The Classicists email list is having one of its periodic flame wars; in classic horror movie style, a softly-spoken, genteel little email list, which normally spends its days politely relaying conference announcements and information about studentship opportunities, is provoked by a casual remark and transforms into a raging monster. Clearly some sort of mutant DNA was spliced into the discipline in its past, because this does keep happening in one way or another. “I’m getting pedantic. You wouldn’t like me when I’m pedantic…”
The last I saw – my university is changing over its email system this weekend and new messages are being relayed into some account that I don’t yet have access to, so I’m now cut off from developments until some time next week – we’d reached the stage of people trying to call things to a halt by pointing out some of the absurdities and unpleasant elements of the debate, which will doubtless have all the effect of Harry Enfield’s Scousers telling one another to calm down. It does all tend to demonstrate why blogs are much better places to hold such debates, not least because it’s possible to delete trolls and prevent them coming back to argue that they’re not trolling, these are important points of academic integrity and principle and clearly the people asking everyone to calm down are traitors to the profession.
The reason for devoting any time to this – time that could be spent deleting the latest batch of emails from the list, or indeed finishing my book – is that such flare-ups can be incredibly revealing; like a Rorschach blot or a word association game, the way some classicists respond in this situation uncovers the true heart and soul of Altertumswissenschaft in a far more vivid and multi-facted manner than if the same people were deliberately trying to characterise their profession. Core beliefs are exposed, it becomes obvious what really matters to people, and the foundational myths and inherited archetypes of classical studies come to the fore.
In this case, the whole thing was sparked off by an innocent request from a graduate student for advice on whether there was an English translation of something or other (I’m not going into specifics, partly because I wasn’t paying attention but mostly because that’s not the point; we’re looking for the underlying patterns here). This set off a great deal of harrumphing about the fact that modern scholars, especially Anglo-American ones, simply don’t know European languages and so can’t read foreign scholarship. Yes, came the response, but that’s because we can’t learn so many languages at school, especially those of us who came through the state system. That’s no excuse, you could have studied them at university, if only your Latin and Greek weren’t rubbish as well so you had to spend the whole time in remedial classes instead; no, the problem is that you’re arrogant know-it-all imperialists, or words to that effect. No, you’re elitist snobs…
There are of course a whole load of really serious and important issues here. I’ve talked before on this blog about my commitment to engaging with languages other than English, even trying to give papers in them and certainly trying to be aware of other scholarly traditions; on the other hand, I’m very conscious of how much effort it has required over a long period of time to get to that sort of level. Graduate students have to prioritise, given the need to get their disserations completed in far less time than previous generations were given, under greater pressures; you cannot possibly acquire every skill that a classicist could possibly need, so you select those that seem most important for the project – sometimes that should be modern languages, sometimes epigraphy or palaeography, sometimes archaeology or even, as Elton Barker has suggested, IT skills. Sometimes, indeed, these skills are more important than Greek or Latin (“Burn the heretic!!” they cry) for a specific project; frankly, there was just one single point in my entire thesis that relied on my linguistic skills, and it was utterly trivial and so I would have been better off reading more economics instead.
There is no denying that this creates problems later: it is entirely possible not just to pass an undergraduate degree but to write an excellent and academically credible PhD in, say, ancient economic history without the slightest grasp of ancient languages, and some of my best students have been those who’ve come up through schools that offered no Latin or Greek and then preferred to study historical units rather than spent a third or more of their degree on languages. The problem is not the quality of their research – if the subject is one where language is not required, as I said – but their future prospects; regardless of the fact that an ancient history lecturer may never have to teach language (I never have at Bristol), it’s still applied as an entry criterion for jobs that they should be capable of doing it if necessary. So, we’ve been offering non-language routes to generations of students, claiming that they’re not inferior to old-fashioned Classics degrees – in the knowledge that we’d never consider giving such people academic jobs at the end of it. There is a problem here, but I’m not sure it’s with the students.
