I know some of the faculty at WUSTL, and I cannot for the life of me imagine how they came to think this was a good idea. I did not think they were either stupid enough or self-serving enough to support such a program.
Anonymous 11:36, As one who almost certainly knows more of the WUSTL classics faculty than you and knows them better, I'm just going to say that it is among the departments in our field that does not deserve to get beaten up anonymously on Famae Volent.
The better question might be why some clearly inferior departments with fewer resources still have PhD programs.
Anybody hear from University of the Sciences? It's weird that their application was due so early, but there's been no movement on the wiki. Did the job get canceled?
Shutting down a program that shouldn't exist is a step in the right direction, but such programs continuing to exist is merely the status quo.
What WUSTL is doing is actively making the situation worse by taking definite action, and expending effort, just to make the world that much shittier a place.
They're opening up a new PhD program in this environment.
They may not be the kind of toxic bloodsuckers one encounters elsewhere in Classics, but that's still incredibly bad judgment, they should know better, and it is entirely appropriate to point that out in this forum.
I'm sure they are all nice people, but to me that doesn't mitigate the fact that they're doing active, serious damage to the lives of "only" two people a year. I'm sure those two people don't see their financial security, self-worth and professional future, all of which are almost certainly going to be torpedoed, as negligible.
to change the subject, would it it really be so hard for departments to email the candidates they're interviewing rather than (or, I mean, in addition to) causing interviews to "magically" show up on calendars?
I do not really care about what you think of this or that faculty member at the University of Washington at St Louis. Creating a new PhD program in Classics is totally unethical. It is despicable, self-serving and utterly condemnable. They should be shamed on this forum and on any other possible venue. Shame on you too, for diminishing the gravity of this.
Yeah, the fact that anyone as an individual thinks that some or all of the people there are nice has no bearing on the fact that, as a group, they are exhibiting culpable callousness to their potential students. (I would note that "niceness" and callous obliviousness/indifference often go hand-in-hand.) And one person's individual affections most definitely do not prohibit anyone else from commenting on WUST's actions as a classics department.
It is wholesome to think, staring down SCS and the boatload of existential angst it delivers to us on the job market, that whatever might happen to classics the discipline the texts that discipline studies continue to offer comfort and perspective to those who need it.
Regarding Washington University in St. Louis, some of you aren't using your brains, or so your shrill rhetoric suggests. All this means is that a small number of people who would have been stuck either in lesser PhD programs or PhD programs in lesser schools (U-Illinois and U-Missouri come to mind as the ones that are geographically closest to St. Louis) will instead be at Wash. U. The lesser programs will have either fewer PhD students or maintain their numbers but have some inferior students. Perhaps over time one of the lesser programs will close down because of the competition. Wash. U. will probably have a better job placement record, so those who might have been stuck at Illinois or Missouri or somewhere else will have a better chance at a job -- it is the people who would take their spots at the lesser places who will be in a bad position. But most of those people don't seem to compete for college teaching jobs anyway. (Look at the old wikis and you will see how rarely jobs go to people from second- and third-tier PhD programs.)
I am not going to flesh out all of the different possibilities here, but it is just plain silly to conclude that a new PhD program is a terrible thing.
And I will add that if you are from one of the top programs and are upset at additional competition, well, 1) there is nothing wrong with competition, and 2) there is already competition from overseas PhD's, so 2-3 more on the market from a top American school is not a problem.
No kidding. I'll start. The blithe assurance that these students will be placed, when nobody who knows what they're talking makes that assumption about even students from very strong, established programs anymore. Then there's the stunning indifference to the wellbeing of those additional "inferior students" who will be admitted to lower-tier schools (because who are we kidding: somebody is going to need to grade myth exams there, with or without job market competition from WUSL).
The notion that most Ph.D. students apply geographically is an odd one. The best schools compete on an international level. Is WUSTL really trying to say only that they now offer the best Ph.D. program in Missouri and the western half of Illinois? Plus, the idea that an upstart program like WUSTL is automatically better than Illinois, simply because WUSTL is a wealthier school, is stupid. Illinois has a long tradition of producing good students, especially of the more philological bent. Mizzou has an established reputation in archaeology. What niche is WUSTL filling here?
Finally, have the WUSTL faculty asked themselves two simple questions?
"Would I encourage my best undergraduate students to go to WUSTL were I teaching elsewhere, and would I myself have chosen to go to WUSTL to get my own Ph.D.?"
I'm not a WUSTL faculty member, but I can answer both of those quite easily.
No, and no.
I'd extend this principle even further. If you wouldn't send your best undergraduates to your own Ph.D. program, assuming their field interests line up with such a program, then you shouldn't offer a Ph.D. program.
The discussion about the WUSTL program has now made it to the Chronicle of Higher Ed fora. The first reply is a rousing, moralistic defense of WUSTL that can be summed up by "the market will correct itself".
The market is correcting itself now, and will continue to do so. The moral issue comes in with the fact that the market corrects itself by crushing human lives.
What bothers me most is the argument that the program might be new and even mediocre, but the university has the $$$ and reputation to pull it off. This basically tells me that it will lure naive and possibly gullible applicants (and we know there are plenty of them out there so please dispense with the market-demand, natural selection rhetoric), who are drawn to the brand of Wash U, largely developed off the back of its medical program, regardless of their chances post graduation. So in the best case scenario, these graduate in turn will land more generalist jobs at institutions that know little about the field but are themselves lured by the brand. Yeah, I'm sure classics will be served well by these students as our ambassadors.
As a clarch, I would not send my archaeology students to Harvard if they had better options just as I would not send my philology students to Cincinnati. I venture to guess that the faculty who advice students to apply to Wash U will have little classics training and will do so because of the brand name and not because of fit.
What baffles me is that Wash U had a sterling reputation for Greek art and archaeology back in the day under Mylonos and they let it rot. Why not leverage traditional areas of strength? Now their art history and archaeology department is de facto art history due to the strong pressures of disciplinary boundaries and I would not send them any of my students who truly wish to become archaeologists (sorry art historians, but studying beautiful things with little context is not archaeology).
No question that there are better places to do philology, but Cincinnati's placement rate for philologists is actually not bad: ~75% of PhDs over the past 15 yrs currently placed in full-time college/university jobs, with more than 50% in permanent/indefinitely renewable positions. Quite a few places with better reputations have worse track records. /derail
50% of PhDs over the last *15* years are in TT or identifiably renewable positions--meaning that 50% have either left the field or are still job-hopping and may not even have health insurance--and this is supposed to be a laudable statistic.
Not only are statistics usually kept hidden, but some places shamelessly advertise the success of what amounts to 1-3 people from their program from the last decade. Prospectives are liable to be fooled, no one else.
We complain about statistics, but it would be quite easy to come up with very accurate ones. If three or four people from each Ph.D. program, ideally spaced out in different cohorts, were to track the fates of everybody they knew over the past ten years or so, we'd have our answers. And they would be unassailable. Why don't we do this?
I don't know if people would feel comfortable identifying their university on a semi-public forum like this. It's a small world, and our departments would consider it a betrayal, which would leave us even more screwed than we already are. Is there any way to get around that?
