This is the tenth year in a row that I've performed for students at UIC.
I've performed for them in the weird brutalist classrooms that I love for the intimate distance from the audience and how the cinderblock walls absorb (or don't absorb) sound.
I've performed for them over Zoom during the first year of the pandemic and in-person wearing a mask during the second.
I've loved having a great relationship with my hometown Classics program and I've especially loved the discussions that come reliably from one of if not the most diverse student bodies for which I've performed.
There's a narrative in the media right now that all campus free speech is under threat. And while there are numerous, diverse and well-documented issues around free speech on campuses, I'd like to provide pushback to the loudest one being shouted on cable news networks and algorithmically boosted on social media. This isn't to discount the experiences of and challenges for professors, many of whom I call friends.
This is to say that I've been lucky enough to perform on college campuses 20 to 50 times a year for the last decade plus. I've played what would be characterized as more conservative religious schools in Benedictine College, Baylor, Notre Dame, and BYU. I've played every Ivy League school but one (COME ON DARTMOUTH: get it together). I've played big public universities like UC-Berkeley, UT-Austin, University of Florida, and University of Michigan, and I've played small private Liberal Arts colleges. I've played in every state in the country.
I've seen the student population turn completely over at least three times. I've been invited back to many schools and seen changes over time. I've played through a pandemic over Zoom and seen university culture come creeping back slowly in the years that followed.
What I've found in the last 18 months is that students are more open to difficult conversations and productive discomfort than they have been at any time in the 20 years I've been performing my Homeric pieces and leading discussions around them.
The Odyssey and Iliad cover all the big issues that are in the spotlight in the narrative about campus speech: leadership, human violence, gender, love, sexuality, family, character, morality.
Students have always shown me amazing things in my discussions with them about these things but something in the last 18 months has (on balance) changed and it is in the exact opposite direction from what you and I are being told by people who haven't set foot on a college campus in decades.
And it's encouraging.
And my performance at UIC for the tenth straight year in one of those brutalist classrooms was no different. After I sang the Odyssey, the students challenged me. I challenged them. We laughed. We confronted real human issues. We squirmed a bit.
It was beautiful and human, an experienced shared by people of a wide array of identities. It was a showcase for the relevance and usefulness of Homeric epic as a conversation starter, a mirror in which to see ourselves individually and collectively.
In my experience of leading over 500 discussions with students, it makes a difference how you approach them and frame the conversation: instead of saying “Prove Me Wrong," say “How did you feel?" and ”What do you think?"
And then listen.
It's amazing what you'll hear.