Michael Lurie, a fellow at the National Humanities Center, called my attention to a study by Derek T. Muller, Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law. It includes a graph showing on one Axis the median LSAT  scores, and on the other the grade point averages of students in various majors who apply to US law schools.  The software for this blog (or my ability to use it) doesn’t let me reproduce the graph so click here. (I’ll also post it as a PDF on the  “Provocations” section of this site).  In addition to the graph there is a chart,  giving the numbers, major by major, and another graph in Professor Mueller’s blog entry shows which majors are represented among students  matriculating in law school.

Classics leads the pack.

To be sure, caution is in order.  The graph does not show who actually gets in to Law School, or which law schools they enter..  It’s hard to imagine, though, that the average applicant who majored in International Relations and earned a 3.38 GPA and scored 157.3 onn the LSAT will be denied admission in favor of a  Criminal Justice major with a 3.12 GPA and a LSAT of just over 143.. 

Josipa Roksa points out to me that the picture of those who actually matriculate is rather different. See http://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2014/4/sorting-law-school-matriculants-by-major-lsat-ugpa. She also points out to me that “selection bias” may be significant, for instance,  Natural science majors may have more options on graduation than humanities majors do, so those applying to law school may not be fully representative of  the top students in the field.

The figures do not tell which colleges or universities produce the candidates with the highly attractive combination of high GPA and high LSAT scores.  The figures for Classics, however, are instructive, since the field is represented in only about 15% of US  four year institutions , and those are most often the  Ivies and Ivy-look-alikes, flagship state universities,  and the more selective liberal arts colleges. No one will be surprised if graduates of these institutions, whether Classics majors  or not, will do well in law school admissions.

The figures also omit socio-economic status or race.  But the curricular offerings of historically black institutions are currently heavily weighted toward the vocational fields –the ones least likely to produce majors with strong law school qualifications.  

Let’s be clear: Choosing a major from the top right corner of the graph will  not necessarily mean a high LSAT and an easy search for admission.   One could argue, for example, that students who  concentrate in a  challenging discipline such as the  Classics are likely to be intelligent, disciplined  and hard-working, hence likely to do well on the LSAT.  But those qualities, presumably, are precisely the ones Law Schools are looking for.  The inference, then, would be if a student likes the  Classics or International Relations, or Art History, or Philosophy, or another field  near the top right corner of the graph,  she should not hesitate to major in that field.

 Plenty of voices are telling students to pursue vocationally oriented majors, whether they are interested in the subject matter or not. But what a disservice it would be to tell a student interested in law school to choose a vocational major. At the very bottom both in GPA and in LSAT scores are the most vocational majors: Business Management, Business  Administration, Social Work, Criminal Justice.  It’s hard to imagine that these majors are powerfully attractive to law school admissions officers.  The undergraduate major  in is Law (also pre Law) is also at a disadvantage, especially when compared to humanistic and social scientific fields at the upper right hand corner of the graph.

So go for it! If you are lucky enough to be enrolled in a colleges that offers a strong major in Art History, or Classics, or Philosophy, and if you are genuinely interested in the field, don’t hesitate.  You may be a stronger candidate for law school as a result.

Coincidence strikes again.

At a recent conference a speaker who had recently spent a lot of time talking to faculty members about their teaching reported that she was amazed how frequently she heard faculty use the metaphor of “pumping” knowledge into students’ heads.  Students, it turns out, also use that metaphor when describing less than satisfactory learning experiences.  

On the plane flying back from the conference, I was reading the Hippocratic Law, when Coincidence struck.  I came across this description of how physicians should be taught:

The learning of medicine may be likened to the growth of a plant. Our natural ability (physis) is the soil. The views of our teachers are as it were the seeds. Learning in childhood is analogous to the seed falling upon prepared ground. The place of instruction is as it were the nutriment that comes from the surrounding air … . Diligence (philoponie) is the working of the soil. Time strengthens all these things so the nurture is perfected.

          Hippocratic  Law iii, trans. W.H.S. Jones, modified

That’s a much richer metaphor than “pumping.” Look for natural talent, good early childhood education, and make sure there is, as they say, a “good learning environment.”  Nice. But it It turns out that’s not the end of the story. The agricultural  metaphor grows and blossoms in antiquity, for example this passage from a summary of the philosophy of the Stoic Zeno.  We’re told that philosophers have many metaphors for their subject :

… they liken Philosophy to a fertile field,  Logic being the encircling fence, Ethics the crop, Physics the soil or the trees.

     Diogenes Laertius VII. 40, trans, R.D. Hicks

The Hippocratic Law, however, also resonates with the imagery in the parable of the sower told in each of the synoptic gospels. In Mark it goes like this:

Listen!  A sower went out to sow.  And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it.  Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it had not much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil; and when the sun rose it was scorched, and since it had no roots, it withered away.  Other seed fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain.  And other seed fell in good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty fold, and sixtyfold, and a hundredfold.

         Mark 4, 3 – 8, trans. Revised Standard Version. Cf. Matthew 13, 18 – 23, and Luke 8, 5 – 8.

The astonishing thing in the parable to my way of thinking is the rash promiscuity of the sower.  He casts the seed this way and that, as if it were cheap or of no value at all. It seems not to bother him that the forces of nature all work against him, the birds, the sun, the acanthus bushes.  There is, to be sure, some good soil around, but there is no hint that the  sower has prepared it, or that he covers the seed over with soil, or  waters it, or comes back to weed it.  None of that is his job.   Yet his efforts succeed, with yields of thirty, sixty or even a hundred fold.

So, ewe have plenty of  metaphor  to choose from -- the pump, the  well prepared soil, the  logically bounded field, or the unconstrained scattering of seed.  But watch out: metaphors sneak up on you; they have a way of  shaping  practice, and determining results. So I guess we had better be careful which one we choose.

