[noemon]

I think we need to make a distinction here between the Classics and the study of the Classics. The "discipline" of classical studies has indeed done all the things which Dr Padilla described.

That is such a wide accusation that can not be seriously qualified. Every university has its own discipline of Classical studies. To accuse them all of being responsible for racism is quite far-fetched, don't you think?

Your argument would make sense if Padilla focused his energies on the particular discipline(s) that he thinks is guilty of something but he does not, he talks about the entire academic discipline(singular) of the Classics.

The discipline of Classics in its general sense is the Classics.
In a particular sense it is a particular academic tradition followed by a university, its affiliates and those that have imitated it.

When one accuses someone of something, that 'entity/person' needs to be qualified.

I did not interrupt you once, so you are going to let me talk. You are going to let someone who has been historically marginalized from the production of knowledge in the Classics, talk. And here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you’ve outlined: If that is in fact a vision that affirms you in your white supremacy, I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies, that you’ve outlined, dies, and that it dies as swiftly as possible!

They omitted so much stuff, I wonder why.

The New York Times celebrating Padilla in a multi-page biopic omitted Padillas use of identity politics, "you will listen to me woman, cause I've been marginalised" and all I have to say to you is that "you 're a white supremacist".

Notice that the argument she made about "democracy, equality and liberty" was not replied to and was simply dismissed as "white supremacy"

Bear in mind that this is coming from the host of the panel who spent the majority of the time lecturing the audience that the study of Homer, Cicero, Thucidides, and Sappho is to celebrate "white supremacy" and that academics should not be judged on their merits but on their identity.

[Julian658]

Yes, this is an important distinction to make.

Classical cultures and authors may even have done these things, so to speak, but Dr. Padilla does not seem to think that is the problem either. In fact, as a scholar and a person of colour, he is probably quite keen to study how classical cultures and people created the historical foundations for present injustices. And because of this, he probably wishes that everyone knew this.

His position seems to be that people should study classics, but they should do it from a socially just and critical perspective rather than the traditional methods of the discipline. And this would then help students of the classics from recreating those mistakes in his field that affirm white supremacy.

———————

The NY Times piece seems to have edited Dr. Padilla’s words.

Here is what he actually said, according to the woman on the other side of this exchange, Dr. Williams.

I did not interrupt you once, so you are going to let me talk. You are going to let someone who has been historically marginalized from the production of knowledge in the Classics, talk. And here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you’ve outlined: If that is in fact a vision that affirms you in your white supremacy, I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies, that you’ve outlined, dies, and that it dies as swiftly as possible!

https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i- ... l-meeting/

Padilla is a typical 3rd wave antiracist that had massive success in America, but seems ungrateful. In the end he is very tribal and dislikes the West and yet he decided to study a Western discipline. I suspect he was not radicalized when he made that decision years ago. Padilla has embraced the role of the noble victim and sees this as empowerment. When one chooses to be a victim in the middle of success there is a problem.

[wat0n]

Another problem has to do with what does Padilla mean by "White Supremacy". This seems to be a typical example of differánce, since what he means by "White Supremacy" - as can be inferred from what he's saying - is not what most people would normally associate with the term, but simply that most of the top researchers in his field are White. From @Pants-of-dog's source, these are the remaining quoted fragments of whatever Padilla said:

I want to look at a blinding derangement: the responsibility of the major journals in the field for the replication of those asymmetries of power and authority that impoverish knowledge production in the field of Classics by perpetrating the epistemic and hermeneutic injustice of denying a space and a place for scholars of colour.

Although not normally acknowledged in the dossier of his most explicitly racist words and deeds, Gildersleeve’s founding of [the American Journal of Philology] in 1880 helped to shape American classical scholarship by spurring the development of a journal-centred disciplinary culture that has proven remarkably if unsurprisingly resistant to the pursuit of racial diversity and equity as a core objective.

If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of colour as producers of knowledge, one could not to better than what Classics has done.

