The research pursued these days in university humanities departments does not, as a rule, enjoy high esteem among those who value the West’s traditional forms of education. For decades, critics of the university have been reporting the titles of courses, funded research, and conference papers, with a mixture of ridicule and outrage, to illustrate the capture of academe by political activists. Attendees of the Modern Language Association convention in 2024, for instance, could enjoy lectures on “Decolonize the Literary Curriculum,” “Chicanx and Latinx Poetics,” and “Trans Joy!” They could take in sessions devoted to “suicidality” (in solidarity with advocates of assisted dying), the joys and sorrow of climate change, book banning as a strategy for controlling disinformation, literary representations of migrant populations, the “Politics of Black Hair,” joyful transfeminisms, the politics of BIPOC and indigenous writing, “Fat Bodies in Speculative Space,” “Carceral Narratives and the Carceral State,” “Queer and Trans Multispecies Justice,” and so forth, in predictable profusion. There was also the occasional session devoted to literature, the ostensible remit of the MLA. Among the 170 conference session titles from the first day, I noticed in a very few the names of just six white male writers: Boccaccio, Chaucer, Cervantes, Milton, Melville, Heine, and Byron. Older white females also went missing. Not even Jane Austen made it in 2024.
The MLA convention gives us a window on the sort of research that is being supported by university departments of literature at present. So it is hardly surprising if teachers who have cut their ties with progressive education and joined the classical school movement have developed a prejudice against humanistic research. If one thing unites classical schools in the United States, it is love of the Western heritage. Yet college literature and history departments have for decades been infected with hatred of the Western tradition and contempt for the great authors of its classical, medieval, and early modern epochs. As a result, I have met more than a few people in the classical education movement who reject humanistic research outright as a distraction from, even a threat to, inculcating the virtue and wisdom of the classical authors.
If by “research” one means the bilge showcased by the MLA, one can only agree. But here we encounter a problem of babies and bathwater. Research in the humanities cannot, I believe, be simply abandoned without loss of intellectual vigor. A research community with proper values, methods, and goals is not only valuable in itself, but necessary to the health of classical education as the movement matures over the coming years.
Research in the humanities dates back to Renaissance Italy, at the very beginning of humanities education. Research was indispensable to the central cultural project of the Italian Renaissance: the revival of classical antiquity. This project was shaped by the great poet Francesco Petrarca, inventor of the studia humanitatis as a cycle of disciplines. Petrarch believed that the reason Christian civilization seemed on the point of collapse in his time was that its ancient bond with classical culture had been ruptured. The disciplines of poetry, eloquence, history, and moral philosophy, vital to civilized life, were no longer taught to leaders in the Church and state. His call to renew ancient educational traditions came at the end of three centuries dominated by universities, whose curricula were based on the study of Roman and canon law, Aristotelian logic and science, Christian theology, and Arabic medicine—all valuable and necessary. Yet the disciplines traditionally devoted to character formation, the cultivation of correct, beautiful, and persuasive speech, and the acquisition of practical wisdom through the study of history had been neglected. These were the disciplines Petrarch and his followers sought to revive.
Petrarch knew that this project could not be realized without research. Only a handful of ancient Roman authors were in general circulation, and Greek literature was almost unknown in Latin Christendom. Thus the task of rediscovering and restoring ancient Roman literature, mastering ancient Greek, and translating Greek literature into Latin (and later the vernaculars) began in the Italian Renaissance. It continues to the present day. In the sixteenth century, Erasmus took the lead in reviving the literary heritage of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church. He was the original champion of ressourcement, a return to the sources of ancient Christianity.
Renaissance scholars made it an article of faith that Greco-Roman antiquity, including Christian antiquity, had been the wisest, most learned, and most virtuous age in Western history, and was therefore worthy of imitation by modern Christians. But in order to imitate a lost world and recreate its intellectual and moral standards, you first must know what that world was like. Thus the project of reconstructing the ancient world, which began with Petrarch’s hunt for old manuscripts, continued in the quattrocento. The papal official Biondo Flavio, the most learned classical scholar of the fifteenth century, created several comprehensive research projects designed to reconnect Renaissance Italy with ancient Rome. His Rome in Triumph, a survey in nine books of the Roman republic and empire in its greatest era, reconstructed Rome’s religion, government, law, and social practices, doing for Renaissance Christian humanism what the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert would do for the Enlightenment.
The reconstruction of classical antiquity is a project that continues even today, in a few classics departments and research institutes. Over the centuries, many other humanistic research projects have emerged alongside it. When I was a classics major in the 1970s, I learned that the Latin literature of the Renaissance itself had disappeared from literary history. Like many others, I was inspired by Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–99), a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who was engaged in exploring this lost continent of literature. I became his research assistant for six years, helping with his massive Iter Italicum project, a “field guide to Renaissance literary manuscripts,” as it has been called. As the Iter made clear, the vast majority of Renaissance Latin literary works—tens of thousands of texts—were not yet known or studied, much less edited or translated. Kristeller had spent seven decades visiting thousands of manuscript depositories around the world. His aim was to give scholars a comprehensive view of the sources for Renaissance Latin literature. Renaissance scholars were astonished and galvanized when Kristeller’s work began to appear in 1963. Kristeller made it possible to edit critically the literary heritage of whole centuries of European literature, the period in which Europe itself had been engaged in reviving classical antiquity. The best and most interesting of these texts are now gradually becoming known. As a result, the story of European literature has a new chapter, covering the three centuries of the Western tradition that stand after the ancient and medieval classics and before the modern vernacular literatures.
