Dr. Michael J. Taylor

Here let me offer a gentle critique: Classics is burning now, and its been burning for a while. The discipline needs existential change while also facing imminent extinction. 2/

Classics will be okay at the Ivy League: indeed, these well resourced departments are best positioned to model a new direction for the discipline. But as we speak, U Vermont, the public flagship of Bernie Sanders state, is moving to eliminate its Classics Department. 3/

This is a report from the ruins, about what the world looks like AFTER Classics has burned: SUNY Albany, where I teach, eliminated its Classics Department about 15 years ago, well before I arrived. Budget cuts, but also a plagiarism scandal that made it an easy target 4/

Mind you, I have always been a bit of an outsider to Classics: BA and PhD through History departments (ancient), and I now teach in a History department. But until I arrived at SUNY, I had always been at an institution that also had a Classics Dept. 5/

I've had my own beefs with Classics Depts: theoretically interdisciplinary, in reality they tend to be dominated by literary studies for research, built around a narrow canon of authors; historians and archaeologists are often seen as ancillary. 6/

Indeed, its almost a bad joke that a historian can go into a Classics Dept. job talk, lay out a sophisticated project merging social and cultural history leavened with material culture, and the question they get is "can you teach a seminar on Tacitus?" 7/

But, the world after Classics, also known as the present, sucks./8

For one thing, I now appreciate how much a Classics department anchors the overall ancient community at an institution: talks, socials, conferences koffeeklatsches, etc. Its a critical mass of faculty and students that make these possible./9

Secondly, I now really appreciate language teaching as a resource. With no Classics, we cannot get our own graduate students up to speed on Greek and Latin. And we need these languages for our Medievalists. /10

Indeed, myself and our two medievalists spend quite a lot of our spare time trying to teach the Medieval grad students Latin and Greek, because we can't just have them take courses in Classics to get where they need to be. /11

It also means that I will probably never train a graduate student in Ancient History. Graduate training takes a village, and with a Classics department to provide additional seminars, outside readers, and again, language training, it might be possible. (also, no jobs) /12

Classics might allow me to teach more graduate seminars on Ancient History, because their grad students could fill out seats. Again, the department really does provide the critical mass of interest, even for historians, archaeologists and art historians in other departments /13

In short, the study of the ancient world is much impoverished if Classics Departments, for all their many flaws, go away, even if scholars of the ancient world remain scattered in other departments. I've only come to realize this in the last three years. FIN (I think)

Actually one more thing: I miss having the concentration of technical knowledge that Classics produces. I often need help with things like papyrology, epigraphy, paleography, or simply reading a difficult passage.