In practical terms, this means that in an economy of academic prestige defined and governed by scarcity, white men will have to surrender the privilege they have of seeing their words printed and disseminated. They will have to take a back seat, so that people of colour, and women, and gender-non-conforming scholars of colour benefit from the privileges, career and otherwise, of seeing their words on the page.

…this is an economy of scarcity that, at the level of journal publication, will remain to a degree zero-sum. Until and unless this system of publication is dismantled—which will be fine by me—every person of colour who is to be published will take the place of a white man whose words could have or had already appeared in the pages of that journal. And that would be a future worth striving for.

As @Potemkin correctly said, this debate is not about the Ancient Greek and Roman authors. This is about how Classics, as an academic field in the 21st century, works and who the leading figures are, not what the quality of their work is. What Padilla seems to be saying is that the overrepresentation of White male authors in the top journals in his field is an example of White Supremacy, which is interesting because no one would make analogous claims of "Indigenous Supremacy" in Indigenous studies or "Black Supremacy" in African studies when analyzing the demographics of the leading authors in those fields. As I also mentioned before, he's self-centered (and I would add arrogant) since he seems to believe that he's so good that he even managed to beat White Supremacy in his field, as a result of a quality of his work. But this does not compute, because under what most of us understand as White Supremacy, it doesn't matter how smart or accomplished a non-white person is, only Whites are allowed to be recognized at the top just as it never quite mattered how smart or efficient a slave was, the slave would still be a slave. There is no meritocracy under such a system for nonwhites.

And hence I cue back to what I mentioned earlier about the project of deconstruction of science and make identity categories a factor to judge what is "good" science, which is usually summarized in the demands to "decolonize science". Of course, this is a lot harder to do than in the humanities, but in the end it's all part of the same political project and no different from aberrations such as the Deutsche Physik movement.

[Pants-of-dog]

I wish to note several things:

Dr. Padilla gave Dr. Williams every opportunity to speak and criticise his statements. He did not, in any way, try to silence her. He only asked that she not interrupt him and allow him to reply to her criticisms.

At this point, he made a conditional statement. If x, then y. And the statementwas that if someone supports a traditional and uncritical acceptance of the current approaches to the discipline, then that person is affirming (consciously or not) a set of approaches that have affirmed white supremacy and perpetuate a lack of voices for people of colour in the field today.

As far as I can tell, this is a true statement. And it is true regardless of the very real contributions that classical texts have given us.

[noemon]

As @Potemkin correctly said, this debate is not about the Ancient Greek and Roman authors. This is about how Classics, as an academic field in the 21st century, works and who the leading figures are, not what the quality of their work is. What Padilla seems to be saying is that the overrepresentation of White male authors in the top journals in his field is an example of White Supremacy, which is interesting because no one would make analogous claims of "Indigenous Supremacy" in Indigenous studies or "Black Supremacy" in African studies when analyzing the demographics of the leading authors in those fields. As I also mentioned before, he's self-centered (and I would add arrogant) since he seems to believe that he's so good that he even managed to beat White Supremacy in his field, as a result of a quality of his work. But this does not compute, because under what most of us understand as White Supremacy, it doesn't matter how smart or accomplished a non-white person is, only Whites are allowed to be recognized at the top just as it never quite mattered how smart or efficient a slave was, the slave would still be a slave. There is no meritocracy under such a system for nonwhites.

And hence I cue back to what I mentioned earlier about the project of deconstruction of science and make identity categories a factor to judge what is "good" science, which is usually summarized in the demands to "decolonize science". Of course, this is a lot harder to do than in the humanities, but in the end it's all part of the same political project and no different from aberrations such as the Deutsche Physik movement.

You have a point that is evident in the text you quoted but I believe that Padilla goes further.

He talks about the academic replacement of white publishers with ones of colour but he is also laying out his feelings about the Classics in general:

Padilla began to feel that he had lost something in devoting himself to the classical tradition. As James Baldwin observed 35 years before, there was a price to the ticket. His earlier work on the Roman senatorial classes, which earned him a reputation as one of the best Roman historians of his generation, no longer moved him in the same way. Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped.

