James Kierstead
@Kleisthenes2
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Research Fellow @nzinitiative , co-host @FreeKiwis , advisor @nzfreespeech , on ed board @InquiryOpen , @AntigoneJournal
Wellington City, New Zealand
Joined March 2017
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'Décider, c’est décider soi-même. Ce n’est pas laisser la décision à des “gens compétents”, soumis à un vague “contrôle”. Ce n’est pas non plus désigner les gens qui vont, eux, décider.' - Castoriadis
#autonomia
#demokratia
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Map of 'imperial density,' the number of years an area has spent inside a state bigger than 500 000 km2 from 1000 BC to now. By
@chriscwolfram
, after a similar map in a recent study (). Persia and China emerge as the imperial heartlands.
#worldhistory
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1. Maybe the most curious institution of the classical Athenian democracy is ostracism, by which the citizenry would kick a politician out of the city for ten years. Here's a very very short introduction.
#ostracismculture
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I have now been made redundant by Victoria University of WELLINGTON
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The Victoria University of WELLINGTON leadership team, after much reflection, has renamed itself 'Te Hiwa,' which means 'the steering paddle' and also apparently means 'to be focused, active and robust.' Te Hiwa have recently overseen a $30 million deficit
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1. This response to the idea of right-of-centre people having a say at VUW is also further evidence that most academics and students now see universities as places for left-wing ideas, and not as public institutions concerned with politically-disinterested teaching and research
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If you could magically recover a complete manuscript of one lost work from antiquity, which would it be?
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Why is modern Stoicism apparently so much more of a thing (especially online) than modern Epicureanism?
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I might add that if vice-chancellors are not capable of fulfilling their obligations to academic freedom under the Education Act, perhaps they shouldn't be collecting a generous, taxpayer-supported salary for that role
"If students are not resilient enough or mature enough to be able to deal in ideas - even those that they find uncomfortable - then maybe they shouldn't be at university."
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I’m blessed to be able to introduce another group of students to this marvellous city, almost 25 years after I first visited it
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This inscription in the Vergina Museum of the Royal Tombs preserves some its original colour. Many Athenian inscriptions, too, would have had their lettering picked out in red like that
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'Why, you may wonder, is it necessary for someone who wishes to teach maths to teenagers to hold a politically correct interpretation of a document signed in 1840?'
@damienmgrant
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It's worth remembering as well that universities are required to uphold the speech rights of academics and students by the Education Act. This episode is just more evidence that NZ universities aren't currently doing what they're required to do and what we pay them to do
Taxpayers fund universities to expose students to new ideas. If that's no longer the case, the dangerous corollary is that universities are only there to reinforce students' prejudices.
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The Athenaion Politeia café, the only one of 158 original polis constitution cafés that survives today
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🦉A thread on the evolution of owls, more specifically the silver owls that flourished in classical Athens. With apologies to ornithologists.
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1. You may have seen this cartoon circulating on social media. It claims to summarize what Karl Popper called 'the paradox of tolerance' in a footnote in The Open Society and its Enemies Volume I.
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Dinner with some senior scientists and educationalists the other night. Talk was of all the damage that has been done to NZ higher education - in science but now also humanities - over the past few years. So many things that will have to be put right
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This is a pretty good point actually. Why aren't there administrators at NZ unis whose job it is to defend academic freedom as defined in the Education Act, while there are lots dedicated to other values which may be admirable but which unis aren't legally obliged to uphold?
Senior Lecturer at Victoria University, Dr James Kierstead, joined Rodney to speak about university bloat and the erosion of academic freedom.
Listen to the full replay here ⤵️
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Thank you for all the kind words - too many for me to react to individually, but appreciated nonetheless
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1. The Acropolis has changed a bit since I was last up there, in ways that have (imho) made it both more and less accessible.
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This shop in Agios Nikolaos has the most accurate replica vases that I’ve found anywhere in Greece
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Some Greek nationalists are furious with me for talking about the differences that exist between ancient and modern Greek (alongside many continuities). Luckily, I've just written what I hope is a balanced and even-handed article on the Elgin marbles. That should calm them down.
