at it.
We can bemoan this state of affairs, or we can steel ourselves for the future, prepare as best we can, and do whatever we can in the meantime to short-circuit the arrival of this potential apocalypse.
Who knows. We might just get lucky. But I would not count on it. They have an orgasmic need for your humiliation. It’s difficult to reason with that, or to dissuade it with much less than brute force.
And if we do indeed forestall the storm for some period, what do we do after learning what these creatures are really like, just beneath the surface?
Time for white males to support AOC and apply for an unwilling to work paycheck, I demand $5,000 per month because I’m worth it.
Padilla himself seemed to actually be saying that people in minority groups should get jobs based on race
Yep. Here’s what he wrote about that part of the exchange with Mary Frances Wiliams:
DNW–
Yes, things are starting to head in a direction that is getting to be a tad reminiscent of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and their Red Guards–who dragged those who didn’t get with the program, didn’t mouth the right phases from Mao’s “Little Red Book,” or who delayed their genuflections a little too long, the insufficiently “red’ offenders, people who were supposedly partisans of the “four Olds” i.e. old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas, “rightists,” “deviationists” and “splitters”–out of their offices and homes, put dunce caps on their heads and hung signs listing their crimes around their necks, beat them, and dragged them through the streets to a public square, where they were told to confess their crimes.
Those who were lucky survived, and were not permanently maimed, untold numbers did not survive.
Then there were their delightful “criticism and self-criticism sessions” they forced people to attend, and massive physical destruction of China’s cultural heritage.
It was all so much fun.
DNW–
Yes, things are starting to head in a direction that is getting to be a tad reminiscent of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and their Red Guards–who dragged those who didn’t get with the program, didn’t mouth the right phases from Mao’s “Little Red Book,” or who delayed their genuflections a little too long, the insufficiently “red’ offenders, people who were supposedly partisans of the “four Olds” i.e. old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas,” “rightists,” “deviationists” and “splitters”–out of their offices and homes, put dunce caps on their heads and hung signs listing their crimes around their necks, beat them, and dragged them through the streets to a public square, where they were told to confess their crimes in the middle of intimidating crowds.
Those who were lucky survived, and were not permanently maimed, untold numbers did not survive.
Then, there were their delightful “criticism and self-criticism sessions” they forced everyone to attend, and the Red Guard’s massive physical destruction of China’s (and Tibet’s) cultural heritage.
It was all so much fun.
A good book to read on this subject is Peter Wood’s _Diversity: The Invention of a Concept_. It came out in 2003, and had I read it then, I would have been very uncomfortable with it as too extreme and pessimistic. However, I didn’t get around to it until about ten years later, and Wood’s adage that “diversity drives everything else out” was absolutely prescient.
IIRC, about 2,000 baccalaureate degrees in the Classics are awarded in this country in a typical year. Classics professors are expendable. There are the people ruining the discipline and the people allowing them to do it. Time for college trustees to go Kenesaw Mountain Landis and shut the Classics department down in every venue where there’s an indication of this.
Art Deco,
Ha ha! Any trustee that tried that would be out on their ear in days and probably have their businesses and lives ruined in short order.
The intellectual, cultural and moral pillars of Western civilization are no longer being simply attacked but are being destroyed before our very eyes. The barbarians are within the gates and they are immune to reasoned persuasion. In fact, attempts at reasoned persuasion are now declared to be evidence of irredeemable guilt.
Rabid dogs must be put down. A metasticizing cancer must be cut out of the body. All else is superfluous verbiage and willful blindness while whistling past the graveyard.
After Trump, whether that be tomorrow or in 2028, the time for action will have arrived. As a RINO like Pence (close friend to Jeff Flake) will not present a substantive obstacle to the Left. So we will then be faced with a binary choice; the permanent surrender of our liberty or Civil War.
For the Left will have it no other way… the Nazis demonstrated that there’s only one way to stop evil; good must offer itself as sacrifice. When mortally threatened, liberty must be earned.
One obvious fix to some of this is the elimination of a lot of colleges and universities. This country has WAY to many universities. I’m often amazed when some obscure school is in the news that I’ve never even heard of yet they employ thousands of these SJW types in faculty and administrators.
Make these nutjobs get real jobs.
Neo, I wasn’t clear enough in my comment. I don’t mean this is funny because of the low stakes (although I did relate that quote). To me it’s funny in a laughing as the world burns, sort-of way. That anyone would argue anything but a meritocracy makes sense in academia is so absurd and illogical it is humorous.
A few decades ago there was some statistical evidence that symphonies judged male applicants as stronger than females because they were male. So some symphonies started placing job applicants on the opposite side of a curtain from those doing the hiring. More women did end up getting hired, so this practice became more widespread. The goal was to have the best musicians in one’s symphony, a meritocracy, so when it was learned that errors were being made through false, visual queues the process was changed to get a more accurate result.
These fools are actually arguing the opposite. A meritocracy produces a result they find visually distasteful, so screw merit and talent.
“Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Western Civ has got to go!”
With the nonsense at Evergreen State and the University of Toronto spawning the “Intellectual Dark Web” what else will we see created as Atlas shrugs?
