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.
