Last month, the University of Oxford announced in the weekly Gazette a series of proposed “changes to the Conduct of Ceremonies in Congregation, and certain other Ceremonies.” Among these changes are some alterations to the Latin spoken at the conferral of degrees, which, the university claims, are “necessary so that the Latin used can refer to those who identify as non-binary, as well as those who identify as male and female.”
The necessity, it should be stressed, is not obvious since the United Kingdom, whose Supreme Court has just unanimously ruled that “the words ‘sex,’ ‘woman’ and ‘man’ in [the Equality Act 2010] mean (and were always intended to mean) biological sex, biological woman and biological man,” does not recognize “non-binary” as a legal category.
But what about the Latin? Articles about the removal of some ceremonial words that are grammatically marked as specifically masculine or feminine—examples include forms of the noun magister (master) and the pronoun hic (this)—quickly appeared in more conservative British papers, such as The Telegraph, and in venues on this side of the pond, too. The two principal objections to the revised language are the motivation behind it and its purported inelegance. For example, Abigail Anthony, who has published in The New Criterion, writes in the National Review that “to change the refined traditions in accordance with a depraved modern trend is an insult to the alumni (er, alumnx?) who preserved the university’s customs through perilous times,” while Dominic Selwood is quoted in The Times of London as follows: “Universities and languages are alive, and sensitive updates are healthy. That said, the proposed new language is consummately devoid of any elegance, atmosphere, beauty or tradition.” Notably, both objections refer to custom and tradition.
Still, one well-known conservative lover of Latin—and, like Anthony, a contributor to The New Criterion—mounted an immediate defense in UnHerd: “I studied classics at Oxford,” writes Harry Mount, “but I don’t mind this change to ancient tradition. Despite being a supposedly dead language, Latin can clearly change with the times. Even then, the masculine plural has always been used to cover a mixed-gender group.” Oddly, though, Mount does not appear to have seen the proposed language when he composed his words: he “will be thrilled to read how [the] new text looks if the changes go through.”
Mount, it should be said, learned both Latin and Greek at one of England’s great schools, Westminster, where he was taught by the man who approved the changes to the Latin, Jonathan Katz, a linguistic phenomenon whom he correctly describes as “planet-brained.” Katz (a friend of mine but no relation) has been Oxford’s Public Orator since 2016; of his role he has said, “Ideologically, I remain neutral in this, but it was an interesting linguistic exercise that the lead Dean of Degrees and I were requested to go through.” Someday perhaps he will explain the awkward passive and who exactly requested them to go through it.
In the weeks since the announcement, things have heated up in anticipation of the meeting tomorrow, April 29, at which the Congregation, Oxford’s sovereign body, comprising about five thousand staff members, will vote on the proposed changes. In particular, earlier this month, The Telegraph published a follow-up article: “The academics incensed by the woke overhaul of Oxford’s 800-year-old graduation ceremony.” Despite the title, however, the article makes clear that those who know the most about the ancient world are sharply divided.
According to David Butterfield—one of the most brilliant Latinists of his generation, who made waves last year when he left a lifetime appointment in classics at Cambridge to become the professor of Latin at Ralston College in Savannah, for reasons he has explained in these pages—“The result is incredible and weird Latin.” Also quoted in the article against the changes, mostly citing tradition, are Lord Biggar, the retired Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford (also a contributor to these pages); Douglas Hedley, a professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge; two students at Oxford; and two academics (a “lecturer” and a “senior fellow of an Oxford college”) who go unnamed, in at least one of the cases because of an explicit desire to have his or her identity concealed. (When twenty-first century academics are unwilling to have their opinion be known about a matter of Latin wording, you know there’s a serious underlying issue.)
On the other side, however, The Telegraph quotes two distinguished senior Oxford classicists, Armand D’Angour and Christopher Pelling, and one current student of ancient and modern history. D’Angour says, “There’s absolutely no reason why the use of Latin shouldn’t move with the times if one wants it to”; Pelling, who retired some years ago from the Regius Professorship of Greek, claims, “The proposed form is perfectly good Latin, and is arguably less clumsy than the form that has been used up till now”; and the student, whom the paper describes as “one of the 0.2 per cent identifying as non-binary at Oxford,” states, “It’s very nice to have tradition and celebrations, but Oxford is already an elitist institution which is fundamentally unwelcoming. Knowing that the language has changed makes it that bit more welcoming for me.”