Presumably a large (and ever-increasing) number of us have no hope of a career in Classics, and would therefore have nothing to lose by disclosing such information.
Wake up Classics-types - the party is over. Time to turn out the lights. Tell the dinosaurs that the 19th century is over and they should just quietly become extinct as soon as conveniently possible. You can argue about stats as long as you want to no avail - you are only rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic hoping against hope that you have one in which to sit. For most (good, mediocre, or awful), there is not a chair now - nor ever. The discipline we all shackled ourselves to has stubbornly resisted sensible change, growth, and development. It still maintains its colonial and post-colonial barricades in most cases. It touts the fallacy of Greco-Roman exceptionalism. And to what end? To defend a pigeon-holed, marginalized discipline that could, in fact, be the cat's meow but is, instead, a dog's breakfast.
lol lol. So much time spent commenting on this site. So much time not spent working on getting a job, in Classics or elsewhere. Way more useful to debate the merits and rank of programs you didn't attend than to write an article...
And shame on you for suggesting that we should all care about our own employment so much that we simply don't have time to point out that WUSTL is trying to sucker a few poor souls a year into a dead-end career path just so that they can say they have a PhD program.
Judging from some of the comments here, Classics has a pretty high number of people who are pretty damn sure they deserve the best of everything. Maybe some of that attitude seeps out in interviews and non tenure-track jobs? Just saying.
Fuck you. We have PhDs. We deserve better than being unemployed and without health insurance without even being eligible for unemployment because seven years of being a TA doesn't count for anything.
And we are entirely correct to be castigating departments for actively trying to recruit more people to enhance their prestige and teach their courses, then be discarded as outlined above.
"Judging from some of the comments here, Classics has a pretty high number of people who are pretty damn sure they deserve the best of everything. Maybe some of that attitude seeps out in interviews and non tenure-track jobs? Just saying."
Says someone who was probably put on third base by an advisor's phone call and thinks he did it by his sparkling personality and brilliant intellect.
The people who get the jobs are the long-term losers; they're still going to be in this field years from now, and things are only going to get worse.
Be glad you can't get anything; use it as an opportunity to break out of Classics Stockholm Syndrome and pursue an actual career that exists in the world we live in.
I know many friends who were in TT jobs and said fuck it before going up for tenure. I would say most of those who are tenured are fairly unhappy to downright miserable from terrible colleagues, poor pay, adapting to region, suffering family life, overwork, etc. Move on. There are plenty of jobs that offer a better lifestyle and they usually pay more.
Data collection is crucial. If we want people to understand what it is like to undergo a grad program in Classics, we need clear figures.
Here are the figures for the University of Toronto. I have collected the data from the early 2002 to the late 2012.
In those years, a total of 26 people were awarded a PhD. I know of at least 4 people who went close to getting a PhD but never did. They dropped out of the program.
8 of the 26 grads are in a continuing position: they are either Assistant or Associate Professors, typically in a Canadian University.
An additional 5 are in fixed-term positions.
It remains unclear to me if 4 out of the remaining 13 have a permanent academic position. They are teaching somewhere, but are not listed as Assistant or Associate Professors.
I can tell for sure that 5 of the original 26 do not hold an academic position.
To sum up, the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto managed to place one-third or, if count fixed positions, half of its grads between the years 2002 and 2012.
I count 15 Phds from my upper-second tier east coast university between 2005 and today. Five have TT jobs, nearly all of those placed at the beginning of that time period.
UNC-Chapel Hill posts their placement here: https://classics.unc.edu/academics/graduate-programs/graduate-placement/classics-graduates-on-the-job-market-2001-to-present/
They do not indicate the fairly high rate of attrition and non-completion they have experienced over the past decade or so.
In order for this data to be useful we need all of it, including attrition/non-completion. Prospectives need to understand exactly what they are getting into. For that reason the UNC stats are completely misleading. Surely we have some recent UNC grads, and not-so-recent grads checking in here? Can you all fix the numbers based on your inside knowledge?
There are PhDs in Archaeology, History, Philosophy and Whatnot competing on the Classics job market. In some universities they fall under the Classics umbrella, in others not. I'm not sure how they fit into the picture, data-wise.
According to this, 50% of history Phds end up in TT jobs. Let's assume that classics is about the same, for the sake of argument. What does that tell us?
The key is how you interpret the figure. Like the old joke says, two hairs in my soup is too many, two hairs on my head is too few.
Here, the issue is that if you are writing a dissertation a 50% placement rate is terrifyingly low. But if you're a 21-year old who has no idea what to do with her life, it sounds not too bad.
Note that the sample from which the 50% number is drawn is from History PhDs who filed their dissertation between 1998-2009.
What you have done is exactly the way in which faculty mislead their undergraduates. First, you conflate PhD completion with enrollment in a graduate program (not in your own head, but in the slippage of your speech). You don't identify that 50% of those who enroll complete and 50% of those landed a TT job. Second, you use statistics which are not only woefully out of date, but which specifically and explicitly predate the major watershed in our employment. Yes, there are figures from 2009 in there, but they are greatly outweighed by the 1998-2008 period. This is intellectually dishonest (if I give you intelligence the benefit of the doubt) or incredibly shoddy method (if I give your morality the benefit of the doubt).
Thank you for reading my comment carefully and for not insulting my intelligence or morality.
First, proportion of enrolled in phd program vs. completed and proportion of completed vs. employed in t-t jobs are different metrics. They measure different things and should not be conflated.
Second, I cited that study "for the sake of the argument." We can take a different number. Let's assume that the true proportion, right now, of classics phd completed vs. employed in t-t jobs within 5 years of completion is closer to 30%, which is actually what I would estimate.
My argument is that even if the true number is that low, it's not low enough to deter the typical classics undergrad intending to pursue graduate training.
Based on a couple calculations done in my head with two really darn good programs (maybe not top 3 but definitely top 10 and arguably top 5), I see around a 30-40% placement into TT jobs out of those who became ABD during the hey day (1995-2005 graduates). I think it might be a bit lower if you include all matriculants but we had very few drop out before ABD status.
My guestimate is that we're around 20% for 2005-2014 graduates. It's tougher to say since it's standard now for people to do several post-docs and VAPs, which was quite uncommon in the past. It might become as high as 30% for this group if you give it several more years, approaching the hey day, but I think it will hover around 20%.
20% success? To a typical high-achieving 21-year old that sounds like pretty good odds. After all, they have already gotten into Dartmouth (11%) or Chicago (8%) or Berkeley (17%). Heck, getting a TT job is easier than getting into any top school. Sign me up!!
I joke of course. 20% is horrible, but I don't think it will sound horrible to a naive and ambitious college junior or senior simply because they have beaten what seemed like worse odds before. They just don't realize the importance of competition pools in making these distinctions.
I agree but I don't think using acceptance rates at elite universities is the best analogy. The fact is that there are hundreds of great universities and colleges to choose from and a top 10% student is bound to get into a top 100 school, however defined.
