Immigrants

In a very odd way I can sympathize with the workers in England who fear the arrival of competition in the work place from immigrants.  As a professor of classical languages I am not only supposed to know the Latin and Greek languages, and to read the literary texts composed in them, but also be conversant with and read in the scholarship of Germany, France, and Italy.  I began Latin at fourteen, Greek at nineteen, and did a sketchy survey of German, French, and learned Italian later while living in the country.  At the time of the Second World War the country became a home to numerous refugees, some of them indeed professional classicists.  We have the testimony of Professor Werner Jaeger who came from Germany because his wife was Jewish to the effect that no one who had not taught in the USA can imagine how soulless and intellectually vacuous the universities of this country are--I am not quoting him exactly but words to that effect.  He was once my seminar professor and his disengagement from the students in that class had all the marks of a man of great learning and abilities who thought he would soon go mad with the class he had before him.  Well, he bored me, too, so there! I never heard such vacuous nonsense delivered in a monotone for two hours non stop.  When I got out into the profession I was quickly made aware of the extraordinary difference between us folks and the Germans and Brits who had come here to look for jobs since in the 1960's university education was being heavily funded by federal government.  Congress was thinking of us beating the Russian Sputnik, but some smart guys got appropriations for classics into the budget as well.  Americans with their anemic educations were competing with English and German professionals who started their Latin and Greek at nine or ten and then went on to all the modern languages and if diligent could read the ancient texts with some proficiency.  And the rest of their rigorous educational preparation was of the same high caliber and dedication.  We were blown out of the ball park for the most part.  Plus we did not have those plummy accents acquired at Eton or Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge nor were we endowed with an elegant European accent either that called up notions of reservoirs of culture and history.  We were rednecks, even for the most part the graduates of our Eastern schools, and we feared the competition: the immigrants.  That has of course changed as American educational goals have diverged ever more sharply from the models laid down for us by European universities.  The emphases are elsewhere now, much more about women, about slaves, about, the various acts of empire building seen from the standpoint of the native peoples.  When I was a student the field of classics was still the property of the American WASP well born, and the subject was taught from the perspective of the ruling classes.  But things separated out when the moneyed  classes realized that making money was the first priority and gravitated to Harvard Law School and Business School and their counterparts across the country.  Now there is a new kind of immigrant class, ironically enough, the refugees from the uneducated working classes across America who have been seduced by the life of the mind to accept the less than perfect working conditions that college teaching offers or imposes, I guess is a better word.  You get a real mix, not so many WASPs, lots of women, men who are openly gay, some persons of color--still a hard sell for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Nationals from elsewhere often find us American classicists quite bizarre, as much for our strange academic interests as our showbiz classroom personalities.  But, hey, most of those old time immigrants into our academic scene, the competitors from the days of my youth, would not make it through an interview today.