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PRINCETON  CLASSICS DUMPS  ITS GREEK AND LATIN REQUIREMENT?-. WHAT’S GOING ON?

6/17/2021

10 Comments

 
​The media are having a field day with the decision of the Princeton Classics department to allow undergraduates to major in the field without ever completing a course in the Greek or Latin languages.  “Flexibility,” the department proclaims; “Sell-Out,” sneer the critics.
 
      The decision comes at a time when the New York Times and other publications have been calling attention to the doubts of one of the department’s members   whether the field of Classics is so infected with ”whiteness“ that it does not deserves to survive.   
    Seen in this  light the department’s decision to abolish its language requirement  looks like the first step toward dismantling the field as a whole.  It would take a brave student to chose to major in a field so infected by its alleged “whiteness.”
    Self-destruction is certainly not what the department intends, as one can see from its website (  https://classics.princeton.edu/department/news/statement-community-undergraduate-concentration ).   It believes that persuasion can do more than compulsion can to bring students to the study of the ancient languages.  Is this whistling in the dark? Or could it actually work?  Yes! Says  the Atlantic for June 8, 2021, where  Graeme Wood suggests that this strategy is not so different from those used by drug peddlers, who start their clients off on  light stuff before moving them on to the heavy stuff.  
Time to step back and ask, “If ‘flexibility’ is the solution, what’s the problem?  Not, it seems, large numbers of students needing more flexibility” to find their ways through  the  rich smorgasbord of departmental offerings– from  Akkadian to contemporary Caribbean literature.. No, it’s Just the opposite, as an article in the Washington Free Beaco for  June 8 2021 pointed out,. It points out that the number of Classics majors  at Princeton  has fallen  significantly in  recent years  .  Seen in that light the new “flexibility” looks like a desperate survival strategy.
 What the Beacon doesn’t report, however, is that the numbers have fallen in almost all the university’s  departments in the humanities.  I no longer have any insider knowledge of Princeton’s affairs, but reports of humanities-wide decline seems to match a national trend. Although enrollment statistics are never up-to-date and always tricky to interpret, the National Center for Educational Statistics documents a steep decline in most   humanistic fields during the decade ending in  2019.  These statistics, however, do not provide a picture of  shifts within the fields, for example, in English Literature between courses based on contemporary popular culture  and social issues, and those based on traditional  authors, e.g.  Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton. Melville, Yeats etc.   In this respect Classics serves as a seismograph measuring the shift away from canonical authors and topics elsewhere in the humanities.
Why it matters: If a recent  decline in majors is not restricted  to Classics but is occurring throughout the humanities, then remedies specific to Classics, such as lowering language requirements, may not  deal with the real problem.  It’s a humanities-wide issue.  In that case a department must either lock arms with other humanistic fields to develop a humanities-wide strategy, or decide to go it alone, emphasizing the difference between it and the  others .  The Princeton situation, in other words, raises the question whether Classics have something  distinctive to offer, and if so, what is it?   
Sound familiar? What’s the story on your campus?
----
PS:  Readers: I invite you to post your comments on these matters.  I am especially interested whether the same pressures are being felt on other campuses and how Classics departments are responding.
 
 
June  17, 2021
 
10 Comments
Rebecca Kennedy link
6/20/2021 10:04:49 am

We wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed last week discussing some of the issues. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/06/15/why-and-how-study-classics-changing-opinion

You can also find more information here: https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2021/02/changing-classics-what-do-we-want-not.html and https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2021/02/changing-classics-to-save-classics-view.html

Jackie Murray and I also wrote a piece for ESPN’s The Undefeated on the closure of Howard (surely more important than minor program changes to Princeton’s undergraduate degree). You can find it linked to further material on my blog under the post on the “New Negro”, Race and Classics. The field has far more issues than Princeton’s flexible program—which is already the standard at most small programs already and has been for years.

