The craziness of cancel culture has struck again. This time at Princeton University. The infamous university decided recently to remove Greek and Latin for Classics majors to combat what it called “institutional racism.”
According to Princeton Alumni Weekly, faculty members sadly approved modifications to the Classics department, including the elimination of the “classics” track, which required intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the focus. Students are no longer required to take Greek or Latin.
A statement on the department’s website states that “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,” the statement says. “We condemn and reject in the strongest possible terms the racism that has made our department and our field inhospitable to Black and non-Black scholars of colour, and we affirm that Black Lives Matter,” the statement reads.
The debate arose in response to an early February profile in the New York Times Magazine of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Dominican Republic immigrant who is now a professor of classics at Princeton University and believes that the classical tradition is inextricably linked with white supremacy and that his discipline, as it currently exists, may not deserve a future.
What are your thoughts on this cancel culture in the education system?
This is ridiculous. How is learning a language racist? What’s next I won’t need to learn Spanish to be a Spanish major? Being able to read and translate the original texts is extremely important in historical and classical fields especially when researching.
I am not Greek nor do I speak Greek or Latin. I have found, however, that my rudimentary knowledge of Latin and Greek as the roots of English words has helped me to understand the cultural history and significance of my native tomgue, English. I am as fascinated by Asian or African or indigenous sources of American English words as I am by any information that expands my knowledge of the meaning of my thoughts and my expression of them. I aver that we should seek to expand rather than restrict our knowledge of what goes into making us who we are.