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If they are able to, they will grow much bigger still. Demographic trends are about to deliver a big increase in the number of school leavers. Only around half of all younger people currently go to university, but a staggering 97% of mothers of young children want their offspring to get there.

Meanwhile, politicians of all parties say they want more spending on research and development as a way of delivering future economic growth. And, as a higher proportion of research spending goes to universities in the UK than in most other countries, this would directly boost the higher education sector and universities bottom lines.

Given this positive story, why has the credit rating agency Moodys just downgraded its perceptions of some UK universities, including Oxbridge, Leeds, Keele and De Montfort?

Economic and political upheaval

The answer is that universities are not unconnected islands; they are rooted in wider society. When there is economic or political upheaval, they are often among the first to feel the chill winds.

The downgrading by Moodys reflects the tougher environment in which UK universities are now operating and all the signs suggest things could get worse before they get better. The challenges are international, national and regional.

Internationally, there is huge competition. Only this week, Clarivate Analytics showed China has snatched the UKs number two spot behind the United States for the concentration of highly cited researchers.

Chinas rise is not just in research; it is in teaching too. In the West, we regard China as a source of international students for our universities. We typically forget that 1,000 Chinese universities are now attracting hundreds of thousands of international students of their own.

General election

At a national level, the current UK general election campaign is adding extra uncertainty. Resolving the UKs future relationship with the European Union could be helpful, but a bad Brexit would mean less research funding and less staff and student mobility.

The election manifestos are now confirming that more than one party wants to end Englands high tuition fees, which would mean less money for teaching as well as likely new restrictions on student places. Meanwhile, the culture wars that have unsettled universities in various countries, including the US and Hungary, are getting closer to British shores.

At a regional level, higher education is perhaps even more out of favour. Take the potential Oxford-Cambridge arc, which the property company Savills has just declared to be one of the greatest opportunities for economic growth in Europe. Instead of celebrating this as a fantastic prospect, the election candidates of the main political parties on the route are falling over themselves trying to outdo one another in their opposition.

So higher education institutions are aware they are living in more febrile, more competitive and more challenging times. University staff feel under such enormous pressure that many are on the cusp of industrial action.

Their managers meanwhile argue, with hard evidence and some force, that keeping the UK university sectors world-class position means not only surviving but having the resources to deliver more teaching, undertake better research and build improved campuses. When other countries are developing their higher education systems so fast, to stand still means to go backwards relative to your competitors.

International fees

It is often forgotten that, of all the things universities do, only one makes a financial surplus. The income from home and EU students roughly cover the costs of teaching them, while research projects are generally severely underfunded. So there is a shortfall that has to be made up in the UK (as in competitor nations, like Australia) from international student fees.

That is another reminder that higher education is at its best when it is at its most connected. Universities were originally made up of travelling bands of scholars with little respect for boundaries. Later on, the great cities of the world founded universities with a greater sense of place, but they sucked in people from around the world.

That history should remind us that, in our own century too, the most successful academic endeavours will be those that are both globally interconnected and have the support of their local communities.

All UK universities have bold strategic plans to stay at the top of their game as well as globally competitive. The downgrading by Moodys wont send them into an immediate panic, but it will still concern governing bodies. It could, in time, affect their capacity to borrow to invest and to work with partners at home and abroad. Most importantly, it could be seen as a warning sign of worse to come.

Nick Hillman is director of the Oxford-based Higher Education Policy Institute, an independent think tank.

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UK universities face chill winds of change - University World News

I visited a performance center in Richmond, California last week and came away mightily impressed. Hows this for a mission statement

East Bay Center for the Performing Arts engages youth and young adults in imagining and creating new worlds for themselves and new visions for their communities through the inspiration and discipline of rigorous training in world performance traditions.

Wow! This is a mission statement for UNICEF, the United Nations, the European Union, and yes, the United States of America. This is exactly the mission the world needs, and is missing right now, to heal wounds that divide us as we approach 2020.

I had the pleasure of dining with the Performing Arts social worker, Corinna, who facilitates getting kids off the streets of Richmond and into programs that provide new ways of seeing the world, and new ways of contributing to that world. She is a young Mother Teresa in a hardscrabble town. Were I not older than Methuselah I would have asked to join her staff, or at least sign up for an African drumming class.

The Center makes a strong statement as to why arts matter in public education

The arts rewire the brain to make strong and more plentiful neurological connections. Heaven knows we could all use more neurological connections, one or two would be a windfall for me.

