When the New York Times interviewed E.L. Doctorow  recently  they asked

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?  He had a long list. At the top, though, was your friend and mine, the father of history:

“Well, it could be Herodotus’ “The Histories” in the Landmark edition published by Pantheon. Herodotus is spectacular — part historian, part investigative reporter and inveterate storyteller. “

He went on to praise Tom Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos  as “ an intense philosophical takedown of Neo-Darwinism and scientific materialism. It’s a brave contrarian book.”

Doctorow seems to like brave, contrarian books; I’d love to hear him apply those terms to Herodotus, who in addition to being the investigative reporter and inveterate story teller, may also be a contrarian or  morew of a revisionist than we give him credit for.

Latin is not the whole story for the Classics, far from it, but it can be instructive.   See what you make out of this pyramid:

High school students in the US (2012):                    17,047,000

Graduating from HS with some Latin                         680,000

HS students taking the National Latin Exam                   136,000

HS students taking  the AP Latin Exam (2011)                   6,044

Passed the AP Latin exam                                                    3,861

Undergrad. Classics majors                                                  1,197                                     

This pyramid tells a story about the Classics in the US, but not the whole story. ( The news is not all bad: College Latin enrollments totaled 32,606 in 2009, a healthy rise  since the 1980s.) And courses in Greek and those not requiring the use of an ancient language need to be factored in as well.  The result will not be another narrative of decline, but the Latin figures are  a sobering tale of attrition –  especially when one considers that those 1197 majors are distributed over perhaps 400 Classics programs.   That means an average of 3  majors per program,   That’s not the right metric for gauging the educational contribution of  a Classics program, but its hard to wean administrators  from it.

So it’s important to ask whether there are intervention points where focused effort could reduce attrition or bring in a new student every time another student stops pursuing the field. 

I see at least a half dozen such intervention points, and they all point to the same maxims --Begin Early, and Share Knowledge.

Here’s my list. I hope you’ll add to it.

First, if it is true, as I hear, that the restraint on high school Latin enrollments comes  in large part from a shortage of trained Latin teachers, then that fact should be disseminated.  Classics majors can almost be guaranteed a job.  They need to know that (and so do their parents).  A larger number of  classics graduates going into high school teaching  could build the base of this pyramid.

Second, there is a major disparity between the number of high school students enrolling in a Latin course and those who go on to  take the AP Latin exam.  A frank dialogue with high school Latin teachers on this topic might determine if there are ways college and university faculty can  help, for example, by staffing a  summer  virtual or on-campus  “academies” for  promising students.

Third, do the students who pass AP Latin or otherwise distinguished themselves in Latin know which colleges and universities offer a classics program and which do not?  At least 85% of US colleges and universities provide no option to study the most influential texts of the Western literature with a teacher trained in the field.   Students should know that fact at an early stage. Before they have decided which colleges to apply to,  students who excel at the AP Latin exam  should receive a letter from the professional association of classicists congratulating them on their  progress to date and encouraging them to build on their accomplishment in a college  that provides them that option.

Fourth, the  slack period between the time students apply to college and their arrival on campus should be made less of an intellectual wasteland.   Students are known to slack off in their senior year of high school, and the summer is usually a waste as well.  So a national summer seminar might make sense aimed at introducing  students to the texts and issues that are basic to any college education worth its salt.

Fifth, Classics should be strongly represented in the orientation programs for first year students.  I don’t mean by having an occasional classical text  recommended for summer reading, but  an opportunity to introduce these newly arriving students to the Big Questions  that are  brought in focus and illuminated by the best minds of the past.  If other departments don’t care about the orientation period, or shy away from talking about “Big Questions,” i.e. personal and civic values, why not claim the turf for Classics?

Sixth, – only now does the curriculum come into focus – is there a Classics course taught in English translation for first semester, first year students that delivers the goods on the promises implied above.  If well designed, and well taught it should feed other courses in the ancient world, not least a beginning Greek course offered in the second semester.

