The Academic Memory Hole

L ast week, I was supposed to be in Greece. When, almost exactly a year ago, I was invited to speak at a four-day international conference in Athens on “The ‘Future of the Past’: Why Classical Studies Still Matter,” I accepted happily. Finally, after years of turmoil, I was going to have the chance to sit down with colleagues and help chart a workable course forward for our embattled subject. In the end, however, the fact that my wife is pregnant made me decide to participate instead over Zoom. This turned out to be a blessing, since had I gone in person, I would have had to spend Thanksgiving with some loathsome people.

You hear about the disinvitations of controversial speakers on campus. You hear about the heckling and, in extreme cases, the violence directed at them. Far less dramatically, you hear about audience members expressing disapproval by showing up for a talk and then walking out. What all these reactions have in common is the recognition that the speakers are, at least, people — that they’re worthy of a reaction, even if that reaction is contempt.

But what I’ve grown most accustomed to is not being treated as a person at all. In the academy, I’ve become invisible — or, in the words of Mark Bauerlein, I’ve “been disappeared.” The standard name for this is damnatio memoriae, Latin for “condemnation of memory,” and there are familiar ways of doing it, from the removal of names and images of the Egyptian heretic pharaoh Akhenaten to the photographic erasure of enemies of the Soviet state.

One technique for memory-holing scholars these days is to remove them from the acknowledgments of books and papers. Another — more pernicious — is simply to refuse to cite their publications, however relevant; I know people whom the Twittersphere has condemned in this way.

Why am I invisible to the thousands of professional colleagues and students with whom I spent so many hours, days, and years until July 2020, when almost all of them decided, overnight, that I did not exist? You probably know the answer, since there has been so much press: When a few hundred Princetonians signed an inflammatory public letter addressed to the senior university administration that made a number of illegal and in my opinion immoral demands in the name of the cancerous racist framework known as “anti-racism,” I published a frankly mild dissent.

A disorienting fact: At the very same time that I became invisible to my former friends and acquaintances, what I wrote propelled me, wholly unwillingly, into the public sphere. The result is that plenty of people no doubt talk about me but almost no one I used to know talks to me.

I can quantify this in many ways. Here’s an example: Exactly one of my 16 non-retired former colleagues in the Department of Classics at Princeton University has been in touch since I was fired last May, and almost none of them have spoken or written so much as a single word to me in two and a half years. When a friend made the mistake of simply mentioning my name to a Princeton classicist over a year ago, the reaction was shock: “We don’t talk about him.”

So there I was a few days ago, Zooming in to the Academy of Athens, seven time zones ahead, where an assembly of European and British classicists, many of whom have known me for decades, had gathered. Some of them boycotted my presentation, walking out as I began to talk. This, of course, is generally the behavior of activist students toward an external invited speaker, not the behavior of distinguished professors toward a longtime and once-respected colleague. Because I wasn’t in the room, I wasn’t able to judge just how many people left. What I know for sure is how my talk started and how it ended. While every other speaker — there were nearly 30 of us — received a fulsome introduction, I didn’t receive so much as a single word: I was brusquely told to begin. I have attended well over 100 conferences in my life, and this is the first time I’ve ever witnessed such a thing. Equally unusual, and at least as rude, was this: My talk didn’t earn so much as a single clap, not even from the moderator. And far less unusual but perhaps equally telling: I was not asked a single question. Welcome to invisibility.

For those of you who do acknowledge my existence, let me tell you what I spoke about: “Classics: Inside Out and Upside Down.” Like most humanistic disciplines, classics is in trouble. Even at a tony institution like Princeton, fewer and fewer students care enough about ancient Greece and Rome to enroll in the occasional entry-level class about Athenian democracy or Augustan literature, never mind major in the subject. Of course, there are also far, far more classics Ph.D.s than there are tenure-track positions — or any academic jobs at all.

In 2014, when the main professional organization of North American classicists changed its name from the American Philological Association to the Society for Classical Studies because of a lack of understanding of the word “philology” among the broader public, the group’s then-president sent a letter to its members about the importance of speaking up for classics. She wrote, wisely, that “we must strive for clarity in the transmission of our message.” Even then it was unclear whether the change would provide much clarity, since “classical” in ordinary parlance refers to Shakespeare and Jane Austen (and there is the further issue that one may wonder why such languages as classical Chinese and classical Ethiopic are not regularly considered exemplars of the classical as well). Be that as it may, if there is one thing classicists are not doing now, it is transmitting a clear message.

Take Princeton. In recent years, a number of scholars educated or currently teaching at the college that U.S. News & World Report continues to rank No. 1 in the country have been leading the charge against classics as inherently “white supremacist” and calling for burning the field down. A former student and colleague of mine was profiled in a New York Times Magazine piece in February 2021. “He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness,” read the title. “[He] thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal—even if that means destroying their discipline,” read the subheading. There were at least three reactions in National Review, all of them worth reading.

A few months later, my former department decided, effective immediately, to allow undergraduates to graduate with a degree in classics without taking so much as a single semester of either Latin or Greek. Unsurprisingly, normal people found this move embarrassing, all the more so as it was made in part to further the anti-racist agenda. Again, this magazine had choice words, and its skewering of Princeton would be delicious if the story were not so sad.

In my Zoom talk, I discussed what all this tumult says to students, parents, employers, funding agencies, the media, and the world at large. I tried to transmit a clear message about what has gone wrong, in my view, and what we might do to rescue the situation. But since no one who was present has spoken or is likely again to speak to invisible me, I will probably never know whether, as I suspect, the great majority of classicists agree with me and are just too scared to say so. I suppose I can console myself with this, though: At least when everything does go up in flames, I’ll be watching from a safe distance as my former colleagues burn.