My Own Kind

This has been a tough year for college administrators as the so-called minority students on a number of campuses have agitated often very aggressively and sometimes downright rudely about issues of exclusion, inclusion, social class, gender distinctions. The  June 9th issue of The New York Review contains an interesting interview with the president of Yale University in which he discusses the issues that have exercised the students and faculty on that campus during the academic year now behind us.  I have spent my life in academia, and I know that the problems and solutions are a lot more complex than the outside observer might imagine.  And as someone whose field is Latin and Greek I have trouble getting my head around the idea that students and faculty at Yale, as reported in this interview, immediately think of southern plantation owners with whip in hand when they hear the heads of the residential colleges addressed as "master," when of course as "everyone" knows it comes from the Latin magister,  or "teacher."  Well, of course, everyone doesn't know, but it's one of those twee things like a restaurant owner calling his pub Ye Olde something or other.  I am a professor of classics, so of course, I know.  Once upon a time in the English speaking world, classical studies were essential, then they migrated to being very popular with upper class students, who would not think of majoring in something that smacked of "business."  This derived from the fact that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century a college education was by and large only for upper class males, and classical studies were the prize intellectual pursuit along with philosophy and theology.  The one exception were the products of Catholic schools who had often started their Latin and Greek in their early teens.  A number of fierce working class boys went on to become college professors by virtue of this early training.  Minority students were not in my classes because their schools generally did not provide exposure to this culture and they had no impetus to take up classics.  My first experience of teaching African-American, Latino, Caribbean students came when I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx, and the experience was a delight.  Probably not for the students in my night class, however, who were working all day and had to take what they could get in the evening and if it was Tuesday that was me for three solid hours. If they were intelligent, and hardworking and ambitious, they set to and worked hard to understand something which had no intrinsic interest for them.  It was a delight to discover inspiration and ideas and intellectual development among these students, men and women who never in a million years would have thought to study such a subject, let alone even know of it.  Those years were rich and fulfilling for me; my students were universally from a background utterly foreign to me, and we got along famously. But I began to ask myself if perhaps ancient literature was not a negative experience  I came to realize that most literature of classical antiquity, the Homeric epics, for instance, are depictions of the life and problems of the ruling, exploiting, oppressing class, valorizing their struggle to control, and for that reason, although they are brilliant depictions of the life of royalty and aristocracy, the poets utterly exclude the struggles of ordinary people.  And what is more, ancient literature was meant for the free born male population in a society that granted almost no rights to women.  By the time I retired I had begun to question whether this exquisite literature was not altogether wrong for the student population of today.  I bequeath the question to my successors.  I am out of it now.