Obviously, both the aesthetics of the new Latin and the matter of tradition are controversial even to the cognoscenti. For my part, I don’t especially object to the Latin as such. If I did not know the original, I don’t believe I would notice the change in wording for the bestowal of a master’s in philosophy (my own Oxford degree) from
Insignissime Vice-Cancellarie, vosque egregii Procuratores, praesento vobis hunc meum scholarem in facultate Artium, ut admittatur ad gradum Magistri in Philosophia
to
Insignissime Vice-Cancellarie, vosque egregii Procuratores, praesento vobis scholarem in facultate Artium hic adstantem, ut admittatur ad gradum Magistri in Philosophia,
with “I present to you this student of mine” altered to “I present to you the student standing here” because the words hunc meum (this of mine) are specifically masculine, agreeing with the masculine noun scholarem (student, pupil), while adstantem (standing) is a participle that can be interpreted as either masculine or feminine and hic (here) is an adverb and thus has no gender. I might add that those intoning the new words had better remember to pronounce the adverb as hīc and not as hĭc since, besides being ungrammatical in context, the latter is a specifically masculine form, the nominative corresponding to the offending accusative hunc.
Again, I don’t especially object to the Latin. But four matters are worth noting. First, in Oxford’s zeal to make a very few scholares feel more welcome by, well, not neutering but de-gendering Latin, the university ignores the fact that gender remains everywhere, including in some mismatches that must bother more people than hunc meum scholarem. Take, for example, the titles that begin each of the many formulae: Vice-Cancellarie (a post-Classical form) and Procuratores are both masculine, as the immediately preceding vocative adjectives insignissime (most distinguished) and egregii (splendid) make clear. And yet the current Vice-Chancellor, Irene Tracey, is female, as was her predecessor, Dame Louise Richardson; so are two of the current Pro-Proctors.
Second, an earlier attempt to be gender-inclusive is on the chopping block. In the current “Conduct of Ceremonies,” forms of the word scholaris—which is not Classical Latin, first showing up in British sources only in the eighth century—are used just once as a feminine as well as a masculine noun, in the plural. (Consistency in ritual seems surprisingly unimportant.) In a formula to bestow various master’s degrees, Oxford proposes now to change
. . . praesento vobis hos meos scholares et has meas scholares in facultate Artium,
which specifies that those presented are hos meos scholares (these male students) et has meas scholares (and these female students), to
. . . praesento vobis scholares in facultate Artium hic adstantes,
with the phrase hic adstantes, where adstantes is the plural of adstantem, which we have already seen. In other words, it’s not enough to use “the masculine plural . . . to cover a mixed-gender group,” and it’s not enough to add a modern feminine plural to the masculine plural so that both men and women are explicitly represented; the new line is to ramp up “social gender” and thereby tamp down grammatical gender.
Third, adstantem and adstantes are participles of a(d)stare, a compound of the basic verb stare, which means “to stand.” According to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, conventional definitions of a(d)stare include “to stand by,” “to stand waiting,” “to stand still,” and “to stand on one’s feet, stand up.” But what if an imminent graduand is in a wheelchair or otherwise cannot stand? Of course it would be ridiculous for someone in this situation to be offended by the language, and yet ridiculous people exist. Why does Oxford wish to protect non-binary people but not the differently abled?
And fourth, I owe to conversations with the Oxford philosopher of language Paul Elbourne the observation that the proposed removal of the initial vocative magister (master) from oath formulae such as
Magister, tu dabis fidem ad observandum statuta privilegia consuetudines et libertates istius Unversitatis
is especially odd since everyone to whom this is said is being admitted ad gradum Magistri, that is to say, “to the master’s degree,” or already possesses this qualification. Americans are, of course, used to the minefield of the word “master” in English, which entered the language long ago as a borrowing from Latin magister and its descendant in French. The English word, which Harvard, Yale, and Princeton decided in 2015 was an inappropriate designation for the heads of their principal residential units, is now verboten in what was until recently the entirely familiar phrases “master bedroom” and “master bathroom.” (On April 24, when the present article was already in press, the Oxford Gazettte promulgated an amendment to the original proposal by Tristan Franklinos and the already-mentioned Jonathan Katz whereby “[i]n the light of . . . resistance” and because “they form part of the tradition handed down to us and they connote . . . respect,” formulae with magister would keep the vocative after all.)
So what about tradition? It should already be clear that Oxford’s Latin is not Cicero’s. And it is clear, too, that for those who do not subscribe to the view that “Latin’s a dead language, as dead as dead can be./ First it killed the Romans, now it’s killing me,” new vocabulary and expanded meanings of words are often called for: Butterfield begins his piece on Ralston with an anecdote about deciding that the Latin for “laptop” is computatellum. That said, there is a huge difference between tweaking an item of vocabulary and using a wrench to try, as Butterfield puts it, to “hide the fact that grammatical gender is baked into” the language.
