Administrative Appointments: A Contribution to the Dialogue on the Present and Future of Classics...

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.

Universities serve multiple goals: the purest pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; the formation of character; development of the whole person or individual capacities, especially critical thinking; preprofessional training; norming in a culture’s traditions and certification for transmission of that culture. In other ages, it was the path to the soul’s salvation. For millenia institutions of higher education have served the goal of producing qualified citizens aware of and ready to assume certain social responsibilities.

How can departmental and university-wide administrators work to better encourage, support, and assess scholars interested in public outreach and digital humanities projects? This talk explores how higher education administrators can work together with both Classics faculty and students in order to encourage collaborative digital scholarship targeted to the public.

The purpose of this paper is to present “the Future of the Classics” from my perspective as the Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Richmond, and Professor of Classics.

Why are you still teaching Latin and ancient Greek? What can you do with a classics major? These are frustratingly familiar questions, questions that despite our best attempts, classicists have failed to answer to the satisfaction of almost anyone outside academe.

Having enjoyed for over two centuries a privileged (though much debated) status in American higher education, the field of Classics now confronts serious existential challenges in colleges and universities across the country. Classics joins other humanistic disciplines, notably history and other departments of language and literature, whose undergraduate majors and enrollments in core disciplinary courses are falling, whose retiring faculty are being replaced with contingent hires instead of tenure track lines, and whose graduate fellowship funding is being cut.