And they dont just teach music, dance and art, they cultivate creative and critical thinking, collaboration and communication. As many students begin this growth odyssey in seventh or eighth grade, much attention is paid to nurturing an ability to act in a world beyond the center. By participating in production projects, students link with the broader community. This remarkable center has been reaching out and touching thousands of young people across Richmond for 51 years, in-school, after-school and in-house on 11th Street.

They work closely with classroom teachers and principals to align workshops designed to meet the needs of the students, so consequently, focus falls on cultivating cultural activities outside the center.

For college-bound students they help research and identify schools, grants, scholarships and financial aid opportunities. This is amazing stuff. Every community should have such a Center for the Performing Arts, for if every community were to have one, well, we would no longer live in fear of nuclear wars, cyber wars, or culture wars. Good- fellowship is their game, and they play it very, very well.

As I was about to leave the center, filled to the gills with optimism, I turned to the development manager and extended my hand

You are building something here much larger and grander and more important than a performance center. You are building a model for the United Nations, thats what I think.

He smiled a humble smile, extended his hand, and said, Thanks, Dad.

Learn more about McAvoy Layne at http://www.ghostoftwain.com.

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Pine Nuts: Power of the arts - Sierra Sun

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) It was a running joke in his AP U.S. history class at Saint Joseph High School: Would Peter Buttigieg the smartest kid in class, language whiz and devotee of John F. Kennedy use his unusual last name in his eventual run for president of the United States? Or would he have a better shot of winning the voters of the future if he went by Montgomery, his middle name?

It was the late 1990s, Bill Clinton was in the White House, and a round-faced teenager in South Bend, Indiana, was viewed by many around him as an eventual successor. As early as grade school, Buttigieg exhibited an attention-grabbing combination of brains and curiosity, the sort of kid with a reputation among kids and teachers. He would be named high school valedictorian, voted senior class president and chosen Most Likely to be U.S. President. He sat at the adults table.

Now, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg not Montgomery is indeed running for the highest office in the land.

Its an audacious leap. No mayor has ever gone straight to the White House (let alone from a city of just over 100,000). No president has ever been so young (hell be 39 on Inauguration Day). And no commander in chief has ever been openly gay (or had a husband).

But people who have known Buttigieg since his Indiana boyhood say it all feels predictable.

Interviews with nearly two dozen people who knew him in his formative years paint a picture of a child with an extraordinary range of talent and ambition, cultivated by a tight-knit family able to indulge his many interests. There were clear signs of the candidates earnestness and intensity. Friends and family say he worked to overcome an early shyness by throwing himself into challenges. All the while he felt a bit apart.

It was always understood, says Patrick Bayliss, a friend from high school. It was just kind of matter of fact that he was special and brilliant.

Now Buttigiegs intellect is at the core of his campaign narrative. Hes won headlines for his achievements and improbable hobbies. (Speaks Norwegian? Check. Plays the didgeridoo? Yup.) Admirers often cite his intelligence when asked about his appeal, arguing it makes up for a shortage of experience.

But as he rises in early-caucus Iowa, Buttigiegs self-confidence is exposing him to accusations that he is pretentious and entitled. When he declared Iowa was becoming a two-person race between Elizabeth Warren and him dismissing a former vice president and several senators Sen. Kamala Harris called him nave. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has repeatedly argued that the young mayor is benefiting from sexism a woman with such a short resume wouldnt be taken seriously. On Wednesday, she pointedly noted Buttigieg is a local official who lost his only statewide race.

I think experience should matter, she said.

Buttigieg doesnt argue much with the knocks, but he doesnt seem bothered either, telling reporters during his New Hampshire bus trip this month: I guess Im comfortable doing things in a way thats kind of out of order or unusual for my age and my experience.

__On the campaign trail, he frequently invokes the hollowed-out city of South Bend, the onetime home of the automaker Studebaker, which shut down two decades before he was born.

But Buttigieg grew up in another side of South Bend: the cluster of neighborhoods around the University of Notre Dame, home to thousands of students and professors. His parents had stable jobs at the elite Catholic school, and he was educated in private schools whiter and wealthier than the surrounding community.

His father, Joseph, was a professor of English, garnering attention for his scholarship in critical theory and civil society. Joseph earned degrees in his home country the Mediterranean island nation of Malta then from Heythrop College in Oxford, England, before moving to the United States to earn his doctorate. He met Buttigiegs mother, a linguist and Army brat with roots in Indiana, when they were both on faculty at New Mexico State University.

They married and moved to South Bend in 1980. Peter was born two years later. The young family eventually settled on a tree-lined street less than two miles from campus.

