In my first presidential letter, right after the annual meeting last January, I wrote about the need to consider not only where we meet, but at what time of year. This letter addresses the first question; I will write separately about the other one.
January 15, 2018
Dear Members,
Presidential Letter
June 19, 2017
Dear Colleagues,
The draft budget proposed by President Trump's White House seems unlikely to be adopted. Many believe it is simply an habitual negotiator's opening salvo, intended more to "start the bidding" than to be taken seriously at face value.
I should like to bring you up to date on the Society’s efforts to encourage the development of a more diverse profession of Classics. It is perhaps appropriate that I write these words in St. Louis, which has become one of the symbols of our nation’s failure to achieve equity in a diverse population. It might also, however, become representative of what can be achieved by people of very different outlooks and interests, working together for the common good.
As I mentioned in my last message, at their meeting in June the Board of Directors adopted significant changes to the Bylaws and Regulations. Please do not stop reading here! These documents do not make interesting reading for most people, but they embody our sense of what we are about, and the changes are important.
Your Board of Directors met in New York on June 18th. Our gathering came as we near the hand-over from one executive director to another for the first time in seventeen years, with Adam Blistein’s retirement at the end of this month. Helen Cullyer, his successor, began work for the Society on May 1st, and they have been working together closely over the past seven weeks.
No one who was present at the presidential panel organized by John Marincola in San Francisco will soon forget the combination of analysis, passion, and practicality offered by the speakers, as they sought to quantify and personalize the plight of those looking for permanent academic employment today (Eleanor Dickey, Stephanie Budin), to suggest a wider range of career possibilities for those with doctorates in classics and the humanities more broadly (John Paul Christy), and to propose ways large and small in which all of us can help make the working conditions of adjunct faculty more huma
I am delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Helen Cullyer as the next Executive Director of the Society for Classical Studies. She is a classicist, with special interest in classical philosophy, educated at Oxford and Yale, where she received her doctorate in 1999. She taught at Evergreen State College and the University of Pittsburgh before moving in 2008 to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where she is currently Program Officer in the Scholarly Communications Program.
Dear Colleagues,
It is now less than a month away from our annual meeting in San Francisco, and I hope that you have all had a chance, despite the busy time of year, to check out the program at the website. The Program Committee has done an outstanding job this year, and there is a variety of offerings for virtually every interest in our wonderfully wide-ranging field.