One of my daughters originally wanted to be an English professor. That was before she did an MA in English lit. The critical studies approach was already well entrenched fifteen years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better. This discussion of what has happened to classics is no surprise.
Rufus T. Firefly:
I understand what you’re saying.
But this description of the events at the conference, written by Padilla himself, was so chilling in its malevolent demands and swollen self-importance that I really can’t laugh, even in a laughing-as-the-world-burns sort of way.
Many days I am close to despair. Some days I cross over into despair. On rare occasions I just laugh. However, you are correct. This is malevolent, depressing and we’re likely not at the bottom yet.
I hope Geoffrey Brittain’s prediction does not come true.
The author’s suggestion of phasing in sanity by taking a daily break from racism might work for hard core woke racists willing to try it. However, since the grievance warriors appear to be deeply entrenched in their derangement, rational humans will benefit from further prolific chronicling of the wokeness plague.
As you say, the rot runs deep, and it is not limited to academia.
Five years ago I retired from a large law firm after 40 years of practicing corporate law. As an alumnus I get invited to various firm outreach events, which lately have become a cornucopia of “diversity” events. Before I retired we had mandatory “diversity” training, which became over time non-stop hectoring about “diverse” client service teams (appearing to respond to racial and racist demands from large corporate clients who themselves were being badgered by smug apparatchiks from the ABA, the Black Lawyers Society and various La Raza types). Having said all that, my old firm had hired many excellent black and hispanic lawyers, and I was proud to be their colleague. We just need enough of them to meet artificially inflated demands. The racial nose-counting by corporate law departments is insulting to everyone.
Banned Lizard,
It seems exactly like religious fanaticism.
C.S. Lewis:
They must destroy western civilization to save mankind. They are heroes in a morality play worthy of Aristophanes.
Bryan,
Music, like sports, has objective criteria for measuring performance. Incompetence cannot be hidden amidst incomprehensible PC jargon.
As for diversity as an overriding necessity: Diversitas excrementum tauri est.
The universities are usually the first places to go: Nazi students and professors began agitating against “Jewish science” and the presence of Jewish students in 1930, and the Jews were expelled from the German universities beginning in 1933, as soon as the Nazis came to power. Immediately after the Anschluss, Jews were expelled from Austrian universities.
Dr. Williams made a point in her post that I had wondered about after reading the New Criterion essay:
This is similar to what Rufus said (7:43 pm) about blind-auditions for orchestras. I read about that discovery (hah), some time ago; I think that ALL applications for anything ought to be “demographicly neutral” at least until after an initial round of vetting.
Which puts this comment into context, somewhat.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting/#comment-72647
Loopz
March 1, 2019
“I teach at a Masters programme in Musicology (for those who don’t know, this studies the history and analysis of classical music). I read the article on Wednesday and though: ‘Classics without Latin and Greek? This is crazy’. Yesterday I was told that assuming that my Masters students will be able to read classical musical notation and follow a score is not inclusive enough. Musicology without notation and scores? Well…”
Some information about Peralta.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting/#comment-72968
X. Citoyen
March 2, 2019
“Seems to me it’s the armchair quarterbacks in the comments that have lost perspective. Peralta delivers a speech proclaiming that only blacks and Hispanics should be published in classics journals. A speaker puts a few awkward questions to him, and a roomful of alleged scholars erupts in outrage and rushes to the podium to grab the mic from her.
…
As for Peralta himself, have you noticed that he’s had every accolade, award, and scholarship bestowed on him, including professorship at Princeton, despite publishing absolutely nothing of consequence? He has a couple of minor papers, a book review, and two puff pieces in Zuckerberg’s Eidolon—that’s it. His Wall Street Journal hagiography (one of many cited in his Wiki page) proclaims him the greatest classicist of his generation. Yet the dissertation of this unrivaled scholar, which was accepted in 2014, has never been published. How come the dissertation of the greatest scholar of his generation hasn’t been published when he’s published nothing else of note? What exactly does his greatness consist in? I think I know the answer.”
Somehow this situation seems familiar….
Classics, Musicology, Law — what next?
FWIW, in the late seventies, AesopSpouse took a course in Constitutional Law, but they were not required to actually read the Constitution itself, just the cases – and that was in a very conservative university.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting/#comment-72575
Avid Reader
March 1, 2019
“You could come here to Oz, where in at least one major University they have removed, from the Law Faculty, the requirements that a student needs to “demonstrate understanding” of various statutes. I pity the public, who will be able to find a lawyer that knows there is a statute, but is completely unable to apply it, much less argue it in a combative courtroom.”
https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting/#comment-72065
Phillip P
February 28, 2019
Quote from the most brilliant mind of the modern era, Forest Gump: “Stultus est sicut stultus facit”.
Reply
Smartassacus
March 2, 2019
Corrigendum: melius “stulte facit”.
