11 ms·

Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe

146 points by hncurious 5y ago

noah_buddy 5y ago
Does anyone have a recommendation or a reading list in the classics (perhaps a Coursera or something) where I can self-study? I'm tech by trade and education but I would love to read the greats through the last several millennia in the western canon. Also open to a course or reading list that has eastern philosophy in addition.
- koolba 5y ago
  You can’t go wrong with any of these in any order you’d like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- meco 5y ago
  Bloom's "The Western Canon" tries to answer this question. https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-massive-list-of-works-in-the-western-canon.html https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-m...
  - harry8 5y ago
    Someone bought that for me years ago and it s*at me to tears reading his deep thoughts. Paraphrasing: You should read literature to come to grips with your own death. But took about 100 pages to say so with the most meandering, tangential, irrelevant segway loaded prose that was utterly stultifying. Such as you might get from someone desperate to prove how incredibly clever they are rather than filling the role they claim to be filling. I stopped reading it with the idea that just about anybody's else's list would likely be superior. Obviously YMMV. Brought back the memory seeing it here. Would be really interested if someone had a different reaction to it.
    - adolph 5y ago
      > the most meandering, tangential, irrelevant segway loaded prose that was utterly stultifying Reads like the work personally transported you.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Important context for those considering it: Bloom's book was seen as a rejection of those bringing new voices (i.e., non-white, non-male) into the 'canon'; it was popular among conservative culture warriors. That doesn't disqualify it, but understand Bloom might be injecting some politics into it.
    - voldacar 5y ago
      >was seen by whom?
      - kixiQu 5y ago
        https://theriveter.co/voice/its-time-to-banish-the-western-canon/ https://theriveter.co/voice/its-time-to-banish-the-western-c... This is on the first page of Google results, so it's at least a sample.
    - splitstud 5y ago
      Blooms list is rejecting bringing politics into the classics canon
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        That is just to view 'my' perspective as the norm, as reasonable, and those that differ as political change.
      - shanhaiguan 5y ago
        I don't think so. Supporters may think Bloom's conservative position stands 'above' insufferable woke politics or something like that. In fact the politics has already been brought, so to speak, and is now inescapable. Perhaps Bloom was not the first one to inject 'politics', but once the new ideas have been brought, rejecting them is reaction and political too. And what is this definition of 'politics' anyway?
      - kesselvon 5y ago
        The status quo was as much political as was the "woke" activism
- RNCTX 5y ago
  The best internet primer I know of is Wes Cecil's youtube channel, he's a Literature professor in the PNW, and does hour long public lectures a couple of times a month and uploads them there in categorized playlists. These are good to start with because they're for a general-public audience, rather than for students who have already read the material once and are just in class to get the finer points and debate the concepts (that's why these things don't typically translate well to video lessons, his channel is an exception). From there, you can go on and read yourself what interests you, and while I typically have little use for the prospect of learning by video rather than reading, humanities / philosophy / literary study is one example in which you will get a lot more from the material if you find a lecture that accompanies it. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA Even as a humanities grad who has been through a lot of this stuff once, I find myself listening to his lectures for nostalgia's sake. Humanities classes are fun, that's why people still go to them.
- ctdonath 5y ago
  You can get the complete 51-volume Harvard Classics set on Kindle for a buck. https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=harvard+classics&i=digital-text&s=price-asc-rank&qid=1635295291&sprefix=harvard+classics%2Cdigital-text%2C122 https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=harvard+classics&i=digital-text...
  - Arubis 5y ago
    Unreal. I suspect much of this is out of copyright, but I’ll pay the One Dollar for the compilation and convenience. Thank you for the pointer!
    - xbar 5y ago
      As noted above, here they are for free: https://www.harvardclassics365.com/p/free.html https://www.harvardclassics365.com/p/free.html
- smogcutter 5y ago
  Just fwiw, “classics” as in TFA means specifically Greek & Roman language & lit, not “the greats” writ large. To be fair TFA does not make this distinction clear, and conflates “the classics department” with “the classics” to make a rhetorical point (and a good one, imo).
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    This is similar to "classical music". For those farther removed from this discussion, "classics" would include Shakespeare just as much as classical music would include Bach. No point in arguing "well, he's really Baroque".
    - smogcutter 5y ago
      Sure but if the article is about a “baroque department” being eliminated it becomes a distinction with a difference. I edited my post a little though to address that West is talking about both, but only one is actually in danger.
    - autarch 5y ago
      You're conflating two things here re: classical music. There's classical music, the genre, which includes the Classical Period as well as The Baroque, Romantic, and Modern periods. Admittedly, this is really confusing, and it'd make a lot more sense to call one of those "classical" things something else, but I'm not in charge of naming things (any more).
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > For those farther removed from this discussion, "classics" would include Shakespeare I think for a academic department, Classics would be Ancient Greece and Rome, not Shakespeare (which would be in the English department).
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      Not so. A "classics" department in a university is focused on greek and roman language and literature. Shakespeare is a thousand years too late.
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  the podcast Ad Navseam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDzHLZSTGGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDzHLZSTGGw
- troupe 5y ago
