The State of the Society

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• The State of the Society
• Matthew Roller

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learned society, professional association, annual meeting, Annual Meeting Task Force, executive director, executive director search, public statements, SCS Policy on Public Statements, board of directors

The following text is an edited transcript of the presidential address delivered on January 6, 2024, in the Society for Classical Studies Plenary Session of the 2024 Annual Meeting. The address speaks to “the state of the Society” at that moment. Significant developments that have occurred in the five months between the annual meeting and the finalizing of this text (mid-June 2024) are noted as updates and provided in the footnotes.

it is the singular honor and privilege of serving as president of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS) to be granted the time and the audience to deliver this address. The question of how to use this opportunity and, more broadly, how to use most appropriately and effectively the platform that the presidency provides, has weighed on me throughout this year, and I will say more about that weight in what follows. Specifically regarding the presidential address, however, it was not long ago that the distinguished scholars whose shoes I now try to fill used this occasion to present their current scholarly work. I vividly remember, as a young assistant professor, hearing my own mentors and teachers Robert Kaster and Susan Treggiari employ their presidential addresses to speak about, respectively, the “Shame of the Romans” (1996) and “Cicero between ‘Public’ and ‘Private’” (1997). As recently as a decade [End Page 351] ago, presidents Denis Feeney and Kathryn Gutzwiller spoke, respectively, on “First Similes in Epic” (2014) and “Fantasy and Metaphor in Meleager” (2015).

But times are changing. Scholarly organizations like the SCS, which originated and have long histories as learned societies, are evolving—incrementally and over an extended period—into what might better be described as “professional associations.” The SCS continues to provide fora for scholarly exchange, to be sure. However, its efforts and resources are increasingly devoted to supporting the professional development and careers of its members. Even though the Society no longer organizes and hosts a full-scale placement service at the annual meeting—at one time a very substantial and burdensome commitment—it has continued to post advertisements for academic (and sometimes para- or even nonacademic) positions. Increasingly, the events that the SCS organizes and hosts, both at the annual meeting and outside of it, focus on networking, mentoring, and relationship building. The Society has a very busy Professional Ethics committee, whose job is to field ethics complaints and grievances raised by members regarding the behavior of other members or organizations. The Classics Advisory Service offers advice and interventions when programs that support teaching and research in our field are in danger of elimination. Some of the Society’s liveliest committees and affiliated groups are those that convene members who share a particular professional status, such as contingent faculty or graduate students or K–12 educators; or that provide fora for members who face professional challenges related to their race, socioeconomic status, gender or sexual identity, disability status, or other factors. The Society provides various types and levels of organizational and budgetary support to such committees and groups, which for their part often organize social events, professional development sessions, and/or scholarly paper sessions at the annual meeting, thereby leaving a significant imprint upon the program. Further, the SCS devotes ever more resources, via small grants, awards, and programming, to supporting the professional development of members employed in positions that do not provide such resources adequately. The COVID pandemic has accelerated this process of turning the Society’s collective attention to matters of professional development, as its members have confronted fundamentally altered landscapes of research, teaching, resource availability, and the timing of career advancement. In short, the SCS has for some time been evolving in ways that reflect profound changes in the world of scholarship and teaching and in the landscape of higher education generally. To be a classicist in 2024 is simply not the same thing as it was a decade or two ago—let alone in 1994, the year in which I first took up a professional position. [End Page...