Identifying the real agenda of the new Classiscists.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting/#comment-72014
James Kierstead
February 27, 2019
…Now, obviously, who gets cited more in a particular field will depend mainly on the set of people who’ve been especially influential in a field. In the (Western) classics, a field which has a particular place in European culture, that will be mainly white people, just for demographic reasons. Classics is also unusually old for an academic field, and that means there will be lots of scholars (e.g. Wilamowitz) who lived in times when female emancipation wasn’t as advanced as it is now. I’m also not sure we should refrain from citing people who we disapprove of morally, since, if we applied that approach consistently, we wouldn’t be able to cite anyone before about 1950.
Prof
March 2, 2019
…
Thank you for that comment. I just had a light bulb moment. What if that’s precisely the point? Get dead people out of classics? (Just dwell on that thought for a second.)
The issue is never the real issue.
The issue is always power.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting/#comment-71874
Bugbear
February 27, 2019
“I watched the video on youtube of the event described. What seems most egregious is how this Pedilla – Peralta “scholar” claims to spend his time: scouring the internet for evidence that not enough POC’s are represented in the Classics.
WHAT IF HE ACTUALLY WROTE SOMETHING OF SUBSTANCE IN THIS FIELD INSTEAD OF OBSESSIVELY SEEKING “EVIDENCE” OF “MARGINALIZATION”?”
“The issue is always power.”
Of course! What else could it be about. Not a criticism, just noting this is obvious.
BTW, some may remember the same sort of brouhaha surrounding the Medievalist Rachel Fulton Brown back in 2016.
One of her more current posts doesn’t address the academic problem particularly, but is is about SJWs in action.
https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com/2018/10/one-angry-judge.html
“October 06, 2018
What would you do if during the course of a job interview you were accused of crimes so heinous that they would not only disqualify you for the position, but also land you in jail—justifiably, if you were guilty—for the rest of your life?
According to some 2,400 members of the American legal profession, including some of my own colleagues at the University of Chicago, Brett Kavanaugh is incapable of serving as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States because he was “intemperate” when accused publicly not just of high school and college drunkenness, but of rape, gang-rape, and attempted rape.”
This one is more on point:
https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com/2018/11/satan-be-gone.html
“I have done all the appropriate service to my profession and my university as a reviewer, committee member, conference participant, and colleague.
And on Friday, April 13th, of this year, I was told that my scholarship was not good enough for the University of Chicago to promote me to full professor.
I will let that sink in for a little bit.
My department chairs and deans have bent over backward these past seven months assuring me that there was nothing political in their decision to deny my bid for promotion at this time.
It was the outside letters they received, they said. It was the outside letters that judged my work to be not of sufficient scholarly merit—although on what basis, my chairs and deans will not say.”
This was too funny not to share:
https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com/2018/11/satan-be-gone.html?showComment=1545167881025#c5861175742798096554
Erich von AbeleDecember 18, 2018 at 3:18 PM
Re-reading that quote from Prof. Brown’s 29 colleagues at the Divinity School —
“Professor Brown promulgates a view of religion and theology that is not widely represented among the Divinity School community’s diverse views”
— I realized that would be a great example of a paradox for use as an exercise in a Logic 101 class. You’d think a view that is “not widely represented” among the “diverse views” would be a view that would logically contribute to the “diversity”. I.e., any minority view (particularly a lone voice like Prof. Brown’s) is automatically and logically part of a “diversity” of views. I need to take an Excedrin, my head hurts from trying to think like a Leftist…
As someone with a Classical Education I would like to put in a dissenting judgement because I read Williams’ Quillette article with many reservations.
It seems to me her insistence on a strict philological approach to the Classics will do the discipline no favours. In the comments at Quillette I see several comparison with the Classics in U.S. universities and European universities. This is not comparing like with like. Classics is introduced into the curriculum much earlier in Europe. I began learning Latin when I was eight years old. That was a while ago and the discipline has softened a bit since then but the principle remains the same.
I can think of a good comparison: Neo, could you take 40 tubby 18 year olds who had never danced before and bring even two or three up to the level of their peers at the Bolshoi in four years? How many of the original 40 would drop out in the first fortnight if you made a serious attempt? The claim that a class of non-specialists could become fluent in Homeric Greek in the course of a general four year humanities degree is equally overambitious.
I should add that usually we are rallying around Conservative professors who are under attack not for what they said but what their hearers imply they meant. Here it is the other way around. Even Williams does not deny what she said. She should not have her career ruined for becoming tongue tied under pressure. Al the same, she might apologise.
It’s official.
All decent, educated, smart, caring, intelligent, empathetic, sophisticated, wise, tolerant and loving people, dedicated to human rights and everything good, must now come out forcefully AGAINST freedom of speech as an unmitigated evil (that is, if they haven’t already done so….):
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/03/trump-promises-executive-order-requiring-universities-to-support-free-speech-if-they-want-federal-research-dollars/
Ha ha! Any trustee that tried that would be out on their ear in days and probably have their businesses and lives ruined in short order.
Who has the authority to fire an institutional trustee?
The problem with trustees is that their otiose and cowardly and generally lick-spittles for the administration.
Caedmon:
For her to apologize to the barbarians who rule the roost is to accept the premise of their accusation; you don’t accept the “beat your wife” question.