 

 

 



I asked the audience “How many of you watched the winter  Olympics at Sochi when you should have been reading Greek or Latin?” A few hands went up, including my own. 

“Come on, tell the truth.” A few more hands went up.

“You have a chance to redeem yourselves by answering a question and solving a riddle.”

The Question: Which work of ancient literature is set in or near Sochi?

After a silence, a bright student said, “Aeschylus’ Prometheus.”

“Which Prometheus? He wrote three of them.”

“Prometheus Bound.”

“Good. Now the riddle.”

The Riddle: How are the Classics like Prometheus?

 

Lots of suggestions came.  The one I liked best was, “Because administrators keep trying to rip the guts out of us, but don’t succeed.”

“Here’s another way to approach the riddle,” I suggested.  “Did you ever notice who comes to visit  Prometheus up there in the Caucasus?  Oceanids and their daddy,  and then poor wandering Io, and finally Zeus’ errand boy, Hermes.   These are all on the move, unconfined to any one spot -- in one way or another, unbounded. Oceanus is a good example:  “I come/ on a long journey, speeding past the boundaries  / to visit you, Prometheus  …”(lines 279 f.).

So, in this play bounded confronts unbounded. Is there an analogy to Classics? Sure, in this respect: Classics is both chronologically and geographically bounded.  What’s more, Classics is the only field that by definition is so bounded. All the others can move forward or back, earlier or later, north or south, east or west, whatever they choose.  English can go back to the roots of Old English, or up to the lyrics of Gangsta Rap.  Scholars in the field can journey with Chaucer to Canterbury, or whisk off to Australia, India, the Falklands, wherever English is spoken.   Similarly with History, or Musicology or Philosophy, or Near5 Eastern Studies, or –well, you get the point. Meanwhile, Classic, like Prometheus, is confined to its remote mountain peak.  

What a disaster! 

But wait a minute.  Prometheus is determined to tough it out, until Zeus relents.  Could being bounded  possibly be a good thing for Classics?

“It keeps you focused.”

“You don’t have to run around in circles all the time.”

True enough and Classics is not subject to the dynamic of growth that often shapes the unbounded fields of academia.  Their incentives all push toward the contemporary.  That’s the low-hanging fruit.   Over time departments in the unbounded fields are tempted to move toward whatever is new and easy to explain to students.  Earlier periods get compressed or dismissed, staffing shifts toward the present.  When the past survives, moreover, it is judged by the standards of our time. “Presentism” takes command.   That’s not a story about Classics; it’s is about the whole of human experience until very recent times.  Medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment studies all suffer, -- and not just European civilization.  The roots of all cultures are in danger of being left neglected and parched.

Today you can see that happening in many colleges and universities.  If that continues the result will be that the study of the past is eviscerated, and students attain only a very impoverished education.  It’s not easy to stand up against that, but when, as Prometheus puts it, “Classics is an anchor to windward when, as Prometheus says, “all the winds’ blasts / dance in a fury” (1085 f.  trans, David Grene), Classics is an anchor to windward.

 

 

I had been working hard on a talk for a group of North Carolina classicists.  So when a letter came from Bob Hellenga, an old friend and a much admired novelist, I put it aside, just glancing at the enclosure, the text of a lecture at Monmouth College, called “Confessions of a Fictional Classicist.”  I’ll reads it later, after the lecture, I promised myself.

En route to the meeting, Bob Simmons, a visiting Assistant Professor at UNC-Greensboro, said he noticed I had an honorary degree from Knox College.  Very politely, suppressing any amazement that I should have received such an honor, he asked how it came about.   My long-winded answer necessarily involved an account of my friendship with Bob Hellenga.

“The Bob Hellenga who wrote Fall of a Sparrow? “

“The very one.”

“That novel changed my life.”

“How so?”

“It made a classicist of me.”

As I teased out the story, I realized that no specific passage in the novel had yielded this result.  Simmons said, “ it just reminded me of the joy that a professor of Classics can take in doing the work that she or he does. “  Joy, but a lot of hard work, too.

The day after my talk at Greensboro I turned to Hellenga’s lecture, a rich exegesis of Fall of a Sparrow, with its light-handed Homeric resonances.  Of course, Homer won’t resonate in your novel unless you pour out a full libation of hard work.  For Hellenga much of that came during the years we were both at the University of Michigan.  Before I met him Hellenga had taken Great Books and  Introductory Greek with Art Hanson:

Everything came out of these two classes  .. Friends, my wife (introduced by someone in Greek class).  My intellectual framework.  Especially Homer… I worked hard to translate sixty lines a night. Professor Blake would come into class and say , ‘Rosy-fingered dawn came up like this this morning,’ and he’d hold his hands up to demonstrate.  That was the extent of literary criticisms in the class.  All we had to worry about was slogging through sixty lines per class. There was absolutely no pressure to appreciate the Homeric poems as works of great literature. And I think this was a good thing. Appreciation came naturally, unforced.

 

And in time a series of novels, and real-as-life characters, came too. Of these  Woody in  Fall of a Sparrow is one of my favorites.  He’s a classicist, though not in the mold of Warren Blake. “It was a truly wonderful thing, he reminded himself, that a man could earn a living talking to young people about Homer and Ovid and Horace.”  Wonderful, and a joy as well, as Bob Simmons rightly inferred.

So watch out which texts you read. They have a way of sneaking up on you and changing everything.

--

OTHER NOVELISTS WITH A CLASSICAL BENT:

E.L. Doctorow, see blog entry of January 22, 2014

Roxana Robinson (Sparta), see blog entry of January 10, 2014