The closer analogy would be telling a student that s/he has a 20% of getting into any university, or on the flipside, saying that your chance of landing an advertised classics job at Dartmouth (really any university) is less than 1% statistically speaking. The reality is that it's much less since it's not nearly the level playing field or relatively straightforward formulaic process that college admissions is.
You wrote: "Is WUSTL really trying to say only that they now offer the best Ph.D. program in Missouri and the western half of Illinois? Plus, the idea that an upstart program like WUSTL is automatically better than Illinois, simply because WUSTL is a wealthier school, is stupid. Illinois has a long tradition of producing good students, especially of the more philological bent... What niche is WUSTL filling here?"
Do you know what you're talking about? I myself have NEVER met a recent Illinois PhD, nor can I remember even hearing of the existence of one -- since they do exist, it appears they must not amount to much. A search of the wikis from the past four years lists just two as having gotten jobs: a decent one-year VAP and a rather poor tenure-track position. (The Illinois department does not list its alumni, unlike so many other PhD programs, so better info is not available.) You must have in mind the program's past -- indeed, storied -- reputation, since today it is nothing special. Only 2-3 of the current faculty would be worth studying with -- hardly a program that merits your praise. Which is a shame, since they are reputed to have an amazing library collection, which is rather wasted. (If you do not believe me, just go through the CV's of the tenured faculty, paying attention both to the type of scholarship and the length of their articles, and you will see few who seem ideal mentors for young scholars. The link: http://www.classics.illinois.edu/people)
Overall, putting aside all issues of whether it is right or wrong for Washington University to have a new PhD program -- I personally do not care -- I think one would have to conclude that their program will be superior to that of Illinois the moment it materializes. (Not know much about archaeology, I have no opinion of Missouri, to which Wash. U. was also being compared.)
"Your chance of landing an advertised classics job at Dartmouth" is especially slim if they really got 1700 applications for the three-year post doc position advertised this year.
Anon. 8:10 here. I have not been rejected once by Illinois. Believe it or not, it is possible to form a negative opinion of the program without having attempted to be hired there.
I think is it truly stupid to think that someone who thinks little of Illinois or any other school failed a job search. NB: I am not the person who posted the original comment. I will say that I did fail at places where I applied out of sheer desperation. This does not mean I cannot have an honest opinion of the school and its faculty.
I do think the attitude expressed by Anon 8:10 is a part of the problem though. if you're that contemptuous of the work of others, the odds are good that attitude seeps into your interactions. Or, if you've "made it" in the profession, that you're conveying that attitude to your graduate students.
why a negative opinion on a dept has to be sour grapes? shall we just be in awe of those who secured a job anywhere? or think that just because they do have a job they are stellar scholars working in stellar places? I do not mean to be disparaging, I am just raising s a few points.
I do think the attitude expressed by Anon 8:10 is a part of the problem though. if you're that contemptuous of the work of others, the odds are good that attitude seeps into your interactions. Or, if you've "made it" in the profession, that you're conveying that attitude to your graduate students.
Surely by now we have all realized just how random job placement is? I have friends who were finalists, as in on-campus, final two or three, for tenure-track jobs at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Michigan, UCLA, Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and UNC.
Some of these people are now out of the profession because they couldn't find anything. Some are now at places like Illinois. Some are at places like Little Sisters of the Holy Corn Circle College of Northeast Iowa, Dubuque Satellite Campus. Some of them may have bombed their on-campus chances. But most of them didn't get that hot-shot job simply because they were narrowly not chosen due to "fit," or the fact that the department chair didn't like the flashy belt buckle one of them wore that day, or another really liked the flashy bolo tie the other candidate wore the previous day, etc. etc. etc. etc.
Have a hot-shot position? Congratulations, you probably earned it. Have a not-so hot-shot position, congratulations, you probably earned it, and you are lucky to have a job.
Illinois? That's a fucking hot-shot position that any one of us on the market now would be pleased as fucking punch to land. So spare us the bullshit language of hierarchy and prestige. That shit is toxic garbage. Yes, the WUSTL faculty are every bit as good as the Illinois faculty. And the Illinois faculty are every bit as good as the Wisconsin faculty. And so on and so forth.
All that doesn't mean we need a new, tiny Ph.D. program in Classics. By that measure then places like Baylor and UMass should be offering Ph.D. programs.
I don't know why WUSTL has decided to do this. I suspect the faculty thinks it will get them some prestige, and goodies from the university. But for all of the extra work entailed, and the fact that they are going to be responsible for placing students in a horrible job market, I think it was a raw deal for them, and a horrible deal for their students. But the die is cast, so best of luck to them.
You're absolutely correct about the prestige BS and job placement, but, just to be fair, Anon. at 8:10 did base his/her judgement of Illinois on the scholarship its people are producing, not their location.
I found Anon 8:10's remarks about scholarship more objectionable than the pedigree comments. What s/he really meant was, "They're not doing the sort of work I'd do, and therefore they'd be bad mentors."
I found the whole of 8:10's remarks objectionable, but also fairly representative of a broad swath of classicists. FWIW, I know a few recent Illinois Ph.D. holders, and they are every bit as good as the few Stanford Ph.D. holders I also know.
Anon. 8:10 here, posting on this subject for the last time.
Most of the guesses regarding me are way off the mark. But this is fine, since I did not exactly give you a lot to go on.
All I want to add is that after one has been around for a bit--going to conferences, spending time on digs or at research institutes, and of course having conversations with departmental colleagues--one gets to hear about what is right and wrong with certain programs. That can include stuff that is widely known, stuff that can be learned by a bit of digging, and (not infrequently) some juicy stuff one is not supposed to know about. (People do like to talk, after all...) Illinois is one of a few places about which I have a negative opinion, and I was in a giving mood so I decided to share it. I did not criticize any of the other programs because I was responding to a post specifically about Illinois and Missouri. If one of the other places is mentioned perhaps I will criticize them; I have also posted positive comments on Famae Volent, and likewise might do so again.
For some reason, Illinois classics gets a rep that's probably more indicative of the overall environment of the university. Compared to a department like Texas, Illinois is full of pussycats.
You guys should check out the previous posted Chronicle forum. There's some idiot historian on there disparaging classics. Time to help out and fight back guys.
That Chronicle forum commenter actually thinks that because Classics was the center of the curriculum in the 19th century but then just one field among many in the 20th, the discipline must have been in inexorable institutional decline for more than 100 years. Because as we all know, the number of students enrolled in higher education did not undergo an astronomical expansion during the 20th century, especially after WWII, increasing the absolute numbers of faculty positions and students broadly across disciplines.
FWIW, Classics in the US underwent a serious, maybe even epochal, crisis in the *1970s*, if HS Latin enrollments are any indication: #s dropped from >700,000 in 1960 to 150,500 in 1976. (Source: Benario's handy-dandy history of CAMWS: The First 80 years. B. blames the shift to the sciences during the space race and attendant changes in apportionment of public education funding.) Cf. the subsequent disastrous job market of the 1980s. We could see some of the same dynamics today with the focus on "STEM" and pre-professional training. Or we could do the easy thing and keep harping on the Victorians.
