Classicizing Philadelphia

On this eve of Independence Day, I take my title from an article by Paul Allen Miller.[1] Allen and I crossed paths briefly at the University of Texas more than forty years ago, and I learned that what he has to say is always worth thinking about. This article is no exception.

“Tyranny, Fear, and Parrhesia” was written when the first Trump administration was well under way, but it opens with a story from the day after the 2016 election. Miller, then a vice provost at the University of South Carolina, looked around the room at a meeting of senior administrators and said, “We are like Heidegger in 1932.”

Miller reports that his colleagues “stared at him” and said nothing. In November of 2016, comparing the election of Donald Trump to the German elections of 1932 that brought Hitler to power probably seemed a bit overwrought. And implicitly comparing the good people who administer a great American university to Martin Heidegger, the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University—and a philosopher who, despite that, cannot be ignored—verges on insult and perhaps accounts for the stares.

Miller was not wrong in 2016, only premature. On July 4, 2025, things are much worse, and at the same time much clearer. In recent weeks we have seen one great American university after another capitulate to pressure from the Trump administration—which is to say, agree to the demands or whims of someone who can now fairly be called an autocrat. University presidents resign under pressure from the White House. Columbia, Harvard and Penn make deals; other schools follow. Yet none of the presidents, provosts, deans, and other administrators who have signed off on these deals can be compared to Heidegger, who believed in and enthusiastically promoted the Nazi takeover of German universities. If asked, the American administrators would no doubt say something like what Acting President of Columbia Claire Shipman said in an email to alumni on June 12: It is “essential to restore our research partnership with the government, if possible,” and “following the law and attempting to resolve a complaint is not capitulation.” Miller’s staring colleagues, he reports, felt that their first obligation was “to preserve the institution.” They had to “weather the storm.” They would just “ignore these people and do the right thing.” It was important not to be “self-indulgent and irresponsible.”

As a former administrator, I sympathize with these sentiments. I suspect I would have echoed them if I had been at that meeting. The welfare and continued existence of the institution must come first. Now, however, all seems different. The changes in our Republic in just the first few months of the Trump presidency seem to me to demand a different response. Parrhesia, the third word in Miller’s title, means “frankness of speech.” It is the appropriate word for the speech of a philosopher who addresses a tyrant and takes responsibility for both the truth of his words and the consequences of saying them. It is time for those of us in academe who can to become parrhesiasts. Our institutions may may become poorer and smaller, but our souls will not, and our Republic may be saved along with them.

~Lee T. Pearcy
July 3, 2025

[1] Miller, Paul Allen. “Tyranny, Fear, and Parrhesia: Truth in the Neoliberal University, or ‘How Do I Know I’m Not Heidegger?’” Symplokē, vol. 29, no. 1/2, 2021, pp. 179–95. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48642811. Accessed 1 July 2025.

As I recall, some readers of The New Yorker felt a bit of a shock in 1998 when they read Toni Morrison’s characterization of Bill Clinton as “our first Black president.” I was only a bit less electrified when it occurred to me, shortly after noon on Martin Luther King Day, that Donald Trump may be our first post-modern president.

By “postmodernism” in this context I mean Foucault, the most influential of the post-modernists who have focused on politics and the state.  If you want the political Foucault in a nutshell, it’s this: systems of power don’t just depend on structures of discourse, they somehow are those structures. How people talk about prisons or clinics or sex in the city guides and creates those institutions, and whoever controls the discourse controls the levers of power.

Which takes us to the Gulf of America, as viewed from a long way off—say, from the peak of Mt. McKinley. Trump has always been focused on names, describing, and discourse, and he has made his fortune on turning words into money, and money into power. If he says the Trump brand is worth millions, it is. (Unless, of course, a court rules otherwise, as it did in two civil and criminal cases in New York. As my sister in Texas says, by way of capping a list of Trump’s flaws, “He may not even be rich.”) In attempting to bend reality by bending words and applying his Sharpie to the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, our 47th president aligns himself with the crowd of renamers who have changed the labels of buildings and holidays in the belief that doing so somehow made injustice go away.  It won’t. Reality—not things, as the Wittgenstein of the Tractacus said, but the alignment between things and how we describe them—has a way of refuting the postmodernist belief that discourse is all there is—that you can turn a brand into dollars, or a meme into money.  In the next few years, let’s cling tight to facts and call things what they are, as best we can tell.

~Lee T. Pearcy
January 22, 2025

I don’t go into Bryn Mawr’s Canaday Library as often as I used to, before the building of the wonderful Carpenter Library for archaeology, art history, and classics, but last week I found myself in Canaday’s main lobby to pick up a book from Interlibrary Loan. The lobby was busy. Students sat at long tables cluttered with books, scissors, glue, ribbons, and other craft supplies, and heaps of other books waited on carts. A librarian I know called me over to look and explained. The students were learning to fold books into hedgehogs, flowers, hearts, and other decorative shapes.

The books, my librarian friend assured me, had all been deaccessioned and were available online.

Here, I thought, is one of those moments when one can see the old order of knowledge giving way to the new. The books on the carts appeared to be mostly back issues of periodicals, which are indeed available online and therefore surplus to requirements at a modern academic library. To the undergraduate students especially, academic books—the physical, bound volumes—are beginning to be alien objects. In 2019, when last I taught a course at Bryn Mawr, I assigned a few books and had the bookstore stock them. Most of the students preferred to read them online, and the bound volumes languished in the bookstore. I had imagined a lost world, where “reading” for a course meant underlining, writing in margins (always in pencil, as one of my teachers advised me, so that you can eradicate stupidities when you’re older), taking notes in a notebook, and for much of my reading thumbing a dictionary and commentary beside the text that I was reading.

As I walked down Canaday’s front stairs, I thought of mummy cartonnage. In Egypt’s Ptolemaic and Roman periods, old papyrus documents, surplus to whatever the requirements of the day happened to be, were often torn into strips and converted to a kind of gesso-covered papier-mâché used to make mummy casings. When these cartonnages are dismantled, sometimes an important text, or parts of one, can be read—thus we know, for example, about Sappho’s poem on old age, and some new bits of Simonides. Classicists have to envision time in centuries and millennia, not the three or four decades that it’s taken to push into oblivion those books on the carts, waiting to be turned into hedgehogs. Will someone, someday a millennium or so from now, sit patiently unfolding a hedgehog hoping to recover what remains of volume 27 of Rheinisches Museum für Philologie?

~Lee T. Pearcy
March 29, 2024