Center and Margins: Recruiting, Anxiety, and the Power of Reaching Out
(Originally delivered as a speech during the Society for Classical Studies’ Presidential panel on January 4, 2020)
Good afternoon everyone,
When Tolly initially asked me to be a speaker on this panel, I was a bit hesitant to accept. She reached out about three weeks ago (as you all can see, my name isn’t printed in the program), but I wasn’t as concerned about the short-notice as I was about being up here as the only grad student in a group of professors, some of whom have had long and distinguished careers, and one of whom is the president of SCS. The specter of last year’s “Future of Classics” panel still lingers in my mind, where a scholar far more distinguished than I am was confronted on the basis of his credentials. And perhaps even more the articles that followed, namely the New Criterion’s “Decline and Fall: Classics Edition,” that further assert that said scholar does not deserve his platform on account of a lack of “scholarly merit,” in that he does too much outreach, without having published a scholarly book. What reason would you all have to listen to me, a first-year grad student, who is speaking at the SCS for the first time, without first providing some sort of proof of his scholarly merit? As a result, I was very anxious. And it is this issue, this anxiety, that I am going to talk about today.
I first started taking Latin about nine years ago. When I was in eighth grade, I was in my third year of French. The class was slow and the students were un-engaged. One day, my classmate turned around and asked me for the time. Instead of answering, I dismissively told her to just look at the analog clock on the wall. When she told me that she wasn’t able to read it, I was mortified and decided that I needed to get out and go “where the smart people are.” So, I asked myself, “where are the smart people?” And quickly, I arrived at the conclusion that “smart people” take Latin. This is how I began in the field of Classics.
As the years have gone by, that story has become a source of great shame. I don’t believe I had ever told it prior to last year. But as I reflect on it, certain aspects of it stick out to me. Specifically, that my view of Classics, before I even entered the discipline, was one primarily characterized by exclusion. Although I had initially conceived of my entrance as an attraction to a space where I would be surrounded by intelligent individuals — and to a certain extent, maybe it was — it was, in reality, a reactionary attempt to seclude myself from those I considered beneath me. Usually when we talk about recruitment, diversity, and how the two work together, we adopt the language of “lowering the walls” around the field, but it was those walls, and my confidence in my ability to surmount them, that attracted me to the study in the first place.
Different versions of this story, not always this pronounced, are not uncommon among classicists, especially among those of us who entered the field before going to university. The desires to become “cultured,” or to “look smart,” although many of us have acknowledged the problematic aspects of them, are understandable and attractive, not only to students, but also to us as recruiters, who often fall into the trap of using the same old arguments of “Why Classics?” to bring students in, and leaving the deconstruction of the problematic elements until after the students are already interested.
When I was a summer intern at the Paideia Institute in 2018, the first thing that we did when editing the Aequora materials aimed at a younger audience of students, was remove a paragraph in the introduction where the previous editor addressed the decolonizing approach of the materials, in light of Classics’ history in justifying slavery, imperialism, and white supremacy. At the time, we all agreed that it was probably best “not to scare” the impressionable students, but what we did was leave the door open for potentially problematic uses of our work. Last year, in the Sportula’s open letter regarding the Paideia Institute, I anonymously recounted an argument I had with the president about whether it was “our place to judge” the reasons people use our materials, and Classics in general. When I raised concerns about neo-nazi/white supremacist uses of Classics, stating “I’m not going to link arms with the alt-right,” the president responded, “Would you rather let Classics just die?”
I know this example may seem a little extreme, but as the “Eighteen Concerned Classicists” letter highlights so aptly, it’s actually, quite — in their words describing the political views of the Paideia administration — ordinary. Or if not “ordinary,” perhaps natural. After all, when we recruit using a narrative of buying into an idealized “Western tradition,” who would be more drawn to that narrative than those who form an entire identity around idealizing the West? But this discussion, of course, is neither new to the field nor to this conference. No, but what I think we’ve gotten wrong, is that we assume that this narrative is fundamentally alienating to all people-of-color and other marginalized groups, but I actually find that it’s often quite the opposite.
The notion of buying into a long Western history of civilization and culture is especially appealing to many more pragmatic and ambitious students-of-color, because they see the use of attaining an old-school, white-coded form of excellence that can only be accessed through knowledge of the “great works,” and even more so when one does so in their original languages. I remember that when I first started showing an interest in and talent for Latin, the people who were most excited were my grandparents, who grew up under British colonial rule in Jamaica, and were thrilled that their grandson was gaining a skill traditionally reserved for the white elite.
But although this method may be somewhat effective (and decreasingly so) in terms of getting students of color into secondary school seats, it does little in the way of diversifying the field. You may get a couple of students who enjoy the material, and decide that they want to continue, but you’re always going to lose the vast majority to more traditionally prestigious career options: medicine, law, politics etc. This is because, although this recruiting strategy promotes the study of the classics, it does not promote the kind of ownership over the material that would lead one to pursue a career in it. For those of us that do stay, many of us are plagued by a series of anxieties: Chief among which is “Do I belong here? And will I ever be fully accepted as a scholar?” but others follow such as “Why am I studying a history of the oppressor? And in doing so, am I still chasing the prestige of the white elite?” “Is there any way that I can recruit that is not a small-scale colonization?” and “Is there any way I can decolonize myself and my work?”
These are questions to which I do not hold the answers, and I’m hoping this PoC-heavy panel of more senior scholars will share their experiences and advice. In terms of less-problematic diverse recruitment, the rising prominence of reception studies is a step in the right direction, in that it allows students from different backgrounds to access diverse (and possibly very personal) traditions of interactions with the classics of which they were not previously aware. I think many in the field recognize that. To draw from my own experience, at the end of my first-year as an undergrad at UNC, Sharon James (from whom you have all just heard), in her capacity as the department’s diversity liaison, called me into her office, and told me that the faculty had noticed me taking classes in the department and were impressed with my work, and that if I wanted to enter the field, there would be a place for me. After I told her I was interested, she immediately gave me a complete timeline of everything I needed to do if I wanted to be prepared to enter a PhD program straight out of undergrad. And throughout my years of undergrad, she became a person I could always turn to when I needed advice or support, particularly when I needed help allaying anxieties about my abilities or worth: the decision to start learning Greek, to apply to Princeton’s PhD program as opposed to its pre-doctoral fellowship, and most recently, to join this panel. I say this not merely to puff-up Sharon, but to illustrate a simple but often forgotten point: seeking out relationships with your students of marginal identities, listening to them, and giving them encouragement about their abilities and value, goes a long way. At first, drawing attention to this may seem rather mundane. After all, it is the principle at the very core of advising and mentoring, but although it seems simple, so many of my peers of color, who have these anxieties, will tell me how much they wish they had a person who sought them out to give them a piece of advice or encouragement. Furthermore, getting to know someone to the point where they would be open to discussing their anxieties, and trusting you to take them seriously, takes time. I wish time permitted me to explore more approaches to diverse recruitment, and how the labor of forming these close relationships too often falls on women and people-of-color, but I hope that we will address these issues in the discussion period. But for now, I leave you with this: can you think of any students you may have overlooked? And what is stopping you from asking about them and their interests? Taking these steps may do more for them than you think. Thank you.
