Bret Devereaux

And I know in writing this I am preaching to the choir. So many of the classicists I know on twitter are *already* working hard doing good public-facing work. But we need more of it and we need to be smarter about how we do it. 13/16

And of course in the end that means that hiring and tenure committees need to learn to value it - which may mean something as hopelessly crass as judging public engagement by actual reach (read: views), rather than by how it drives the #ClassicsDiscourse. 14/16

Because we all know that when it comes to jobs, public engagement doesn't 'count.' You get what you pay for. It's not the only thing that matters, but if we don't re-engage the public with our field, we're not going to be able to do any of the other things either. end/16

Addendum: And to my long-suffering twitter followers I promise I will now lay off of the interminable Classics Discourse (tm) for a bit.

So just in my undergrad I never took a classics course at all. The closest I ever came was a survey for you know world history part 1. And I have to admit I often find myself thinking that it just doesn't seem to matter that much to teach the classics.

Once you accept the value of the humanities broadly construed, the necessity of classics (broadly considered), I think follows unavoidably, since the oldest recorded human things serve as the foundation for all of the subsequent human things.

I have a history degree. And I agree with the argument for the humanities. But on a practical level I often if almost never run into a situation where my lack of knowledge of the classics in depth really kills me Some theology sure but how far does that go time wise.