Last summer, after Princeton decided to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its School of Public and International Affairs, Padilla was a co-author of an open letter that pushed the university to do more. Classics was a discipline around which the modern Western university grew, and Padilla believes that it has sown racism through the entirety of higher education. For several years, he has been speaking openly about the harm caused by practitioners of classics in the two millenniums since antiquity: the classical justifications of slavery, race science, colonialism, Nazism and other 20th-century fascisms. Padilla, a leading historian of Rome who teaches at Princeton and was born in the Dominican Republic, was one of the panelists that day. Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “ Every month is white history month.” Recently the effort had gained a new sense of urgency: Classics had been embraced by the far right, whose members held up the ancient Greeks and Romans as the originators of so-called white culture. Long revered as the foundation of “Western civilization,” the field was trying to shed its self-imposed reputation as an elitist subject overwhelmingly taught and studied by white men. On top of the problems facing the humanities as a whole - vanishing class sizes caused by disinvestment, declining prominence and student debt - classics was also experiencing a crisis of identity. But that year, the conference featured a panel on “The Future of Classics,” which, the participants agreed, was far from secure. In the world of classics, the exchange between Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Mary Frances Williams has become known simply as “the incident.” Their back-and-forth took place at a Society of Classical Studies conference in January 2019 - the sort of academic gathering at which nothing tends to happen that would seem controversial or even interesting to those outside the discipline. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

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