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Rebecca Futo Kennedy
6/20/2021 10:18:17 am

I also want to recommend this piece by Dan Walden.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/06/calm-down-the-classics-arent-going-anywhere/

To be honest, the Free Beacon piece gets some things correct, but clearly misrepresents Dan-El Padilla Peralta's position and person.

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Bob Connor
6/25/2021 01:15:45 pm

Thanks for your two very helpful comments. I'll post another piece based on emails I have received. I will be interested in your reactions.

don lateiner
6/20/2021 03:18:17 pm

The complicated issue of the future of Classics, aka Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, aka the Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE and CE, disallows easy explanation or solution or salvation.
At Ohio Wesleyan, a resurrection in the early '70s, followed by a renaissance, fell with a crash when the one tenured faculty member left/resigned/was terminated under several dark clouds. The imprudently arranged one-person department (formerly part of Humanities-Classics), in an atmosphere of financial exigency (designated by another name), was folded into a World Languages and Literatures department--a harbinger of hazard and marker of marginalization.
The position (as opposed to the person) should have been secure, but it is not in these times that try decent souls. There will be a one-year VAP. After that the position will need to be re-approved by the department before the relevant all-college committee gets to decide whether to approve it.
The ancient languages are an essential part of studying the many ancient societies and those authors and artists who represent it. But many faculty members feel comfortable only in English, and recently introduced Diversity hoops will have to be jumped through. So, despite support from Alums, some colleagues and the SCS, the future of ancient Greek and Latin are here in peril.
I agree with BC that all the Humanities disciplines face decreased enrollments. This should be a matter of concern to all liberal arts college divisions but in the current dog-eat-dog world of disciplinary positions, a liberal education is an endangered species. Can we deem "Classics" (an arrogant term many of us objected to when the APhA was renamed) the canary in the coal mine?
The fighting cocks of Classics are ready to slice their colleagues to death, unless the rules and expectations are changed. The foot-soldiers may behave like ostriches (to mix metaphors), hoping the dust will settle without apocalypse.
Well I know the day will come when these languages, essential for understanding our dynamic unequal culture, will perish, both ancient Greek and Latin. But may I be dead and buried before they are dragged away and forgotten
IMHO, the ancient Mediterranean world was diverse. Like ours,

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Christopher Francese link
6/21/2021 04:21:02 am

Our switch from a rather language heavy major (8 semesters of language + 2 Civ classes) to a more moderate language requirement (5 language + 5 civ) was motivated by a straightforward desire to appeal to students who primarily interested in history or archaeology rather than philology. It has worked well on that level, and enrollments are strong across the board, including language classes, though we now essentially do not teach the senior level advanced language-based seminars which used to be the capstone. Capstone is broader and better, I think, because we are no longer implicitly training them to go to grad school. Some still do, but we serve a broader constituency now. Most of our majors are double majors in classics and something else.

To your bigger point, recently declining humanities enrollments, we observe it also at Dickinson, though some departments such as philosophy and education are quite popular. History and English rather less so. The bigger dynamic at work is high tuition costs, which impel students to majors perceived as more practical. My personal belief is that there is no sin in this, that classics was long a highly practical major, and that we should be teaching subjects like public speaking that are in the classical wheelhouse and are in fact practical.

One quirk at Princeton, I believe, is that they have no double majors. So it’s going to be tougher for them than for most of us to sustain higher enrollments. Fwiw, I tutored a Princeton undergrad (African American) who was taking a year off during the pandemic in Ancient Greek. Her main concern was not doing less language, but doing more so she could win the department’s translation prize in Latin and Greek. Students who love the languages will study them intensely, and we need to serve them, too.

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Al Duncan
6/21/2021 04:58:17 am

I so appreciated this post and the thoughtful replies its already generated, and would strongly encourage others to click-through on RFK's links for further reading. This is an important conversation we're having now.

As readers of this blog will know, issues of accessibility at the undergraduate level are entwined with those of 'pipeline.' At UNC Chapel Hill, we've been looking over various strategies to make ancient Greek more accessible, from language pedagogy to course scheduling (a real concern when there is only one section), to outreach in many forms. In seeking to expand access to our major and our coursework, we're finding it easy to jump through institutional 'Diversity hoops' almost as a matter of course.