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One of the impressive things about power-trips is the smallness of the power required for people to go on one
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This is why the museum guards tell you not to point your finger-pistols at the Minoan statuettes
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Victoria University students win campaign over attending lectures, no longer have to turn up in person
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I'm pleased and slightly bewildered to see my piece on Popper's *Open Society and its Enemies* and its enemies in the Journal of NZ Studies pass 10K views on academia dot edu (an order of magnitude more than some other articles I worked much harder on!) Here it is in 12 tweets.
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I think this is actually quite an interesting post, because it shows an academic taking advantage of free speech norms (to an unusual degree if you think his speech verges on libel), in order to attack an organization defending free speech, and in exactly the same breath
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Ι. Athens is often said to have been the first democracy, but was it? A short thread on possible earlier democracies in the ancient Greek world.
(I'm tabling the question of whether there were earlier democracies outside of Greece.
Below is the Pnyx, site of Athens' Assembly.)
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@Kiwihawke1
Universities face a choice between offering a high-end, multifaceted educational experience centred around in-person interaction, and producing educational videos in competition with online content providers, a competition they will lose. The seem to be going for the latter
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1/This is a really interesting piece on the global history of democracy by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow. They think participatory government was discovered separately in India, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica, sometimes earlier than in Athens.
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Interesting to reflect that this amount could employ a senior lecturer in classics for 125-150 years
$15 million to 'indigenise trade policy and enable mana motuhake.'
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0. My paper on the Athenian jigsaw tokens - clay tokens used to randomly select city officials - in 12 tweets.
#sortition
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3. Why should they be spending billions of dollars year in taxes to fund supposedly public institutions that are openly contemptuous of them and that can't even uphold their fundamental right to free speech?
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It's especially odd since Michael taught at VUW for a decade until only a couple years ago, presumably without anybody being irreparably damaged by his speech then
Here we have the tragi-comic spectacle of a debate on free speech being shut down because students are “freaked out” that it includes “right wing” voices.
I've read about lions on the yellow brick road showing more courage than the university leadership here.
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Poster at Vic earlier this year. I support the students’ freedom of speech & association, though I do think tarring others as extreme is an interesting strategy if you’re the Bolshevik Club.
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Here's the decree setting up Athens' first democratic priestess, to be randomly selected from all the women of Athens (line 3: ΕΧΣ ΑΘΕΝΑΙΟΝ ΗΑΠΑ[ΣΟ/Ν]). But where are the crucial words stipulating that the new priestess is going to be selected by lot?
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Two late Bronze Age lion gates.
At Hatusas, the Hittite capital, 14th-13th centuries BC.
At Mycenae, 13th century BC.
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The biggest chunk we have of Cicero's 'On the Republic,' probably the most significant work of Roman political theory, is a 4th/5th C copy that was discovered by Cardinal Angelo Mai in 1819. Someone had copied Augustine's commentary on the Psalms over it in the 7th C.
#palimpsest
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This is the kind of thing that always makes me worry that a lot of the work on classics being 'intrinsically white-supremacist' vel sim has a tendency to look almost exclusively for examples that support the hypothesis rather than for examples that might put it in doubt
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The gates of Mycenae are guarded, then as now, by ferocious lions
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1. M.C. Miller (1997): the Odeion of Pericles in Athens, meant to resemble the tent of Xerxes at Plataea, was a 'proud statement of empire' - an example of the Athenian Empire imitating the Persian one
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I wonder how many people who watched the VUW free speech event would deny that my prediction about its balance (or lack thereof) was accurate, i.e. that there was an 8:2 split, with 8 people arguing on one side and 2 people on the other.
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@mualphaxi
I'm not a great critical theorist or third-wave feminist myself, but I do enjoy translations of classical texts from different perspectives, and this opening passage doesn't seem too far off (at least, it's no looser than some of the other versions you discuss below).
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The re-organization of the event with a 7:2 left-right split at the behest of a few vocal student activists only makes it even clearer that VUW can't at this point reform itself into the fair-minded public institution it's paid to be. It will have to be reformed from the outside
1. This response to the idea of right-of-centre people having a say at VUW is also further evidence that most academics and students now see universities as places for left-wing ideas, and not as public institutions concerned with politically-disinterested teaching and research
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10. One interesting find was 190 sherds in a well near the Acropolis with Themistocles' name on them, but apparently written by only 14 individuals. Was an anti-Themistocles crew handing them out to people?