  Britannica has a 10 year reading plan that they published along with their Great Books Of The Western World set that you might find interesting. http://www.greatconversation.com/10-year-reading-plan http://www.greatconversation.com/10-year-reading-plan The Harvard Classics is a similar set of books that pre-dates Britannica's set. It has a 15 minutes a day reading list for the year. The reading list is in volume 50. https://www.harvardclassics365.com/p/free.html https://www.harvardclassics365.com/p/free.html
  - kleiba 5y ago
    How realistic is such a "10 year plan" though? With 20 books per year, this list implies that spending only ~2.5 weeks on each book would be both possible and fruitful. I doubt that very much.
    - kixiQu 5y ago
      They do specify which parts to read. Focusing on excerpts would be typical for a survey -- seems fine to me.
    - dhosek 5y ago
      Dipping into this, most of the books listed are very short, especially in year one. 2.5 weeks for Hamlet, for example, is quite generous. Likewise for two chapters of Gibbon.
      - loughnane 5y ago
        The two chapters on gibbon were a fascinating read. They focus on how Christianity came to power under the Roman Empire… a topic I’d not seen treated elsewhere. I imagine some improvements in our understanding have been made since Gibbon’s time, and I’d def seek those out before walking around claiming I “know” what happened back then, but as an entry point is was a great, if a little bit too wordy, read.
        pmdulaney 5y ago
- pmcjones 5y ago
  For a very short list, see this from Alexander Stepanov (C++ STL, etc.): http://stepanovpapers.com/#Civilization http://stepanovpapers.com/#Civilization
- wolverine876 5y ago
  IME, people learn best by exploring. You don't need to learn certain things by a certain time, so just explore: Find something that grabs you, start there, and follow your nose where it leads you. Have fun, find joy and beauty, challenge and wisdom. The classics are renowned for a reason and I find them most appealing, engaging, and get the most from them when I think that the book was written by an ordinary, flawed person; there's a personality, their interior world, their experiences, their own vision, their blind spots, just like me and my ordinary neighbor - it's not scripture, there's another person in the room. Then - holy cow, it's incredible that a human created it. I think our instincts provide a good indication of what we are ready for - based on what we've learned so far and what state we are in for learning. Also, it took me time to not see classics as tests, and to be comfortable not understanding everything. I'm probably not going to understand everything on the level of the authors of humanity's greatest works (and in their field of specialty at the pinnacle of their achievement), or of the experts who study them, or sometimes even of my ordinary neighbor - they will see things I don't; it's not a race. Sometimes, after reading something else, after more life experience, I return to them and they made more sense. Being honest with myself about what I don't understand helps me gain much more than people who fake it (to themselves and to others). For one thing, I know my strengths and weaknesses and can address them; for another, when there's something I don't grasp, I don't deny its existence (to protect my ego) or twist it into something I already think - I give myself an opportunity to learn more. If nothing strikes you now, a short history of the ancient world might be a good starting point. It would provide ideas on what to read next, and lot's of context - even modern classics often reference or reflect ancient ones. Britannica provides excellent histories for non-specialists, long enough to take it seriously but shorter than book-length, written with personality and the author's voice voice, and usually by real experts (e.g., leading scholars). If nothing grabs your attention, I'd start with their history of Ancient Greece. Also, I strongly recommend getting annotated editions of the books, which will explain many of the references which may be obscure to non-specialists, or no longer common knowledge. Finally, I recommend subscribing to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is fantastic for understanding the history of a concept and all the different ways it has been perceived and expressed over time (with the actual quotes from the people who create and use the words). When you encounter a concept that feels alien - either the word itself or how it's used, a quick lookup in the OED provides immediate sense and context, and gives you some grasp of it. It's really a remarkable work of knowledge - the history of (almost) every concept ever put into words.
- CalChris 5y ago
  Start with the Iliad and I recommend the Lattimore translation although Fagles is good too. You may want to read the first book (chapter) a few times to get the flow. You may also want the backstory, the Judgment of Paris and the Golden Apple. This kind of explains why the Achaeans are there at Troy. BTW, watch Troy with Brad Pitt. It's got its points but it really deemphasizes the gods. It takes liberties but it's fun. Then read the Odyssey. The Odyssey is a little stranger because it's kind of told backwards. Then Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil is 'plagiarizing' Homer and steals a minor character Aeneas; so it helps to know the Iliad+Odyssey to get the homage. There is a really good course/podcast on the Aeneid by Susanna Braund from Stanford. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/virgils-aeneid/id384233916 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/virgils-aeneid/id38423... There is also the Harvard class, the Ancient Greek Hero, which may help. https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/ancient-greek-hero?delta=0 https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/ancient-greek-her... Thucydides The Peloponnesian War has great parallels and lessons. In the middle of the war, some idiots ( Alcibiades) decide to attack Sicily because it was going to be easy and the war will pay for itself; they get their asses kicked. You can read this as an allegory for Iraq, an expensive pointless distraction led by idiots. There's also the Siege of Melos. Yale has a good course by Donald Kagan (Project for a New American Century Donald Kagan) that has background for all this. https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205 https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Do NOT start with the Iliad. Boring AF and I love the classics. Start with Xenophon, which is what they’d start school boys on for Greek translation. Either read his dialogues with Socrates, his “education of Cyrus” (hey, non-western!) or “Anabasis.” The last one is probably the most exciting. Alternatively, Herodotus is fun, but you won’t read the whole thing. It is good to dip in and out of. Oh, Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander (the great)” is not too long and better than a history, because he focuses on his character and telling personal stories. Once you get going, Plato is frikkin amazing. But you have to want it— or have a guide or group. I personally like “the Parmenides” because it is mind bending. Or the symposium to hear from a brilliant lady philosopher about the nature of love. Oh, then if you want something fantastic, read Iamblicus’ “Life of Pythagoras.” It is very well written and will change your concept of the western world.