Regarding Cincinnati: sure, they're philology side is smaller than many philology-only departments, but have you looked at them recently? The senior scholars are doing top, interdisciplinary work and the junior people hired over the past six years seem to be good scholars as well from what I have seen/heard. Combine that with an immense amount of funding for graduate students and a program ethos that believes that philologists should have rigorous training in the fields/methodologies of ancient history and archaeology as well... I'd send my students there. But that's because I train my students see philology less narrowly than many.
Why so defensive, Cincinnati? It's not very becoming. Yeah, it's a nice little program. Its archaeology is exceptional, possibly top 5. I still would pick 20 other programs for my philologically oriented students to attend. There's nothing wrong with this as my own department doesn't even have a MA program, but let's call it as it is. If you would send your own students there instead of at least ten other programs, you're full of shit.
Yeah, it's pretty easy to name twenty without even going over to Europe.
Brown Berkeley Chicago Columbia Cornell Duke Harvard JHU Michigan NYU Penn Princeton Stanford Texas Toronto UCLA UNC USC UVa Yale
And here's another twenty in the same ballpark, many I would still put above Cincinnati:
BU BMC Colorado CUNY Graduate Center Emory FLorida FSU Illinois Indiana Iowa McMaster Minnesota Northwestern OSU SUNY-Buffalo UBC UC-Santa Barbara Washington Wash U Wisconsin
The good news is that with a load of money, a couple generations of superstars, and some good luck Wash U *might* have a chance to sneak into the top 20. There is no way in hell it will ever break into the top 15 in the next century. I doubt they survive into the next generation once the job market is littered with their jobless grads.
Top 5 in archaeology? Doubtful. Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago, UNC, Brown are clearly a cut above and it's highly likely several more programs are as well.
Well the archaeology rankings cut several ways. Top training does not equal the top placement records. Take it from one who knows the bloody, painful truth. And that list above is a bit whacky on ranking programs.
Whacky? You mean that obscure thing called alphabetizing? Sheesh, you must be one of the archys who can't tell an alpha from an omega unless it's capitalized in front of a frat house. You probably would have a job if you knew Greek and Latin like a proper classicist.
hey ass hat, how is this list "Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago, UNC, Brown" in alphabetical order? no wonder people hate classicists.
"You guys should check out the previous posted Chronicle forum. There's some idiot historian on there disparaging classics. Time to help out and fight back guys."
Well I might be in the small minority here on FV, but I agree much more with the "idiot" than with the traditional "real classicist" going by the handle kaysixteen. If this person is under the age of 60, which it sounds like s/he is, I can't believe a traditional "real classicist" like this still exists in my generation. Classics truly does deserve a quick death if you have people this blind representing the field in any number. For the record, I'm a Hellenist and not a "fake" historian or archaeologist.
I wouldn't put too much stock in this person. Yeah, there are still people like this around, and even some of recent vintage, but I think most classicists from the last 20 years believe in a balanced department where it's allowable, and even welcome, to have faculty less experienced in Greek or Latin if it means other assets are brought to the table. The real/fake classicist perspective perpetuated by this individual is so out there that I can't even comment on it. The person in question entered graduate school in 1993 so they graduated around 2000, right as the market was peaking. He's bitter about not landing a job as a Roman historian in a classics department during the halycon days and it obviously colours his worldview.
Traditional training in Latin and Greek usually doesn't give a student true reading fluency, and almost never gives her even basic conversational ability. So on what basis are we philologists entitled to claim that our training is rigorous?
Nobody who's gone through a couple of Classics degrees would deny that our training is difficult, exacting, and time-consuming. And there are some obvious gains: it's clear we teach a firmer grammatical understanding than other lang and lit departments manage to pass on to their majors/grads.
Then again, modern language departments can train their undergrads to speak and read fluently within the course of a bachelor's degree, even when the language in question is morphologically/grammatically as complex as Greek and Latin (e.g. Russian). I've met a few people who can speak Latin and Greek fluently, so it's not like it's impossible: they are, after all, natural languages just like all the others.
Since we can't speak the languages we study, and since most of us don't read them as well as a PhD in Russian reads Russian, what is the basis for our usual bromides about the exceptional rigor of Classics? Do the abilities provided by our training justify our praise of it?
If there are Classics PhDs who can't read ancient Greek fluently, shame on them. I certainly don't know any.
As far as our undergraduates not being able to speak these languages, they shouldn't be trained to do so. That would be silly. These languages are for reading ancient texts, and not only is there no benefit to be had from learning to speak them, but it can even be detrimental, since it will force them to focus their efforts on turns of phrase often found in speech but rarely if ever in the texts that actually exist in these languages. This is time that could be used actually learning to read Latin or Greek. "Spoken Latin" is laughable pedagogical quackery, apparently based on a facile analogy with the pedagogy of living languages; luckily "spoken Greek" is not even a thing.
In small Classics departments (e.g. mine, with 2.75 full-time positions), each professor MUST be able to teach both languages at all levels. The much-maligned poster on the Chronicle is exactly right, at least for small departments. All of us teach both languages at all levels (undergraduate; we have no grad. students); what we teach varies from year to year. One year we may be teaching 1st-year Greek and 4th-year Latin; the next year, it may be reversed. We could not even consider hiring someone who was not capable of teaching the languages with complete facility at all levels. Our individual research specialities really don't matter for our teaching here; we teach languages and basic civ. courses and that's all we have room for. We never teach our research specialities--when/how could we?
I know many older classicists who can think back to when they were 30 and thought they knew Greek and Latin well, and did not realize they had decades ahead of them of learning to read Greek and Latin a little bit better every year, and still would not understand them particularly well.
Hi I was just noticing that UNC's placement page was mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
It might be useful to look at the page before the page that cited (you can see the link on the page cited) which states
""Anyone considering pursuing a Ph.D. in Classics and a career in college or university teaching should know that prospects for employment in Classics or in academics more generally are always uncertain. No one should apply to graduate school in Classics whose advisors have not told them at length and in detail how difficult and uncertain the job market can be."
I am doing my PhD at a 'good' school and feel like I barely know Latin and Greek, despite years of training, passing my program's brutal qualifying exams and having my work on literature being modestly well received.
The author that I specialized in I am pretty quick at reading now, and I can get through Virgil/Ovid/Cicero fairly quickly... but many other Latin authors I am shamefully slow in and just end up resorting to a dictionary or commentary. And despite having dedicated a year of my life to Greek a couple of years ago in preparation for the qualifying exam (and in order to finally feel like I was getting somewhere) it is still less than pointless for me to pick up any of the works I love so much (tragedy, Homer, let alone Pindar or any other lyric poet) without a dictionary, grammar book, commentary, and an entire afternoon.
I find it extremely distressing and embarrassing, and I think that I am probably slightly towards the lower ability end of the spectrum language wise, but actually, it can't be that uncommon. There are a couple of real language geniuses among the students on my program, but I think most of them are probably like me, possibly to a lesser extent.
I too always rejected as spoken Latin (and Greek! it exists!) as nerdy and unintellectual, but actually, I can happily pick up a novel or have a chat in French, German and Italian, languages that I've learned on the side and dedicated little time or brainspace to. whereas I have essentially a 6 year old's reading ability in the languages I've (ostensibly) devoted my life to.
