Classical Renewal by Research
- patricklewisbaker
- Jun 23
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 21
The research pursued these days in university humanities departments does not, as a rule, enjoy high esteem among those who value the West’s traditional forms of education. For decades, critics of the university have been reporting the titles of courses, funded research, and conference papers, with a mixture of ridicule and outrage, to illustrate the capture of academe by political activists. Attendees of the Modern Language Association convention in 2024, for instance, could enjoy lectures on “Decolonize the Literary Curriculum,” “Chicanx and Latinx Poetics,” and “Trans Joy!” They could take in sessions devoted to “suicidality” (in solidarity with advocates of assisted dying), the joys and sorrow of climate change, book banning as a strategy for controlling disinformation, literary representations of migrant populations, the “Politics of Black Hair,” joyful transfeminisms, the politics of BIPOC and indigenous writing, “Fat Bodies in Speculative Space,” “Carceral Narratives and the Carceral State,” “Queer and Trans Multispecies Justice,” and so forth, in predictable profusion. There was also the occasional session devoted to literature, the ostensible remit of the MLA. Among the 170 conference session titles from the first day, I noticed in a very few the names of just six white male writers: Boccaccio, Chaucer, Cervantes, Milton, Melville, Heine, and Byron. Older white females also went missing. Not even Jane Austen made it in 2024.
The MLA convention gives us a window on the sort of research that is being supported by university departments of literature at present. So it is hardly surprising if teachers who have cut their ties with progressive education and joined the classical school movement have developed a prejudice against humanistic research. If one thing unites classical schools in the United States, it is love of the Western heritage. Yet college literature and history departments have for decades been infected with hatred of the Western tradition and contempt for the great authors of its classical, medieval, and early modern epochs. As a result, I have met more than a few people in the classical education movement who reject humanistic research outright as a distraction from, even a threat to, inculcating the virtue and wisdom of the classical authors…