Kenneth Scott Morrell
Emerging from a series of inter-institutional programs sponsored by Sunoikisis, the Center for Hellenic Studies undertook a study of the undergraduate major in classics from 2006 to 2008, with funding from the Teagle Foundation. Among the goals of the study were (1) to determine from the perspective of faculty members and majors what constituted the discipline of classics, i.e. what were the typical constituent components of a major program of study in the field, and (2) to examine the relationship between the goals of classics programs and the overall missions of the institutions.
The findings of the study appeared in a special issue of Liberal Education on Liberal Education and the Disciplines 95.2 (2009): 14-21. As part of that study, the team collected data on the programs at sixty-nine colleges of the liberal arts, five universities that offered terminal master's degrees in classics, and ten universities, five public and five private, that offered doctorate degrees in the field. Those data provided a snapshot of the discipline in the United States at that moment, which is now ten years ago.
This presentation will return to that set of data and compare it with the most recently published data and provide some quantitative observations about what has happened over the last decade and what the trends suggest. It will also review the efforts of Sunoikisis and other organizations to foster inter-institutional initiatives during that period and offer an assessment of the outcomes and challenges of collaboration on a curricular level among institutions of higher education.