He feels that the Classics pose a cultural danger to other cultures and as such the Classics themselves are the problem beyond just the 'discipline'.

He continues:

Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today.

To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.

Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,” Denis Feeney, Padilla’s colleague at Princeton, told me. “I think it’s sad.” He noted that the classical tradition has often been put to radical and disruptive uses. Civil rights movements and marginalized groups across the world have drawn inspiration from ancient texts in their fights for equality, from African-Americans to Irish Republicans to Haitian revolutionaries, who viewed their leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, as a Black Spartacus. The heroines of Greek tragedy — untamed, righteous, destructive women like Euripides’ Medea — became symbols of patriarchal resistance for feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, and the descriptions of same-sex love in the poetry of Sappho and in the Platonic dialogues gave hope and solace to gay writers like Oscar Wilde.

“I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.” She went on: “My line has always been that the duty of the academic is to make things seem more complicated.” In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike. Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race. Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”

To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves. Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past. This past semester, he co-taught a course, with the Activist Graduate School, called “Rupturing Tradition,” which pairs ancient texts with critical race theory and strategies for organizing. “I think that the politics of the living are what constitute classics as a site for productive inquiry,” he told me. “When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”

One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.

[ThirdTerm]

In the West, Classical Studies need to rely entirely on ancient Greek and Roman authors whose original works were written in ancient Greek and Latin because ancient Britons or Germans were not quite literate. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle written in the 9th century is the oldest English history book that they can go back to. There is a gaping hole in classical literature in the ancient era. In China, they can study Sun Tzu who lived in the Eastern Zhou period (771-256 BCE) of ancient China and many other authors from the ancient era.

I think you intended to write something else.

I meant the lack of classical literature in Europe outside Rome and Greece. Learning classics pulled Europe out of the Dark Ages of ignorance, when most Europeans were illiterate. This is why the classics was a discipline around which the modern Western university grew and it is the literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture. In a way, northern Europeans appropriated a foreign culture to advance their own culture. I was one of the victims who had to learn Latin and ancient Greek just like European students until the 19th century.

[noemon]

There is a gaping hole in Classical literature in the ancient era.

I think you intended to write something else.

It was not just the Europeans that have looked to discover links to their own history in the quite large library of classical works. We even have magazines from the Greek and Roman antiquity. The Arabs, Africans, Eastern Europeans, Persians, Indians and many others have utilised Greco-Roman literature for the same purpose. The Bible has been used a lot for the same purpose as well.

[Pants-of-dog]

To tie this discussion about Dr. Padilla back to the topic, I would say that the right wing media’s attacks on Dr. Padilla constitute an example of cancel culture. And this cancel culture example is driven by identity politics: a political will to maintain a status quo that benefits white male scholars at the expense of female scholars and scholars of colour.

[wat0n]

In what way has the criticism of Dr. Padilla been a form of cancellation? Has anyone called Princeton to fire him, despite his tenure?

[noemon]

To tie this discussion about Dr. Padilla back to the topic, I would say that the right wing media’s attacks on Dr. Padilla constitute an example of cancel culture.

Which right-wing media, and which attacks are you referring to? The New York Times multi-page biopic article on Dr Padilla that we are currently discussing is a eulogy to him.

And this cancel culture example is driven by identity politics: a political will to maintain a status quo that benefits white male scholars at the expense of female scholars and scholars of colour.

If we cancel every field where people of colour are less than white people inside western societies then we have to cancel every university department, civil structures, courts, etcetera. Why should the Classics be cancelled instead of say putting more Black people in them and giving them more endowments for people of colour?

Padilla will not find any criticism there and has not found any while doing it in Princeton for the past decade but his attacks are against the Classics in general and he very explicitly states that he sees the study of Greek & Roman culture as "dangerous to other cultures".

[Pants-of-dog]

As far as I can tell, the condemnation of Dr. Padilla is the only movement right now.

If that does not count as cancel culture, then nothing else in this tale counts. And if that is the case, this is then not an example of cancel culture.