Well-crafted interventions  at these six points could make a big difference for classics and for the students who are ready for a wide-ranging and challenging education.

Coincidences, I have come to suspect,  point us in useful directions.  Superstition? Maybe, but listen to this.

In the mail pile, all wrapped up in antiseptic plastic, was the new Daedalus, edited by the formidable Denis Donoghue, who has marshaled the big names of the humanities to tell us “What Humanists Do.”  The answer came clear very quickly: humanists read and write about literary and theoretical  texts in English (and occasionally French or German), written after 1840 or so.   They may tip their hat to Vergil (Michael Putnam writes well about “Dido’s Long Dying”) and look for a while at Brancusi, Giacometti and de Kooning, but they don’t waste much time on art, archaeology, music, moral or political philosophy, or stuff outside the Euro-American world.  Humanists, by implication, are literary scholars who write  discursively within those chronological and cultural boundaries, and to judge from these essays by the all-star cast  Donoghue has put together,  they do it very well.

But next to the new Daedalus was that morning’s  Times, with a front page story by Ron Nordland on something quite different, the re-opening of the Kabul Museum. The Taliban had smashed everything they could get their grimy hands upon and looters and war lords had done the rest.   But thanks to the bravery  of the museum staff, customs officials, and others some of the collection has survived.    In the museum’s basement, moreover, scholars from  Chicago’s Oriental Institute, are compiling  a data base of the 11,000 objects that are still under the museum’s protective wing.  Once their catalogue is done, it will be a lot harder to raid the museum and smuggle the objects onto the world art market.  Stone age, Bronze age, Bactrian silver and gold, a  head of the Buddha.

So let’s ask, “What do these cataloguers do?”  They preserve the past, try to get the historical record right, make it accessible, help the rest of us understand something outside our own time and place.  Does that count, too?  Or is it just the already accessible near- present that is worthy of the name? After all, we humanists have expropriated that name from the scholars of what was once called  the Renaissance,  who did something very similar –they preserved a past that might otherwise have been lost or left in the great obscure.   If someone calls me a humanist, I think of those humanists, and feel humbled by what they were up against and what they achieved.  I would gladly share that name with those Chicago cataloguers who walk each day through the streets of Kabul to get on with the work of preserving a vulnerable past.  

 


Falluja falls to Al Quaeda;  soldiers who fought there feel it in the gut.  So the Times reminds us.

The news sent me back, as if I had fallen into  some of her  flash-backs, to Roxana Robinson’s extraordinary novel Sparta. Yes, ancient Sparta’s military society is the sub-text;  Iraq is the  inescapable reality; suicide keeps drawing closer.

But what haunts me about the novel is the contrast between the armor worn day-in, day-out by American troops in the war zone and what happens when they return home.  In combat he has every conceivable support; when Lt.  Conrad Farrell return home he has no protection.  There seems no where to turn, not to the overstretched bureaucracy of the VA, not to  family, for all their willingness to help, not to uncomprehending civilian friends. Nor is it easy to admit to another veteran any sign of weakness.  He’s alone; all alone.

 There is no armor back here, even the armor Simon Weill refers to in the apograph of the novel:

The man who does not wear the armour of the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul.

The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force.

 Sparta, I suppose, supplied that lie for its soldiers, “..the old lie/ dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”  But Conrad can’t  say that to himself, not what Cardinal Wolsey says to Cromwell in Shakespeare’s Henry the Eighth,

 Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies. (3.2.455ff.) 

But, naked to his enemies he is, and the enemies are the demons of his psyche.

The best of American education, moreover, does Conrad no good.  He graduated from Williams, majored in Classics, before joining the Marines.  But when his demons take over, what he had learned at Williamstown seems to evaporate.  How much did he write  in those four undergraduate years at Williams?  A lot one imagines, but the skilled writer of the novel never lets her hero glimpse that writing is a way some troubled souls bring order to life.  The novelist is right, I guess;  that’s not why serious writers write. That’s not the way to teach it.  It’s literature not therapy.  

