Bret Devereaux

There seems to be a real disconnect between the things classicists think connect with the public and thus do in 'public facing' forums and what - it seems to me - actually connects with the public? 1/16

I wonder (and you may or may not have an answer; I do not) whether we also need to distinguish between connecting with the public and actively recruiting classicists (broadly construed).

Obviously, raising the general interest level is ultimately going to be better for recruitment, but active recruitment would need to focus on people with the opportunity to take classics courses - which is largely going to mean pre-university teenagers.

So, we need to do both, but we also need to be aware that the field cannot survive if all we do is train classicists to train other classicists. At some point, the river must meet the sea - there has to be a general public sense that what we do is good and necessary *generally.*

I've been to a number of 'save the classics' discussions where at least some of the comments boiled down to, "we need more undergrads to train more high school Latin teachers to get more undergrads" in an endless loop. That loop is important, but it will not save us.

Yes, I suppose my question is what public facing stuff serves this goal? Because the popular stuff will, I suspect, generally be more what meets the expectations of the already interested audience; how do we go beyond that to showing the general significance of the discipline?

So...I do ancient history on the internet and sometimes I do that ancient history to popular pop culture things, like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones and Battlestar Galactica. My very rough sense is that the ancient history part of that stuff is new to most of my readers.