Some of the contributors to the debate were concerned with precisely these issues, and trying to be sensible about some genuinely awkward dilemmas. Many, however, were involved in something much more primal and instinctive; essentially, what these dilemmas express about the present state of classics as a discipline. For example, I think we have already had evocations of all seven of the major symptoms of societal and cultural decadence: the lamentable ignorance of the young, who simply don’t know or value the things that the older generation values, and so clearly don’t really know anything. In my day, you know, we talked Greek at the breakfast table at home, so when I got to secondary school I could concentrate on perfecting my Sanskrit and Estonian. There’s little attempt at situating these claims about a more golden and educated past in any social or economic context; it cannot possibly be that the older generation of PhD students (let alone those who went on to academic jobs) were to a greater degree drawn from a narrower and more privileged social stratum, hence had a head start on languages, it’s that the younger ones are clearly idle and can’t be bothered. The idea that they might have*other* skills doesn’t enter into it, because that implies putting such skills on level with those skills traditionally valued in the descipline – which is to say, effectively down-grading the traditional skills. Decadence and decline, clearly.
There is an unmistakable archetype of the ideal classical scholar lurking behind all this: not, as one might initially imagine, the academic in his fifties or sixties, but rather a research student in his twenties who is as that sixty-something academic was at that age, or an idealised version thereof. And, yes, I’m pretty sure that it’s a ‘he’ as far as the collective consciousness of the discipline is concerned. So, youngish in age but old in attitude, polymathic, skilled in ancient and modern languages, either single so he can be monkishly devoted to his research in case he comes across another language he has to learn, or supported by loyal and self-effacing girlfriend/wife so he can be monkishly devoted to his work with occasional extra benefits.
I could go on – though actually I’m more inclined to recommend reading Nietzsche’s Wir Philologen if you don’t already know it, as he was skewering this type 150 years ago. What most struck me this time around, however, was the way that this Heroic Classicist is conceived, quite unconsciously, as a Lone Scholar (putative self-effacing girlfriends/wives don’t count in this respect). Even if he’s part of a department, he researches alone, which is why he needs command of all these languages and other skills. Obviously he can’t talk to anyone else or draw on their expertise, because that’s not how things work. (Actually it may also be because all other scholars are figured as enemies, potential or actual, to judge from the tone of some of the remarks, but that’s a separate issue).
Now this is clearly mad – but it is how we think, and in this case I don’t think ‘we’ is confined to the dismayed older generation. I don’t imagine I was the only one who reacted to Elton’s suggestion about the importance of learning computer skills with “yes, but I don’t actually have time…” Current research students have enough trouble getting to grips with ancient languages and modern languages and technical skills for their research, and they should do computer stuff as well now? The point is that they don’t actually have to do all these things themselves, if there is someone else they can ask. If we think of scholarship in terms of a collective enterprise – still more if it’s actually organised as a team – then what matters is the blend of skills and knowledge within the team, not the individual accomplishments of a single person.
This has been the revelation of my Thucydides project; working with a political scientist, Christine Lee, so that she can cover certain areas of the topic and teach me to understand what’s going on there, and I can do the same for her. That’s obviously necessary because it’s an interdisciplinary project, and so it’s easy to assume that it’s irrelevant to mainstream classical research – but it isn’t. We don’t all have every possible skill required for Altertumswissenschaft; personally, I don’t think anyone ever has, but maybe older generations were more skilled in tailoring their projects to the skills that they possessed (a bit like the marksman who drew the targets after he’d fired), whereas today we get carried away with interesting research questions that we’re not wholly qualified to address properly.
My point is that we need to think of all projects as effectively interdisciplinary, even when they’re in theory wholly within the discipline; at which point it isn’t an issue that, say, my understanding of Renaissance Latin is rubbish, because I can simply talk to an expert or, if it’s central to the project, make sure there’s an expert on the team. We just have to change the way we think about research. The problem is that this goes against the foundational myth of our discipline, the idealised image of the classicist: the Polymathic Lone Scholar, contrasted against the narrow specialisms and inferior minds of scientists, social scientists and even other humanities people. Even some of the most reasonable classicists I know – including members of younger generations who have been objecting vociferously to the “you don’t know German so you’re a bad scholar” arguments – adhere closely to this archetype in the way they conceive of their own research.
