Solveig Gold
This speech was delivered, under the title “The Race against Racing the Classics”, as part of the “Classics in the Present” panel at Antigone’s five year celebration, in Jesus College, Oxford, March 13-14, 2026. It receieved rapturous applause.
I’m glad we’re starting with this panel because, honestly, it will be good to get it over with and move on to doing real Classics. The beauty of Antigone is that we don’t actually spend that much time talking about Classics. We just do Classics.
That said, it’s important to take stock about where we are as a discipline. Antigone’s success is remarkable precisely because it has flown in the face of all the sinister and downward trends in Classics and academia. There are lessons to be learned, and cautionary tales to be told. So here we go.
From Roehampton to Indiana, dozens of college and university programs in Classics have been eliminated or downsized across the English-speaking world in recent years. Even extraordinarily wealthy universities are making cuts: last year, both Brown and the University of Chicago announced that they would be suspending their PhD admissions for Classics and other departments in the humanities.
At the same time, as Tyler Austin Harper detailed in a widely read article last month in the Atlantic, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has been busily handing out nearly half a billion dollars a year to fund humanities research in the United States. Enough to make a real dent in the future of the humanities, especially compared to the meager $69 million allocated by the federal government. But Mellon is not funding traditional research – research for research’s sake. They’re funding activist research – research directed towards a very specific and yet moving target of social justice, as defined by a certain set of neo-Marxist ideologues. Or, as president of the Mellon Foundation Elizabeth Alexander promised in 2020, “There won’t be a penny that is going out the door that is not contributing to a more fair, more just, more beautiful society.”
Which brings us back to Classics. In 2024, the Mellon Foundation gave an eye-popping $1 million grant to Princeton’s Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Brown’s Sasha-Mae Eccleston for “Racing the Classics”, an initiative that involves both a conference series and a multi-year cohort-based fellowship program at Princeton and Brown.
Despite the title of my talk, I do not actually wish to dwell on this initiative in particular. From the program’s sunny and vague webpage, it’s not at all clear what the practitioners of “Racing the Classics” have been up to in the last year – or how the fellowship program will continue when, as he recently announced, Padilla Peralta leaves Princeton for Arizona State University in the fall.
But behind the name “Racing the Classics” is a new vision of Classics, the vision that currently dominates our field in the US and, increasingly, the UK. To be clear: this vision is not about diversifying existing Classics departments, so that Ivory Tower halls may be populated by darker-colored skin. If it were, then the million-dollar grants would be given instead to places such as Howard University, which in 2021 was forced to close its Classics department – the only Classics department at a historical black college or university.
No, the new vision of Classics involves remaking every aspect of the discipline, from abolishing the practice of blind peer review to downplaying the study of Greek and Latin – and with it the sub-discipline of close reading and careful textual analysis known as philology. “Racing the Classics” is not, in the first place, a race-based project. It is an intellectual one.
The idea is that philology, which has long been the core of Classics, pretends to be an impartial, near-scientific method of textual interpretation, when in fact it is a means of blindly projecting our contemporary white biases onto the past under the guise of objectivity. It is impossible, activist scholars claim, to “un-race” ourselves. So we must instead “race” the discipline.
What does that look like in practice? As my husband Joshua and I put it in our article for Antigone last year, titled “An Apology for Philology”, the new intellectual approach “aims, at turns, to use Classics to solve contemporary problems, to project contemporary problems onto the analysis of Classical material, and to look at how the reception of Classical material has caused or perpetuated many of these problems in the first place… There’s a whole lot of discussion about Classics, but very little, well, Classics.”
Since I do not assume that everyone here has read “An Apology for Philology” (though you all should!), I want to reiterate some of its central points. Joshua and I are perfectly willing to grant that it is impossible to strip away all our contemporary biases and fully un-race ourselves when approaching an ancient text. But, as we say, that does not mean we should throw in the towel, give up trying to understand the ancients on their own terms, and resign ourselves to identity-driven studies. Impartiality, however unattainable, remains a worthy goal.
And, crucially, we have yet to see evidence that the impossibility of fully “un-racing” ourselves actually does have a significant impact on philological scholarship. We checked all the footnotes and went back through all the sources. Only one scholar, Patrice Rankine of the University of Chicago, has even tried to support the claim, and he gives only two examples of supposed white bias in Classical scholarship, neither from philological scholarship, and one of which involves him wildly misrepresenting his source in what we call a staggering act of intellectual sloppiness or dishonesty. If you want to know more, please read our piece.
Now when I say that Racing the Classics is an intellectual project, I do not mean that its work stays on the page or in the classroom. On the contrary: the intellectual project is meant to provide grounding for a slew of political aims within the university, the nation, and the world. Padilla Peralta has, for instance, said that “decolonizing” Classics must involve literal land redistribution. In his words, “By decolonisation, I mean the labour of redistributing the material conditions of knowledge production, beginning with the land expropriated violently through settler-colonialism.”
At the top of the list of land he and other activists in Classics would like to see redistributed is Israel. As journalist Aaron Sibarium observed in an April 2024 tweet, an “under-explored dynamic” of the anti-Israel protests that swept elite college campuses after October 7th was that “classicists are overrepresented”. At Princeton and Columbia, Classicists led the charge to publish open letters and occupy campus buildings. As early as October 20th, 2023, they corralled 352 “classicists, ancient historians, and scholars of antiquities” from around the world to sign a letter that blamed Israel for October 7th, accused the Israeli Defense Forces of genocide (again: this was October 20th!), and demanded a total ceasefire – but no return of the hostages.