- pianoben 5y ago
  The entire undergraduate curriculum of St. John's College consists exclusively of reading The Great Books - the list is public and freely available: https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    That...isn't what I thought "Classics" meant. Like, I know someone who got a degree in Classics and the core curriculum seems to be reading and translating Greek + Latin + a modern language, either French, German, Italian, or modern Greek. Example course: "Roman Invective and Verbal Abuse An exploration of the world of Roman verbal assault. Readings in Latin will range from inscriptions on sling bullets and walls, to scurrilous pamphlets, to formal full-blown invective speeches. We will investigate especially how themes within Roman invective reveal broader cultural values." "The Roman Novel Students will read substantial portions of the two surviving Roman novels, Petronius’ Satyricon and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (or Asinus Aureus). In addition to improving reading speed and ability, the class will introduce the genre of the ancient novel. Students will be assigned secondary readings relating to the novels and will be expected not only to translate, but also to give oral reports on assigned topics and provide commentary on designated sections of the text." You also concentrate in literature, archeology, or history.
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - perl4ever 5y ago
      I'm saying classics != books that conservative culture warriors like. Don't take it personally.
      - number6 5y ago
        Do you mean something like: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/100-must-read-classic-books.html https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/100-must-read-classi...
- N1H1L 5y ago
  Read what you like. There are great, moving works of literature in so many languages that anyway we will not finish them all. Read more, and read often. This petty squabbles over Western Canon and Classics is just culture war nonsense.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Does anyone have a recommendation or a reading list in the classics (perhaps a Coursera or something) where I can self-study? I'm tech by trade and education but I would love to read the greats through the last several millennia in the western canon. "Classics" refers specifically to Greek and Roman literature from around ~700 BC to ~200 AD.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > Does anyone have a recommendation or a reading list in the classics (perhaps a Coursera or something) where I can self-study? I'm tech by trade and education but I would love to read the greats through the last several millennia in the western canon. I'm "well educated" in the classics by most standards (I studied Latin for the better part of the decade, can spot recite poems and speeches, &c) and I think that reading "the greats" as a whole is a kind of category error: classical antiquity is a period of 1.5 millennia spread across the better part of Southern Europe and Northern Africa. Reading them as a uniform narrative is like trying to draw a line from the beginning of the Ottoman Empire to the California Gold Rush: the history is all there, but a thematic connection is tenuous. If you want to read classics in general, I suggest picking a subject you like (plays, epics, poetry, military history) and expanding in circles. You can even pick a modern author as a guide; I can personally recommend both SPQR[1] and Introducing the Ancient Greeks[2] as excellent histories of their respective cultures. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28789711-spqr https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28789711-spqr [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316534-introducing-the-ancient-greeks https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316534-introducing-the...
  - deleted 5y ago
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- zetazzed 5y ago
  For those who want more of a secondary source, but still deep, consider listening to the Literature and History podcast: https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episodes/all-episodes https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episodes/all-epis... The podcast moves chronologically through western literature. Each episode focuses on a single text, placing it in its historical context. It goes quite deep - e.g. the Iliad + Odyssey sections add up to roughly 12 hours of audio, and the section on Greek drama is particularly strong. You can really feel that it is a passion project made with care.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  I like reading generally including classics and there's some nice ebooks of some of then at standard ebooks. But the real shortcut to a classical education is to learn absolutely anything that is so esoteric that normal people don't learn or get taught it, and then act as if it's mystically powerful and makes you special for no clearly defined reason. A dead language is a good one. You've fallen for this trap and will find that there's no there, there, other than some cool books.
- tarboreus 5y ago
  It's broader than just the classics, but take a look at the great books curriculum of colleges like St. John's. https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
  - pmdulaney 5y ago
    It's a great list, but I have to say that reading science written by folks hundreds of years dead is usually not very helpful for me. I'm interested in learning the science, not the history of the science, per se.
    - tarboreus 5y ago
      Many are still useful. Darwin was a great writer as well as a great scientist and Origin is still really worth reading, IMO.
post_from_work 5y ago
Another non-paywalled article on the subject: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/10/995389117/howard-universitys-decision-to-cut-classics-department-prompts-an-outcry https://www.npr.org/2021/05/10/995389117/howard-universitys-...
- roflc0ptic 5y ago
  The link article is by Cornell west, a well known and generally respected black leftist (among lefties, anyways), so it’s… pretty powerful hearing him in particular condemn this thing
  - fidesomnes 5y ago
    he must be a loser since his race is his only characteristic you find notable.
  - ChainOfFools 5y ago
    Widely admired by everyone not named Ta-Nehisi Coates, that is.
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      And Barack Obama.
  - themitigating 5y ago
    What does this have to do with politics or race?
    - jgwil2 5y ago
      Howard is an HBCU