Maybe it’s understandable; for example, how much of the continuing prestige of Classics (or, if not prestige, then the fact that it’s survived as a separate discipline for so long) rests on the idea that it’s particularly difficult because of the difficult languages involved, and so classicists must be particularly brilliant? Do we tend to conceive of the discipline in terms of its specific skills because that’s actually the only thing that makes us distinctive, because otherwise we’d be subsumed into departments of history or literary studies or philosophy?
Of course I debar myself from this conversation automatically because I don’t really think of myself as a classicist, which gives everyone else license to ignore this. I hope they won’t ignore this question, however: yes, researching the ancient world requires an astonishing range of skills and expertise, but why do we almost always assume that these must be required of every individual researcher?
Sphinx 
You make a fine argument for more collaboration. I’d just add that digital projects are often better venues for such collaboration than traditional forms of publication.
Absolutely – though as I’ve admitted on this blog in the past, this is a world that I’m struggling to come to terms with (as someone who is probably pushing it a bit in identifying with the ‘younger generation’ in the post, and doesn’t even own a smartphone…).
I don’t have a smartphone either Neville. But I know people who do… Yes: collaboration is the watchword and, what’s more, it’s fun. In fact, I look forward to finding out more about your much anticipated Thucydides project!
PS. I wasn’t “seriously” suggesting that people learn computer languages in addition to everything else, only that we would be remiss not to appreciate the role they too may play in the future of our discipline. I don’t know my RDF from my SPARQL.
“….maybe older generations were more skilled in tailoring their projects to the skills that they possessed…”
There’s an interesting passage on this very theme in A. E. Housman’s 1911 Cambridge Inaugural (“The Confines of Criticism”) about how often things go wrong when an editor strays outside his comfort zone: “The author discourses of philosophy, and the editor is no philosopher; or the author writes in complex metres, and the editor’s metrical education stopped short at Porson’s canon of the final cretic”.
Nice quote. My one hesitation is that I suspect Housman’s intended message was “therefore they shouldn’t attempt it, but leave it to someone like me” rather than “therefore they need to consult one of their colleagues”. One danger of the ‘lone scholar’ approach is that you may not realise that you’re missing things, so wouldn’t even think to ask someone else.
“..regardless of the fact that an ancient history lecturer may never have to teach language (I never have at Bristol), it’s still applied as an entry criterion for jobs that they should be capable of doing it if necessary.”
The point is not just whether an ancient historian will ever be called on to teach elementary Greek, though: it is that an ancient historian needs to be able to understand the material which s/he teaches. In my view it is a problem if a tutor in ancient history is in fact reliant on someone else to translate every single piece of evidence for him/her.
I’m not so sure; when I teach on, say, the later Roman republic, I rely on the many reliable translations of Cicero rather than doing it all myself, and I’ve never had a problem – the fact that I could translate it if necessary doesn’t actually seem to affect anything beyond the belief that I ought to be able to in order to have this job. My knowledge of, say, the analysis of pottery fabrics is vague in the extreme, but it doesn’t prevent me from teaching classes on the study of trade based on archaeological evidence; I read the secondary literature, and if a student wants more detail I admit that it’s not my specialist area and point them in the direction of some specialist literature, I am not saying that language is not important; I simply don’t understand why it is festishised in a way that other skills are not.
Thank you Neville. As one of the unemployable ‘bad scholars’, this utter commonsense has made me feel considerably better.
Thank you, Neville, for this lucid and thoughtful (and civil!) blog. As I’ve watched so many of my colleagues in the sciences (and social sciences) perfect the art of collaborative research, I too often wonder what exactly is holding all of us in the Humanities back from such approaches.
“What exactly is holding all of us back…”
Money, Ralph, money.
We are so constrained by the day job as individuals that there is little time or money left for working with others outside the box.
Of my two latest projects one is with a chemist, the other with a physicist. But both depend on time-intensive applications for research funding for which the odds are that they will be unsuccessful.
It’s a great post, and it is a bit embarrassing that we are so bad at collaboration. Even more embarrassing when aspiring scholars are found wanting in comparison to an idealized abstraction.
