Sphinx

Thinking that we’re getting older and wiser, when we’re just getting old…

There’s a painful scene towards the end of season 1 of Shtisel (and if you don’t already know this series, I recommend it highly: engrossing low-key family drama with a side order of comparative religion and anthropology). Shulem, the Shtisel patriarch, has been puzzled that his monthly pay as a teacher in the local cheder is substantially lower than normal. Initially the principal tells him that there’s a general cash-flow issue, but when he realises that he’s the only one affected the truth comes out: this is actually his pension; he was officially retired at the age of sixty, and since then the money to make up the difference to his old salary has been coming from his mother, as his wife was so worried that stopping work would kill him within a few months.

Well. Quite apart from the logistics and paperwork, I don’t think it’s very likely that any of my family would hatch such a plan, and I don’t think it would be necessary – with the gardening and brewing and music and sausage-making, and maybe even finally getting round to the novel, I’ll have plenty to keep me occupied. But I can imagine how much of a wrench it will be, finally to stop teaching and lose the adrenalin rush of engaging with young people (even in online conditions, it remains a a thrill and a privilege). And still more I can imagine the feeling of being suddenly confronted with the reality of being too old, irrelevant, redundant.

And so you should! heckles the imaginary voice from the gallery. You may have been the future once – a rather peculiar, borderline dystopian future – but it’s time for a new generation, old man! Stop trying to be down with the twenty- and thirty-somethings, and just shuffle off into the twilight!

Yes, well. Having spent much of the last nine months wondering if my brain would ever work properly again, struggling through the after-effects of the virus on top of a longer-standing tiredness, it’s unfortunate that, just when I’m feeling a bit more on top of things and have actually caught up with some my very long ‘to do’ list, circumstances conspire to raise the same questions from a different direction. Perhaps as a result of the sudden hole that’s opened up in university budgets – extended lockdown, rent refunds, government merrily throwing universities under the bus – there are suddenly plans for job cuts at multiple places, and lots of rumours elsewhere. This is almost never good for the humanities. And so, alongside my own self-doubt, I find myself wondering how far I might seem to others to be past my prime, not as good as I used to be, ripe for down-sizing instead of someone with more productive years left in them.

This overlaps with a broader, perhaps more existential, question, as to whether the discipline to which I have more or less committed myself over the last few decades is in a similar state: no longer fit for today’s world, getting by on past achievements and status, and – as I might as well go the whole hog in imagining classical studies as a reflection of myself, and vice versa – tempting fate by developing a searching self-critique. This was a thought prompted by current developments at the University of Leicester, where the pre- and early modern sections of the English department are threatened with radical cuts, in the name of a more diverse and relevant curriculum – despite the fact that medieval studies, as a field, has been notably active in addressing problematic aspects of its traditions, assumptions and what the far right does with some of its material. Or maybe ‘despite’ isn’t the right word; maybe someone has picked up on these debates, and concluded that the field is too problematic to survive.

This is the problem with critiques of Classics that, however rhetorically and however understandably, take the position of “Burn it down!” There are people – which is to say, university management – who may be all too happy to, and not in the sense of investing in the range of new posts required to develop an alternative field of Ancient Studies or Global Antiquity. We can happily imagine alternative configurations of subject areas, exciting new multi-disciplinary enterprises that expand the horizons of our activities and set up lots of productive new conversations – but we’re more likely to find ourselves in the situation of ‘sauve qui peut’, in which a capacity to expand teaching and research beyond the traditional focus on Greece and Rome becomes a requisite for continued employment in a diminished department rather than an argument for expansion in visionary directions.

And it’s easy to see, both in some of the responses to Sarah Bond’s Twitter thread on this issue and in the fall-out to the Leicester announcement, how this might develop further: a doubling-down on the very claims that made these disciplines problematic in the first place. How dare anyone suggest dismantling the study of the very foundations of Western Civilisation? It’s a clear sign of the bankrupt wokeness of the modern university that it dares attack such eternal values! Etc. And, while I doubt that most classicists have much sympathy with the sorts of commentators who trot out the whole “why can’t we celebrate Our Culture without people going on about slavery and racism?” brigade, would they reject them as potential allies if it came down to saving some jobs?

The deferment of disciplinary retirement on the basis of cheques drawn on someone else’s account, for the wrong reasons…