Rupture and Return: Hierarchy and Pedagogy

Abstract

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• Rupture and Return:Hierarchy and Pedagogy
• Amy Pistone

as we are all acutely aware, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have been catastrophic on a variety of fronts. Thinking about both rupture and return, however, I want to reflect on both what was lost and what was gained. To begin, I focus my comments about rupture on the ways that very real harm was done to and by members of the field, in ways that I suspect have gone unnoticed by many of the perpetrators of harm and, as a result, cannot easily be mended. In terms of return, I offer some thoughts on the adjustments to our teaching, often necessitated by the crises we found ourselves in, that we want to keep, if in modified form, as we return to this new normal.

Starting at the ruptures on the level of the school or university, we all saw a lot about our institutions laid bare. That is not to say that the ideologies and priorities in play were not there before the pandemic, but the pandemic has been a stress test of institutions in so many ways. It became abundantly clear that some institutions think of their employees as expendable frontline workers in the fight to turn a profit. Some schools trusted instructors to make the best decisions for themselves and their students while others issued demands that classes meet in person, health concerns be damned. We all saw, in different ways, how our institutions balanced their ostensible missions and values against a model that treats students as customers. When faced with the myriad ways that compassion and efficiency came into conflict over the past several years, which people and institutions were willing to take a stand for compassion? Far too many instructors had no one shielding them from the political pressures to surveil and discipline students, to adopt flexible or (heaven forbid!) less "rigorous" forms of assessment, to demand forms of attendance and engagement that ignored the cascading crises we were facing. Many institutions have a great deal of work ahead of them to earn back the trust that was shattered, and some wounds have yet to heal—and may never do so. [End Page 307]

In terms of the specifics of our discipline, the ruptures have a slightly different character. There are many structural issues, centered around the choices made by professional organizations, that continue to impact members of the field today. In particular, I am thinking about the conferences and other events hosted by professional organizations and the investment of money, time, and labor that went into making (some) events accessible for everyone. We also saw which conferences were (and are) unwilling to do so—implicitly telling swaths of our field that their participation was optional. Throughout this process, we saw that steps toward greater accessibility (things that disability advocates had been told simply were not possible, like livestreaming and captioning) were in fact possible, when there was sufficient political and social will. We saw, over and over again, that a budget is a moral document. The choice of how to allocate funds is an expression of the priorities of an organization. Some organizations took seriously the health-related needs of their members (albeit imperfectly, at times) and others showed no interest in those members' concerns. Those too are ruptures that will be slow to heal.

A less obvious, though no less deep, form of rupture is the interpersonal one between members of the field. Some of this was a function of the political climate more broadly and the ways that hateful speech has entered the mainstream. These trends coincided with the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but they were not entirely the result of it. However, in the crucible of social isolation, stress, fear, uncertainty, grief, financial concerns, damage to mental health, and everything else that accompanied the global pandemic, a lot of simmering tension came to a boil. Against this backdrop, many of us have felt the lasting impact of seeing things that members of our field were comfortable saying publicly (on listservs, on social media) about their fellow Classicists or the state of the field.

I do not say this to...