​Dan-el Padilla  (Classics at Princeton) and Roosevelt Montás (whose book Rescuing Socrates was discussed in our last blog post) have a lot in common and, if I read them right, some important differences in their views of literature and education .  They will be talking to each other at the Strand bookstore (828 Broadway at 12th Street) in New York City on  Friday November  5th from 7:30 to 8:30 pm  . It should be lively! 

 “Transformative texts?” Most people reading this blog have, I bet, encountered such texts, but perhaps not in the way Dominican born Roosevelt Montás has.. It couldn’t have been easy moving to the States and growing up in the Big City, but now he’s   Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Columbia University.  On November 16 Princeton Press will release  his  book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. You can preorder it now.          But why wait for the release? The Teagle Foundation, under the skillful leadership of Andy Delbanco, will provide an on-line opportunity to explore “how certain books transformed the life of this immigrant from the Dominican Republic—"and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds.” You can  interact with Roosevelt Montás   in a Teagle  virtual workshop  on November 4th from 12:30-1:30 p.m. EST. (Foundation staff will remain from 1:30-2:00 p.m. EST to answer questions about the Foundation’s  Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative.)  The workshop is free and open to current  Foundation grantees and prospective applicants.  You can  Register for workshops > here.

​Thirty words of Coptic on a scrap of papyrus, discussed in the preceding blog post, caused scandal enough for any field of scholarship.  But now there’s more  affecting the study of ancient texts – more , and maybe worse.
The scam about the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” exposed  primarily institutional weaknesses – a prestigious journal, a venerable professorship, and university governance were all swept off their well-heeled feet by a snippet that any alert classicist would find suspicious from the outset. A careful check of its provenance and a radiocarbon  dating of the papyrus itself confirmed such suspicions. The question then becomes why did institutional structures fail to rein in the scam before it wasted such energy and caused such damage.
But there’s a parallel, or rather intersecting story about a no less serious crime against scholarship. In this case the most interesting questions are at the individual, rather than the institutional  level..
This time the story centers on Dirk Obink,, the MacArthur award winning papyrologist suspected of having stolen and sold some Oxyrhynchus papyri to some of the same over-zealous  buyers involved in the “Gospel of Jesus” scam. Again, the story is well-told by Ariel Sabar in the June 2020 issue of The Atlantic. (The electronic version has the title “A Biblical Mystery at Oxford,” – but it’s not just about biblical papyri.  Nefragments of Sappho” are involved as well.)
New developments in the story have now been  reported in the   New York Times article, “He Taught Ancient Texts at Oxford. Now He Is Accused of Stealing Some”..


If Obink is found guilty, the most puzzling and enduring question in the case,  to my way of thinking, will be  how such an intelligent and devoted scholar could fail to recognize that while  he could destroy some  evidence of the theft, another list of these papyri existed – of course it did!  How could he fail to know that? This record was very likely to be checked when the stolen papyri surfaced. 
But there’s more to it than that. The most serious crime against scholarship in this case is not the theft itself, but the misdating - for a while at least -  in an apparent effort to increase the market value of a text.  Again, such misdating would eventually be discovered once the papyrus was properly published. In the meantime, the reputation of the great scholar would mislead anyone interested in its implications.
 When such things happen, the whole foundation of scholarship in the field is shaken.  So the questions multiply:
What could have caused such blindness?
Who can now be trusted?
 
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Please enrich the discussion by posting a comment or adding information..

​Ariel Sabar’s book Veritas is a must read.  Its subtitle tells where it’s headed, “A Harvard Professor, a Con-Man and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” but doesn’t give a clue to the brilliant sleuthing, deft writing, and crafty exploration of the implications of his story..
By the time Sabar’s detective work is over very few of the elite players  are left standing; as if it were the last scene in a Shakespearian tragedy. The reputations of   well respected papyrologists, eminent scientists, holders of endowed chairs and  senior administrators from journal editors right up to the president in Massachusetts Hall.  
Those still standing are not the princes of the realm, but a few ragtag amateur scholars who do the heavy lifting, while others chase fame and fortune. And, of course, there’s  Sabar himself, without whose prodigious work the full implications of the scandal would never have become clear.
Here’s the scenario: An email comes in from someone you have never met offering to give you (or your university) an ancient   papyrus written in Coptic. The would-be donor says he has no expertise in Coptic but with a dictionary and grammar has puzzled out enough to offer a rough translation, including “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’”
Take it from there. but don’t expect  to learn much about Jesus’ marital status, his relationship to Mary Magdalene, the attitudes of early Christians to sex, the place of women in the early church, or even what the term “gospel,” entails. The book touches on each of these topics, but is not really about any of them. Instead, it poses the question whether universities today cam distinguish genuine scholarship from self-serving deceptiveness,– if they try at all.
The detective work plays out on two levels,  individuals who succumb to  personal advantages of one sort or another,  and institutions  that fail to uphold the standards they profess to defend. . The real importance of the book lies in the question whether post-modernism in its current form and similar movements have now  eroded the university’s traditional determination to “get it right.” Getting it right involves, to be sure, taking time to make careful comparisons, working out the chronology, determining provenance, avoiding conflicts of interest,  consulting people with genuine expertise and resecting their judgment even if it isn’t what one wants to hear.  It’s a slow, unglamorous process but its better than rushing into feel-good story telling, or cliches about “Indeterminacy” and “enriching the conversation,”, or substituting “operational effectiveness” for accuracy, or trying to redress today’s injustices by rewriting the past
Read it and post a comment on what you find.