The barbarians are not interested in your answer, you are already guilty, condemned. You cannot be innocent of the crime of being “you.”
The claim that a class of non-specialists could become fluent in Homeric Greek in the course of a general four year humanities degree is equally overambitious.
Something like this could be said about Engineering and math. That’s why it’s called “Classics.” I read Homer in translation at age 12. I never learned Greek but, if I had been really interested in Classics, I might have.
Art Deco,
‘Who has the authority to fire an institutional trustee?’
They don’t have to fire them they just harass and destroy them until they are forced out or just resign.
They don’t have to fire them they just harass and destroy them until they are forced out or just resign.
By what legal mechanism are you ‘forced out’? By what mechanism does a college president ‘destroy’ an offending trustee? How do you ‘harass’ someone who doesn’t work for you or put in appearances more than once a month?
Al the same, she might apologise.
No, that’s blood on the water, and something the sharks attacking her never do absent a court order.
The claim that a class of non-specialists could become fluent in Homeric Greek in the course of a general four year humanities degree is equally overambitious.
Waal, another thing we might do is eliminate baccalaureate degrees in favor of briefer and more specialized programs. We could cut enrollments at tertiary institutions by about 30% with no loss in value.
Art Deco,
Come on man! You can’t be that naive. They protest the trustee meetings, they attack everyone that has anything to do with the offending party. Trustee on a board of some corporation. Attack them non stop ruin them if necessary.
For crying out loud it’s how these leftists operate why would this be any different.
I am somewhat dubious about expelling old dead white men from the classics. I have been to Europe and Africa. In Europe I went to museums and operas and saw the architecture, art and literature. In Africa I saw the vast plains and animals. I didn’t see too much in the way of African culture. Probably because of the silencing of the knowledge that people of color carry.
Caedmon:
What on earth do you think Williams said? Padilla had made a speech in which he said that people should be hired BECAUSE they are black, and whiteness should mean that people are NOT hired. In other words, he was explicitly advocating racial hiring and racial non-hiring: reverse racism. And Williams merely said that while he may have gotten his job because he was black, she prefers to think he was hired because of merit and she believes in merit.
You can watch her remarks at YouTube here. Her portion begins at around 45:39. The sentence in question was at the end of an impassioned speech defending Western Civilization and democracy as embedded within Western Civilization, and defending the teaching of these things, and not paying attention to race. They, on the other hand, are obsessed with race, which she is not.
The “offensive” part of her speech occurred around 48:46. Williams had started out calm and respectful and tried to make some points, and she had been almost immediately interrupted in a somewhat hostile manner several times. One of the panelists in particular started out by interrupting and arguing with her (I haven’t been to too many academic meetings, but I don’t think that’s the usual protocol). Williams knew from the start that talking about Western Civ and being proud of it, and talking about merit as the main criterion to be used for accepting articles, would arouse anger, and she got a bit rattled by the hostility.
So at 48:46 she says:
“I’m not a socialist, okay? I believe in merit. I believe that the journals have articles on the basis of merit. [Interruption from woman on panel, but Williams continues with what she was saying]. I don’t look at the color of the author [another interruption]….okay, you may have got your job because you’re black [hoots of derision from the crowd], but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
That was a response to this sort of thing from Padilla. It’s the quote I offered earlier in my post. I repeat it here. He’s a racial bean-counter and a flagrant racist:
She has absolutely nothing to apologize for. And note that she did not say he got his job because of his race, she said he may have (after he had advocated that exact method—racial preferences for non-white people—of hiring people and choosing whose work to publish in journals). He is all about hiring because of race. She was saying that may have happened but she prefers to think he was hired because of merit. Her remark was the opposite of racism, in the face of a group overwhelmingly advocating racism.
Oh, and by the way—the controversy her remarks stirred had nothing to do with the issue you discuss. One can have a discussion about how to teach classics in terms of languages and the like, but that was not the thing that roused so much concern at the conference, it was the remark of hers that I highlighted.
Did you watch the entire video? I certainly only watched part of it, but as someone with some knowledge of the field you may want to watch the whole thing.
Merit is opposed to diversity, and is also unequal.
In the Special Olympics, all the participants get “participation trophies”.
In the real Olympics, the ones who perform the best, demonstrate the most merit, and win.
The diversity people want the world to be like the Special Olympics, so we can all win — and get decent, middle class lives paid for by the gov’t, even if we are unwilling to work.
We need, as a society, to stop funding the colleges, especially those which don’t have Republicans.
The acceptance of “open secret” discrimination against Reps, by colleges, is the main root of current US culture wars. We need to stop accepting it.
Maybe Trump is about to start working on it with his Free Speech stuff — I hope so. Civilization needs it.
Caedmon:
Also, please see Padilla’s written response to the whole thing. It will give you an idea of his point of view. Quite an astounding document. Hard to even describe; it really must be read.
Aesop,
https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com/2018/11/satan-be-gone.html
I went there and what I read almost put me in tears. Very moving.
I’m going to have to read her book (the first one). I am actually quite interested in the history of ideas, especially the history of philosophy, and also especially in the history of Christianity in its theological and philosophical aspects. It sounds as if the book might go a ways toward educating me in exactly that.
