From the issue dated January 6, 1993
Beleaguered Classicists Debate Strategies for Survival
Proponents of new theoretical approaches challenge traditional philological model
By Peter Monaghan
In keeping with the Socratic maxim that one should avoid living an unexamined life, classicists have for several years been reviewing the assumptions and practices of their discipline.
They have been contentious years. Traditionalists wedded to a strict philological model -- the study of classical languages and the production of authoritative editions of classical texts -- say their field can thrive only if it avoids new theoretical approaches supported by many colleagues. Classicists who identify themselves as progressives say the only way even to survive is to entertain many new methodologies, including feminism and deconstruction, and to build bridges to other disciplines. Also needed, these scholars say, is a revised picture of the ancient world, to acknowledge that the great civilizations of Greece and Rome, however important to Western culture, were not all there was.
Debate has proceeded against an often gloomy backdrop. Classics departments are beleaguered by budget woes, threats of closure or merger with other departments, and the prospect of having fewer and fewer of the language courses that have been the field's rationale.
Added to those challenges have been criticisms by conservative commentators and public officials. William J. Bennett, while he was Secretary of Education, and Allan Bloom, in a 1987 best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, both declared classical studies central to higher education.
But they both said classicists had been lagging in their responsibility to defend ancient classic texts. And both denounced such movements as feminism: Mr. Bloom called it "the latest enemy of the vitality of classic texts."
Most classicists agree, however, that a major revival of interest in classical studies in its older traditional form is simply not coming. Timothy Long, professor of classics at Indiana University, thinks that is lamentable. "Calls for privileging of the European tradition have fallen on deaf ears in our national organization," he says, referring to the American Philological Association. "I don't think classicists believe in the moral value of the texts we teach anymore."
In Mr. Long's opinion, classics is becoming a subset of sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines, weakened, he says, by the same theories and ideologies that ruined those fields. Forsaken have been "hard-core language instruction" and "moral-appreciative" criticism. "The philological tradition is dying," he concludes.
Most classicists are less gloomy. They say there never was an unchanging corpus of truth-bearing texts that colleges could embrace to revive American education. Most say, in fact, that they long ago abandoned as romanticized the notion that classical studies can serve as the basis for a glorious history of Western civilization.
Many classicists believe that politically motivated conservative figures have distorted the classical tradition in their opposition of such contemporary movements as multiculturalism. Those who hope to do that "by championing the classical tradition as the essence of Western civilization," says David M. Halperin, "seem not to want to understand anything about the cultural diversity of the ancient Mediterranean in the classical period." Mr. Halperin is a professor of literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a classicist who studies sexuality in Greco-Roman antiquity.
Clearly unsympathetic to a conservative agenda are many of the arguments and approaches found in classical studies today:
* Many scholars are challenging assumptions about the field of classics and even the term "classics" itself. Some believe classical studies elevate the classical periods of Athens and Rome but slight those of other civilizations. Another aspect of this prejudice, they add, is that classicists until recently concentrated on male citizens of Athens and Rome and rarely bothered to study women and slaves. Some also believe the term "classics" is snobbish -- that it assumes a privileged status for classicists as interpreters of Western tradition.
* Classics has, many practitioners contend, come to resemble an interdisciplinary "area study" that can profitably import approaches from other disciplines that study society and culture, such as anthropology and literary theory.
* Energetic debates continue on such subjects as sexuality in the ancient world. Influenced by social and cultural theory, particularly that of Michel Foucault, some classicists are asking, for example, Does the prevalence of pederasty in Athens and Rome throw light on whether certain forms of sexuality remain constant through history or are culturally "constructed"?
To teach students about such questions, says Mr. Halperin, professors cannot rely on texts prepared decades ago by philologists whose annotations "blur over" issues that don't fit an idealized picture of ancient Greece and Rome. Mr. Halperin is editing a series of translations of classical texts for use in such fields as lesbian and gay studies, ethnic studies, and feminist studies. The translations will be published by Routledge.
While trying to do justice to new areas of inquiry, many classicists are, as one puts it, also taking up the challenge to "transmit the heritage without the baggage of elitism."
Daniel P. Tompkins, associate professor of classics at Temple University, says, "It's a delicate task to distinguish between simple idealization of ancient cultures and a recognition that in Greece certain ideas were developed that were on the whole positive. Freedom and democracy were two of them."
Scholars today suspect idealizations, Mr. Tompkins says. "We are alive to things like slavery and try to figure out what kind of economic system it supported, which isn't a simple thing," he says.
Few classicists, however progressive, wish to discount the profound influence that classical Greece and Rome have had on Western culture. The fear that the classical canon is in danger of abandonment, adds Erich S. Gruen, professor of classics at the University of California at Berkeley and outgoing president of the APA, "is on the whole an unnecessary concern."
Rather, says Amy Richlin, associate professor of classics and women's studies at the University of Southern California, progressive classicists, while themselves fully trained philologists, are asking different questions of texts. She, for example, has suggested that rape in Ovid's Metamorphoses was glossed over as the love of the gods, because classics traditionally trained readers to revere texts.