[noemon]

When someone claims that the study of African studies is "dangerous because it would replace the identities of those studying it" and that "it should be cancelled as an academic discipline", that someone would be a 'racist'.

Padilla argues that the study of Greek & Roman literature is dangerous for the identities of those studying it.

Why should the Classics be cancelled as an academic principle instead of say putting more Black people in them and giving them more endowments for people of colour?

[Pants-of-dog]

It seems like Dr. Padilla is being mischaracterised as a leader of a cancel culture movement, despite the fact that he is merely asking questions and making observations.

The reactions to the recently deceased Rush Limbaugh are a good example of how “cancel culture” actually manifests.

For years, he said the most horrible things, and was paid by mainstream media outlets to do so. And this lasted until his influence created the whole right wing media industry, at which point, he switched from “mainstream” media to mainstream right wing media. And continued to say awful things without any consequence. And he did until his dying day, receiving accolades from even the POTUS at the time.

More info here:
https://newrepublic.com/article/161422/ ... m-nineties

[noemon]

It seems like Dr. Padilla is being mischaracterised as a leader of a cancel culture movement,

These fake and unsubstantiated accusations against abstract people that you disagree with, are an obvious example of cancel culture. You have done it in 3 consecutive posts, so tread very carefully. If you want to accuse a particular person of mischaracterising Padilla, then do the decent thing. Quote and criticise the text you are referring to.

despite the fact that he is merely asking questions and making observations.

This is an observation:

Padilla argues that the study of Greek & Roman literature is dangerous for the identities of those studying it.

When someone claims that the study of African studies is "dangerous because it would replace the identities of those studying it" and that "it should be cancelled as an academic discipline", that someone would be seen as a 'racist'.

And this is a question:

Why should the Classics be cancelled as an academic principle instead of say putting more Black people in them and giving them more endowments for people of colour?

[Pants-of-dog]

These fake and unsubstantiated accusations against abstract people that you disagree with, are an obvious example of cancel culture. You have done it in 3 consecutive posts, so tread very carefully. If you want to accuse a particular person of mischaracterising Padilla, then do the decent thing. Quote and criticise the text you are referring to.

I apologise if anyone feels offended. I do not think any one person is trying to mischaracterise Dr. Padilla. This seems to be the theme of several articles in right wing media.

My point is that this thread is about cancel culture which is defined as a movement (usually online) to publicly shame or ostracise someone and remove them from a public position.

If we apply this to the discussion on Dr. Padilla, we are then asking ourselves who is trying to cancel whom. The author of the piece (Melanie Phillips) that was first cited in this thread seemed to imply that Dr. Padilla is trying to cancel the classics. This does not seem to be the case.

There is no movement, online or otherwise, to cancel the classics.

And this is a question:

Why should the Classics be cancelled as an academic principle instead of say putting more Black people in them and giving them more endowments for people of colour?

Dr. Padilla would definitely prefer the latter.

However, if the field as a whole does not address the racism issues in the field, Dr. Padilla would argue that this tacit support of racism is reason enough to stop having this field.

[wat0n]

I apologise if anyone feels offended. I do not think any one person is trying to mischaracterise Dr. Padilla.

My point is that this thread is about cancel culture which is defined as a movement (usually online) to publicly shame or ostracise someone and remove them from a public position.

If we apply this to the discussion on Dr. Padilla, we are then asking ourselves who is trying to cancel whom. The author of the piece that was first cited in this thread seemed to imply that Dr. Padilla is trying to cancel the classics. This does not seem to be the case.

There is no movement, online or otherwise, to cancel the classics.

So who's been trying to remove Padilla from his tenured position at Princeton?

[Pants-of-dog]

So who's been trying to remove Padilla from his tenured position at Princeton?

I do not think I claimed that.

If you wish to quote the post that caused you to erroneously think I am arguing this, I can then clarify what my point was.

But it is good that you bring up tenure.

It is very difficult to remove a tenured professor from their position. And so one good way of protecting university faculty from “cancel culture” would be to provide more tenured positions.

By the way, I do not think Dr. Padilla is a tenured professor.