I will say, though, that something I value in humanistic education is a focus on the individual as such and not only as a part of some collectivity. There is some tendency in collaborative research for team members to become rather like cogs in a machine. Admittedly, Classics is a long way from that, but I do think that the ideal of educating the person — even as a professional Classicist — as a flexible, adaptable generalist and not just as a specialist of some sort, is something not to be lightly let go of.
The article both inspires and worries me. Having late in life decided to re-educate myself in classics with the intention of finding some or any role in the world of classics- I wonder if indeed there is a future for me. If as one of my friends said ‘If my love, passion and enthusiasm for the subject alone were enough, I would have a degree already
Thank you for this.
I also think there are significant repercussions in our teaching if we simply do not try things we need collaborators for in order to do them well. This may be more relevant to US Liberal Arts institutions such as mine, but I share my experience here for what it’s worth.
In 2011-12 I taught our intermediate Latin sequence, on Petronius in the first semester, using David Porter’s Widow of Ephesus site (http://homepage.usask.ca/~jrp638/widow/widowframes/main.html) in tandem with a traditional commentary in the first semester as a model for 1) using the internet as a tool for academic work and 2) practicing the cross-referencing the cross-referencing of resources necessary to understand a text.
In the Spring term I taught Ovid’s Heroides and had the students create their own online commentary of an underserved text (letter 4). Although I do not have the skills to create such a thing, our web designer Tammy Roundy does, and was a Greek student as an undergraduate to boot. While what we came up with is nothing like Porter’s site, it embeds Perseus and provides a grammatical commentary created by the students as well a short annotated bibliography. Had I not been willing to call upon the expertise of another, my students would not have gotten this sort of “real world” application of their Latin studies, would not have had to work collaboratively on a virtual project, and would not have crafted a modern English commentary on Her. 4.
If I ever get it edited the link will be available on the Center for Hellenic Studies site, hopefully some time this summer. It’s a project I hope to continue, and hope that our students can be proud of. In response to your (correct, I expect) assumption of the ideal male monastic scholar, I should add that I see additional value in this project given that I teach at a women’s college, and hope that with this stone I can at least aim at two birds: the twin tendencies to assume that classical scholars and digitally fluent individuals alike are male.
Um? Can I clear something up? No one said to the student in question that she had to be a (male) lone star, beaverishly working away on obscure and recondite disciplines to make it as a Classicist, just that, if she was determined to study Classics to a high level, she needed to be prepared to read texts in modern European languages. That doesn’t imply mastery, as you claim. I typed most of the German and Dutch I had to read into Google Translate (which is a very effective tool, I might add).
This is not about cooperation among scholars; no one is going to sit down and translate a load of German articles for you on Mithridates because you can’t read them, when there are perfectly good resources (like language classes and translation software) for you to do it yourself. I had to do it (despite going to a Public School, I did no Greek and only learnt Latin to GCSE because I originally intended to study History at university), and so did most of those who spoke to her.
I’m afraid your caricature of the lone-scholar is nothing more than that; you can’t rubbish a call for high standards in a discipline (that you seem to tacitly support: “So, we’ve been offering non-language routes to generations of students, claiming that they’re not inferior to old-fashioned Classics degrees – in the knowledge that we’d never consider giving such people academic jobs at the end of it. There is a problem here, but I’m not sure it’s with the students”) through spurious claims that it is “sexist”. That’s lazy rhetoric and typical of the fuzzy and vaguely resentful way the issue has been handled (‘us’ underprivileged grammar school types v ‘those’ elitist public school types). Having a chip on your shoulder isn’t going to change the fact that you realistically need to have some command of Latin and Greek to understand the texts you are working from or that that is what we Classicists profess to specialise in (here I disagree with your comments about the possibility of studying ancient economics without Latin and Greek and your reply to Sian Lewis below). One of the continuing criticisms of social scientists who use Classical texts is that they fail to understand the linguistic subtleties of what they are reading and thus ascribe anachronistic ideas to the writers they study. Now, your comment about collaboration come into play here – but surely what that shows is that we, as Classicists, are supposed to be as salt and light to the ignorant? WE, relying on others’ skills, bring our own unique skill set to the table; otherwise, what gives us a right to be there? Imagine turning to a political theorist or philosopher and saying “well, I don’t have any Latin or Greek to help you with; in fact I’m a second rate version of you without the specialist training you have received in statistics or formal logic and without my own skills to contribute”. Collaboration isn’t, in short, about relying on others, but about making your own contribution to others.