#wellwellwell
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This claims that VUW's original free speech event 'was postponed after a student backlash over a lack of diversity.' But if the report that students were 'freaking out' over 'right-wing voices' was accurate wouldn't that be a backlash *against* diversity?
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4. One option is for universities to continue on this path and see support for their access to public funds further eroded. Another is to carry through a long and thorough process of university reform until they actually do the job we pay them so generously to do
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Good discussion
@HdxAcademy
's blog of how much surveys of self-censorship really tell us about the intellectual atmosphere in universities. (Like
@szzhou4
and Shelly Zhou I think they can tell us quite a lot, but
@johnkwilson
makes some excellent points).
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[σ]ε͂μα τόδε, Χσενόφαντε,
πατέρ σο<ι> θε͂κε θανόντι
Σόφιλος, ℎο͂ι πένθος
θε͂κας ἀποφθίμενος.
Ἀριστοκλε͂ς ἐποίεσεν.
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@clockworknoyuzu
Because it's apparently more racially sensitive to hint that Maori wouldn't be able to understand phrases like 'management team' and will be more comfortable with vague phrases based on canoeing
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1. Maybe I'm a bit behind on my reading, but I have to say that my impression is that Western Hellenists interested in 'decolonization' tend to show much less interest in the Ottomans than other powers whose colonial role in Greece was less obvious and long-lasting (Britain say)
5. There's a similarly strange claim in the piece below about how Greece endured a 'metaphorical colonization, not by the Ottomans' [no, their colonization was quite literal!] but by 'early European antiquaries and travellers'
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The Han dynasty Chinese on the Romans, and the Romans on the Han dynasty Chinese (from Scheidel, Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires, 2009)
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0. The Athenian popular courts: a very very short introduction (thread)
#athens
#demokratia
#isonomia
#law
#courts
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Olive-tree in Rotorua, a gift of the people of Crete to NZ veterans of WWII.
Μετά τη μάχη της Κρήτης, αυτή η ελιά δόθηκε σε στρατιώτες της Νέας Ζηλανδίας.
#NewZealand
#Κρήτη
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Jonathan Ayling, come to think of it, was also a VUW student not that long ago. If two quite recent members of the VUW community aren't allowed to put an outsider's perspective on free speech at a VUW event, who would be allowed?
It's especially odd since Michael taught at VUW for a decade until only a couple years ago, presumably without anybody being irreparably damaged by his speech then
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1. The Athenian Assembly: A Very Very Short Introduction (thread). The citizens' assembly was probably the most important decision-making body of the Athenian democratic state (though it's worth remembering that women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded)
#demokratia
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In local café, takeaway cups replaced a while back by ceramic mugs customers were asked to return. Then an email saying they'd lost a lot of mugs; now paper cups available again. A case of how it's best to make policy based on how people are rather than how we'd like them to be?
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At Thorikos the students sat in the grass section of the theatre, despite our entreaties. Fools! Heedless of their homecoming, they forgot the zea-land of their fathers. Desperately we hacked at the winding tendrils to free them and only just made it back to the bus.
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With
@ProfSimonton
on the holiest site in Athens. This is just before we mounted the bema and made competing speeches about oligarchia and demokratia. True worshipers of Athena (and only true worshipers) will be able to see her temple in the background.
#OKbema
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1. This sort of review (of Maura Dykstra's book on Qing bureaucracy) is every academic's worst nightmare, though if claims about misrepresentation hold up this obviously isn't just a case of getting things wrong
This might be the most brutal academic book review I’ve ever seen - by George Zhijian Qiao
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Another poster up at Vic a couple weeks ago, since removed. I like how it looks like a response to ‘How online are you?’
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If some of us think these new panels are unbalanced or say we are 'freaking out' over the 'platforming' of left-wing speakers, will VUW postpone this event at short notice? If not, why not?
The VUW free speech saga continues, this time with a split session and double the speakers ...