When you know someone for almost all your adult life, you don’t expect to be surprised when you read his obituary. I felt that way when Jim Tatum routed me to Benjamin Fortson’s memorial on the death of Don Cameron.… But I was surprised, moved and enriched by it.  Whether you knew Don or not, Fortson’s words are worth pondering.  They catch the spirit of a remarkable human being, and of an era in American liberal education. 

​ Over the years Don may have taught  15,000 undergraduates at the University  Michigan, most of them Honors students enrolled in the Great Books classes he taught. He loved the texts he taught and teaching itself.  It worked: eyes were opened and lives changed.
​
But it didn’t stop at the classroom door. Andy Szegedy Maszak told me a story about Don reaching out to him. While an undergraduate at Michigan Andy for various reasons never enrolled in any of Don’s classes,
“ … and yet I think of him as one of my cherished teachers.    It was a turbulent time, and Don was not happy about a lot of the student protests, which I tended to support. I think I learned from him what it meant to have a spirited, civil, adult conversation.  “
What a gift! I wonder whether that capacity was simply a feature of Don’s personality, or whether it was also nurtured by the books he so valued and taught so well.  Synergy, I bet.
          I admire the work  he did on Aeschylus and Thucydides,  but for me he was the embodiment of the study of the Great Books.  That means of course than in addition to personal loss his passing marks for me the end of the era in which liberal education was nurtured by those books.
          Where do we go now? I’ll explore that question in a subsequent post,; meanwhile, a moment  of blog silence in honor of H. Don Cameron.

​She is classically trained with important publications on ancient democracy; she has seen clearly how it links to the problems democracy confronts today; she left a cushy post at the Institute for Advanced Study to direct Harvard’s Edmond Safra Center for Ethics and helped launch the Educating for American Democracy project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Now she has decided  to put all this academic experience to the test in the “real world.”
Here’s the link to the Boston Globe’s coverage of Danielle Allen’s announcement of her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  And, if you share my enthusiasm for her candidacy, here’s  the link  for contributing to her campaign.  Or, if you’re like me and prefer to write a check, send it to:
Committee to Elect Danielle Allen
124 Washington Street, Suite 101
Foxborough, MA 02035
 
 

Based on comments by Jed Atkins, Paul Cartledge, Richard Martin, Greg Nagy,  Josh Ober and Dan-el Padilla
,
The discussion of civil society in Haiti and elsewhere (blog posting of July 16) stimulated  some lively comments, some on the blog (scroll down and see), others as email messages.  Here’s a summary of some of these responses.
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No one was  optimistic about the future of Haiti, but some people agreed that building civil society offered the best hope.  Greg Nagy , for example, urged a  “focus on supporting the work of community-based organizations (primarily NGOs), rather than on the counterproductive habit of  funneling aid to governmental bureaucracies that, as we all know, are endemically vulnerable to corruption and, in fact, sustain not a “democracy”, but a covert small elite plutocracy – or rather, kleptocracy – that has dominated Haitian politics behind the scenes ever since the days of Haitian independence.”
      But what about the concept of civil society itself? Is it too narrow?  Too colonial? Too ‘white’? Too tied to a thought pattern rooted in the Enlightenment and more recently in the work of Havel. Habermas and other Europeans?
 