As the example of Kristeller and his followers shows, humanistic research has not always been in its present politicized state. Great humanistic scholarship can open up the wellheads of tradition. But it will do so only if the institutions charged with stewarding the ancestral streams understand their value.
For most of my life, until the last decade or so, universities, learned societies, and foundations were supportive of sound humanistic research. They understood the importance of discovery for the life of the mind—how traditions of teaching and scholarship are refreshed by bringing to life dead civilizations, discovering lost texts, facilitating the study of manuscripts, inscriptions, and papyri, funding archeological digs, restoring lost languages, and keeping alive the knowledge of dying languages. They appreciated the widening of historical perspectives, the opportunities for inter-civilizational understanding, the ability to orient ourselves in time and space that followed when Western scholars—somehow it was always Westerners—decoded hieroglyphs and cuneiform tablets and pre-Columbian languages, or dug up lost civilizations in India, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. They knew that humanistic scholarship made us more wise and humane when it brought us into contact with ancient voices and unknown ways of life. In order to achieve all this, historians and literary scholars developed a panoply of sound methods to ensure that their research was true, or as accurate as they could make it, given the limits of sources. The desire to verify and refine our picture of the past was one reason we thirsted for new sources.
Many traditional research projects persist today, underfunded but unbowed. But sound humanistic research has, for the most part, been marginalized in contemporary academe. Young scholars with humanistic interests find that their research topics must conform to the political agendas of senior scholars, professional associations, university administrators, journals, and funding agencies. For a young classicist today to declare an interest in editing texts or pursuing other forms of traditional philological research would be an act of career suicide. The same applies to a young historian who might wish to study military or diplomatic history or the American Founding or the Reformation, all subjects currently disfavored by professional historians. Centuries-old traditions of Western learning are dying out, owing to their loss of institutional prestige and support, and research skills are atrophying. In my fields of classical and humanistic philology, skills in paleography, codicology (“the archeology of the book”), manuscript research, and textual and source criticism are becoming rare specializations, kept alive more by librarians than by professional historians.
The preservation of traditional humanistic research is thus a matter of some urgency. The problem might be addressed by the new civics centers that have emerged in the last few years to combat the politicization of the academy. The National Endowment for the Humanities under proper leadership—or other, uncorrupt foundations for the humanities—might help. Here, though, I want to make the narrower case that teachers involved in classical education could benefit from time away from their schools, conducting research in degree programs designed to cultivate the life of the mind. Having learned to practice sound scholarship, they might in time help to restore standards, should it ever become possible to refound our learned traditions.
All secondary school teachers are familiar with the problem of burnout. Classical school teachers generally take pleasure in passing on their knowledge and are rewarded when their students respond to their enthusiasm. But keeping their own enthusiasm alight can be difficult, especially in small schools where they have few colleagues, few resources, and little time for independent reading. Preparing lessons from the same materials year after year is a formula for teacher burnout and tedious classes. It is not the way to inspire students with a love of learning.
Summer programs for “professional development”—those sponsored by the NEH, for example—do exist, but most last no more than a month. And they suffer from the same pathologies and the same perverse incentive structure as do other parts of modern academe. Public school districts reward teachers financially for earning graduate degrees, mostly at schools of education. There the teachers learn “pedagogy,” a curriculum that is taken by too many of their professors as an opportunity for political indoctrination. Such a course of study is unlikely to appeal to classical school teachers.
Classical school teachers need a different kind of sabbatical, one focused on the subjects they love. They need a chance to renew the life of the mind, the freedom to pursue their intellectual interests among like-minded researchers. They need to be among fellow historians, fellow literary scholars, fellow philosophers, fellow students of the arts and religion, in a beautiful, peaceful environment—what the classical poets called a locus amoenus, a place to refresh the soul. They need to develop their ideas in writing, perhaps with senior scholars present to offer guidance. They need, in other words, something like the environment offered by Oxford and Cambridge for their Master of Philosophy and Master of Studies degrees, a year to live the contemplative life, laying down stores of knowledge and reflection for later use. They would return to the classroom ready to fulfill the motto of the Dominican order: contemplata aliis tradere, to pass on the fruits of contemplation to others. With their own knowledge deepened and matured, and their own curiosity in that state of divine dissatisfaction that Aristotle in his Metaphysics called wonder (to thaumazein), they would be ready to stimulate wonder in their students. And wonder, as Aristotle wrote, is the beginning of philosophy—the love of wisdom.