Conrad feels himself totally alone, is as if no one had ever experienced that before, not Achilles, not Ajax, not Philoctetes.  He’s not the first to have experienced the corrosion of war.  He doesn’t have to be alone. Come on, Roxana, let him reach out to one of those texts, there on his bookshelf, and break that spell of isolation.   When my friend Paul Woodruff returned from Vietnam, he told me,  he read and re-read the Iliad.  Time and time again. It helped.    But. Oh no,  that’s not what literature is for, not the way to teach it, or read it.

Or is it? Maybe Conrad’s feckless younger brother, Ollie,  catches on. An aspiring film studies major at Bard, he emails  Conrad:

Last night we stayed up until two watching alien movies. It’s fir a class, we’re meant to figure out how aliens represent ourselves, and what aspects of our society they represent… I think it’s great to use this stuff, but I also wonder if I’m missing things -- will I ever read the Iliad if I don’t read it in college? I remember you talking about it when you were reading it, and I remember thinking that’s what college is like, and that’s how it would be for me. But it’s so different here. (p. 352)

 And later another email:

I transferred out of that class. I hated it. I’m taking The Age of the Classics instead. (p. 356)

 Yah, Ollie, maybe you’ll find something there; maybe you’ll come through. Yah.

 

 



How healthy are the Classic?  There are plenty of anecdotes, but what’s the evidence? Here’s what I have been able to gather about undergraduate education in the Classics in the US.   Please add to it or correct it when you think it is in error.

 

How many Classics programs are there?  The American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies) knows of over 450 institutions of higher education in the US and Canada offering some form of instruction in the ancient Greek and Roman classics:

406 US four year institutions (out of 2774  Title IV eligible four year institutions)

 42 Canadian universities (out of about 98)

   7 US community colleges  (out of 1655 )

How many Classics majors are there? Material gathered by Ben Schmidt  show 1197 bachelor degrees in classical languages, etc.    awarded in 2011. (For comparison, there  were over 52,000 degrees awarded in English, and over 371,000 in Business and related fields.)

 

How many students study the Greek and Latin languages?  The MLA’s 2009  survey of US college enrollments in languages other than English shows 

-Latin varying from  25,000 to 32,000 from 1980 to 2009, with a generally upward trend line.

-Ancient Greek varying between 16,000 and 22,000 per year, with no clear trend line, and some statistical problems in the tabulation.

How many college teachers of Classics are there? The membership of the professional association of Classicists is about 3,000. Not all are active classroom teachers, and not all college teachers of the Classics are members. The figure also includes a substatial number of Canadian membews.

What are enrollments in classical MOOCs? Massive open on-line courses in the Classics have substantial enrollments:

 

A course in  classical mythology  taught by Peter Struck of Penn enrolled about 50,000 the first time it was offered. About 5% earned certificates.  Enrollment for the second iteration is around 30,000. 

From Harvard Greg Nagy’s  HeroesX enrolled  35,000 in Spring 2013, of whom 1400 earned certificates of completion. 

The initial offering of a MOOC in Greek History by Andrew Szegedy-Maszak of Wesleyan University  enrolled 43,000 students of whom 3868 earned a “statement of accomplishment.” In the second iteration  23,672 students enrolled and  2003  received a statement of accomplishment.

Is there global interest in Classics as they are taught in the US?

Over 40 percent of the enrollment in some of the classical MOOcs comes from outside the US.

At NYU’s ca,puses at  Abu Dhabi campus and  Shanghai:  Matt Santirocco  reports that the Classic  are “part of the curriculum.  “

The same is true at Yale University’s joint venure with the National University of Singapore.

What don’t we know? A lot, for example, the number of faculty associated with each classical program, total enrollment (including courses not requiring Greek or Latin), relationship between high school study of Latin and college work in Classics,  gains in critical thinking  as compared to those in other fields.