Across the river and downtown, abandoned factories, boarded-up stores and empty lots plagued South Bend. Up the hill, it was just a walk to the Golden Dome, the halo at the center of campus.

Peter the name he went by before he became known as Mayor Pete was a curious and quiet toddler who learned to read at the age of 2 or 3, his mother, Anne Montgomery, said in an interview.

His parents sent him to a Montessori school, where learning is self-directed, hands-on and less structured than at a traditional grade school. But by 6th grade, his parents moved him to a more traditional private school. Buttigieg had figured out how to game the system, said Judith Fox, a longtime family friend, recalling the decision.

My mind wandered a lot when I was a kid. And so, it took a nudge from them here and then just to stay on track. Buttigieg said in an interview with AP.

The smart new kid was sometimes a target. Other kids would want to take him down a peg, his mother says. His unusual name drew snickers.

The experience, she believes, was a lesson in how cruel people can be and helped steel him to insensitive comments later. He won them over, his mother says, by learning to prove himself without aggravating other kids.

Buttigieg remembers a teacher explaining that a child picking on him was just trying to get attention. Something clicked, he says, and he decided the best way to deal with bullies was to get to know them. The lesson still works sometimes when he comes under criticism, he says.

While you dont want to reward bad behavior, you do need to make sure that people feel seen.

___

In his room, young Peter kept a collection of model planes and a poster of the inside of a cockpit. He aspired to become a pilot or even an astronaut, although his poor eyesight would make that impossible. He became fascinated with the leader closely associated with the space program, JFK, and others in the Kennedy clan.

At around 11 or 12, when asked what he wanted for his birthday, Peter requested a copy of Profiles in Courage, Kennedys 1955 book on acts of political bravery by eight U.S. senators throughout history. (I had no idea what that was, says his friend Joe Geglio, who bought the book for his friend.)

Peter would memorize excerpts of Kennedy speeches. In high school, his close friend James Mueller remembers him reciting a favorite passage from the presidents 1962 moon speech: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Later, when Buttigieg decided to join the military, he would join the Navy, like JFK.

Buttigieg said the Kennedy mystique loomed large in a community as Catholic as South Bend. He was aware that the presidential campaign of Sen. Robert Kennedy, and the Kennedy tragedies, were defining experiences for his parents generation. Amid the culture wars of the Clinton era, he looked back nostalgically at a time when big things seemed possible.

By comparison, weve been stuck and havent made progress on a lot of the big issues, Mueller said of his friends fixation with the Kennedy era.

By the end of 8th grade, Peter was named valedictorian, which gave him a chance to deliver his own big speech. His performance practiced and strikingly mature is still remembered today by people who were there.

It wasnt like watching an 8th grader up there, says classmate Gavin Ferlic.

The adults left the gym commenting about his poise. It wouldnt be the last time Buttigieg found a constituency in an older generation.

Classmate Loran Parker recalls her grandparents turned to her with what would become a familiar refrain: Peter would make a great politician.

Soon after, the South Bend Tribune published a profile when Buttigieg won a statewide essay contest on the importance of the law. In truth, 14-year-old Peter told the newspaper, it wasnt the law, but aeronautics or journalism that really interested him. The article noted he had won numerous other awards and was set to perform in a statewide piano competition later in the year he started playing at age 5 and aspired to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

There are a lot of things Id like to do, he told the Tribune.

__

By the time he arrived at high school, Buttigiegs reputation had preceded him. Julie Chismar, a teacher at Saint Joe, recalls a buzz among French teachers, who had heard about his language abilities.

Peter had begun to learn French in Montessori and before he got to high school was well on his way to fluency. He also took up Spanish and on his own started learning to read Korean from a friend, Judy Kim. (His campaign does not list Korean as among the seven languages he speaks other than English.)

Its difficult to find someone to utter a harsh word about young Buttigieg. He wasnt a jock or the most popular kid, but he wasnt an outcast. Classmates described him as thoughtful, with a dry wit. If a kid in middle school or high school can respect a fellow kid, they respected him. He didnt show off his intelligence or raise his hand to answer every question. He held back.

Occasionally, there were signs of the reserve and stiffness that sometimes gets mocked today. When he first met Peter, Mueller, his close high school friend, would tease him good-naturedly just like he did with his brothers. Peter, who had no siblings, did not appreciate it.

He likes to make the joke that when he first met me, he didnt like me very much Mueller says.

The introvert pushed himself beyond his comfort zone. He joined drama his senior year and performed in A Midsummer Nights Dream. He learned the didgeridoo and played the several-foot-long Australian wind instrument onstage.

