/lit/ - Literature

>>23095156
and Princeton's Dept of Classics still has classes where you must take Greek to take the classes. See
>>23094998

On another note, the menu for Princeton's Dept of Classic has this as the second item

Equity
The history of our own department bears witness to the place of Classics in the long arc of systemic racism. Our department is housed in a building named after Moses Taylor Pyne, the University benefactor whose family wealth was directly tied to the misery of enslaved laborers on Cuban sugar plantations. This same wealth underwrote the acquisition of the Roman inscriptions that the department owns and that are currently installed on the third floor of Firestone Library. Standing only a few meters from our offices and facing towards Firestone is a statue of John Witherspoon, the University’s slave-owning sixth president and a stalwart anti-abolitionist, leaning on a stack of books, one of which sports the name “Cicero.” So great a fan was Witherspoon of the Roman orator and politician that he named his nearby estate—where he regularly hosted George and Martha Washington after purchasing two enslaved people as farm-hands—Tusculum. This statue is no artifact of the distant past: it was erected in 2001.

Mindful of this history’s reverberations down to the contemporary moment, our efforts in the Classics Department have advanced and will continue to advance the following three objectives:

1) To protect students, staff, and faculty from discrimination

2) To create opportunities for the advancement of students and (future) colleagues from historically underrepresented backgrounds within the discipline .... To make the most of our increasingly diverse faculty and student body, by ensuring that a broad range of perspectives and experiences inform our study of the ancient Greek and Roman past.

3) To articulate a clear, forward-looking, and inclusive vision for our field. Once devoted to the appreciation of Greece and Rome as exemplary cultures (often seen in what was perceived to be their “splendid isolation”), classicists now study a broad range of synchronic and diachronic relationships and pay close attention to exclusions. In terms of synchronic relationships, we investigate, for example, how ideas and forms of expressions circulated between Greece, Egypt, and the Near East; to what extent the Romans and their North African enemies shared the same cultural models; how ancient people related to the natural and built environment; and how the beginnings of literature compare across the world.
...
we investigate, using a variety of theoretical frameworks, how classical texts have been transmitted and received in later cultures. We specifically consider how the cultures of Greece and Rome have been instrumentalized, and have been complicit, in various forms of exclusion, including slavery, segregation, white supremacy, Manifest Destiny, and cultural genocide.