I wonder if immersive language programs would be the way forward for Latin and Greek. In the UK it's compulsory for undergraduates studying modern languages to spend a year studying at a university in a linguistically appropriate country - imagine if we could send Classics majors for a year to an institute where they not only read and wrote Latin and Greek but were forced Middlebury-style to speak them outside the classroom. Unrealistic but wouldn't it be amazing to actually know the languages we study??
This is fine for philologists and even recommended from my point of view if time exists, but you want archaeologists and historians to go through this to satisfy some bullshit "real classics" requirement? No wonder most classical archaeologists and historians can't dialogue with other archaeologists and historians at even a basic level.
Well I might be in the small minority here on FV, but I agree much more with the "idiot" than with the traditional "real classicist" going by the handle kaysixteen. For the record, I'm a Hellenist and not a "fake" historian or archaeologist.
Yeah, I resemble the description of a philologist playing archaeologist. Sue me, it's how I was trained. Now I'm unemployed and both sides think I'm a fucking mutt. What a harsh epiphany to realize so late in the game. For those aspiring archaeologists still unscarred and idealistic, train to be a Latinist or archaeologist, not some fucking mutt. Learn as much Latin as practical but pay attention to all the trends - agency, entanglement, etc.
Better yet, get the fuck out and don't start grad school.
Whatever one might say in criticism of a school not getting in its short lists before the conference, am I alone in thinking it's pretty rich of a certain placement coordinator to be calling anyone out for not doing a job expeditiously? Then again not surprising given said person's history of rudeness.
10:46, maybe you have a comment? Newbie here so this is a question not a comment: I see there are jobs where the schools would presumably be interviewing at the SCS, but the wiki suggests nothing has happened for them at all. No interviews, no Skyping, no cancelled search. Are committees still working on interviews lists for those, then, even at this very late date?
Most likely they have contacted candidates but those people didn't update the wiki; Placement sent out an email a while back saying that all places conducting interviews in New Orleans except Dallas have already scheduled them. But you should check to see if the schools you're interested in are interviewing there. Not all are, and it should say on the original job ad.
Come now! It's also philology and archaeology or whatnot. Or maybe only philology, if you believe the manic ravings of cato the idiot over on the Chronicle fora.
This field died when the APA or whatever they call themselves now ditched the simple and elegant brown hardbacks for the cheaply made journals they overcharge for that get beat up in the mail.
I think the above initiative is wonderful, as long as they don't intend to try to increase the number or size of *graduate* programs.
Classics is a wonderful thing to take classes in, or even to major in as an undergraduate, because these are the places where someone can be personally fulfilled without staking a career (and therefore their livelihood) on incredibly long odds.
This field needed this initiative long ago. Now it sounds more than a day late and a dollar short. Yes - branch out. Are Classicists good at branching out? Uh, no. Many of the gray hairs who presided in my graduate program looked down their noses at anyone who had not read Greek at some rarified place with crimson robes, so I don't see them holding hands with the people in their cognate departments.
Yeah, I think the Chronicle discussions portend as much. There's an underemployed philologist on there who demonstrates that there are even younger classicists hell bent on defending classics=philology to the grave.
While the initiative sounds like a good idea, I have my doubts about this committee they've formed. One, because we haven't been shown who else is on it. Two, because while I mean no disrespect, I have my doubts that a retired college president has the best perspective for leading such a effort, rather than an early to early-middle career professor who is at one of these institutions they are thinking of (community college, HBCU, or a regional comprehensive that likely has no independent classics department). Sure, people from these places are invited to send in their thoughts, but it feels like the same old, same old collection of elite institution bigwigs will then sit around and come up with useless ideas which are mainly intended just to expand the languages when at many places that is a complete non-starter.
I happen to teach at a place that has no classics department, but there is surprising demand for ancient history and classical philosophy courses, along with archaeology. There is almost no demand for Latin beyond the first year and Greek...Greek is off the radar. Frankly, we don't need a traditional classics department. Now, courses on classical literature in translation might well get filled, but we will never need someone to teach an advanced seminar in either language.
So, I am curious as to what they consider expanding the audience. If it's some lame attempt to push traditional classics courses into general education categories, other departments and the administration will laugh them off. If they genuinely want to bring forward classical antiquity as a time, place, and culture that's worthwhile for non-majors to use their precious few elective credits (sadly, the number of free electives students are given these days continues to dwindle), and perhaps even create some multidisciplinary approaches, such as examining the cultural impact of the classics throughout time up to the present day, there might be some advantage to that.
I don't know. I can't speak for many departments, but in the ones I've seen, the desire for "collaboration" and "interdisciplinary" this or that has always spelled one thing: philology becomes the last thing on the list. The historians and archaeologists end up conveying the idea to students and colleagues that language study is merely a means to an end, not a worthy or desirable pursuit in itself. The Chronicle thread is interesting for the insertion of the Biblical Greek poster who laments that at his place, the classicists were "ambivalent" about biblical studies. Because of course they'd be so wrong to want their students to read Homer and Sophocles instead of Romans and Revelation. Ditto the Medieval Latin posts.
There are a lot of reasons for the current job market, but it's not the fault of those who want to preserve philology at the core of a Classics curriculum.
December 30, 2014 at 10:04 AM There are a lot of reasons for the current job market, but it's not the fault of those who want to preserve philology at the core of a Classics curriculum.
Yep, we're going to make it after all...but seriously, I think a lot of our Classics departments would do a lot for themselves if they acknowledged the existence of a huge corpus of Greek literature that appeals to a pretty large proportion of US students. The occasional class in biblical Greek won't necessarily force any of us to become Fundamentalist Christians, but it might allow us to keep teaching something about which we are passionate to a group of students who are also passionate about the material. Just one heretic's perspective.
" I can't speak for many departments, but in the ones I've seen, the desire for "collaboration" and "interdisciplinary" this or that has always spelled one thing: philology becomes the last thing on the list."
So the problem is that philology won't have pride of place to suit your antiquated ideology, Mr. Cincinnati? Yeah, let's approach other departments and say, "I know you don't have any clue or care about Greek and Latin, but let's collaborate!" And "real classicists" wonder why classics is dead.
Philology should have pride of place. It's not exactly possible to do serious studies of ancient history and philosophy if you're ignorant of the languages. Archaeology is a somewhat separate case, but there too, it's pretty tough to do serious archaeology if you're ignorant of the languages of the cultures you're studying.
We're talking about collaborations with other programs, kaysixteen, not how we conduct our own research. You know that an entire world out there exists outside of "real classics," right? Enough of the mindless dogmatism. For the record, I know very few archaeologists who have any vital need for Greek or Latin outside of "real classics" cred and teaching needs assigned to them by classics departments. I know you abhor it after your experience at Cincinnati, but it's really only these external pressures and tradition that drives most "real archaeologists" to learn the languages.
You mean those "other programs" that are so eager to hire PhDs in Classics, but expect Classics Depts to roll out the red carpet for their PhDs in History and the like?
