the fact that this piece casts "doing away with the label 'classics' altogether" as an existentially horrifying and unthinkably radical move tells you everything you need to know about how much thought damon linker has put into it https://theweek.com/articles/965573/cancel-classics

it would be horrifying if homer were no longer studied. it would not be horrifying if the courses in which the iliad and odyssey get studied, in translation and in the original, had a different call number

i am hardly an academic egalitarian. someone who can't read greek will probably not teach the iliad and odyssey as well as someone who does, and people who aren't experts deserve to have the benefit of a colleague's expertise. we still need scholars and teachers of this material

but we don't need to organize the material in the same way. we don't need to quietly put on airs because we happen to be able to play the intellectual genealogy game better than a lot of people. parlor tricks aren't scholarship and aren't the same as intellectual value

if you treat "call the field something different and reorganize the way this material is studied and taught" as identical with "stop studying Homer," then i'm sorry, you are not intellectually serious and have no business butting in on adult conversations