In Peters basement after school, he and his friends would watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, play old school Nintendo games or have Nerf battles, then go outside to play football or soccer. As they got older, his friends would play music together: He learned guitar and bass, and especially liked playing Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix songs, using his wah-wah pedal.

Even though I wasnt out, and in many ways was not really out to myself, I felt that kind of tension, Buttigieg said on his campaign bus. It wasnt only from being gay, I mean, also just being culturally a little different. Just because I was the son of a Mediterranean immigrant, an academic family, that some people thought was weird, because I had a name that was easy to make fun of and hard to pronounce.

Several people close to Buttigieg say they never knew he was gay until he came out in his 30s, after he returned from his military tour in Afghanistan. He said at a CNN town hall in October that he was well into his 20s before he acknowledged it to himself.

Even his mother says she had no suspicions before he came out to her and his father in 2015, not long before he made it public in an op-ed in the local newspaper.

I wonder if I was blind, his mother told the AP. He was a private person about personal matters, so I did not inquire or ask. Offered all kinds of opportunities. But no.

At home, friends who grew up with Buttigieg remember his parents as warm and supportive of whatever Peter wanted to pursue, his house inhabited by an affectionate rescue dog named Olivia, the walls lined with books, art and his mothers photography, a piano filling the front room.

He and his mom would joke together. He and his dad would obsess and commiserate over Notre Dame football. Politics and current events were in the air at his house, he says. His father would come home from work, pour himself a drink and open The New York Times. Theyd watch the evening news together. Friends and colleagues from the university would come to dinner, and young Peter would join in the conversation.

I felt like, we spoke as adults from a relatively early age, he says of his parents. I was a kind of serious-minded kid, and they took me seriously.

Those who have known Buttigieg from childhood say they recognize the same things during this presidential run that have driven him all his life.

He says he wants to do big things, to make an impact. Asked whats driving that, he becomes quiet and circumspect.

I dont know, I just do, he said. I mean, you only get one turn at life, right? And I think its really important that you do as much with it as you can.

When pressed, he continued:

Where is it going to matter that it was me and not somebody else doing something? And am I making the best use of limited time? And I think I always felt that way.

At an arena in Des Moines, Iowa, this month, his supporters chanted his name and hoisted signs reading BOOT-EDGE-EDGE, the slogan he uses to help people pronounce it. He kicked off his speech by invoking the memory of another young man with a funny name, Barack Obama.

In his high school history class, when his teacher or other kids would advise him to use his middle name to run for president, his friend Judy Kim recalls that Peter would listen and even welcome their advice.

His last name was too difficult to pronounce. It looked strange when written out. It wasnt distinguished like other American presidents.

Hed hear them out, then stand by his position. Peter was proud of his Maltese heritage and proud of his last name.

When he ran, he would tell them, it would be as Buttigieg.

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He's a front-runner in Iowa, but just who exactly is Pete Buttigieg? - WCTV

Politicians need to drop the dehumanising rhetoric amid the debate over trans rights, says Laura Waddell.

While the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) debate drags on and worsens for all involved, two Scottish Parliament motions put forward by SNP MSP Emma Harper and Labour MSP Monica Lennon to mark yesterdays International Trans Day of Remembrance shows the empathy that should have accompanied the discussion throughout but which has been sorely lacking, to the discredit and shame of several other politicians.

Critics are right to say its frustrating to see a country which self-brands as progressive allow discussion to be dragged into the gutter while those whose rights are at stake look on.

For the sake of trans people, for women, and for the state of our public discourse, enough of the bad faith actions. The Womens Pledges which have recently sprung up to sit vulture-like on SNP, Labour and Lib Dem fringes are not party affiliated and further single-issue interests under the guise of speaking for all women; the trans-exclusionary alliances with Facebook pages run by young American men attached to Trump, anti-choice, and other pages designed to stoke political fallout from culture wars; the politicians who use the deeply irresponsible, imflammatory, and dishonest phrase war on women about the policy consultation and whove let the idea they are leading the charge go to their heads.

READ MORE: Row over tension between womens and trans rights divides Scottish Labour

READ MORE: Census should count trans people as who they really are Vic Valentine

Enough of those who direct online mobs to harass trans-inclusive Scottish womens charities, shelters, libraries, and bookshops, weakening public faith in these important feminist organisations whove work with determination and grit over the decades for everything they have. Most of this doesnt even pertain to the proposed policy which has attracted like a magnet a collected debris of homophobia, misogyny, men whove never taken an interest in womens rights in their puff, conspiracy theorists and party agitators, condensed like a fatberg in the river of Scottish public conversation. None of it pertains to gender-based violence women all over the world face on a daily, structural basis, workplace inequality, or disproportionate effects of austerity on working-class women, all of which adds up to a real war on women, no matter what Twitter valkyries insist while encouraging fear of trans people.

