Allison Das (The Kinkaid School (Houston, TX))
The future of Classics in Higher Education looks grim. Over the past eight years there’s been a 33% decline in CLL and CIV majors, a loss of 600 undergraduates. When the average number of bachelor majors per department is 7.6 per year, it begs the question: can that sustain our field? The dissolution of Howard University and the University of Vermont's Classics Programs seem to be signs of a future trend. A future without Classical Studies. When compounded with a general decline in college enrollment post-Covid, “It’s big flashing warning light if you ask me…I’ve tried to tell colleagues about it, but they don’t want to hear it,” as a Classics professor explained to me recently. Something needs to change. In this paper, I will argue that in order to move forward we should radically rethink a strictly philological approach to Classics.
My argument will be formed using what I call “dispatches from the field,” a series of short, anonymous anecdotes from Classics professors, teachers, and students from across the US. Through these vignettes, I will explore how Classics is succeeding and how it is faltering in the 2020s. I’ll reckon with transformative, innovative pedagogy and pedagogy that may be holding the field back. I will highlight how the greatest barrier to change may be the conservatism of the field itself. A narrow, often unbudging version of Classics that has driven away some of our most talented teachers and students.
Throughout these vignettes, I’ll also interweave my own experience of growing and diversifying a moribund high school Latin program into one that continues to thrive. A program that I was able to resuscitate, doubling enrollment and garnering some of the most diverse demographics of any world language. I will discuss the changes that I made when confronted with declining enrollment and an internet, where every Latin text is a simple Google search away.
In closing, I will offer some suggestions on how we might move forward as a field. First, I’ll examine how philology can be taught in Classics classrooms without being the beginning and end of our field. Instead, I’ll argue that philology may be at its most powerful when paired with comparative literature, gender and queer studies, art history, and critical race theory. Next, I’ll examine how the AP Latin exam inhibits Classics in K-12 education by overemphasizing strict, line-by-line translation and undervaluing more critical, comparative, or sociocultural uses of translation (Kitchell 2000). Lastly, I’ll look critically at the tenure system in Classics. A system that undervalues good teaching, pedagogical publications, and creativity in the classroom (Brown and Leigh 2018). A system that very well may be contributing to Classics’ closed loop of strictly philological scholarship and teaching. An approach that likely isn’t serving the field in comparison to the many inclusive alternatives that could help Classics thrive instead of struggle in the decades to come (Bracey 2017).