Attitudes like that changed, she says, as more women entered the field. For 20 years, the Women's Classical Caucus, which now has 400 members, male and female, has promoted feminist approaches in the discipline. However, woman classicists, who make up 25 to 30 per cent of the field, claim they remain underpaid and underrecognized.
A heated controversy arose when, during the 1991 elections, a group of conservative scholars cast write-in votes for Ludwig Koenen, chairman of the classics department at the University of Michigan, for the association's presidency. He went on to defeat two women, known progressives, who had been proposed by the APA nominating committee. The way Mr. Koenen was elected infuriated many classicists, who considered it a show of force by male traditionalists.
Many scholars argue that it is time to halt the elitist spin imparted by the discipline's 19th-century British and German pioneers. Those pioneers, the argument goes, camouflaged their politics with noble rhetoric and a supposedly objective emphasis on philology.
In a 1989 essay, Martin Bernal, professor of government at Cornell University, offered an explanation for what the early classicists were up to. They lionized Greece and Rome, he argued, in part to legitimize their own countries' recent triumphs over other nations. Part of that imperialist mentality, he added, was to portray as lesser, and less worth studying, such neighboring cultures as Egypt and Phoenicia.
He argued, further, that the "far right" in the U.S. had in recent years been trying to revive that 19th-century model by pressing classicists "to abandon the academic aspects of their discipline entirely, to become priests and priestesses at the shrine of European civilization."
The first two volumes of Mr. Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Rutgers University Press) represent one of the most controversial of the new approaches. The books trace what he says is the much-neglected influence of Egypt and Phoenicia on Greece before its classical period.
Mr. Bernal has proposed a new discipline, ancient studies, that would include broader perspectives about antiquity and that could serve American education well as the country "begins to face up to its multi-ethnic nature."
American classics has long had a populist strain. It diverged from European traditions after World War II, to reach a wide audience of non-specialists. Classicists taught classics-in-translation courses for great-books programs, and they offered courses in archaeology, history, philosophy, religion, and many other subjects that fulfilled Western-civilization requirements.
Those courses for non-specialists remain crucial to most classics departments. Heavy enrollments in them allow departments to continue offering Greek and Latin courses to a handful of takers.
All the talk about maintaining traditional standards, contends Judith P. Hallett, associate professor of classics at the University of Maryland, discounts "what it is that keeps this enterprise afloat."
At the graduate level, says Ronald Mellor, a classicist who chairs the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles, classics departments are overemphasizing traditional but relatively arcane specialties and authors. Students would be better prepared for academic careers if they had more background in literary theory, comparative religion, and mythology, he says. "The assumption is that when you come out of classics, because you've read Ovid, you can teach mythology," Mr. Mellor says. "It's not that easy."
Many classicists who are impatient for change claim that the challenges to elitism are coming from non-prestigious, often undergraduate departments. They say colleagues at older prestigious departments have been insulated from enrollment and other problems and don't realize how urgent they are.
Karl Galinsky, professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin, scoffs at that notion. It is simplistic and wrong "to set up a bogyman, to say the older guys or women have lost it and are not in touch with realities," he says. "People like to polarize it and set up nice dichotomies."
He dismisses a 1989 book, Classics, a Discipline and Profession in Crisis (University Press of America), in which essayists outlined the ways they thought the field was in trouble. Pure melodrama, Mr. Galinsky says. "It's very fashionable in academe to have a crisis."
However, his just-published book, Classical and Modern Interaction: Postmodern Architecture, Multiculturalism, Decline, and Other Issues (University of Texas Press), in many respects could serve as a handbook for colleagues who, while conservative, realize change is coming and they had better find ways to manage it.
Among his arguments is that classics has always acknowledged that the Greco-Roman beginnings of Western civilization are the product of many different races and cultures, so that classics was multicultural long before the term came into vogue.
Classicists such as those represented in the "Crisis" volume, however, say that is not a perspective that has been included in classics courses until recently. They say many classicists dismissed antiquity's multiculturalism as irrelevant when it was first raised.
Contention in classical studies, the study of the origins of Western civilization, is in many ways a microcosm of the so-called culture wars that have galvanized the humanities. That, says Jeremiah Reedy, who heads the classics department at Macalaster College, should delight even classicists like himself, who abhor many new developments in the humanities and in classics. "We should welcome the challenge to defend the classics, and say what is important in the education of young Americans," he says.
Bring on deconstruction, Mr. Reedy says. Yes, it does "aim to eliminate from Western thought all traces of Greek metaphysics," but it at least requires that its advocates know Greek literature.
And academics are meant to be contentious, notes Mary R. Lefkowitz, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. She says the debates have become complex enough that they confound categorizations such as progressive versus traditionalist. Most colleagues, she says, would consider her the latter, but she now is glad that feminism, which was denounced 20 years ago, has become widely accepted.
Work like Mr. Bernal's is stimulating, she says, "even if one doesn't agree with it." She does not. "The influence of Egyptian literature on Western literature is minimal," she says.
But she is herself doing research on that subject, showing that the lines are not clearly drawn in contemporary classical studies.
Copyright © 1993 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