      - jgwil2 5y ago
        Amazing that this simple statement of fact in response to a question merits downvotes.
rfrey 5y ago
For clarity, this is about the university dispersing the Classics department, spreading the classes among other departments. It's not about removing classic books from the curriculum or library or anything like that. I'm not denying the move could be a precursor to removing the classes outright, but that's speculation.
- garbagetime 5y ago
  Dispersing the classics results in no longer having a classics department which implies the destruction of the classics department what do you think are the implications of the destruction of a department dedicated to a particular subject on the teaching of that subject?
  - lmm 5y ago
    My university (probably one of the top three in the world, especially for mathematics) had no mathematics department. It had a pure mathematics department, an applied mathematics/theoretical physics department, and a department of statistics and somethingorother (maybe economics?).
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      So it had 3 math departments. That's not what's happening in the article.
      - lmm 5y ago
        Mathematics was dispersed across several departments, and this was not a weakness but a strength.
        DiggyJohnson 5y ago
        Three math departments, though. Do you see how that is different from what is happening in this article?
        5y ago
markus_zhang 5y ago
Shouldn't they just rebrand it and sell it to foreigners?
Igelau 5y ago
I mean, I went to a state school, and I don't think we had a Classics Department, but we had courses on the classical era and its works if you really wanted to take them. Headline makes it sound like they torched all the books. Really it probably didn't make sense to still have a whole department for it.
- milesdyson_phd 5y ago
  I went to a state school as well, we had a department of Romance and Classical studies. So it got lumped in with the romance languages.
RNCTX 5y ago
> As German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasized in the past century, traditions are inescapable and unavoidable. It is a question not of whether you are going to work in a tradition, but which one. Even the choice of no tradition leaves people ignorantly beholden within a language they didn’t create and frameworks they don’t understand. The above is absolutely true and I can't think of the last time I saw it mentioned. Another comment mentions Bloom and Iirc he calls it "the anxiety of influence." It's why vampire stories are really romances, why what people today think of romances are always comedies, and really beyond all that, the confirmation of Ecclesiastes 1:9... What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Even if you don't believe in the religion in question it doesn't matter, it's in the culture you live in. If you have no knowledge of it you're a babe in your own woods.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  “Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." - Cicero
throwaway879080 5y ago
well, if math is "racist" what can you expect https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematics-confronts-its-white-patriarchal-past/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematic...
victorbstan 5y ago
Glad to see this on HN. At least not everyone here is anti education, unlike some… I won’t name names.
FactolSarin 5y ago
I don't know, do we really need a whole department devoted to Classics (ie, Greco-Roman literature)? I feel like it can comfortably be out inside another department.
- irrational 5y ago
  Typically those getting a classics degree have to learn Greek and/or Latin. There simply is no substitute for reading in the original language. A ton is lost in translation.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  "Department" is not a fixed term between US colleges and universities (much less international schools): it can be anything from a single professor with a shortlist of classes to dozens of professors within a larger college/school of humanities. The very large state school that I went to had a classics department (and I took many courses in it), but it was probably only about half a dozen professors. Besides: "Classics" is a difficult department to fit within another department. It usually already has a few sub-departments, ancient Latin and Greek among them.
qualudeheart 5y ago
Classics should in the post data scientific age be moved into subfield of computational linguistics. Literature is both empirical (See recent work on statistical approach to computational literature studues) and subset of linguistics proper. The same thing holds for classics as a proper subset of literature. Problem isn’t’ really disbanding the classics department but not having classics studies computationally based or not handing field over to computational linguists.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  I’ll bite. Why would it be valuable to analyze literature or classics computationally? Are you suggesting that they ought to be considered a subset of linguistics? Linguistics is about language, not the content of language.
  - qualudeheart 5y ago
    The meaning of texts and language as Derrida tells us has a graph like structure. Each word in this sentenc eis defined in relation to other words and the meaning of the whole sentence can therefor be modelled as a graph. Modern neural networks— like those used at Palantir Technologies for link analysis- can be applied to the structure of any text including this post right here. GPT-3 can also be used for summaries of literature and biblical exegesis and will soon be an indispensable part of any computational linguist’s toolkit.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    There is value in this. The digital humanities has given us new methods to approach the study of literature (and a great many other fields), which has been dominated by the method of close reading for a long time. For example, can scale our analysis of the transfer of techniques between works and use rigorous mathematical analysis to model influence and networks in a new way. There is a lot of garbage work in the digital humanities (like all fields) that is basically just doing word choice analysis with computers, but it truly is a new method that is available to researchers to put in their toolchest and new methods are almost always good.
chmod600 5y ago
"It recognizes that the end and aim of education ... is to lift every voice." What does that mean and who agreed that it is the "end and aim" of education?
- josh_today 5y ago
  I bet the same people who agreed on Virginia’s “Keep parents out of school” movement
masswerk 5y ago
For a clue on the traditional importance of classics in US tertiary education, have a look at the rather extensive Greek grammar and composition parts in the Harvard admission test of 1869: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde...

