My Name Is…

There’s nothing like an enforced lockdown in the middle of a global pandemic to force someone like me – not antisocial, exactly, but inclined to assume that others are happy to get on with their lives without me imposing on their precious time – to start making contact and reinforcing connections. Longer emails for family and close friends, regular social media contact for everyone else – with a powerful sense of how far I’m already a member of a couple of really important online communities, consisting mainly of people I’ve never met in person, that are now even more important.

One of the things this has brought home is how downright weird some of the algorithms have become. I mean, the whole point of belonging to a local community group on Zuckerberg’s Evil Empire is to hear the latest news, not to get an update on Wednesday that someone was looking for a recommendation for veg box deliveries last Wednesday. Various people have disappeared from my feed entirely, unless I search for them, while I still get regular updates from a couple of students I taught in Bristol a decade or more ago (hi Clio! I hope you found your online yoga tuition). The Twitter is slightly better, but it was very odd to get a notification this morning that someone had liked a tweet I was mentioned in, which turned out to be a discussion from over a month ago of which I had no knowledge whatsoever as I’d never received any alert.

I now feel rather bad that people were looking for my input and just got silence, especially as the topic is indeed something on which I have Opinions. Okay, there are relatively few topics on which I don’t… Even weirder, the alert has now disappeared again, and I can’t find any trace of it, so I can’t check that my recollection of the debate is actually correct or weigh in belatedly there. So, just to prove that I can start an online argument in a disregarded blog post…

How should we conceive of ‘Classics’ – or, what should we call it instead? This is now a well-trodden issue, and people like Jo Quinn have written insightfully about the great weight of historical and ideological baggage the term now lugs around with it: the obsession with language and literature, the narrow geographical and chronological focus, the elitism, imperialism and sexism… Of course much of actually-existing Classics is nothing like this, but the question of whether the subject can ever shake off these associations remains open – especially when, as becomes clear whenever there’s a wider Classics-related news story, many people in the wider culture in countries where Classics has traditionally been strong want it to remain what it was (if not to strip away some of its modern accretions). And especially when, let’s be honest, it’s still difficult not to fall back into old-fashioned evocations of ‘the roots of (Western) civilisation!’ when defending it to university administrators or trying to tempt in students.

One of the problems with changing the name is the loss of such ‘brand recognition’ – perhaps an issue especially for the UK, where students have to be persuaded to commit to a subject from the very beginning of their university careers, rather than in a system where they can pick and choose different courses, and may be much less bothered about the name of the department that delivers them.

Another, however, is the worry that changing the name would be somewhat fraudulent; what sort of ‘Department of Ancient Studies’ teaches only Ancient Greece and Rome? It’s already – albeit quite rarely – a question that gets raised by potential students in relation to Ancient History; no, sorry, despite the name on the door, we don’t do pyramids. Privileging Greek and Latin does actually make some sense in a Department of Classics; is the Department of Ancient Studies going to re-educate all its Latinists to deliver Hebrew and Sanskrit?

Okay, so Classics is a classic case of “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”, and it may be that the depths of crisis, upheaval and uncertainty are not the best place for a radical re-think (the original Twitter thread was, I think, back in February). But one could argue that the aftermath of crisis, upheaval and uncertainty – the likely need for different sorts of rebuilding – is an excellent time for a radical re-think. We can adopt a name that is about the future, not the past, of the subject; not what we are, but what we want to be. Start thinking of ourselves as, say, Ancient Studies, and see where that takes us.

This isn’t a blueprint for wholesale revolution and reorganisation, firing and hiring – not least because no one is ever likely to give me that sort of power, and especially not if I explain what I’d do with it. But we can be the change we want to see in smaller ways. Think about the way we present ourselves to students, and the messages we give them about what’s important. Think about the assessment questions we set, and the topics we include in courses – and next time we need to propose something new, make sure, insofar as we’re able, that it fills a gap in the Ancient Studies curriculum rather than the Classics programme. Keep looking out for opportunities for collaboration and exchange – easier in some universities than others when it comes to teaching.

In the longer term, it’s important to be flexible and imaginative when it comes to replacing posts. Yes, there’s a real double-band here, needing to justify replacement above all in terms of ability to deliver the existing curriculum while wanting to change the curriculum through recruiting people with different expertise – but at the least we can write cunningly-worded job remits, and then hope that the best people who apply are also the most interesting and diverse, in which case it’s just a matter of fighting off the “yes, they’re brilliant, but can they deliver these seven modules that we’ve taught since time immemorial?” argument.

Be the Ancient Studies you want to see…