Michael Kicey (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
When systems are in crisis, they reveal how they work: what, under ordinary circumstances, remained in the background suddenly emerges into the foreground.
As subject librarian for the sole Classics department in our state university system, I have witnessed how ordinarily robust systems have broken down, revealing the assumptions, biases, and exclusions upon which our practices and institutions rest. Systemic crisis has drawn renewed attention to libraries as a crucial – crucially overlooked, crucially misunderstood – node in academic knowledge networks. The complex dependencies and fragilities usually relegated to the background of library work – of which philologists, for instance, are constantly aware in relation to their historical objects of study, but only intermittently aware in relation to their professional lives – have entered the foreground of concerns by virtue of the disrupted relations in which higher education finds itself embedded. In a word, we have been forcefully reminded that the digital text can transcend its material vulnerabilities and its enabling exclusions no more than the papyrus manuscript could.
As adjunct instructor for the two-semester introductory Greek sequence at my institution, I have become penetratingly aware of the diversity of life-backgrounds from which students come into the Classics classroom as well as the diversity of life-trajectories they are pursuing, most of which have nothing to do with Classics. With most of these students, we cannot bank on uncritical acceptance of the special prestige traditionally accorded to Classics, nor should we even expect to find uncritical reverence for the written and printed word. These specific cultural ‘backgrounds’ to the study of Classics, which were formed long ago and which many of us assume are still active in our students, have all but disappeared, and we are not in a position to revive them. If the discipline has a future, it must learn ways to teach students what role classical studies may have in the lives of many different kinds of people – people, namely, who do not accord the classics any special authority and whose hearts do not necessarily thrill at the sight of a printed page. We owe it to our students, just as much as we owe it to the Greeks and Romans, to teach Classics in a properly post-classical world.
In my remarks, I want to apply the concepts of background and foreground to this dual perspective – both librarian and instructor – that I bring to my work as a classicist.