But the paragraph I want to draw your attention to is the following (bear with me, it’s a long one):
We acknowledge that as scholars of antiquities whose work is vested in the geographies, histories, material cultures, languages, politics, and people of the Near East, we have a greater responsibility to speak on and for the existence of the Palestinian people in the Palestinian land. We further renounce the use of the methods of our fields, especially archeological practices, by Zionist movements which attempt to falsify a historical claim to the land by laundering its antiquity. (Laundering its antiquity! I’ll hand it to these scholars: it’s a great turn of phrase!) We recognize how scholarship on antiquity is regularly used by projects of nationalism to forge false historical narratives which underpin the dispossession of others, and it is this practice which we wholly reject and refuse to be complicit to. We commit ourselves to the preservation of traditions of knowledge, epistemologies, and histories of the Palestinian people, and we hold that these must be taught honestly and rigorously in our universities. We believe that we must produce scholarship and commit to pedagogies which address the harm done to the Palestinian peoples.
There is a breathtakingly outsized sense of importance here, as if anyone cares what scholars of Greek and Latin think about Israel and Palestine. But it gets to the heart of what motivates so much of this activism: a desperate attempt to justify the study of the ancient world. So-called scholars who are insecure in their love of or interest in antiquity seek relevance through contemporary politics. They see an ancient land dispute as their perfect opening, their big break.
In a way, I understand this insecurity. I imagine many of us do. When we could do anything, study anything, why have we chosen to study antiquity? We’re asked a version of this question again and again, by friends, by family, by teachers, by administrators, by fellowship and funding bodies, and, of course, by ourselves. Who among us has not had to write a dozen “personal statements” attempting to advance some novel argument for doing Classics, in hopes of receiving a few thousand pounds for our studies or research?
Perversely, I actually even like writing those kinds of statements! But I’ve also started to see them as a real problem. Because while, yes, much of Classics is relevant today, it’s also the case that usually our motivation for studying it has nothing to do with contemporary politics or world affairs. At a certain point, we need to stop twisting ourselves into pretzels to argue for relevance and start admitting that we study Classics because we love the material. Because we find it interesting, or beautiful, or maddening, or true. Or… maybe we study Classics because the best teachers we had were our Classics teachers, and we want to follow in their footsteps. Hell, maybe we study Classics simply because we’re good at it. It chose us as much as we chose it.
I’m sure there are people here today who disagree with me – who are happy about, or at least comfortable with, a politicized and “raced” vision of Classics. But for those who are not, I propose a list of ten action items to resist the trends.
1) Do not be afraid to say, in earnest, that you love Classics. Do not be afraid to say that it has value. You don’t need to qualify or justify. Generations of people across time and space have agreed and continue to agree with you. That alone is enough to justify working on the material.
2) I know this is controversial but: fight to retain the name “Classics.” I say this not because I am particularly wedded to the name Classics but because a name change is never just a name change. In retrospect, when in 2014 the American Philological Association changed its name to the Society for Classical Studies, the attacks on and decline of philology became inevitable. I do not know what changing “Classics” to, say, “Greek and Roman Studies” will bring with it, but I also don’t want to find out.
3) Do not engage in too much discussion about Just do Classics! (And yes, I know that this talk is a walking contradiction!)
4) When you do Classics, focus on the texts and other material sources. They were created by flawed men, sure, but part of the beauty of them is that they defy all modern categorizations. So escape the problems of modernity and figure out: what do these texts actually say?
5) When you do and talk about Classics in this way, you will be name-called a conservative. I know that can be jarring for lifelong liberals. It’s okay. You’ll be okay.
6) In fact, there are conservative donors and foundations who wish to support traditional Classics. In recent years they have helped start new “civic centers” for liberal education across the United States, many of which are actively looking to hire traditional Classicists. Generally, their only political agenda is the formation of a more educated civic body and a civic body that cares about big ideas like such as truth and beauty. Truly, you do not need to be afraid of conservatives bearing gifts! They are not your enemy!
7) There should, of course, be more such donors. If you’re reading this and in a position to support traditional knowledge for knowledge’s sake, be in touch.
8) Speaking of Americans, I implore the Brits here to stop letting yourselves be bullied by cocky Americans who come over to study at Oxbridge for a year or two. (Incidentally, the founders of Racing the Classics met here at Oxford during postgrad.) But two more recent examples. An American Rhodes Scholar was behind the infamous open letter that called on the Oxford Classics Faculty to “acknowledge explicitly its own role in the proliferation of racist, colonialist, and white supremacist attitudes.” And when David here penned a response to the Oxford letter, another American graduate student, who had been at Cambridge for less than a month, campaigned for him to be punished (thankfully, he was not). If you haven’t noticed, we Americans think we know everything. We do not – and you know it. So start acting like it!
9) We also must all stop letting ourselves be bullied into submission by a bunch of chronically online lunatics who hate us and everything we stand for. The noise is blessedly quieter now that so many members of so-called “Classics Twitter” fled X for BlueSky. But they’re still out there and looking for reasons to pounce. Let them. And ignore them.
10) When you’re online, go read Antigone Read it, write for it, support it.
Antigone has a crucial role to play in the race against racing the Classics. Perhaps it sounds hyperbolic, but I believe it really is a race. As scholars of antiquity know well, it’s hard to recover things once they’ve been lost. At the moment, we’ve lost a whole generation of sensible PhD students – on the one hand, because they’ve been brainwashed; on the other, because either they were rejected from the programs to which they applied or they never applied in the first place, after seeing what academia had become. We cannot afford to lose out on another generation of Classicists. So let’s start building the next one, one Antigone article at a time.
Solveig Lucia Gold is Senior Fellow in Education and Society at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. She holds a PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge and has published in venues such as Classical Quarterly, First Things, The Free Press, the New Criterion, and the Wall Street Journal.