146 points by hncurious 5y ago

Does anyone have a recommendation or a reading list in the classics (perhaps a Coursera or something) where I can self-study? I'm tech by trade and education but I would love to read the greats through the last several millennia in the western canon. Also open to a course or reading list that has eastern philosophy in addition.

koolba 5y ago
You can’t go wrong with any of these in any order you’d like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...
- deleted 5y ago
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meco 5y ago
Bloom's "The Western Canon" tries to answer this question. https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-massive-list-of-works-in-the-western-canon.html https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-m...
- harry8 5y ago
  Someone bought that for me years ago and it s*at me to tears reading his deep thoughts. Paraphrasing: You should read literature to come to grips with your own death. But took about 100 pages to say so with the most meandering, tangential, irrelevant segway loaded prose that was utterly stultifying. Such as you might get from someone desperate to prove how incredibly clever they are rather than filling the role they claim to be filling. I stopped reading it with the idea that just about anybody's else's list would likely be superior. Obviously YMMV. Brought back the memory seeing it here. Would be really interested if someone had a different reaction to it.
  - adolph 5y ago
    > the most meandering, tangential, irrelevant segway loaded prose that was utterly stultifying Reads like the work personally transported you.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Important context for those considering it: Bloom's book was seen as a rejection of those bringing new voices (i.e., non-white, non-male) into the 'canon'; it was popular among conservative culture warriors. That doesn't disqualify it, but understand Bloom might be injecting some politics into it.
  - voldacar 5y ago
    >was seen by whom?
    - kixiQu 5y ago
      https://theriveter.co/voice/its-time-to-banish-the-western-canon/ https://theriveter.co/voice/its-time-to-banish-the-western-c... This is on the first page of Google results, so it's at least a sample.
  - splitstud 5y ago
    Blooms list is rejecting bringing politics into the classics canon
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      That is just to view 'my' perspective as the norm, as reasonable, and those that differ as political change.
    - shanhaiguan 5y ago
      I don't think so. Supporters may think Bloom's conservative position stands 'above' insufferable woke politics or something like that. In fact the politics has already been brought, so to speak, and is now inescapable. Perhaps Bloom was not the first one to inject 'politics', but once the new ideas have been brought, rejecting them is reaction and political too. And what is this definition of 'politics' anyway?
    - kesselvon 5y ago
      The status quo was as much political as was the "woke" activism
RNCTX 5y ago
The best internet primer I know of is Wes Cecil's youtube channel, he's a Literature professor in the PNW, and does hour long public lectures a couple of times a month and uploads them there in categorized playlists. These are good to start with because they're for a general-public audience, rather than for students who have already read the material once and are just in class to get the finer points and debate the concepts (that's why these things don't typically translate well to video lessons, his channel is an exception). From there, you can go on and read yourself what interests you, and while I typically have little use for the prospect of learning by video rather than reading, humanities / philosophy / literary study is one example in which you will get a lot more from the material if you find a lecture that accompanies it. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ff15w4ufviWfv9UfIuByA Even as a humanities grad who has been through a lot of this stuff once, I find myself listening to his lectures for nostalgia's sake. Humanities classes are fun, that's why people still go to them.
ctdonath 5y ago
You can get the complete 51-volume Harvard Classics set on Kindle for a buck. https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=harvard+classics&i=digital-text&s=price-asc-rank&qid=1635295291&sprefix=harvard+classics%2Cdigital-text%2C122 https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=harvard+classics&i=digital-text...
- Arubis 5y ago
  Unreal. I suspect much of this is out of copyright, but I’ll pay the One Dollar for the compilation and convenience. Thank you for the pointer!
  - xbar 5y ago
    As noted above, here they are for free: https://www.harvardclassics365.com/p/free.html https://www.harvardclassics365.com/p/free.html
smogcutter 5y ago
Just fwiw, “classics” as in TFA means specifically Greek & Roman language & lit, not “the greats” writ large. To be fair TFA does not make this distinction clear, and conflates “the classics department” with “the classics” to make a rhetorical point (and a good one, imo).
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  This is similar to "classical music". For those farther removed from this discussion, "classics" would include Shakespeare just as much as classical music would include Bach. No point in arguing "well, he's really Baroque".
  - smogcutter 5y ago
    Sure but if the article is about a “baroque department” being eliminated it becomes a distinction with a difference. I edited my post a little though to address that West is talking about both, but only one is actually in danger.
  - autarch 5y ago
    You're conflating two things here re: classical music. There's classical music, the genre, which includes the Classical Period as well as The Baroque, Romantic, and Modern periods. Admittedly, this is really confusing, and it'd make a lot more sense to call one of those "classical" things something else, but I'm not in charge of naming things (any more).
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > For those farther removed from this discussion, "classics" would include Shakespeare I think for a academic department, Classics would be Ancient Greece and Rome, not Shakespeare (which would be in the English department).
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Not so. A "classics" department in a university is focused on greek and roman language and literature. Shakespeare is a thousand years too late.
fidesomnes 5y ago
the podcast Ad Navseam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDzHLZSTGGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDzHLZSTGGw
troupe 5y ago
Britannica has a 10 year reading plan that they published along with their Great Books Of The Western World set that you might find interesting. http://www.greatconversation.com/10-year-reading-plan http://www.greatconversation.com/10-year-reading-plan The Harvard Classics is a similar set of books that pre-dates Britannica's set. It has a 15 minutes a day reading list for the year. The reading list is in volume 50. https://www.harvardclassics365.com/p/free.html https://www.harvardclassics365.com/p/free.html
- kleiba 5y ago
  How realistic is such a "10 year plan" though? With 20 books per year, this list implies that spending only ~2.5 weeks on each book would be both possible and fruitful. I doubt that very much.
  - kixiQu 5y ago
    They do specify which parts to read. Focusing on excerpts would be typical for a survey -- seems fine to me.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    Dipping into this, most of the books listed are very short, especially in year one. 2.5 weeks for Hamlet, for example, is quite generous. Likewise for two chapters of Gibbon.
    - loughnane 5y ago
      The two chapters on gibbon were a fascinating read. They focus on how Christianity came to power under the Roman Empire… a topic I’d not seen treated elsewhere. I imagine some improvements in our understanding have been made since Gibbon’s time, and I’d def seek those out before walking around claiming I “know” what happened back then, but as an entry point is was a great, if a little bit too wordy, read.
      - pmdulaney 5y ago
pmcjones 5y ago
For a very short list, see this from Alexander Stepanov (C++ STL, etc.): http://stepanovpapers.com/#Civilization http://stepanovpapers.com/#Civilization
wolverine876 5y ago
IME, people learn best by exploring. You don't need to learn certain things by a certain time, so just explore: Find something that grabs you, start there, and follow your nose where it leads you. Have fun, find joy and beauty, challenge and wisdom. The classics are renowned for a reason and I find them most appealing, engaging, and get the most from them when I think that the book was written by an ordinary, flawed person; there's a personality, their interior world, their experiences, their own vision, their blind spots, just like me and my ordinary neighbor - it's not scripture, there's another person in the room. Then - holy cow, it's incredible that a human created it. I think our instincts provide a good indication of what we are ready for - based on what we've learned so far and what state we are in for learning. Also, it took me time to not see classics as tests, and to be comfortable not understanding everything. I'm probably not going to understand everything on the level of the authors of humanity's greatest works (and in their field of specialty at the pinnacle of their achievement), or of the experts who study them, or sometimes even of my ordinary neighbor - they will see things I don't; it's not a race. Sometimes, after reading something else, after more life experience, I return to them and they made more sense. Being honest with myself about what I don't understand helps me gain much more than people who fake it (to themselves and to others). For one thing, I know my strengths and weaknesses and can address them; for another, when there's something I don't grasp, I don't deny its existence (to protect my ego) or twist it into something I already think - I give myself an opportunity to learn more. If nothing strikes you now, a short history of the ancient world might be a good starting point. It would provide ideas on what to read next, and lot's of context - even modern classics often reference or reflect ancient ones. Britannica provides excellent histories for non-specialists, long enough to take it seriously but shorter than book-length, written with personality and the author's voice voice, and usually by real experts (e.g., leading scholars). If nothing grabs your attention, I'd start with their history of Ancient Greece. Also, I strongly recommend getting annotated editions of the books, which will explain many of the references which may be obscure to non-specialists, or no longer common knowledge. Finally, I recommend subscribing to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is fantastic for understanding the history of a concept and all the different ways it has been perceived and expressed over time (with the actual quotes from the people who create and use the words). When you encounter a concept that feels alien - either the word itself or how it's used, a quick lookup in the OED provides immediate sense and context, and gives you some grasp of it. It's really a remarkable work of knowledge - the history of (almost) every concept ever put into words.
CalChris 5y ago
Start with the Iliad and I recommend the Lattimore translation although Fagles is good too. You may want to read the first book (chapter) a few times to get the flow. You may also want the backstory, the Judgment of Paris and the Golden Apple. This kind of explains why the Achaeans are there at Troy. BTW, watch Troy with Brad Pitt. It's got its points but it really deemphasizes the gods. It takes liberties but it's fun. Then read the Odyssey. The Odyssey is a little stranger because it's kind of told backwards. Then Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil is 'plagiarizing' Homer and steals a minor character Aeneas; so it helps to know the Iliad+Odyssey to get the homage. There is a really good course/podcast on the Aeneid by Susanna Braund from Stanford. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/virgils-aeneid/id384233916 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/virgils-aeneid/id38423... There is also the Harvard class, the Ancient Greek Hero, which may help. https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/ancient-greek-hero?delta=0 https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/ancient-greek-her... Thucydides The Peloponnesian War has great parallels and lessons. In the middle of the war, some idiots ( Alcibiades) decide to attack Sicily because it was going to be easy and the war will pay for itself; they get their asses kicked. You can read this as an allegory for Iraq, an expensive pointless distraction led by idiots. There's also the Siege of Melos. Yale has a good course by Donald Kagan (Project for a New American Century Donald Kagan) that has background for all this. https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205 https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Do NOT start with the Iliad. Boring AF and I love the classics. Start with Xenophon, which is what they’d start school boys on for Greek translation. Either read his dialogues with Socrates, his “education of Cyrus” (hey, non-western!) or “Anabasis.” The last one is probably the most exciting. Alternatively, Herodotus is fun, but you won’t read the whole thing. It is good to dip in and out of. Oh, Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander (the great)” is not too long and better than a history, because he focuses on his character and telling personal stories. Once you get going, Plato is frikkin amazing. But you have to want it— or have a guide or group. I personally like “the Parmenides” because it is mind bending. Or the symposium to hear from a brilliant lady philosopher about the nature of love. Oh, then if you want something fantastic, read Iamblicus’ “Life of Pythagoras.” It is very well written and will change your concept of the western world.
