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In Jan 2016, I had a coffee with @donnazuck after what had happened to her after publishing âHow to be a good classicistâ. I was chair then on WCC and asked what we could do. She said âwrite somethingâ. So I did. My target was not the average Daily Stormer dude...1/ https://twitter.com/SarahEBond/status/1334865696455528448
...but my colleagues who had sat and done nothing when Donna, Sarah, Dan-el & others were targeted for threats/harassment, who wanted their classics apolitical as if it was some pristine experiment in neutrality. Who wanted to keep teaching & writing about Athenian greatness. 2/
But the way we teach and write about the ancient world shapes the way those students who take our classes later view and talk about and view the ancient world in its receptions. The presences of our field to being apolitical and perfect are harmful. 3/
Because I had spent a long time already studying race and ethnicity and identity in antiquity, it felt important to try to change that. And so, I wrote as Donna suggested. My blog came back to life & âwe condone it by our silenceâ came to be. I have not stopped since. 4/
as @eidolon_journal comes to a close, it is important for us all to think about how it changed us, how it has changed our field, and whether we want to go back to how it was (and we were) before or whether we have learned the lessons of our silence and complicity. 5/
In the news today is the closing of UVMs classics program. Not because the classes werenât filled and it wasnât popular, but because the last 3 decades have seen targeted attackers on humanities because they have ceased to be be simple tools of the oppressor. 6/
It wonât be the last closure that says it is about data and jobs, but is really about trying to stymie the critical humanities that have emerged (always contested) since the 1950s. At itâs best, Eidolon showed us how to fight back, how humanities matter. 7/
Next week, I have a meeting w/ my uni pres about the humanities on our campus. Heâs going to ask me what I think we should do to âsave humanitiesâ. I am not going to tell him to start a great books program. Or how we should be marketing âskillsâ. these do not work. 8/
Iâm going to ask him what he and the Admissions office are prepared to do to show they value humanities, to defend it to parents, to the board of trustees, to donors. Eidolon and itâs small staff made the anti-humanities people scared. It made them worried. 9/
They were targeted in national conservative pubs because they showed the power critical humanities can have. But imagine if universities put their machinery behind humanities and said âWe value this. Society needs thisâ instead of cutting them. 10/
Eidolon is ending, but that doesnât mean we stop. They showed us a way forward, how to fight, how to win. the question we have to ask ourselvesâesp those of us who canâhave we learned that lesson? Will we take up the fight? Or will we fall back into our complicit silences? end/