Dan-el Padilla wrote challenging the dominance of such concepts when  applied to Haiti: ” that discussions of building civil society in Haiti will need to be more steeped in and responsive to the work of Haitian scholars: I've been recommending Jean Casimir's The Haitians: A Decolonial History to anyone and everyone who will listen these past few months, as an example of a work that shifts focus away from Ango-American discourses about (eg) civil society and towards more dynamic and finely braided local knowledges and practices of institution-building.”
I find this interesting at the theoretical level   Can we can extrapolate from Dan-el’s observation to some  wide-ranging questions, whether, for example, we outsiders can even recognize indigenous state-building efforts when we see them  Is that why US efforts in troubled areas such as Afghanistan and Haiti so often bog down? Or, more generally, whether concepts such as civil society can be applied cross culturally.  If so, students and scholars alike  will benefit from reading Aristotle and, as Jed Atkins reminds me, “ Aristotle is a good person to think with here; Tocqueville, even better!”   Fortunately, we don’t have to choose between them.
Athens in the fifth century before our era provides a good test case for such question. Was there a civil society in Athens, or simply a direct, unmediated relationship between citizen and state, “direct democracy” in a narrow sense?  Or push the conceptual issue one stage further, would we even recognize the institutions of civil society in their Athenian garb?
Paul Cartledge   suggests that there was no civil society in ancient Athens but goes on to make an important observation:.  “The democratic ancient Athenians had no 'civil society', and they were not in any sense liberal, but they knew how to build from the ground up - from the deme.”  
      Exactly! Those  villages in the countryside and extended neighborhoods in urban settings  were immensely important.  But other structures may be important as well. That makes me very excited to  hear about Richard Martin’s  research plans. His email to me  quotes the conclusion of my blog post and then starts panning for gold, “ ‘Build Civil Society’--exactly. How, of course,  is another question ( I would start with bowling leagues, laugh clubs, and unionizing...). As it happens, the whole issue is on my mind as I am wrestling (still) with writing about Aristophanes with a focus on such groups in Athens, from phratries to demes to thiasoi and "kômoi" (as well as kômai). Comedy, too, builds community and not just in a we-vs- them divide.”
      These features of   Athenian society stand between individual citizens and their  government.  They also, I believe, generate knowledge, not grand syntheses or handy maxims, but patterns of understanding that work at multiple levels in the society and account for much of its success..
Was that what Aristotle had in mind  when, as  Josh Ober  reminds us, he discusses: “… the degree to which the parts (say, Attic demes) are strictly subsidiary parts of the whole, they seem to be other than what Havel & Habermas had in mind for civil society. There is some way that democratic diversity adds up to something political and good for Aristotle (at least that’s how I read the famous Politics book 3, chapter 11 on the “wisdom of the many” - but it’s a tricky passage…”
So, back to Aristotle and a treasure trove of other texts from antiquity and modern times . If you really care about the suffering, misgovernment and mismanagement  inflicted on people around the world, you need all the help you can get, ancient and modern.
Well, this is not really the promised ‘summary’ of a rich series of responses, but it gives, I hope, a sense of the important issues involved. So, post a comment and if you like the discussion pass it on to others.. 
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The Guardian reports a  pilot program  to expand  instruction in Latin at state schools in the UK:  https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jul/31/latin-introduced-40-state-secondaries-england?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
  Thanks to Paul Woodruff for calling this to my attentjon.
   Like many in the US the Brits have been put off by fears that Latin is "elitist."  The answer to that objection, of course, is to see that Latin is available in schools serving every social, economic and racial group. 

​Goals, Compromise, Leadership.  
by Josh Ober
(with an assist from Edmund Burke)
Guest Blogger
Note: Josh responded some while ago to the discussion on this blog of resilience, especially at the institutional level. I found his comments so important that I asked his permission to post them as a free-standing post. Let us hear what you think about it.
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I agree strongly with Bob Kaster on the need for a set of shared principles - which does not mean shared ideological or partisan commitments all the way down - but does mean having a basis for making reasoned and ethical choices, together, on a grounds of something other than “the strong win.” And on shared goals - which do not have to be all singing in the same pedagogical choir, but do have to add up to something like your notion of adding to technical skills training (those engineering courses Denis Feeney alluded to…), the goal of  "individuals [students] developing capacities they will need for a productive and rewarding life.” I suppose that those capacities prominently include the ability to compromise, and to do so in a principled way. 
 
I just came across this quote from Edmund Burke (“Speech on conciliation with the colonies,” March 1775: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5655/5655-h/5655-h.htm): 
 
"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants… But, in all fair dealings, the thing bought must bear some proportion to the purchase paid. None will barter away the immediate jewel of his soul.”
 