US religious right

Questions also need to be asked about external right-wing interest in Scottish politics. The US religious right are known to have taken interest in anti-LGBT and trans-exclusive groups in the UK, and in some cases, high sums of money have been raised in crowdfunders despite groups refusing to reveal either their identities or to specify their aims. And yet, some of our politicians have engaged with such groups in public.

Is it the case that those jumping on the bandwagon are so drawn to the idea of excluding trans people they are able to turn a blind eye to what theyre aligning themselves with?

Some of these groups exist to promote a traditional family model, explitly stating themselves to be opposed to feminism and abortion. Culture wars being imported from the US is the very last thing we need.

A recent furore around census questions claimed it offered a menu of 23 sexualities. This was quickly shown to be misleading.

READ MORE: Trans-gender politics puts very basis of feminism at risk Susan Dalgety

READ MORE: Day of celebration to focus on trans equality

The most frequent sexualities of straight, gay, and bi were options but the option for respondants to input other dropped down to show previous user contributions, which is where the confusion lay. Some of the contributions will be earnest, others, in the tradition of the census from year dot, will be from jokers. From a data gathering perspective, the suggestive prompt displaying user contributions is not great design. But the misleading interpretation was seized upon by all manner of people in public life, ignoring the more mundane reality in their haste to draw parallels with gender self-identification and mock the spectrum of sexualities as nonsensical.

It was the kind of wilful obfuscation of truth we dont want to encourage in Scottish politics; a winning-at-all-costs desperation willing to fight dirty and bitter. When some gay people warned the GRA debate was going in a direction which might stoke homophobia, this is why.

Step out from the trenches

Some engaging in this behaviour were there for Section 28. So where has it all gone so wrong for them? Having questions about the GRA and any policy impact on womens rights is sensible. Many of the womens organisations who responded to the original public consultation had nuanced answers, drawing on the wealth of their experience. But these serious discussions are blown up by agitators whove dug trenches and declared themselves at war with anyone remotely empathetic towards trans people.

This approach will never, and nor is it intended to, find consensus or solutions. They need to take off the helmet, stop basking in the dubious praise of anonymous Twitter trolls, and rediscover perspective, not least for the sake of the public theyre meant to serve but the dismal tone they set for public discourse on our rights.

Before it was postponed, an event promoted by Jenny Marra and Joan McAlpine was scheduled to take place in Holyrood on International Trans Day of Remembrance.

The line-up included speakers whove claimed trangenderism is a fetish and that trans people parasitically occupy womens bodies. Instead, last night was marked by a candlelit vigil held in front of Parliament, a partnership by groups including Scottish Trans Alliance, Equality Network, Stonewall Scotland, LGBT Youth Scotland and Zero Tolerance. The event notice stated We believe that equality and human rights for everyone are best achieved through collaborative and constructive engagement across all marginalised groups.

As Emma Harper said on Twitter about her motion, It is more important than ever to be open to, value and respect everyone when debating social issues in our society! Monica Lennons motion recognised the need to tackle inequality in all its forms in order to end violence against groups that continue to be persecuted, including trans and non-binary people in Scotland. More Scottish politicians need to demonstrate this sentiment and drop dehumanising rhetoric.

This conversation has to move forward, literally; the Act hangs in the balance and must proceed. Doing whats best for women and trans people depends on our representatives getting a grip and conducting themselves with a bit of humanity.

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The one thing the bitter debate over feminism and trans rights needs right now: a bit of humanity Laura Waddell - Scotland on Sunday

Left to right: Vergil, Cicero, Livy.

Many revere Latin as the soul of Western civilization. But its beauty should not keep us from reckoningwith its history.

Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless LanguageNicola Gardini, translated from the Italian by Todd PortnowitzFarrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (cloth)

Imagine the rush to leave your doomed citythe fires, the smoke, the uncertainty of where you will go, how long you will stay when you get there. In those few moments to consider your possessions, you think, Ah, but I might have time for a book! What do you pull from your shelves? A sacred text? Some handy and serviceable issues of Popular Mechanics? Or perhaps, like the Oxford Renaissance literature professor Nicola Gardini, you reach for Vergils Aeneid. In the event of global catastrophe, he writes in his newly translated book Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language, that would be the book to salvage. At that moment you become Aeneas, bending to carry the pater of a dying patria: your Anchises is the epic of Imperial Romeand the legacy and detritus that comes with it.