pianoben 5y ago
The entire undergraduate curriculum of St. John's College consists exclusively of reading The Great Books - the list is public and freely available: https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
- perl4ever 5y ago
  That...isn't what I thought "Classics" meant. Like, I know someone who got a degree in Classics and the core curriculum seems to be reading and translating Greek + Latin + a modern language, either French, German, Italian, or modern Greek. Example course: "Roman Invective and Verbal Abuse An exploration of the world of Roman verbal assault. Readings in Latin will range from inscriptions on sling bullets and walls, to scurrilous pamphlets, to formal full-blown invective speeches. We will investigate especially how themes within Roman invective reveal broader cultural values." "The Roman Novel Students will read substantial portions of the two surviving Roman novels, Petronius’ Satyricon and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (or Asinus Aureus). In addition to improving reading speed and ability, the class will introduce the genre of the ancient novel. Students will be assigned secondary readings relating to the novels and will be expected not only to translate, but also to give oral reports on assigned topics and provide commentary on designated sections of the text." You also concentrate in literature, archeology, or history.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I'm saying classics != books that conservative culture warriors like. Don't take it personally.
    - number6 5y ago
      Do you mean something like: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/100-must-read-classic-books.html https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/100-must-read-classi...
N1H1L 5y ago
Read what you like. There are great, moving works of literature in so many languages that anyway we will not finish them all. Read more, and read often. This petty squabbles over Western Canon and Classics is just culture war nonsense.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Does anyone have a recommendation or a reading list in the classics (perhaps a Coursera or something) where I can self-study? I'm tech by trade and education but I would love to read the greats through the last several millennia in the western canon. "Classics" refers specifically to Greek and Roman literature from around ~700 BC to ~200 AD.
woodruffw 5y ago
> Does anyone have a recommendation or a reading list in the classics (perhaps a Coursera or something) where I can self-study? I'm tech by trade and education but I would love to read the greats through the last several millennia in the western canon. I'm "well educated" in the classics by most standards (I studied Latin for the better part of the decade, can spot recite poems and speeches, &c) and I think that reading "the greats" as a whole is a kind of category error: classical antiquity is a period of 1.5 millennia spread across the better part of Southern Europe and Northern Africa. Reading them as a uniform narrative is like trying to draw a line from the beginning of the Ottoman Empire to the California Gold Rush: the history is all there, but a thematic connection is tenuous. If you want to read classics in general, I suggest picking a subject you like (plays, epics, poetry, military history) and expanding in circles. You can even pick a modern author as a guide; I can personally recommend both SPQR[1] and Introducing the Ancient Greeks[2] as excellent histories of their respective cultures. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28789711-spqr https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28789711-spqr [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316534-introducing-the-ancient-greeks https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316534-introducing-the...
- deleted 5y ago
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zetazzed 5y ago
For those who want more of a secondary source, but still deep, consider listening to the Literature and History podcast: https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episodes/all-episodes https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episodes/all-epis... The podcast moves chronologically through western literature. Each episode focuses on a single text, placing it in its historical context. It goes quite deep - e.g. the Iliad + Odyssey sections add up to roughly 12 hours of audio, and the section on Greek drama is particularly strong. You can really feel that it is a passion project made with care.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I like reading generally including classics and there's some nice ebooks of some of then at standard ebooks. But the real shortcut to a classical education is to learn absolutely anything that is so esoteric that normal people don't learn or get taught it, and then act as if it's mystically powerful and makes you special for no clearly defined reason. A dead language is a good one. You've fallen for this trap and will find that there's no there, there, other than some cool books.
tarboreus 5y ago
It's broader than just the classics, but take a look at the great books curriculum of colleges like St. John's. https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
- pmdulaney 5y ago
  It's a great list, but I have to say that reading science written by folks hundreds of years dead is usually not very helpful for me. I'm interested in learning the science, not the history of the science, per se.
  - tarboreus 5y ago
    Many are still useful. Darwin was a great writer as well as a great scientist and Origin is still really worth reading, IMO.