So here is my current worry: Burke's statement is NOT likely to be endorsed, or even taken seriously as a matter for discussion, by some of those engaged in the current academic Kulturkampf, either because compromise is considered immoral (that is: all rights are inherent and inalienable and so none may ever be “remitted” ) or because Burke’s opinions are not worth of attention because he was conservative/ imperialist/ otherwise intolerable. 
 
In re. Brook Manville on the essential role of insightful leadership: fully agreed both on the necessity and on your addendum concerning the distinctive form of academic leadership. You and I have both chaired academic departments (in my case both Classics and Political Science) and we both know that chairing is fundamentally "all responsibility/no power." A department chair can try to model the right kind of shared principles, goals, pedagogy, but if one’s colleagues don’t want to be led, they don’t have to be: chairs have very limited carrots and no sticks. Perhaps it is different at “higher” administrative levels, where incentives can at least be offered. But there are no effective sanctions for faculty who choose rankly uncooperative factional behavior that rejects the possibility, indeed the value, of shared principles and goals (unless they are, without compromise, principles and goals of the faction). 
 
I do not think the situation is hopeless. My (perhaps Pollyanna-ish) hope is that at least some students are sufficiently fed up with polemics, and sufficiently eager to gain something of value (beyond technical training), that they will gravitate to courses and to teachers who aim at helping them to develop capacities for flourishing lives. And that academic leaders will reward those teachers and incentivize faculty to offer such courses. We’ll see how that goes. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about Haiti these days, as, I suppose, most of us have.  I have no insight into its present situation, , still less about its future, but reading ad thinking about it have led me to  two strands of thought about democracy, both  Greek in origin  They in turn have led me to some unexpected and perhaps unwelcome inferences, presented here in hope of provoking discussion
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       Why is democracy so difficult? Haiti is a good test case for answers to this question.  If your goal is to establish a lasting, democratic government there, , you have two ways to proceed, as best I can tell.  Both are rooted in ancient Greek patterns of thought but they lead to very different ways of looking at the situation and responding to it.
       The first of the two is a familiar one. It’s based on a widely used taxonomy in which government are classified by the extent of franchise within them: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy. Or if you prefer more emotional language: tyranny, plutocracy and ochlocracy. We get all these words from the Greeks and with them a convenient way of classifying governments.
       This taxonomy may seem purely academic but it has real world consequences.  It focuses attention on eligibility to vote and on free and fair elections. Want a democracy? Make sur everyone can vote and that their votes get properly counted and weighted.   Americans know -or most of us do- how important this is for a democracy. If we want it for our country, surely we should want it for others, too.  So, focus on elections and whatever it takes to ensure they are free and fair, observers, technical support, equipment, maybe even troops.  Then when a duly elected government is in place funnel food, medicine and other aid through it to help the citizenry and build support for the government.
That’s one way of looking at the situation and responding to it.  The second approach derives from a long tradition of political theory, going back to an idea in Aristotle’s Politics reformulated in the Enlightenment, and put to work whenever citizens break away from dictatorships and try to create  a society run by and for  its citizens.  Democracies  seen from this vantage point derive from and depend on the efforts of citizens to take charge of things and make government respond to them, rather than the other way around.
The building blocks of a well-functioning state, then, are all the organizations and structures through which people act for teir  mutual benefit.  That’s why Aristotle started not with a candy shop of different forms of government. but with the household, the neighborhood and other forms of sharing or collaboration (koinonia). 
If he and  political thinkers of a similar cast of mind are right, then a stable democracy begins not with elections but with  strengthening civil society, including a wide range of  neighborhood and social organizations, business and professional associations,  trade unions, religious and philanthropic organizations, even athletic teams and their supporters
People recognize a need, share an objective, band together to do something about it.  No central authority tells them what to do or when to do it.  They probably argue about  the best course of action, take a lot of time to reach a decision, but then roll up their sleeves to do what they can  
Slavery, colonialism, foreign interventions, dictatorships all take a continuing toll.  Drugs, gangs and corruption do further damage.  Haiti has had more than its share of all of these Yet,  there are, as the New York Times has reported,  hundreds of such organizations in Haiti. They face, to be sure, great difficulties – more than I can imagine.  Even in the best of times such  organizations, as we all know, run into difficulties   Their members probably often disagree, get angry with one another, squabble, get discouraged, because of lack of resources, recognition and support.
But they provide an often unrecognized by-product:  Participants in such efforts  develops habits of shared decision making and that in turn is the foundation on which democracy can be built.
They deserve support.
       This way of looking at democracy does not deny the importance of electoral politics, but its priority is clear: Build Civil Society.