Deeply embroiled in the culture wars, Latinremainsa totemic languageattractive to religious schools, nationalists, and traditionalists alike.

Vergil, Anchises, patria. If these words are foreign to youif you dont know that patria is the nominative of country (really, fatherland), or that in Latin my phrase above (pater patriae) would have used the genitive of possessionit is because, some would say, we live in a degenerate age, when the classics are no longer ubiquitous and the past is no longer cherished.

Indeed Latin remains deeply embroiled in the culture wars. Conservative groups and homeschool communities have doubled down on the classical tradition, even as othersmany of us classicists includedhave grappled with its exclusionary and problematic reception and sought a richer contextualization of the past. (Just three months ago Christianity Todayreported on The Rise of the Bible-Teaching, Plato-Loving, Homeschool Elitists.) Latin is no longer the bedrock of education that it used to be (along with Greek, for that matter), but all the while it has remained a totemic languageattractive to religious schools, nationalists, and traditionalists alike for its implicit cultural authority, its tradition of exclusivity, power, and prestige.

It is Latin, not Greek, after all, that is most prominently paraded as intellectual exercise or cultural badge of honor. Hundreds of thousands of precollege students study the language in the United States alone (and many of them compete for olive wreaths and bragging rights in the National Latin Exam), while ancient Greek mostly survives in seminaries and university classics departments. From this perspective, the answer to the perennial question Why study Latin? seems clear: it is imperial, it is canonized, and it valorizes a particular identitythe dead white men who, we are told, invented Western civilization.

The answer to the perennial question Why study Latin? seems clear: it is imperial, it is canonized, and it valorizes a particular identitythe dead white men who, we are told, invented Western civilization.

Of course, this is not the reason Gardini wrote his book. His primary target is the claim that Latin is useless; his impassioned prologue is called Ode to a Useless Language. But he is also particularly irked by the noxious clich that Latin is a dead language because it is no longer spoken (or spoken by only very few). By his argument, no language can be dead that is still producing ideas, generating responses, and prompting emulationfrom the Latin aemulatio, which can also mean rivalry.

His official argument for studying Latin avoids talk of utility altogether. When we study Latin, he writes, we must study it for one fundamental reason: because it is the language of a civilization; because the Western world was created on its back. Because inscribed in Latin are the secrets of our deepest cultural memory, secrets that demand to be read. But his most telling and recurring counterclaim against the tedium of utilitas is love, especially love of the beautiful. Latin is beautiful, he asserts emphaticallythe italics are his own. This fact undergirds all that I will be saying in these pages. What he has written, he says, is not a grammar book, not a history of language or literature, but an essay on the beauty of Latin.

The problems with this approachthis ideology of the aestheticare legion. It fails to recognize that civilization is a process of selectionexclusionary by designand that ugliness is the Janus-faced twin of beauty, the implied defect of those who dont make the cut. Gardinis Latin is that of an unrepentant New Critic, who searches the universe for perfect, rational, well-ordered verbal forms to elucidate (all these adjectives are his), without acknowledging the contexts and conflicts that have led him to seek out those forms in the first place.

There is a real-world danger to this aestheticizing attitude toward linguistic study, this appeal to beauty and pleasure.

There is a real-world danger to this aestheticizing attitude toward linguistic study, this appeal to beauty and pleasure. (Both words appear in the book at least a dozen times.) It threatens to make classics into a mystery-cult rite, through which initiates gain arcane knowledge of the nature of things (to crib some Lucretius). It distorts the marvelous range of Latin-speakingculture, flattening its richness and diversity into a one-note story about the West. And it suppresses analysis of the political and social conditions in which the language was used.

This kind of classicism limits history, makes ethics an entirely personal affair, and distances itself from the dirty confines of politics. Long Live Latin might have a different tone if it had been written not in the waning days of 2015 but rather in the shadow cast by Brexit, the presidency of Donald Trump, and the expropriation of the Greco-Roman past by ethnonationalists and hate groups. Indeed, though Gardini concedes in passing that studying Latin means different things in different contexts, this fact should be the first premise of his inquiry, rather than the last.

If I come down too hard on Gardini, it is because I am in many ways his fellow traveler. I too love Latin. (We both received our PhDs from New York University, in fact.) I am also moved by Gardinis fine writing, and the exceptional translation from the Italian by Todd Portnowitz: the bookis an elegy for a world gone-by, a lament for the secret knowledge of words. And I shared his boyhood view of Latin as a cheat-code for social class. As Gardini writes in the opening of the book, reflecting on his first encounter with Latin textbooks and their description of the Roman domus, his study of Latin became entangled with my desire to, in a certain sense, climb the social ladder: the dream of a magnificent home.

