On the Destruction of "the Classics"

The Rosetta Stone - From Wikipedia

In the mid-1970’s I attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Like many of that era I was sent “to college” as an extension of my “success” in high school.

College, as it turned out, was not much like high school.  Though I was familiar with the physical campus through sport training camps in high school I was not prepared for the more rigorous academic aspects.

After some semesters of floundering I came to realize that I was uncomfortable with the basic model of study used at the time by the University.  Based on some history course or other I formulated the idea that it would be far better to follow the educational model used by many of America’s founding fathers centuries earlier: reading the classics and studying mathematics.  I can’t really say exactly how I came to this idea at the time; the details I are now lost in the many decades that have since passed.

I signed up again for calculus and for “Mrs. Fowler’s” “Ancient Greek.”  (Prior I had never learned anything about foreign languages much less dead foreign languages.)

The first day of Ancient Greek there were perhaps thirty students in the class.  Mrs. Fowler, an imposing older woman, waded right in within the first few minutes with requirements of memorizing the alphabet and some basic noun declensions.  By the third or fourth class we were down to perhaps twelve students.  Even the woman who sat next to me studying Sanskrit abandoned the course after a few more classes.

The work was very hard; nothing like I had ever done before.  More importantly, ancient greek required intense discipline to learn.  Like the old movie “The Paper Chase” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Chase_(film)) one could never hide from being called on by Mrs. Fowler to recite some detail of the previous day's lesson.

Though extremely difficult I enjoyed what I was doing in college for the first time.

As time progressed I took French and Latin, linear algebra and advanced calculus, and studied Egyptian grammar.  By the end I could stumble through Xenophon on my own though Thucydides (Θουκυδίδης) was forever beyond my reach. 

Though I never received a degree in either of these disciplines the benefit of learning them was profound.  I learned how to think.  I also became interested in philology.  I began to think about how computers (and mathematics) might be applied to classical languages.  There was no such thing at the time.  Computers could not really deal with character sets such as Greek at that time much less processing say, Egyptian hieroglyphics.  But it made me think…  What if these texts were searchable via computer?  What kinds of analysis could be done via programs to aid in translation, grammar and understanding?

I was quickly able to utilize what I had learned to make a living: initially the linear algebra help with lens manufacturing.

A few years later (the early 1980’s) I helped to found a company called LEXEME. LEXEME’s goal was to be the Rosetta Stone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone) of computer languages; to allow a program to convert another program written in one programming language into another, different programming language automatically.  I considered this something far more likely to succeed than the nascent field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed at the time which attempted to understand human languages.  The AI-based world of “expert systems” and “natural language processing” worked on at the time ended up as abject failures. 

LEXEME’s technology, however, proved successful for clients such as Bell Labs and Boeing.  Through rigorous application of grammar and philology computer languages and their idiomatic usages in programs could be fully understood and represented in a computer.

So what did a traditional education in Classics do for me?  It taught me discipline, it taught me about about philology and gave me a basis to invent the technology used by LEXEME.

So why am I writing this?

I read an interesting article by Mary Frances Williams at Quillette (https://quillette.com/2019/02/26/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting/).

Ms. Williams discusses the highjacking of traditional “classics” by “social” and “citation” justice (a new concept to me) “warriors” the result of which would be, among other things, to remove the study of classical languages from the curriculum.

You can read the details at the link above.

She concludes “The ancient Greeks defined democracy as majority rule that must have equality before the law and freedom of speech. It is unfortunate that the classicists don’t know the value of their wonderful discipline and no longer accept free speech or due process. Without true equality in law, without free speech, democracy is destroyed. More than just Classics is at stake here.”

Ms. Williams, I would also add that philology and intellectual discipline are also potential victims of the high jacking of classics by the modern social and citation justice warriors.

The negative impact of a modern “university” education on a human being’s ability to think for themselves is profound: engineers that don’t know how things are physically made, failure to grasp history while repeating its mistakes, and so on.  If it were applied to the founding fathers we would still be colony of England and believe in "the vapors" as the cause of disease.

It seems to me that modern “inclusiveness” involves including every one in a growing ignorance (from https://despair.com/products/meetings?variant=2457301507): 

NOTE (EDIT): Long before the internet existed records were still kept. I found a faint reference to all of this here (see Article # 17): "A practical system for source language translation," with T. R. Kueny and P. L. Lehman. Proceedings of the National Conf. on Software Reuseability and Maintainability, pp. B-1 – B-12, Washington, DC (Sep. 1986).