The Chronicle thread is interesting for the insertion of the Biblical Greek poster who laments that at his place, the classicists were "ambivalent" about biblical studies. Because of course they'd be so wrong to want their students to read Homer and Sophocles instead of Romans and Revelation.
You missed the point, and I'm bored enough to respond. The point was not the classicists' ambivalence, but their assumptions that (a) Biblical Greek was somehow inherently less than Classics and (b) they were too good for it. There was never a question of either Homer or Sophocles or Romans and Revelation as you put it, but rather pettiness.
And given that the Classical World runs at least from 800 BCE to 400 CE, why shouldn't Biblical Greek be a legitimate part of that, taught to students who are interested by faculty with backgrounds in it? It's one thing to focus your department on those things your faculty do well. It's quite another to exclude legitimate studies belonging to the language, literature, and culture of the appropriate time period because of some ill-defined sno(o/t)tiness.
Is it not "real Classics" because it pertains to a religion that has endured to the present day and therefore must be relegated to another department? If another department does offer it in the language with all the requisite background required by "real Classics" (again, language, literature, culture), is it still not "real Classics" because it comes from another department and therefore undermines one's own claims? That isn't a defense of education or of students--it is a defense of myopic provinciality.
As for the scorn heaped upon medieval Latin, well, just take a look at the I Tatti Renaissance Latin series. These texts are even later -- gasp -- than medieval Latin, but you'll see the names of a great many prominent "real Classicists" on the covers.
Clearly you're not in a dept where you have 2-4 undergrads who could possibly take advanced Greek...and yes, in that case, I would certainly expect them to get Homer or Herodotus or Plato or Aristophanes ahead of Romans or Clement.
Wrong again. I am in exactly a department that will have 2-4 students taking advanced Greek any given semester. My willingness to listen to why they're taking Classics and to hear how they see it fitting into their lives is strengthening the department.
I'm a philologist. Yes, I want to teach Homer and Sophocles ktl. I also want my major to mesh well with my students' goals, and so we navigate between the two. We can't do everything, but we couldn't do everything anyway, and I'm not about to make an iron-clad list of the order in which authors must be read according to my idea of their quality.
Some semesters I'll read Homer or Vergil or Sappho or Catullus. Others I'll read the Septuagint or John or Bede, if that's what sets my students' hearts to thumping. A couplet of Martial loved is a better argument for Classics than Aeschylus's Ode to Man hated.
No course of study is an end in itself: not Classics, not physics, not med. school. All of these have value only insofar as they advantageous for life.* (Something another philologist once wrote about extensively. His colleagues drummed him out of the discipline, but we know his name now, and not theirs; we read his works and not theirs.)
------ *Philosophers might quibble about their own discipline, but that's an argument for another time.
It comes down to the simple fact that we as Classicists chose this career instead of the many more lucrative options available to us because we have a passion for teaching interesting texts, texts that should matter. The Biblical texts are frankly so boring and have taken human civilization down such a ridiculous rabbit hole that I can hardly fault someone for not wanting to spend one iota of their time not merely reading such dreck but actually teaching it to adolescents.
Well, that's not true. I do know why. It comes down to the butts-in-seats method of counting a department's value to the university. Let's not pretend that it's anything to do with principles.
Because we actually do have a more or less fixed curriculum, and yes, I'll say it: we do think it's necessary for our majors to read Homer and Virgil, and no, not necessary to read Hebrews and Bede. Certainly not in substitute for what'd consider to be, yes, core Classics authors.
Actually, it's both numbers and principles...those aren't mutually exclusive issues. I don't really think a Classics major needs to read Paul's epistles in Greek. I do think s/he needs to read Sophocles.
One would think from reading some of these comments that Augustus himself had descended from the mountain, saying, "Thou shalt have no studies before these:" and bearing a list of about ten literary authors, all miraculously still-extant (Gallus be damned!).
By the way, if you don't speak "interdisciplinary", that's all terribly funny.
If we can't even agree that there are classical authors all our undergrad majors should read, no wonder the field is in crisis. For me the point again remains...would the other departments ever tolerate our telling them what to do or to count for their programs? Doubtful.
No course of study is an end in itself: not Classics, not physics, not med. school. All of these have value only insofar as they advantageous for life. (Something another philologist once wrote about extensively. His colleagues drummed him out of the discipline, but we know his name now, and not theirs; we read his works and not theirs.)
Which philologist? (Forgive a poorly-read philosophy student...)
Which philologist? (Forgive a poorly-read philosophy student...)
And that, dear colleagues, is why Classics is circling the drain: not because some broad-minded folk are willing to read a variety of texts with their students, who blessedly have no intention of going to graduate school but who take classics courses because they are interested, no, but because too many modern-day Classicists do not hold themselves to the very standards they would insist upon for their undergraduates. Instead, they stick to an ever-diminishing canon, cloaked in the guise of principles, to hide the paucity of their own knowledge.
Fine...if it's merely a sign of the "paucity" of knowledge that I think that Classics students should read Virgil Cicero Ovid Lucretius Catullus Juvenal Horace Propertius Livy Caesar Sallust Tacitus Livy Homer Hesiod Sophocles Plato Herodotus Thucydides Pindar Aeschylus Aristophanes Euripides Aristotle Xenophon Menander Plutarch etc., rather than Paul's letters and the gospels, or Clement of Alexandria and the Shepherd of Hermas, or the Venerable Bede...then I would expect that people in other fields would also be reading from the long list of classical authors noted above.
It's also not only about what certain students want. Do chemistry and physics faculty ask their undergrad majors what they'd like to learn in general or organic chemistry? One would think we'd have a sense of what we think a Classics major should accomplish...and I don't think it's unreasonable to fix some boundaries (temporal or otherwise) for an undergrad curriculum.
It has been my experience that people in other fields do read from the list of authors you give, both personally and in their courses.
And if you're going to use "temporal" as a criterion for delineating boundaries, then you can't both include Plutarch and exclude Paul and the gospels. This sounds too much like a version of "stop liking what I don't like".
I passed over your chemistry and physics analogy. Sorry about that. It is, as you know, another false equivalence. Classics is not a science. A better comparison would be to ask whether students in English, in Spanish, in French, in German, etc. have input in what their courses study. The answer to that, of course, is a resounding yes.
There's at the same time both a fundamental curriculum, and room for negotiation at the advanced levels. No one can teach everything, so once you've gone through the sine qua non, then it's better to teach those things for which students feel a passion, if they let us know. It's part of good pedagogy. If your sine qua non is so large that there's no room for negotiation, then you need to rethink your curriculum.
Sorry. There are only so many courses a student can take. Sure, someone coming into college with tons of Latin (forget about Greek) might have many semesters in which to fit advanced offerings. Most people don't have that luxury. Someone might have only 2-4 slots for such courses. So no, I stand by my point. Those 2-4 slots should be filled with classical authors in a classics major program, not Bede or Anselm.
I note the many parts of your argument that you're abandoning.
Still, to grapple with the heart of it: one issue is that you're thinking in terms of "author" courses instead of in terms of content. Even if you stick to the authors you list, you will never read all of even a single one of them with students. You'd be lucky to read an entire, short Platonic dialogue. No chance at reading all of the Iliad or Aeneid in the original language.