The books organizing principle is literary: it is a collection of beautiful passages, deftly mined for their stylistic differences, interwoven with biographical reflections.

This book is that studys magnificent home. Its organizing principle is literary: it is a collection of beautiful passages, exquisitely turned out and deftly mined for their stylistic differences, interwoven with biographical reflections on Gardinis experience with the language. In each chapter he selects texts from specific authors and shows what is special about them. The exercise will be familiar to the classically trained as that special realm of passion and pedantry, where the best demonstrate how good they are at showing how good something else is.

The authors named in chapter headings do not range far beyond the usual suspects, who are in no danger of being forgotten and would have been familiar several generations ago: Cicero and Seneca, Livy and Tacitus, Vergil and Horace, Lucretius and Ovid. All of them are male, and most were incredibly wealthy adjacents to imperial power who relied on slaves to ply their trade. Gardini is completely transparent that the Latin he chooses to write about is the literary Latin that shaped his character and the character of the works he lovesthe Latin of the classical canon, restricted in both space and time, from around 200 BCE to 200 CE. He fails to paint the larger Mediterranean context, especially the influence of Greecean omission that parallels the erasure of non-Western contributions in general. He offers, for example, the typical yet blinkered story of a Latin Renaissance centered in Italy and moving slowly northward, discounting the cultural importance and contribution of the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world.

The authors coveredall mendo not range far beyond the usual suspects,most of whom were incredibly wealthy adjacents to imperial power and relied on slaves to ply their trade.

The temporal restriction is telling, too. Unlike scholarly work that has sought to expand the bounds of the past, this book largely conveys a curious nostalgiaa paean to a cultural pattern created by the Renaissance, written by a professor of Renaissance literature, yet with very little of the Renaissance in it. (When Petrarch does appear in passing, Gardinis fondness for him shines through.) The logic of this structure is partly biographical and partly aesthetic. The chapter on the latest author, St. Augustine, is introduced in the following way: In high school, we hardly touched on Christian Latintoo late in the game, too bland. And yet, in the right hands, it too can be beautiful.

The book shines brightest when his exhortations get you to read the words aloud, to will them back into the world, as he did for me with his evocation of Vergils Eclogues, finding that space between poetic verse and magic spell that is at the heart of Roman literary life. His selections of passages are worth the cover price of the book alone, especially in his chapters on Propertius, Juvenal, and Horace. Gardini makes you want to turn back to Senecas letters, or to marvel at the novels of Apuleius and Petronius again, if not for the first time. In this vein, he is movingly clear on the formal achievements of Lucretius, and equally powerful in his rumination on semantic shifts from Latin cura (concern, dedication) to English care. The most ancient words in our language, he writes, are like haunted houses.

However historical his material may be, Gardini seems persistently disinterested in history and politics.

Occasionally he goes too far, as when he claims that Latin is the language of the relationship between the one and the many and that to speak of Latin is first and foremost to speak of a complete dedication to organizing ones words in a profound and measured discourse. Enjoying this book does not require signing on to this definition, but it does require overlooking certain thingsespecially a richer sense of history. However historical his material may be, Gardini seems persistently disinterested in history and politics. He attempts to link the beautiful to the political earlier on when he writes, Beauty is the face of freedom. What all totalitarian regimes have most strikingly in common is their ugliness. Yet claims of beauty and truth were central to the discourses of fascism in the twentieth century. His avoidance of this fact is either incredible naivet or willful denial.

This aestheticism becomes especially hard to take when he turns to Caesar, whose famously dry prose is held up as the epitome of rationalism and pragmatism. He promises not to dwell on Caesars great ideological and propagandistic value. Similarly, he calls Vergils epic written evidence of an entire civilizationnothing short of a new gospel, with hardly anything added on the century of death that preceded it or the scale of human suffering occluded by its tale. Form, here as elsewhere in the book, trumps content: Vergils enduring success is owed first of all to the beauty of his language. Likewise troubling is the briefest nod to the troubles that attended Tacituss imperial life (and conditioned his harsh indirectness) or the wealth, class, and power that made Senecas stoicism possible. In reading Livy, his uncritical tale of Lucretias rape is no surprise given his silence on Roman misogyny and its inheritance through the canon.

The beauty of Gardinis phrases almost obscures a need to prove that the author is speaking the truth.