Still, we've come to realize that, for students who arrive as freshmen with strong interests and aptitude in Greek and/or Latin languages, we've been providing a *very* narrow path to a major.

Given the state of university funding/productivity models, from Ohio Wesleyan to Princeton and all points beyond and in between, bean-counting is involved in these decisions as we are asked to 'maximize' according to rubric's established by the deans, etc. But at least within the departments themselves, I think we're all (also) concerned with providing students a meaningfully 'complete' (if hardly comprehensive) undergraduate training, for which languages play an important (for some even, essential) role, but which also come with an opportunity cost.

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Gregory Hays
6/21/2021 08:56:20 am

'm an outsider so I know only what I've read, but my sense is that the Princeton changes are being driven by issues specific to the structure of majors at Princeton. That they're serving as a focal point for larger concerns about the future of the field is really an accident of timing.

At UVA we offer courses in translation, but all our majors are Greek or Latin majors and all take at least a year of the "other" language. This is partly reflective of internal structures here: ancient historians, archaeologists, etc. are housed in other departments, so students primarily interested in those areas tend to major in the corresponding department. We've so far elected not to offer a classical civilization major (or minor)—right now we have enough to do trying to serve our current majors and our graduate students—but I wouldn't say we've ruled it out if circumstances were to change. I think different places will find different solutions. I agree with those who see the wholesale elimination of departments (as at Howard), as the biggest concern right now, and I think that's being driven by much larger forces: administrators prone to mindless groupthink, trustees with no understanding of higher education, and bad political actors. In that context the Princeton changes really seem tangential at best.

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Beverly Bardsley
6/21/2021 01:24:07 pm

I suppose "Caribbean literature" means Derek Walcott's Omeros, which is indeed a considerable achievement. I hope they are also teaching my favorite French poet Saint-John Perse, who was born on Guadeloupe. His Anabase might lead at least one student back to Xenophon.

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Andrew Szegedy-Maszak
6/23/2021 02:04:17 pm

WRC has written an excellent essay. Trying not to repeat what others have said so well, here are a few comments.
When I had a visiting stint at Princeton in '98-99, I was brought in to a Department meeting to consult about establishing a major in "Classical Civilization" vel sim., which would require less language study than the traditional Classics major. Many of the faculty were enthusiastic. One senior professor, however, was adamantly, vehemently opposed, saying, as I recall, that such an offering would draw every dumb athlete who couldn't get into another, more demanding major. I replied that our experience at Wesleyan (CT) had been exactly the opposite. It continues to be so. Our classes in history, material culture, mythology, and various kinds of reception are regularly full. The problem, as others have noted, arises with the languages, particularly at the intermediate and advanced level. We used to be able to point to, say, a history class with 60 students and use it to offset a Greek class with 4. No longer. Any course with an enrollment of fewer than 5 becomes a group tutorial, with the faculty member owing a make-up (i.e., overload) class to be taught within the next 2 academic years. Regrettably too, our popular courses don't generate many major declarations, another strike against us in the eyes of some administrators. At the same time I realize we are so much better off than many of our colleagues at other institutions.

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Jeff Henderson
6/24/2021 11:37:07 am

I would add, from my perspective as Director of the SCS Classics Advisory Service (please have a look:https://classicalstudies.org/professional-matters/classics-advisory-service), that whatever the motivation of the Princeton department, which I believe will not be seriously affected, their move against Latin and Greek will serve as ammunition for classics-hostile administrations at less privileged places. I communicate with these on a regular basis at the request of classics programs shrinking, blended into other programs, or existentially threatened and find that their usual excuses -- finances, number of majors (BTW ask your dean about physics finances and majors), etc. -- are mostly bogus, so a major institution designating Latin and Greek as not merely a (useless) luxury (like the other languages) but elitist/racist as well has handed them a potent weapon.

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