[wat0n]

I do not think I claimed that.

If you wish to quote the post that caused you to erroneously think I am arguing this, I can then clarify what my point was.

Then why would you say he's being cancelled, when no one is trying to remove him from his position? Your claim here does not follow your own definition of "cancellation".

The issue with cancel culture does not lie in criticism or even hostility, but in the second part of your own definition.

But it is good that you bring up tenure.

It is very difficult to remove a tenured professor from their position. And so one good way of protecting university faculty from “cancel culture” would be to provide more tenured positions.

Only to an extent, since you can keep a tenured professor while at the same time deny her promotions and the like over her speech.

Furthermore, tenure can also be very damaging in other ways. For starters, the incentives to publish and teach diminish by quite a bit once tenure is achieved. But leaving that aside, it can also be used to coerced untenured colleagues, including those who are underrepresented minorities.

By the way, I do not think Dr. Padilla is a tenured professor.

He's an Associate Professor at Princeton, those positions are normally tenured.

[Pants-of-dog]

Then why would you say he's being cancelled, when no one is trying to remove him from his position? Your claim here does not follow your own definition of "cancellation".

The issue with cancel culture does not lie in criticism or even hostility, but in the second part of your own definition.

I was referring to the current online movement being waged against Dr. Padilla in right wing media.

He is being portrayed as a person who wants to cancel the classics. This seems like the closest thing to cancel culture in this entire discussion.

But I agree that it does not quite fit the definition. As far as I can tell, the issue of Dr. Padilla’s criticisms are not part of cancel culture.

Only to an extent, since you can keep a tenured professor while at the same time deny her promotions and the like over her speech.

Furthermore, tenure can also be very damaging in other ways. For starters, the incentives to publish and teach diminish by quite a bit once tenure is achieved. But leaving that aside, it can also be used to coerced untenured colleagues, including those who are underrepresented minorities.

Yes, there are issues with tenure. But in terms of cancel culture, more tenure positions is better for free speech. This prevents professors being fired just because a student is offended about the racism in a classroom, for example.

He's an Associate Professor at Princeton, those positions are normally tenured.

In most academic institutions in North America, an associate professor is not tenured. It is one step below a tenured position, as far as I can tell.

If Dr. Padilla is tenured and I have erred, I congratulate him and hope he forgives me for not addressing him as Prof. Padilla, should he read these words.

[noemon]

The author of the piece (Melanie Phillips) that was first cited in this thread seemed to imply that Dr. Padilla is trying to cancel the classics. This does not seem to be the case. There is no movement, online or otherwise, to cancel the classics.

Padilla claims that the study of Greek & Roman literature poses a cultural danger and is thus "the enemy".

Padilla began to feel that he had lost something in devoting himself to the classical tradition. As James Baldwin observed 35 years before, there was a price to the ticket. His earlier work on the Roman senatorial classes, which earned him a reputation as one of the best Roman historians of his generation, no longer moved him in the same way. Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped.

Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today.

To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.

Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,” Denis Feeney, Padilla’s colleague at Princeton, told me. “I think it’s sad.” He noted that the classical tradition has often been put to radical and disruptive uses. Civil rights movements and marginalized groups across the world have drawn inspiration from ancient texts in their fights for equality, from African-Americans to Irish Republicans to Haitian revolutionaries, who viewed their leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, as a Black Spartacus. The heroines of Greek tragedy — untamed, righteous, destructive women like Euripides’ Medea — became symbols of patriarchal resistance for feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, and the descriptions of same-sex love in the poetry of Sappho and in the Platonic dialogues gave hope and solace to gay writers like Oscar Wilde.

“I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.” She went on: “My line has always been that the duty of the academic is to make things seem more complicated.” In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike. Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race. Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”

To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves. Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past. This past semester, he co-taught a course, with the Activist Graduate School, called “Rupturing Tradition,” which pairs ancient texts with critical race theory and strategies for organizing. “I think that the politics of the living are what constitute classics as a site for productive inquiry,” he told me. “When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”

One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.

He is openly promoting cultural enmity.