.
Also, how about those SOB profs at my alma mater who saw fit to stone Brett Kavanaugh for “demeanor unbefitting,” so to speak. (Personally I think Clarence Thomas set the gold standard for righteous — I mean that literally — anger and indignation expressed passionately in word and manner, and with supreme self-control, at the end of his public consignment to the Lowest Rung, at the time of his own SCOTUS hearing.) The Kavanaugh stoning was even worse — hateful and inexcusable. Even if it were pure political theater, which it wasn’t. It was torture committed for the sick pleasure of it. (A true example of the perverse, as I commented about awhile back.) I do not see how these — these people can stand to face themselves in the mirror.
But then, I don’t think they do face themselves.
.
Also, the comment you quoted is indeed a hoot.
Thanks!
Come on man! You can’t be that naive. They protest the trustee meetings, they attack everyone that has anything to do with the offending party. Trustee on a board of some corporation. Attack them non stop ruin them if necessary.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent Griffin.
And, no, I don’t think the flatulent corporate types who end up on boards operate that way. Dissident trustees get the silent treatment.
It’s actually sort of funny when you watch the video because Padilla smiles and raises his arms in a right-on gesture in response to Williams’s saying that he may have gotten his job because of his color — which is just what he wants to happen.
Seeing as no one in that room or in the conference corridors afterwards rallied to the defense of blackness as a cornerstone of my merit
Neo, these people are crazy, Padilla is an example of the destruction of culture and learning. God help us !
Grievance ideologies are like opportunistic infections: they will not kill an energetic, productive field of study. If segments of the humanities succumb, perhaps it is because they are exhausted and ready to die; or perhaps more hopefully because they are obese and out of shape, so that they may survive the infection and return to health, chastened and lean.
The claim that a class of non-specialists could become fluent in Homeric Greek in the course of a general four year humanities degree is equally overambitious.
Geez, what kind of slackers are you recruiting? The Army routinely teaches young men to become fluent in Russian or Arabic in 18 months. So do the Mormons, for that matter. I myself became “fluent” in physics through relativistic field theory and quantum statistical mechanics in the process of a four year undergraduate degree that also included math through analysis, a year of organic chemistry, and enough German to read the German scientific literature and make myself understood in Berlin.
I spent 20 years working and teaching in academia. I thought it was bad then, but in the over 20 years since I retired, it has plunged into outright insanity. Unless we do something, we are facing a new dark age that will destroy us all.
The more open they are, the better it is. It’s probably a sign they believe they have all the power, so that’s frightening. But it also means that everyone can see what’s on the end of every fork.
We have been living in the fantasy that things will go back to normal eventually without us having to do anything. The clearer the reality becomes, the less we can indulge that fantasy. And that’s a positive development.
I wonder if the ancients could see the Dark Ages coming back then, too.
Where will you stash your classics when the firemen come? How will you pass down civilization to another generation so they might – eventually – raise up the banner of freedom and truth once again?
The Army routinely teaches young men to become fluent in Russian or Arabic in 18 months.
How many hours do they devote to the task during those 18 months? If, as a college student, you devote > 800 hours to your studies over a semester and allocate 35% of that time to your major, you’ll devote 2,300 hours of study to your major in the course of completing a baccalaureate degree. Note, employed persons in this country are on the job a mean of 1,750 hours per year. So, the time you’re devoting to your academic major is the equivalent of 16 months of employment for the average worker. Classics departments maintain course lists which include language, literature in translation, art history, philosophical texts, and archaeology. In the department I know best, about 3/4 of the majors followed the general course of study. The other 1/4 followed the language options, with a 50-50 split between Greek specialists and Latin specialists.
When will the ‘gap closing’ come to the NBA, NFL and NHL? Those industries don’t reflect society as a whole. A racial overhaul is due.
If ‘diversity’ were real — that there are inherent, substantive differences based on race, etc. — then shouldn’t diversity scientists have isolated some of those differences by now? That after forty years of ‘diversity’ we should know what those “differences” are?
If advocates can’t name actual differences, other than the self-referential BS “they’re experts on their kind”, how can advocates credibly claim that we need those differences that can’t be named?
I’m at the point of taking the simplest explanation (however outre it may be).
CS Lewis was our Cassandra. And Out of the Silent Planet, Perlandria, and That Hideous Strength… were prophecies.
With the rise of AGW, and the argumentum ad verecundiam fallacy of citing “consensus”, science died… the final victim of the Academy’s slide into absurdity and pure camp.
I’ve become radicalized. (I’d add Jesuitical and leaning to Inquisitional, but I haven’t completely hardened. Yet.)
The left is not merely wrong. They’re evil. Demon possessed. Whatever.
But… evil… oh yeah. Malevolent. Evil.
Burn it down.
GWB–
It’s a race between any number of threatening trends/developments—some or all of which may have amplifying effects on the others—to see which will cause the most disruption, upheaval, and damage here in the U.S.