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VII. In short, the cartoon at the head of this thread gives a misleading and incomplete sense of Popper on toleration. And Popper's 'paradox of tolerance' can't really be used to support limits on speech or views that don't involve credible and immediate commitments to violence
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Maybe it's just me, but "decolonization" has always sounded to me like an unpleasantly thorough procedure you might be offered at a Californian health spa
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'What the progressive elites and the mainstream media denigrate as populism is majoritarian democracy and the reason they fear and disparage it is because they know that much of their program would never be endorsed at the ballot box.' - Rebecca Weisser
@lgnz
There were 16 local polls on the establishment of Māori wards/constituencies since 2003. The only poll that passed was in the Wairoa District, which has 67% of residents of Māori descent. The Labour govt removed the option to have binding polls on the issue in 2021 under urgency.
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1. In 1950 these three clay tokens were dug up in the Athenian Agora. What you see is both sides of the three tokens in turn; the first has POL on one side and LEO on the other; the second has HALIM/OS and LEO; the third has POL and ERE.
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Many thanks to all who wrote in on ancient Greek phonology. Comments on this topic are now closed. I have now said what I had to say about ancient sheep, Erasmus' bear, and Dionysius Thrax. I will now have to move onto less controversial topic such as free speech at universities
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1. What is Plato's *Protagoras* about? Is there anything that holds together or connects the Great Speech of Protagoras on democracy with the literary-critical interlude on Simonides' poem and with Socrates' defence of a surprisingly hedonistic account of ethics at the end?
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11. That some illiterate citizens had to get someone else to write for them is also suggested by the tale that one man, failing to recognize Aristeides, asked him to write 'Aristeides' on his sherd for him! (And he did- he was 'the Just' after all)
#justly
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One reason is to have someone teaching and doing research in classics
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The Latin and Greek dictionaries I bought new at school, still the first things I turn to when I'm not sure what a word means.
Recently I came across the great Latinist D.R. Shackleton-Bailey's definition of philology: 'looking things up.'
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0/A Very Very Short Introduction to Athens' Council of 500, a key institution of the democratic state, and one formed by a random selection of citizens from all over Athens' territory.
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Athena Nike taking off her sandals, from the parapet of the temple of Athena Nike on the Athenian Acropolis. Was this a hint for worshippers to remove their footwear before approaching the house of the goddess?
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One problem with the student's argument in this video - that free speech is just an excuse for 'hate speech' and that it can lead to harm - is that a huge number of views that some people disagree with can be seen as hateful and harmful and thus in scope for suppression.
If speech is not free at universities, the very place that exists to test and challenge ideas, then where will it be free?
The opposition which has grown in New Zealand against free speech has started at universities.
Steps to address this can't come soon enough.
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This is Jane. Jane used what she knows about ancient Greek politics to make suggestions about modern democratic reform. Be like Jane.
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My
@nzinitiative
report on non-academic staffing at NZ universities (co-authored with Michael Johnston) is now out. It reveals that the majority of staff at NZ universities are now non-academic administrators and staff, and not lecturers and professors.
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Since people often ask me how ancient history can still be a field (surely everything is already known?), here is a recently-published inscription that has shed more light on (and reopened debate about) an important episode in Hellenistic Athenian history.
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I wonder if it's possible that advances made by European mathematicians are heavily represented in maths as currently taught because European mathematicians between the 16th and 20th centuries happen to have made a lot of the really significant advances
'Students of under-represented and minority groups and colonised peoples are starting to be more critical about accepting unquestioningly the cultural hegemony of mainstream European-based mathematics,' says Professor Rowena Ball of ANU
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These recently-discovered bronze tablets from Argos are, by the way, super-important for the study of ancient Greek democracy outside of Athens
Greek city-states loved to form political institutions out of subdivisions of the citizenry. Athens had a Council of 500 formed of 50 men from each of its 10 tribes. Argos had ‘The 80,’ formed of 20 men from each of its 4 tribes.