So why not do what our colleagues in the modern languages have done and teach content-based and theme-based courses? A Latin course on satire that reads Archilochus (in English), Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Persius, and then spends a day looking at more recent examples like Swift and the Onion or Daily Show and how they do or do not pick up the ancient threads; or a Latin course on letters that reads Plato's letters (in English), Cicero's letters, Seneca's letters, Pliny's letters, Demetrius on style, Julius Victor on letter writing, and then compares changes in attitudes over time -- you could think of dozens more examples. And these thematic courses not only give you exposure to authors, but they allow for much more discussion of history and context and they allow for the inclusion of content of the students' choosing (anywhere from the course topic itself to a week or two's worth of readings). Or another tactic: what about sight-readings (on topics of the students' choice) you keep in reserve for the days when the students are underprepared or overwhelmed by midterms or otherwise just tired and in need of a break?
There are so many ways to bring class and Classics alive that are not just another bored, pale rehash of your graduate reading list superimposed on some Germanic idea of what Classics and study must be.
Not abandoning anything. And sorry to hear that traditional advanced readings are now considered "boring."
Also never said there was an expectation to read, say, the entire Iliad with students.
My point throughout my posts has been simple: there's enough in Classics to fill and more than fill an undergrad curriculum, and a real problem when we start taking up precious time with things that aren't part of a classical canon (there, I said the bad word).
You won't read all of the Iliad under the best of circumstances. But you'll read even less of it, if any if your students are instead reading the Bible because they'd rather read it than Homer.
But again, on the day a religion program says sure, you want Homer instead of Hebrews, let's go...then I'd be happy to see the same flexibility from Classics.
On the day that you're willing to make an honest argument, you can revisit this. You know that Homer and Hebrews are a false equivalence. We've been over that exact argument already. One hopes your scholarship has more exacting standards.
I would wish you the consequences of your attitudes, but that wouldn't be fair to your students.
"Some semesters I'll read Homer or Vergil or Sappho or Catullus. Others I'll read the Septuagint or John or Bede, if that's what sets my students' hearts to thumping. A couplet of Martial loved is a better argument for Classics than Aeschylus's Ode to Man hated."
In other words, some semesters, fine with ditching the classical canon, let's read the Septuagint or John or Bede. You yourself created an equivalence between that content and "Homer or Vergil or Sappho or Catullus," and that's the source of my objection.
I once again note 2:03's lack of acknowledge of the specific points raised. Your post fails the "revise resubmit" test.
As for the quotation of my earlier comment. Yep, I wrote that. You, because of your single-author myopia, chose to interpret that post to mean that those are the only texts I teach in a given class.
Your single-author method worked fine when students had a strong background coming out of high school or could take, as I did, 16 advanced reading courses in Latin and Greek as an undergraduate. (Some of my undergraduate professors took even more when they in turn were undergraduates.) That works because the student gets enough of the classical authors and their attendant context to make sense of them. But if, as you wrote, you're really only giving your majors 2-4 advanced courses, then author-courses no longer work any more for Classics than a course in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and another course one one of Corneille's plays would work for a French major's entire advanced study. If Classics is to have any relevance and any use, it must recognize the starting points of the students and reformat its courses--not double down on an old method developed for the education of a different generation.
You would have your students raise their noses high at having read a few more pages of In Catilinam I. I would have mine know who Cicero, Caesar, Catiline, and Cato were, and what exactly was going on historically. AND the context of a wide, wide variety of other persons, events, and texts.
@2:15. Yes, the arguments of those with jobs. I'm only going on at this point because I hope that seeing two bored people work out the arguments of the old guard and the new guard in print might help current job-seekers work out their own stances. If you're clear with yourself about what you believe will help Classics, and passionate about it in your job materials and with students, that will do much to help you--whether you agree with me or with my interlocutor.
Never said I had a problem reading multiple authors in a given advanced course. And certainly never said historical context and the like weren't an important part of said courses.
Definitely would say I don't think there's room for Bede or Hebrews in undergraduate Classics courses.
Welcome to the conversation. You're thinking of Boethius.
Anyway, IRL I'm an ardent proponent of the canon. I do mean about 75-80% of what I've written. Just having two to four author courses, for example, is a waste of a major's education and in no way a perpetuation of Classics, even if the authors are canonical. (What of the rest of the canon so unceremoniously cast to the curb in favor some sort of ur-canon?) Thematic courses that incorporate reception and show how Classics has continuity with the present are the way to go.
The rest has been a bit of fun at the expense of my generously cooperative interlocutor.
Yeah, because if new generations of classics students are not so good at reading Greek and Latin, it's a great idea to ask them to learn Greek and Latin + reception, history, culture, and everything else conceivably relevant to the texts they read.
Well it is true that if the students didn't learn Greek or Latin at all they would have time to read many more Classical texts in translation, including quite a few outside of the canon. Plus, undergraduates are increasingly stupid, so this would enable them to do something that doesn't hurt their brains as much, and hell, it's not like an undergraduate degree in anything has signaled any kind of competence in a long, long time. The main reason to teach Greek and Latin is because otherwise our jobs would be boring as hell.
I once had a prof proudly proclaim in class that he had never set foot in Italy nor Greece and there was no reason for a classicist to ever do so. I now know he was referring to a real classicist, a benchmark I shamefully can never meet as someone who regularly travels to the Mediterranean.
Yeah, I would have thought that Virginia Tech in particular would have it together at this point. Unless they don't see themselves competing in the first round? But I don't know why that would be. It is a great job that a lot of us would love to have.
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i miss us, classics. remember?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmfd9etbXGE
Dude, there are plenty of big gay orgies outside of Classics, too. Just ask around. The guys will probably be hotter as well.
Well look who's in the news.
Doh! Gonna get ugly. I hope the WUSTL supporters come out in force.
I know some of the faculty at WUSTL, and I cannot for the life of me imagine how they came to think this was a good idea. I did not think they were either stupid enough or self-serving enough to support such a program.
Anonymous 11:36,
As one who almost certainly knows more of the WUSTL classics faculty than you and knows them better, I'm just going to say that it is among the departments in our field that does not deserve to get beaten up anonymously on Famae Volent.
The better question might be why some clearly inferior departments with fewer resources still have PhD programs.
Anybody hear from University of the Sciences? It's weird that their application was due so early, but there's been no movement on the wiki. Did the job get canceled?
So, 8:05, since you don't think the WUSTL faculty deserve criticism, how might you defend their action here?
FWIW I count two faculty there as friends, but I haven't had the heart to ask them, "Dude, WTF?"
Shutting down a program that shouldn't exist is a step in the right direction, but such programs continuing to exist is merely the status quo.
What WUSTL is doing is actively making the situation worse by taking definite action, and expending effort, just to make the world that much shittier a place.
Anonymous 10:24,
I'm not interested in discussing this issue here, and believe that my post, especially if properly read, stands on its own.
I didn't want to ignore you, as that would be rude. But I have nothing more to add.