Sian Lewis is quite right. You do need to be able to teach Latin and Greek to your students, otherwise Classics will never recover from its terminal decline in schools and universities. Schools everywhere are complaining about the paucity of qualified Classics teachers and it is no secret that syllabuses at universities have been dumbed down repeatedly over the last 50 years to accommodate for the fact that students don’t have Latin and Greek to the necessary level. The latter is largely, of course, the fault of schools, both state and public, which have watered down their curricula or simply dropped certain subjects. But equally of the mentality of the pupils, who see languages and traditional humanities as difficult subjects (rather like the complacent, whining post grads they grow into) and universities churning out poorly qualified graduates cloaked in impressive degree titles. Your attitude – that we suffer the poor grad student (who can’t be that poor if she has £15, 000 to spend on an MA) – only fuels the “can’t do” attitude that has led to this decline.
“This is not about cooperation among scholars; no one is going to sit down and translate a load of German articles for you on Mithridates because you can’t read them, when there are perfectly good resources (like language classes and translation software) for you to do it yourself.”
Except it isn’t always so simple. Non-OCR’d texts have to be manually entered into translation software, since in my experience the OCR programs I’ve tried have tended to do a rather poor job with non-English texts. As for language courses, there aren’t any. At my university (where I am a post-grad) I’ve already had to teach myself French from a book and now am trying to do German. It’s lonely and frustrating.
Successful humanities scholars can teach themselves to read (note *read* not converse fluently) French or German. It isn’t that difficult compared to Ancient Greek! You cannot expect to be taught everything you learn – otherwise what kind of ‘original research’ will you perform?!?
I went to a state school in America that only taught French and Spanish. Via university and personal initiative I have learned to read many other languages. Either you care, or you don’t. I personally am interested in the world and would rather take the time to acquire language skills and use them in travel and research rather than wish to expect poor foreign researchers to spend all their savings getting their articles translated into proper English.
Briefly: there’s obviously an important distinction between ‘no one needs to know any foreign languages’ (appalling) and ‘everyone must know all relevant foreign languages’ (impractical), and ‘not everyone needs to know everything’, which is what I was arguing for. Of course we all know that it’s impractical for everyone to know everything, especially once we start including non-linguistic skills as well; what these discussions reveal are our sense of priorities, which skills we feel are most important.
Again, that’s not automatically a problem – depending on what criteria are called upon to establish relative importance. I’ve suggested that the demands of the particular research project have to come first, followed by the demands of teaching; perfectly straightforward, except that what comes across in some of the comments on this topic – whether or not it’s intended – is that there is a different set of priorities, which may be quite detached from the research project and interests of the individual, based on a notion of ‘what skills the ideal classicist should have’. Potentially, given that money and time are always in limited supply, acquiring that skill set might conflict with acquiring decent competence in the skill set that’s directly relevant to the research project and the teaching, and that’s where we have a problem. Attributing this to the laziness and whininess of graduate students, or to general cultural decadence, doesn’t get us anywhere.
If it helps to reassure anyone about my own academic standards, I have a vision of a two-year research Masters programme that would introduce the whole range of practical skills from epigraphy to data analysis and blogging, plus extensive sessions on theory and methodology, and would involve not only periods of study in several different universities but also the production of work in different languages – probably, a survey of an aspect of a particular national tradition of Altertumswissenschaft. I’m also sensible enough to realise that this would be insanely expensive and complicated to arrange, so in the absence of a very generous charitable donation would be restricted to a tiny group of students from privileged backgrounds, and probably wouldn’t appeal to them because it would be too hard work.
Thank you. It’s very dispiriting that senior scholars harbor the ideas you mention at a time when those on the bottom rungs are struggling to get on in the present-day university system. There may well be room for the sorts of criticisms voiced on the mailing list, but the root causes of the problems at issue surely have little to do with the personal failings of a generation of demoralised young scholars who are under pressure from so many different angles.
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