The Pandemic and Undergraduate Greek: Crisis and Opportunity

This paper describes how Ohio, Bowling Green, Kent State, Miami, and Marshall University organized in January 2020 to address the common problem of declining enrollments in undergraduate ancient Greek. Our goal was to make the teaching of ancient Greek sustainable by sharing our students and pooling our teaching resources in a comprehensive undergraduate curriculum. We planned to deliver a real-time curriculum using Zoom conferencing software. Miami and Ohio University were already sharing advanced Latin and Greek classes. The Ohio-West Virginia Greek Consortium would be a scaling-up of that arrangement.

A few weeks later the pandemic struck. The financial impact of COVID on our institutions further threatened the sustainability of undergraduate Greek and made us even more conscious of the need to cooperate. In discussions from February through December we worked out the details both of a common undergraduate curriculum in ancient Greek and a description of the Consortium’s administrative structure.

The necessity of on-line teaching led us to acquire practices accommodated to the new medium.  To note a few: screen-sharing of texts put everyone in the class on the same page; putting the text in Word-format allowed pointed grammatical illustration; Zoom breakout rooms allowed students to work in groups; student screen-sharing enabled real-time composition exercises; since we were on-line from the start, it was easy to access media.  Such techniques seem obvious in retrospect, but it took a while to figure out how to exploit the Zoom classroom for Greek instruction. And we are still learning.

One thing did not change. Human and social skills were critical to our success: the collegiality the Consortium members applied to working out a complex and detailed Memorandum of Understanding; the political calculation involved in negotiating the support of our respective administrations. In this regard, the support of the SCS, in particular, a timely letter from Jeff Henderson and Sheila Murnaghan, played an important role.

The paper concludes with a reflection on our relative privilege as professors of Classics during a period in which economic and social calamity brought enormous suffering to our fellow citizens and thrown public universities into a state of existential crisis. We viewed our commitment to making Greek sustainable as a contribution that we could make as humanities scholars to our students, our discipline, and the public good.