post_from_work 5y ago

Another non-paywalled article on the subject: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/10/995389117/howard-universitys-decision-to-cut-classics-department-prompts-an-outcry https://www.npr.org/2021/05/10/995389117/howard-universitys-...

roflc0ptic 5y ago
The link article is by Cornell west, a well known and generally respected black leftist (among lefties, anyways), so it’s… pretty powerful hearing him in particular condemn this thing
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  he must be a loser since his race is his only characteristic you find notable.
- ChainOfFools 5y ago
  Widely admired by everyone not named Ta-Nehisi Coates, that is.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    And Barack Obama.
- themitigating 5y ago
  What does this have to do with politics or race?
  - jgwil2 5y ago
    Howard is an HBCU
    - jgwil2 5y ago
      Amazing that this simple statement of fact in response to a question merits downvotes.

rfrey 5y ago

For clarity, this is about the university dispersing the Classics department, spreading the classes among other departments. It's not about removing classic books from the curriculum or library or anything like that. I'm not denying the move could be a precursor to removing the classes outright, but that's speculation.

garbagetime 5y ago
Dispersing the classics results in no longer having a classics department which implies the destruction of the classics department what do you think are the implications of the destruction of a department dedicated to a particular subject on the teaching of that subject?
- lmm 5y ago
  My university (probably one of the top three in the world, especially for mathematics) had no mathematics department. It had a pure mathematics department, an applied mathematics/theoretical physics department, and a department of statistics and somethingorother (maybe economics?).
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    So it had 3 math departments. That's not what's happening in the article.
    - lmm 5y ago
      Mathematics was dispersed across several departments, and this was not a weakness but a strength.
      - DiggyJohnson 5y ago
        Three math departments, though. Do you see how that is different from what is happening in this article?
      - 5y ago

markus_zhang 5y ago

Shouldn't they just rebrand it and sell it to foreigners?

Igelau 5y ago

I mean, I went to a state school, and I don't think we had a Classics Department, but we had courses on the classical era and its works if you really wanted to take them. Headline makes it sound like they torched all the books. Really it probably didn't make sense to still have a whole department for it.

milesdyson_phd 5y ago
I went to a state school as well, we had a department of Romance and Classical studies. So it got lumped in with the romance languages.

RNCTX 5y ago

> As German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasized in the past century, traditions are inescapable and unavoidable. It is a question not of whether you are going to work in a tradition, but which one. Even the choice of no tradition leaves people ignorantly beholden within a language they didn’t create and frameworks they don’t understand. The above is absolutely true and I can't think of the last time I saw it mentioned. Another comment mentions Bloom and Iirc he calls it "the anxiety of influence." It's why vampire stories are really romances, why what people today think of romances are always comedies, and really beyond all that, the confirmation of Ecclesiastes 1:9... What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Even if you don't believe in the religion in question it doesn't matter, it's in the culture you live in. If you have no knowledge of it you're a babe in your own woods.

wolverine876 5y ago
“Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." - Cicero

throwaway879080 5y ago

well, if math is "racist" what can you expect https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematics-confronts-its-white-patriarchal-past/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematic...

victorbstan 5y ago

Glad to see this on HN. At least not everyone here is anti education, unlike some… I won’t name names.

FactolSarin 5y ago

I don't know, do we really need a whole department devoted to Classics (ie, Greco-Roman literature)? I feel like it can comfortably be out inside another department.

irrational 5y ago
Typically those getting a classics degree have to learn Greek and/or Latin. There simply is no substitute for reading in the original language. A ton is lost in translation.
woodruffw 5y ago
"Department" is not a fixed term between US colleges and universities (much less international schools): it can be anything from a single professor with a shortlist of classes to dozens of professors within a larger college/school of humanities. The very large state school that I went to had a classics department (and I took many courses in it), but it was probably only about half a dozen professors. Besides: "Classics" is a difficult department to fit within another department. It usually already has a few sub-departments, ancient Latin and Greek among them.

qualudeheart 5y ago

Classics should in the post data scientific age be moved into subfield of computational linguistics. Literature is both empirical (See recent work on statistical approach to computational literature studues) and subset of linguistics proper. The same thing holds for classics as a proper subset of literature. Problem isn’t’ really disbanding the classics department but not having classics studies computationally based or not handing field over to computational linguists.

DiggyJohnson 5y ago
I’ll bite. Why would it be valuable to analyze literature or classics computationally? Are you suggesting that they ought to be considered a subset of linguistics? Linguistics is about language, not the content of language.
- qualudeheart 5y ago
  The meaning of texts and language as Derrida tells us has a graph like structure. Each word in this sentenc eis defined in relation to other words and the meaning of the whole sentence can therefor be modelled as a graph. Modern neural networks— like those used at Palantir Technologies for link analysis- can be applied to the structure of any text including this post right here. GPT-3 can also be used for summaries of literature and biblical exegesis and will soon be an indispensable part of any computational linguist’s toolkit.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  There is value in this. The digital humanities has given us new methods to approach the study of literature (and a great many other fields), which has been dominated by the method of close reading for a long time. For example, can scale our analysis of the transfer of techniques between works and use rigorous mathematical analysis to model influence and networks in a new way. There is a lot of garbage work in the digital humanities (like all fields) that is basically just doing word choice analysis with computers, but it truly is a new method that is available to researchers to put in their toolchest and new methods are almost always good.

chmod600 5y ago

"It recognizes that the end and aim of education ... is to lift every voice." What does that mean and who agreed that it is the "end and aim" of education?

josh_today 5y ago
I bet the same people who agreed on Virginia’s “Keep parents out of school” movement

masswerk 5y ago

For a clue on the traditional importance of classics in US tertiary education, have a look at the rather extensive Greek grammar and composition parts in the Harvard admission test of 1869: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde...