THIS. In addition to harmful effects on students’ mental health, forcing students to undergo intensive language training to “catch up” in grad programs is assimilationist in nature and forces us to become philologist copies of one another and reproduces colonialist ideology https://twitter.com/isisnaucratis/status/1334939498048872450

What other types of training are we missing out on? What other interests could we have been developing instead of reading Latin and Greek and feeling awful about ourselves in the process? Intensive philology erases what made us interesting and unique when we were admitted

I have not met any grad students who have been unrealistic about the language training we need. I’m a historian who works with texts and I know I need a solid command of Latin and Greek (and also Demotic, Coptic, etc. which I barely have time for).

Programs should guide students individually to understand the language requirements needed for the work they want to do. Sit down with us and have an honest conversation about philology in the same way we talk about other methods like theory, etc.

(This is not meant to be a criticism of my own program, and I feel very lucky that I have been given a tremendous amount of flexibility to build my own course of study. I have developed immensely as a scholar already within it and we need more of programs like this one.)

But the constant feelings of inadequacy and exclusion that come from an environment of philology-above-all within this field have real material effects on many of us. They result in health problems which affect our ability to do good work in the things we’re passionate about.