To mention a few, there are :
1. The fast approaching replacement of massive numbers of low skilled workers doing repetitive jobs—truck and cab drivers (there are two million truckers alone in the U.S.), fast food workers, stockers, pickers, and shipping personnel, retail workers, cashiers, supermarket checkout personnel, “fulfillment“ and call center workers, postal workers, general clerks, factory workers of many kinds, etc.—ultimately, we’re talking tens of millions of workers—by the combination of AI and robots, and the massive economic and social upheavals that will cause.
2.. The rise of Leftist caused hatred and division in this country and the attendant—and rising—political violence, and the left’s march toward Socialism/Communism. leading to a possible Civil War.
3. The growing split between Red and Blue states, between the two coasts and the interior of our country. (See 2 above.)
4 . The increasingly obvious fragility of our computer-linked, intricately connected, high-tech economy and society, and its susceptibility to catastrophic failure due to —for instance—a major EMP event—either natural, or man-made.
5. The stranglehold on information, communication, and on free expression that has been attained by high tech companies and their websites—Google, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc.
6. The Leftist infiltration, subversion, and takeover of our Educational Establishment, and the resultant decline in general knowledge and related competence among our population.
7. Increasing—out of control—violence in our society, in Democrat run/dominated big cities, and especially in their inner cities.
8. The ”opioid crisis” that is killing many tens of thousands of our citizens each year. According to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, the estimated death toll due to drug overdoses–just for the year 2017 alone– is over 70,000.
9. A drastic change in our national demographic and political composition, due to both low birth rates among native U.S. citizens, and out of control illegal and legal immigration, especially of aliens who typically have far higher birth rates than us native citizens.
10. Declining life expectancies—see 5 & 6 above.
Summing it all up, I see the possibilities for the coming of a new Dark Age as increasing.
Given this, I have written here that I think that it would be wise for Conservatives to consider retreating (mentally, socially, or physically) from our current day society—much as in the proposed “Benedict Option”—to create parallel organizations.
To create—in effect—Monasteries—refuges designed to preserve and protect the traditional culture and learning of Western Civilization—its History, it’s philosophy, literature, Religion, and Art—from the crash to come, so that—in time—it can rise again. (See, for instance, the SF novel, “A Canticle for Liebowitz”)
So, what exactly do we do to fix the problem? Seriously. I’ve watched this crap building up since I was an undergraduate. The sludge that has been deposited must be removed. Do we need to take rifles to department meetings? Or do the pink-mist conversions in a more distributed manner? As an education for the trustees/regents… Any ideas?
Ray:
I assume you’re being facetious. Obviously, violence is not the answer.
But deciding how to deal with it, now that it’s so deeply and widely entrenched, is difficult. Supporting colleges that don’t have this kind of PC stuff going on is one answer, but of course there are not many such colleges. Publicizing what’s going on is another. There are organizations of university scholars that fight it, as well, and you could contribute to them. I don’t have time right now to find my list of them, but they’re not that difficult to locate though Googling.
One of the best-known is FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, founded by Prof. Alan Kors (U. Penn) and Harvey Silverglate, and described on YouTube by Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE, who speaks quite a lot on issues with which FIRE is concerned — especially Free Speech. His short (4 min.) intro to FIRE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oveHzHuG9vQ
FIRE’s site: https://www.thefire.org/ ;
& see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Individual_Rights_in_Education
Lots of left-leaning organizations are involved in some of the coalitions, however. For instance the National Coalition against Censorship’s “Free Expression Network” shows among its many member associations: People for the American Way, the AAUP, the ACLU, the Friends Committee on National Legislation; on the other hand, EFF — the Electronic Frontier Foundation — and also FIRE. For list of member organizations, with links, see
https://ncac.org/free-expression-network
. . .
By the way, The Chronical of Higher Education” has this piece up: “The Koch Institute Is Worried About Free Speech on Campus. But Not in the Way You Might Think,” from last August.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Koch-Institute-Is-Worried/244184
Second para:
I haven’t yet read the whole thing.
Oh well, edit in haste, repent at leisure. Wiped the closing italics tag after magazine title by mistake. :>(
So, what exactly do we do to fix the problem? Seriously. I’ve watched this crap building up since I was an undergraduate.
1. Well, for a start, add a question to state voter registration forms about what institutions in state awarded you a degree. Forward the data to the state board of elections, who cross-check the responses with alumni records and send postcards to respondents asking them to clarify any anomalies. In this way, the state board of elections (or secretary of state) builds a database of registered voters who are degree holders (bacclaureate, master’s, doctoral) from the state’s public and private institutions.
2. Incorporate into state law mandatory amendments to the by-laws of each higher-ed corporation in the state. For baccalaureate granting institutions or higher, the law would command they be governed by a board of trustees elected by their alumni resident in-state. The number of trustees to be elected for each institution would be a function of the number of resident alumni, with a minimum set at 5.
