Academic bureaucracy is behind the rise of a new anti-classics movement.
“You can care about certain scholars, students, material culture, and texts within a field and still want that field to be dismantled and burned so that those elements can be truly saved & white supremacy can be smothered,” thundered University of Iowa associate professor of history Sarah Bond on Twitter. The reason, she explained, is purely to destroy the “privileging” of Latin and Greek in classics. “I would just like to make it a global antiquity department and to rename it while abandoning Latin and Greek as its core basis. I am not proposing firing people in the least. Quite the opposite. Expanding, combining, and learning and then abandoning Classics as a field.” This week, the University of Leicester, right in the middle of England, decided to scrap teaching Geoffrey Chaucer and foundational English classics such as