But Latin officialese is by and large not spoken by or for those who revel in lingua Latina. It is telling that the one proposed change that is presumably uncontroversial is the correction of “admittaur,” a non-existent verb form, to admittatur (may be admitted)—an error in one formula that has stood unaltered for twenty-three years. The fact is that ceremonial Oxonian locutions are performative and, these days, are performed almost entirely as art for art’s sake. And this makes the proposed changes, which are unquestionably performative, also art—though bad, sociopolitically propelled art. This bad art is motivated by the peculiar malice that some people who have been admitted to and welcomed by one of the world’s greatest and, in the best sense, elite institutions of higher education hold toward said institution and toward the very idea of higher education itself.
It should, however, be pointed out that the bad art is not itself an assault on tradition, at least not on tradition as the sociologist Edward Shils understands the term in his celebrated 1981 book on the subject, Tradition. As Shils puts it,
The performance of a ritual action, whether it is an act of communion or the celebration of an anniversary or loyal toast to a monarch, is not a tradition; it is a set of words and physical movements expressive of a state of sentiment and belief.
The problem, as I see it, then, is that the proposed changes to the Latin are expressive of a misguided state of sentiment and belief. Or, rather, of two misguided beliefs: first, that it is a reasonable activity to try—necessarily wholly inconsistently—to wave away a fundamental part of a given language’s grammar; and second, that ritual formulae in Latin, of all languages, should be socially engineered for the purpose of validating a faddish view of “social gender” that was until very recently indicative of mental illness and is likely soon to be so viewed again.
There is more to say. I have seen no article that notes that Oxford proposes to change the wording of some ceremonies in English, too, namely ceremonies to admit the university’s two highest officers, the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor, as well as some others, such as the Proctors and the Public Orator. So if, for example, the Congregation votes yea tomorrow, the instruction
On the occasion of the admission of the Vice-Chancellor, the retiring Vice-Chancellor shall address Congregation briefly concerning his or her period of office, hand to the Proctors the statute book, the keys, and the seal of office, and leave his or her place to his or her successor
will change to
On the occasion of the admission of the Vice-Chancellor, the retiring Vice-Chancellor shall address Congregation briefly concerning their period of office, hand to the Proctors the statute book, the keys, and the seal of office, and leave their place to their successor [italics my own].
And what happens next? After taking an oath,
The new Vice-Chancellor shall then receive the insignia of office from the Proctors, take his or her seat as Vice-Chancellor, and hand to the Senior Proctor a list of the persons whom he or she has selected to act for the time being as Pro-Vice-Chancellors and perform such of his or her functions as he or she shall depute to them.
A bit clunky, true, but consider how the instruction will read with the proposed changes:
The new Vice-Chancellor shall then receive the insignia of office from the Proctors, take their seat as Vice-Chancellor, and hand to the Senior Proctor a list of the persons whom they have selected to act for the time being as Pro-Vice-Chancellors and perform such of the Vice-Chancellor’s functions as the Vice-Chancellor shall depute to them [italics my own].
It does not take a linguist to explain why whoever is responsible for the new wording decided that it was preferable to repeat “the Vice-Chancellor” twice at the end rather than propose this mess:
The new Vice-Chancellor shall then . . . take their seat as Vice-Chancellor, and hand to the Senior Proctor a list of the persons whom they have selected to act for the time being as Pro-Vice-Chancellors and perform such of their functions as they shall depute to them.
Surely the use of the pronominal adjective “their” as a singular in the revisions is, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “[i]n relation to a generic or indefinite noun or pronoun referring to an individual (e.g., someone, a person, the student, etc.), used esp. so as to make a general reference to such an individual without specifying gender” (I.2.b), a usage first recorded around six hundred years ago in the phrase “Ife any wighte Praye . . . to that damesele, She wille hyme helpe . . . Ife theire desire be goode & leele.” It can hardly be that it is instead here “[u]sed with reference to a person whose sense of personal identity does not correspond to conventional sex and gender distinctions” (I.2.c), a sense first documented on December 11, 2009, when @genderbitch posted on Twitter, “My partner is FAAB nonbinary. I avoid their genitals when they have dissonance flares.” But since these and similar proposed changes to the English appear directly underneath the proposed changes to the Latin and will be voted on by the Congregation at the same time (and since there are some non-binary-inspired Latin changes as well in the formula of admittance for the Proctors and the so-called Assessor), it is difficult not to wonder just how completely Oxford is willing to debase itself linguistically in an effort to win the favor of an illiberal faction that will not be satisfied even once it has reduced to rubble the site of the university’s major ceremonies, Christopher Wren’s sublime Sheldonian Theatre.
On April 1, a student newspaper at Oxford published an article that announced that the university would be abolishing the undergraduate degree in Classics (a.k.a. “Literae Humaniores”). Happy April Fools’ Day! But Jonathan Katz at the end of March said, in response to a query about the changes in Latin that he had approved, “One of my colleagues wrote to me this morning to ask whether this was an early April Fool. It isn’t.” If only it were.