Of his textual explications, his section on Cicero may be the least convincing. The clear and instructive tour through Ciceronian passages moves between pellucid comments on syntax and quite passionate flights of fancy: under Ciceros direction, Latin takes the stage as a language of truth and justice. As with Ciceros own writing, the beauty of Gardinis phrases almost obscures a need to prove that the author is speaking the truth. Such is the Ciceronian desire and ability to recast the world through the word, rather than deigning to make words faithfully represent it.

Gardini sings the praises of Western civilization, then, without acknowledging that this also includes imperial, colonial, and enslavingmisogynists. The implicit requirement for appreciatingthe aesthetic beauty Gardini so admires is ignoring that literature is a political discourseand that the canon may be complicit in history rather than merely a product of it.

We need to look to classicsmore critically to understand how easy it is to use what remains of Roman and Greek culture as shackles rather than means of liberation.

In the time that has passed since Gardini wrote the Italian edition of this book, we have learned a lot about what people do with Latinwho studies it, and why. In her recent book Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (2018), for example, Donna Zuckerberg tracks the alt-rights appropriation of the classics, from the use of classical texts among Mens Rights Activists to the superficial use of Ovid as inspiration for pickup artists. O tempora! O mores! we cry with Cicero upon seeing classics used by hate groups. Scholars such as Curtis Dozier (with his Pharos project) and Sarah Bond (with her tireless public outreach) have worked alongside mainstream authors such as Myke Cole to record and expose these misunderstandings and misuses of the past.

But the fact remains that classics has been a force of imperialism, classism, racism, and colonialism since its inception. (The historian Rebecca Futo Kennedy has joined others such as Dorothy Kim in cataloguing this long legacy.) We need to look to the history of our discipline more critically to understand how easy it is to use what remains of Roman and Greek culture as shackles rather than means of liberation. Affiliating ourselves with Latin requires scrutinizing the world that has received and transmitted it.

All this points to something we all know but are afraid to admit: the classical humanities have failed as humanizing enterprises. Just consider the classical educations of slaveholders such as Seneca, the classical trappings of colonialism, the superficial Latin and Greek of the so-called Founding Fathers (among them, Thomas Jefferson). German Philhellenism played no small role in Nazism and twentieth-century fascism. And, really, one needs look no further than the Oxford classical education of a buffoon like Boris Johnson to recognize that Western Civilization has a problem.

Those who still admire the work of canon-defending may find in Gardinis book the echo of a rallying cry. But others will find the discomfort of self-recognition. When he closes his book, Gardini claims first that Latin is a worthwhile study because it is fun, but also because Latin is here to remind us that meaning is not to be taken for granted. In the latter claim, Gardini almost seems ready to gesture beyond the narrowly aesthetic, but instead he limply insists that achieving linguistic beauty is one of the highest aims of being human. Gardinis Latin thus ends as an aesthetic wonder: a form with some content, but which should teach us the importance of historical distance and that the ancients speak for the ancients. Perhaps these comments are a belated attempt to stave off the distortions of twentieth-century interpretation or political misusebut it is a weak one, undone by the implicitly political gesture of the books championing of a very narrow and specific canon.

Gardini sings the praises of Western civilization, without acknowledging that this also includes imperial, colonial, and enslavingmisogynists. His Latin is an aesthetic wonder, form without content.

For my part, I carry the Latin I have learned with me every day as a gift. The first line of Catulluss elegy for his brother (multas per gentes et multaper aequora vectus) ran through my head as I travelled to arrange my fathers funeral; I have regularly found comfort in Senecas Moral Epistles, and have learned much about how life makes us all complicit from Ciceros personal letters. These gifts have come to me through chance and privilege.

But it is not enough to learn Latin alone, to excise it from its place and time for merely personal use. It may be nave to think we can appreciate the pasts beauty all the more after recognizing its horrors; that we can find comfort and hope in shared humanity; and that we can still learn from the imperfect past to improve our imperfect present. Yet isnt this the very hope for fame and glory that animated Ovid to sing?

At the end of the day, we may be what we love. Love makes Latin live through Nicola Gardini, and it is certainly lively in his hands. But part of learning to love the classics is learning what they truly are. Our engagement with literature, he admits, should make us more critical of what itand wedo in the world; how we talk about what we love is an expression of how we view ourselves. As the Roman poet Propertius warned, sine sensu vivere amantis, et levibus curis magna perire bona: lovers live without sense / and great affairs perish because of petty concerns.

Link:
Loving Latin at the End of the World - Boston Review