3. The elections would be conducted by the state board of elections (or secretary of state) and the voting would be by post. Any alumni would be eligible to run (though there might be rotation-in-office rules).
a. You arrive at the offices of the state board, fill out an application with identifying information, pay a deposit refundable if you achieve a certain performance, and leave behind a 600 word statement explaining your candidacy.
b. When the registration period lapses, the board then has ballots printed up. Because it’s a low information election, you need to vary the order of names on the ballot or the numbnutzes will see to it that the first five names listed are elected; if you vary the ballot order, the numbnutzes cancel each other out. You hold a drawing and put each name you draw on a daisywheel. To construct one stereotype, start at a point on the daisywheel for the top name on the ballot, and run counterclockwise for each of the other names. To construct another, you start at a different point and move counter-clockwise. You construct as many stereotypes as candidates who qualify for the ballot and then print up an equal number of each stereotype. In the population of ballots you mail out, each candidate will have an equal chance to occupy the top position, the second position, the third position, etc.
c. The board assembles the statements of the candidates into a prospectus, and sends out a mailing to each registered voter. The mailing consists of the prospectus, a ballot, and a set of instructions. The voter fills out the ballot and mails it back to the state board. Any ballot arriving by election day is deemed validly cast. Those arriving later are mailed back to the voter with a note of regret.
d. This ballot would be an ordinal ballot, where the choices are ranked. The condorcet tabulation method would be used. You have multiple rounds of tabulation until you have left a set of candidates in number equal to the number of slots on the board.
4. Require by law that all trustees elected in the state be administered an oath (or be directed to state an affirmation) by a local justice of the peace. The content of the oath would require they acknowledge their responsibility for the academic integrity of the institution.
5. Require by law that the board fill out reports to the state board of regents listing the staff employed by the board, and affirming that the offices of the staff are not on the campus and that none of the staff are employed by any component of the institution other than the board.
6. Enact by law a glossary which nominates degree and concentration programs and provides capsule descriptions of them. Require by law that public institutions offer only those programs which are to be found in the glossary. Require that private institutions issue a disclosure form to all constituents listing any programs offered which are outside the glossary. Make the wording of such disclosures standard per statute.
7. Require that any state institution wishing to offer a degree program apply to a supervisory commission appointed by the board of regents. The commission would then hold hearings where the institution presented its case and other public institutions could present a case that the market was saturated or that the franchise to start such a program was properly allocated elsewhere. Concentration programs subordinate to degree programs would not require a franchise, but would be permitted so long as the superordinate degree program was permitted.
8. Subject all state institutions to periodic audits by the state comptroller. What the auditor would do is look retrospectively at the number of degrees in a given subject awarded each year to those students whose board scores placed them above the 30th percentile of their entering class. Then you calculate for each year the share of graduates (excluding those below the 30th percentile of their entering class) who receive this degree. Then you take the median figure for the full array of graduating classes you have in your dataset (limiting your set to the last 35 graduating classes if its a venerable major). If this metric falls below a critical value, the program would be ordered closed by the state comptroller unless it merited a reprieve. You’d grant a reprieve under two circumstances: the program had been founded < 12 years earlier or the school was designated to be the repository of said program it not being offered in any other state institution.
9. State functions of trustees in state law: to select the institutions president; to monitor searches for the president's direct reports and their direct reports, and impose their own choices at their discretion; to vet all contract renewals and grants of tenure for faculty; to adopt the institution’s budget prescribing all expenditures; to determine when to issue bonds and commercial paper; to determine whether or not to initiate or settle a suit; to adopt an employee manual in accordance with state law; to adopt a student disciplinary manual in accordance with law; to approve all statements to constituents which create legal obligations by their utterance.
10. End all state grants and subsidies to private institutions in the state.
11. Limit state funding of public institutions to the proceeds of a dedicated income tax.
12. Mandate that faculty retire once they are eligible for full Social Security, eligible for Medicare, and have contributed to TIAA-CREF for 40 years (pro-rating years of p/t employment). Limit multi-year contracts to 12 semesters and limit continuous tenure to faculty over 55 (excepting those awarded endowed chairs).
Ironically, there are already african studies depts and women’s studies depts and probably an oriental history dept (or minor) if you want to study those topics or get published. The classics ARE about western civ and we ARE the beneficiaries of those classics.
I didn’t like much of the translation of the King James and other versions of the Old and New Testaments (anachronisms actually, as originals were not divided between Old or New), so I made my own translation from the Ancient Hebrew.
Ancient Hebrew is much akin to Old English vs Shakespeare Middle English vs Modern English. You may be using the same sounds and the same words even, if slightly misspelled, but they don’t actually mean what you think they mean any more. The culture, political socio economic society has changed too much.
How will you pass down civilization to another generation so they might – eventually – raise up the banner of freedom and truth once again?
The Pre Flood Civilizations etched often unreadable writing and mathematical drawings upon pillars that were high enough to be above the waters. Of course much of this stuff is now on the ocean beds as underwater pyramids and crystal structures.
Who was it who said battles in academia are so fierce because the stakes are so low?
Someone who lacked the proper understanding of how to build a nation in the long term… or tear it down.
Rufus, the World will Burn, as I told people back in 2015. First Water was used to reset this server matrix world. Next is Fire. No point being depressed about it; it is baked in the cake already. Either eat it or not.
