Reckonings

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• Reckonings
• Matthew S. Santirocco

keywords

sustainability of Classics and SCS, misappropriations of Greece and Rome, race and racism, accessibility, SCS mission and priorities, SCS annual meeting, reparative scholarship, open access publishing, educational innovation

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i speak to you tonight with a great sense of humility and gratitude.¹ As a graduate student over forty years ago and then as a young untenured professor, I found in the American Philological Association (APA), as our Society for Classical Studies (SCS) was then called, the larger intellectual community, professional mentoring, and personal support that I needed, but that none of my institutions at the time could provide on their own. Over the years I have tried to give back to the organization by serving it in various capacities, among them as editor of its monograph series, as vice president for professional matters, and as financial trustee. I want to thank you for giving me one more, and very special, opportunity to serve as your president.

The past three years have been challenging ones for all of us. But the SCS has shown remarkable resilience. It is impossible to overstate the important [End Page 287] role played by our executive director, Helen Cullyer. During her tenure, there has not been a year in which she has not had to manage some sort of disruption, be it operational, financial, political, and even, climatological. In all these situations, her foresight, judiciousness, creativity, and energy have been equaled only by her deep commitment to the Society's mission, her responsiveness to our diverse membership, and her support of the Board and especially this grateful president. We are also fortunate to have on our team Cherane Ali, who, together with Helen, had to turn on the proverbial dime to rethink our annual meeting, first when COVID necessitated moving it online, and then this year when we are having our first hybrid meeting. Moving from our administrative team, I want to thank the Board and the many volunteers who take on SCS responsibilities. Finally, we all owe a great debt of gratitude to one such colleague, my predecessor as president, Professor Shelley Haley, who cares so deeply about moving our field in the right direction. When she handed me the gavel a year ago, I committed to continuing that work.

I decided that the best way I could do that was to draw on my experience as a Classicist who has been engaged in academic administration for over three decades, as a department chair, center director, college dean, and academic vice provost.² I have been fortunate to be at institutions that had the will and the wherewithal to be ambitious on behalf of the humanities and especially ancient studies. Of course, this is not the case everywhere, and many programs are underresourced and even at risk. For that reason, I invited the SCS Board during my presidential year to make sustainability a theme for our discussions. By sustainability, I mean how to ensure the viability of this institution, the SCS, and also how to ensure the vitality of our profession, Classical Studies. Yesterday's presidential panel, "Ensuring a Future for Classical Studies in the Academy: Institutional Strategies for Survival and Success," explored different ways in which our field can organize itself at the institutional level. Tonight, I would like to focus on the larger challenges and opportunities our field faces and on the role the SCS can play in moving us forward. To that end, I have entitled my remarks "Reckonings." A word that is enjoying wide currency of late in our political discourse, it has several meanings that are relevant to the current state of our profession. At its most basic, to reckon means to think, and I will be sharing with you some thoughts which I have been developing, on the basis of the extensive reading I have done this year and the many conversations I have had with members of the SCS, especially younger members. But reckoning also means taking stock of where we are, keeping the accounts, [End Page 288] so to speak. Finally, a reckoning is also a bill or an invoice, an occasion to pay back or, perhaps in our case, to...