I Don’t Want To Talk About It

As I commented last month, the thing that has made an otherwise pretty dreadful term bearable has been the enthusiasm and engagement of the students. Yes, attendance has got patchier in recent weeks, presumably through a combination of accumulated exhaustion and impending coursework deadlines; yes, there are a couple with serious chronic health issues (but who are great when they do make it); and yes, there are a couple who have never showed up – I’ve established that they’re alive, and that this is their choice, and there’s not a lot more I can do other than dread what their essays are going to look like. But overall I’m getting well over 50% attendance in every class, with the majority missing only one or two over the course of the term – a stark contrast with the same time last year when I think the majority of students attended less than half the time. And the discussion is great, intelligent and well-informed; some minor tweaks to my approach (a bit more direction, a bit more chatting in small groups before general discussion) has led to pretty well everyone having lots to contribute. This makes life so much easier.

When I wrote about this last month, I was experiencing some anxiety about the prospect of having to navigate issues around Israel and Palestine in relation to themes like justice, freedom, the causes of war and other topics in Greek political thought and/or Thucydides. This did not in fact transpire. On the contrary, I have a growing sense of how little the classes wish to engage with the possible contemporary relevance of what we’re discussing; they don’t reach for current examples to illustrate points, they don’t comment on the wider implications of ideas – they seem to be very comfortable within a basic historicism that takes for granted big differences between past and present and seeks to focus on understanding the past in its own terms.

Which is okay – I’m not going to force them to embark on contemporary digressions if they don’t want to take up the numerous opportunities to do so – but it’s interesting. It was most striking yesterday, when the Thucydides class was doing the Plague. They really, REALLY did not want to talk about COVID. Mostly, it wasn’t clear whether this was because they were perfectly happy to talk about ancient ideas of plague in their ancient context as an end in itself, or whether there was active avoidance of the subject. I do find it a bit odd that one could read this section, just three years after lockdown and all, and not have complex reactions – but then I didn’t experience it as an 18-year-old. One student did comment on how implausible they found Thucydides’ claim that the plague affected people’s memories, and I simply had to point out that cognitive impairment was one of the symptoms of COVID and Long COVID; no response.

Again, maybe that’s an old person’s perspective on the disease – old person with undeniable memory issues as a result of it. The gulf between their experience of having their lives massively disrupted by something that was just a kind of flu and my sense of the epidemic as something alarming and unprecedentedly disruptive might be all there is to this (one student was quite keen on the ‘actually it wasn’t really a single disease but a historiographical construction’ argument – but didn’t make any attempt at linking this to COVID scepticism). University for them is all about being able to move on from the nightmare of the final year in school, which is why they’re so cheerful and engaged, and don’t particularly want to dwell on that bit of the past.

Still, when much of the arguments around the humanities tend to focus on their irrelevance and hence uselessness, it is striking that students appear to be quite happy with that irrelevance. They want to study Greek politics for itself, and as a means to an end, not to try to relate it to their own lives; if they do reflect on possible parallels or implications, they keep this out of the seminar. Positively, this makes it less likely that I’m going to be secretly recorded saying something unwise and provocative, selectively edited and then plastered over right-wing media. But part of me would still rather risk that in the cause of finding classical texts and examples to be still relevant in the present.