Victor Davis Hanson spent decades teaching Classics, including Greek and Latin, to Fresno State students, many of whom are Hispanic. He has commented on the fact that the discipline is collapsing as an academic subject,
Happened long time ago, based on the various stories from Michael Heiser concerning Ancient Semitic language department he was in. Quite an interesting view into “academic” corruption that poses as intellectual rigor and honesty. You humans are pretty funny in how you make the Gap between farcical social masks and the actual truth.
As for CS Lewis, he wrote truth as fiction, not prophecy. A prophecy is an event where a person channels a higher order entity, aka any god or The Creator a specific god or elohim, in order to accomplish some aim of that entity. There are many instances of channeling that had little to do with the desires of a higher order entity, Edgar Cayce being one example.
The Army routinely teaches young men to become fluent in Russian or Arabic in 18 months.
One potential problem with learning Ancient Semitic or Homerish Greek is that they are dead languages. That means humans have to interpolate what the words mean in the original social context. These “interpolations” get corrupt from so called peer review. If 99% of your peers think this word meant that Greeks loved homo sex, and you think this word means something slightly different, unless you have hardcore scientific scholarly research backing you up (aka Authorities), you are not going to get far in “peer review” publishing. This might be a good thing since it cuts down on cranks and crazies, but it is usually the crazy stuff that pushes the boundaries and forces humanity to leap ahead. Otherwise, the academic field stagnates and becomes just the Old Guard talking about how airplanes won’t work, via Lord Kelvin. There were very good reasons why airplanes shouldn’t work, and the science is not quite as comprehensible as people believe given engineering feats. But it worked nonetheless. Many such instances happen in science, such as so called transmutation aka cold fusion, which is not actually fusion using gravity. It is actually scalar energy tech but they called it cold fusion to blow it up and suppress research into it. Another result of “peer review”. So the field stagnates. And humanity continues to live in the “Dark Age” of Enlightenment and modern conveniences.
But anyways, back to the topic of languages that aren’t dead. In the US, people may still comprehend what a Super Bowl means and what a Lemon means when it comes to “buying a lemon” that doesn’t work. But to future generations, without our cultural context, can they actually decipher what we meant by super bowl and buying bad lemons? They might just be taking us literally at our word because you know, 99.9999% of the other texts defined lemons as a fruit and a super bowl as a really big bowl to eat out of…
That’s basically what scholars have to go on with Ancient Semitic and Homerish Greek. If there’s no text that has a denotative or connotative usage of a term, then the term is locked to the existing texts, which are locked to the existing comprehension of denotative and connotative meanings and usage of a term. So if a word has 10 different connotations like “gender” or “sex” does for us, then they won’t understand all the nuances and meanings like a person that lives in the language when it was spoken would understand it as. So they basically have to memorize a bunch of dead grammar, which is fine if your memory works but if you want to utilize language processing, then it requires you to think in that native language. However, one cannot think in a language that is dead because you don’t have their cultural matrix and assumptions down. It would be like someone thinking they can learn American English but they don’t know anything about America. Their English will still be English but it won’t be American English. Maybe Australian and British “pop” English
Snow on Pine on March 4, 2019 at 12:53 pm at 12:53 pm said:
Most of the things you raised I have thought about and finished analyzing 10 years ago. These events may be new, shocking, and surprising to the moderns, but to me they are just old school cycles and stuff that bores me. Already seen where this leads.
You should input “Yuri Bezmenov” on youtube and see his lectures directly, Snow. You might actually comprehend the extent of his meaning now given how your context has changed due to recent events in American life.
See, comprehension is not a matter of IQ to me as an autodidact. It is more a matter of life experience and wisdom, or applications and experience.
2) It is important to go back to teaching undergraduates about the great classical authors—Cicero, the Athenian dramatists, Homer, Demosthenes, the Greek and Roman historians, Plato, and Aristotle—in English translation in introductory courses;
Um… if I may be so bold, I would categorically and implicitly state that the Problem is that you cannot teach something that you yourself don’t know anything true about.
Which in this case means that academy shouldn’t be wondering whether they should teach Plato or Aristotle… because few if any of them understand Plato or Aristotle’s work as they were originally written.
AesopFan on March 3, 2019 at 2:54 am at 2:54 am said:
Much as the Catholic dogmatic doctrine and the Protestant pastor doctrine has determined that Mormonism is founded on false cult beliefs and the worship of the Angels “Moroni” and other spiritual devils or demons or some such, so I also think the Catholic “Mary” worship belief is not exactly as they have painted it. There are many entities that can be described as the Queen of Heaven, creating an immortal son, such the ISIS/Osiris mythologies.
One needs to be very accurate in their portrayl of an elohim’s basic character before they can then use their human language cores to tell the rest of us that she is who they think she is.
I know a talent manager in LA who can’t get ANY white male writers hired for ANYTHING. The POC jihad is on, people. And yes, it’s going to be like the Maoist Cultural Revolution, and swine like this mediocrity, Padilla, are the Red Guards.
So what are we going to do? Bear it tamely? Or fight? If we fight, we’d better do it soon, because it’s going to come to violence if we go too much farther down this road. Violence — or slavery.
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