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Philomen Probert, in the preface to A New Short Guide to Greek Accents, writes, 'I do not think that intellectual pursuits should require justification'; but for people who have already decided to brush up on their accents, she does provide some helpful 'excuses':
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II A 14th-century BC boar's tusk helmet from Mycenae, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens
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Bronze Negau-type helmet dedicated after the Battle of Cumae in 474 BC:
ΗΙΑΡΟΝ Ο ΔΕΙΝΟΜΕΝΕΟΣ/ ΚΑΙ ΤΟΙ ΣΥΡΑΚΟΣΙΟΙ/ ΤΟΙ ΔΙ ΤΥΡΑΝ ΑΠΟ ΚΥΜΑΣ
Hiero the son of Deinomenes and the Syracusans (dedicated) to Zeus Tyrrhenian (=Etruscan) (spoils) from Cumae.
Now
@britishmuseum
#Classics
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1. I think students at Western universities could be exposed to more non-Western thinkers, especially in the history of philosophy, but
Plan by woke academics to decolonise philosophy by sidelining Aristotle and Socrates in favour of new-age thinkers | Daily Mail
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2. One question that brings up for the huge number of right-of-centre Kiwis (a majority at the recent election) is:
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1.This is yet another excellent piece by
@tmbejan
on concepts of free (and equal) speech, one which yet again pays laudably close attention to contemporary social media while also engaging with more pressing questions about Athenian Begriffsgeschichte.
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If this is the complete panel, it looks to me like 4 people from the left plus 1 from the right. Is this more balanced than the original panel, which had a 2:2 split (with 1 neutral)? If not, what does that say about the idea that VUW postponed the original panel for balance?
@VicUniWgtn
@nzinitiative
Jonathan will sit on the panel with Anjum Rahman
@kiwistargazer
,
@MorganGodfry
, Prof.
@lynda_johnston
, and Dr. John Byron. It will still be moderated by
@CorinDann
.
Should be… lots of fun.
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Here’s another one: ‘boundary of the sanctuary of Athenaia.’ Mid 5th century, Aegina
In its earliest appearances in our texts Athena's name is often written 'Athenaia' - as in Pindar, Aeschylus, and this dedication by one Philon from sometime before the great Persian invasion of 480 BC. ΑΘΗΝΑΙΑΙ ('to Athenaia') is the first word in the second line
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VI. Popper also consistently defended toleration of opposing views - even views that might seem dangerous or offensive. This makes Popper a very unreliable support for 'hate speech' laws or other attempts to shut down opposing views simply by labelling them 'intolerant'
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Excited to start my new Honours seminar on Western civilization next week. Here is the intro blurb.
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V. Our view is that Popper generally located the limits of tolerance at violence or at direct and credible threats of or incitements to violence. Only movements that are clearly committed to violence should be suppressed, and only as a last resort.
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It was an honour to produce an English version of this short piece
@AntigoneJournal
by the great Italian classicist Luciano Canfora. It puts forward a new solution to an old mystery - the fate of Aristotle's library.
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7. How did it work? Ostracizing someone nowadays is more of a social thing, but the Athenian practice was a highly formal one. Each year there was a vote (by show of hands) in the Assembly on the Pnyx hill about whether there should be an ostracism that year.
#pnyx
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We all struggle with demons
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In response to an incredulous, 'Do you think all right-wingers are bigoted?' Again an attitude I've encountered in academia, and another sign that our universities, handsomely paid to serve the whole of society, have become partisan institutions and need to be reformed
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Constantine Cavafy's 1911 poem 'The God Abandons Anthony' (Ἀπολείπειν ὁ θεὸς Ἀντώνιον) in Greek and English (trans. Keeley and Sherrard); the Plutarch passage it's based on; and Leonard Cohen's adaptation of it, 'Alexandra Leaving':
#poetry
#hellenism
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Research on ostracism continues (I just read a very good MA thesis by one Bryant Ahrenberg). For more on the procedure, one book I can recommend is this one by Sara Forsdyke:
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The Epigraphic Museum has done a lot of work since I was last there to make some of its prize inscriptions more inviting and accessible. It’s great
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The fashion for NZ universities to include references to 'mana-enhancing' civility in their academic freedom policies again reveals a gross misunderstanding of free speech. Civility is good, but rigorous criticism of someone's ideas will not always increase their mana.
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