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Thanks for posting this link Supernumerary. Like Dana, I hadn’t run across Gabb. I wish I could say that the issue raised in this piece by Gabb is new and surprising … but alas … see Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath’s – Who Killed Homer? (1998). Unfortunately what is
going on at Oxford has been going on for some time . As Gabb writes ” … because I see the proposal [of removing the study of Greek and Latin] as a further enemy advance in the Culture War through which we have been living for at least the past two generations.”.
Hey Oxford … while you’re at it why don’t you remove also the study of Logic. After all the study and application of logic might prevent the creation of states of affairs in the world that would prompt someone to write some thing such as the following:
“Adding in all the ugly, horrific details, In short, would only add to the weight you already carry, the weight of worrying about the people you love, the weight of carrying around a fury that want’s to go find these people where they sleep, and prevent them from ever hurting anyone ever again, to undo the evil that has already been done, and all I would end doing by doing do, is to make you grieve, to grieve as many of us already do, for what has already has been done, to so many, and to grieve for how many we have already lost- to Disease, to Famine, in Wars, In Alleyways and in Abandoned Buildings, lost to Big Pharma, and Chemical Concerns, to Pimps, Perverts and Politicians, to Petty Bureaucrats and Unprincipled Professors, and last but not least, to a group of White Coated Heartless Assassins, a group of monstrous self deceived “geniuses” who see themselves as “Researchers”, and “Scientists” – and yet not a one of whom can be seen to still possess the empathy, of a piece of steel sharpened to a point at the end of rifle. All I would be doing is arguing for a known, a case that’s already been tried by History – and tried in each of our own hearts. The Verdict of That Case – is Clear. – From BlakeCosmos’ question posed to Dr. Farrell for the 21 February 2020 vid chat.
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From: On Classism in Classics
By Eric Adler. 3 January 2017 ·

“Hanson, as many undoubtedly recall, became the bête noir of numerous classicists in large part due to his co-authorship with John Heath of Who Killed Homer? (1998), a polemic on the demise of classical studies in American academia. Who Killed Homer? contended that ever since the late 1960s, classical scholars in America had helped murder their subject matter by failing to act as stewards of ancient learning. Instead of sharing “Greek wisdom” with their students and an interested general public, these pedants gloried in obscurantism, publishing either esoteric exercises in philological minutiae or jargon-laden, politicized boilerplate that unfairly belittled the Hellenic legacy.”
In connection with the end of Adler’s quote see also Umberto Eco on the phenomenon of infinite interpretive drift “ … when we recognize [this] technique implemented by contemporary readers who wander through texts in order to find in them secret puns, unheard-of etymologies, unconscious links, dances of ‘Slipping Beauties,’ ambiguous images that the clever reader can guess through the transparencies of the verbal texture even when no public agreement could support such an adventurous misreading?’ (Eco, from an essay in The Limits of Interpretation, 1990). This is the danger of Hermetic Drift. Hermetic Drift, in short, is finding oneself in the situation where no contextual structures and or strictures of interpretation hold. The Interpreter acts as if somehow ENTITLED to move from any association to any other association with the result that any and every connection (logical or otherwise) becomes acceptable (and is beyond critique). X-Series Episode #6,321,846 anyone?
Francis Bacon in his Parasceve ad Historiam Naturalem et Experimentalem (1620) objected to the failure to distinguish between relationships of causality and relationships of similarity. Some analogies can be extended while others can’t. I guess that Oxford will not see it as problematic that Bacon’s – Parasceve ad Historiam Naturalem et Experimentalem will no longer be able to be read. Thank God scholars at Cambridge translated Bacon into English … http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/metabook?id=worksfbacon

Full article by Adler can be found at:
https://eidolon.pub/on-classism-in-classics-157c5f680c4a

I found “RADICAL COUP: A case For Reaction” to be a treasure of a book and delightful reading.
I was hesitant to bring Gabb up in the past year for taking attention away from Dr. Farrell’s signal and superb recent work.