Perhaps someone out there can change the subject by attacking a department more deserving of it?
They're opening up a new PhD program in this environment.
They may not be the kind of toxic bloodsuckers one encounters elsewhere in Classics, but that's still incredibly bad judgment, they should know better, and it is entirely appropriate to point that out in this forum.
I'm sure they are all nice people, but to me that doesn't mitigate the fact that they're doing active, serious damage to the lives of "only" two people a year. I'm sure those two people don't see their financial security, self-worth and professional future, all of which are almost certainly going to be torpedoed, as negligible.
to change the subject, would it it really be so hard for departments to email the candidates they're interviewing rather than (or, I mean, in addition to) causing interviews to "magically" show up on calendars?
Does that mean those departments don't interview candidates who don't go to this year's meeting?
I do not really care about what you think of this or that faculty member at the University of Washington at St Louis. Creating a new PhD program in Classics is totally unethical. It is despicable, self-serving and utterly condemnable. They should be shamed on this forum and on any other possible venue. Shame on you too, for diminishing the gravity of this.
Yeah, the fact that anyone as an individual thinks that some or all of the people there are nice has no bearing on the fact that, as a group, they are exhibiting culpable callousness to their potential students. (I would note that "niceness" and callous obliviousness/indifference often go hand-in-hand.) And one person's individual affections most definitely do not prohibit anyone else from commenting on WUST's actions as a classics department.
Anyone else reading this?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/12/12/370343232/syrian-women-displaced-by-war-make-tragedy-of-antigone-their-own
It is wholesome to think, staring down SCS and the boatload of existential angst it delivers to us on the job market, that whatever might happen to classics the discipline the texts that discipline studies continue to offer comfort and perspective to those who need it.
this thing on?
The Goodwin Awards have been announced. Winners are 3 Brits. Discuss.
Meh.
Pretty sure no one gives a fuck about the Goodwin Awards.
Regarding Washington University in St. Louis, some of you aren't using your brains, or so your shrill rhetoric suggests. All this means is that a small number of people who would have been stuck either in lesser PhD programs or PhD programs in lesser schools (U-Illinois and U-Missouri come to mind as the ones that are geographically closest to St. Louis) will instead be at Wash. U. The lesser programs will have either fewer PhD students or maintain their numbers but have some inferior students. Perhaps over time one of the lesser programs will close down because of the competition. Wash. U. will probably have a better job placement record, so those who might have been stuck at Illinois or Missouri or somewhere else will have a better chance at a job -- it is the people who would take their spots at the lesser places who will be in a bad position. But most of those people don't seem to compete for college teaching jobs anyway. (Look at the old wikis and you will see how rarely jobs go to people from second- and third-tier PhD programs.)
I am not going to flesh out all of the different possibilities here, but it is just plain silly to conclude that a new PhD program is a terrible thing.
And I will add that if you are from one of the top programs and are upset at additional competition, well, 1) there is nothing wrong with competition, and 2) there is already competition from overseas PhD's, so 2-3 more on the market from a top American school is not a problem.
The poster above seems to live in an entirely different universe from the rest of us. Not sure where to begin.
No kidding. I'll start. The blithe assurance that these students will be placed, when nobody who knows what they're talking makes that assumption about even students from very strong, established programs anymore. Then there's the stunning indifference to the wellbeing of those additional "inferior students" who will be admitted to lower-tier schools (because who are we kidding: somebody is going to need to grade myth exams there, with or without job market competition from WUSL).
The notion that most Ph.D. students apply geographically is an odd one. The best schools compete on an international level. Is WUSTL really trying to say only that they now offer the best Ph.D. program in Missouri and the western half of Illinois? Plus, the idea that an upstart program like WUSTL is automatically better than Illinois, simply because WUSTL is a wealthier school, is stupid. Illinois has a long tradition of producing good students, especially of the more philological bent. Mizzou has an established reputation in archaeology. What niche is WUSTL filling here?
Finally, have the WUSTL faculty asked themselves two simple questions?
"Would I encourage my best undergraduate students to go to WUSTL were I teaching elsewhere, and would I myself have chosen to go to WUSTL to get my own Ph.D.?"
I'm not a WUSTL faculty member, but I can answer both of those quite easily.
No, and no.
I'd extend this principle even further. If you wouldn't send your best undergraduates to your own Ph.D. program, assuming their field interests line up with such a program, then you shouldn't offer a Ph.D. program.
Dear Anonymous 5:42,
You wrote the following:
"Look at the old wikis and you will see how rarely jobs go to people from second- and third-tier PhD programs."
With that simple observation you undermined your own argument.
WUSTL will not be a first-tier program, but second-tier if it is very lucky, and third-tier most likely.
Ergo, you are quite clueless.
now this seems topical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S73swRzxs8Y
The discussion about the WUSTL program has now made it to the Chronicle of Higher Ed fora. The first reply is a rousing, moralistic defense of WUSTL that can be summed up by "the market will correct itself".
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,175073.0.html
The market is correcting itself now, and will continue to do so. The moral issue comes in with the fact that the market corrects itself by crushing human lives.
What bothers me most is the argument that the program might be new and even mediocre, but the university has the $$$ and reputation to pull it off. This basically tells me that it will lure naive and possibly gullible applicants (and we know there are plenty of them out there so please dispense with the market-demand, natural selection rhetoric), who are drawn to the brand of Wash U, largely developed off the back of its medical program, regardless of their chances post graduation. So in the best case scenario, these graduate in turn will land more generalist jobs at institutions that know little about the field but are themselves lured by the brand. Yeah, I'm sure classics will be served well by these students as our ambassadors.
As a clarch, I would not send my archaeology students to Harvard if they had better options just as I would not send my philology students to Cincinnati. I venture to guess that the faculty who advice students to apply to Wash U will have little classics training and will do so because of the brand name and not because of fit.
What baffles me is that Wash U had a sterling reputation for Greek art and archaeology back in the day under Mylonos and they let it rot. Why not leverage traditional areas of strength? Now their art history and archaeology department is de facto art history due to the strong pressures of disciplinary boundaries and I would not send them any of my students who truly wish to become archaeologists (sorry art historians, but studying beautiful things with little context is not archaeology).
It isn't just naiveté keeping potential students from seeing the risks of less-prestigious (meaning, not Ivy or Berkeley) programs: my program had a very strong placement record when I enrolled. It hasn't placed anyone in a TT position since 2008. Yet still it advertises that all recent PhDs are employed in the field. The only people that are going to be fooled by that are prospectives, and how likely do you think it is that anyone is going to explain to them about how fun it is to be an adjunct or an academic nomad? I think it is fair to say that Wash U is going to be a considerably weaker program than the one I came from. Most prospectives won't see what they are getting themselves into soon enough, and it is not entirely their own fault.
Re: December 14, 2014 at 1:54 PM
No question that there are better places to do philology, but Cincinnati's placement rate for philologists is actually not bad: ~75% of PhDs over the past 15 yrs currently placed in full-time college/university jobs, with more than 50% in permanent/indefinitely renewable positions. Quite a few places with better reputations have worse track records. /derail
Just what is the placement record (t-t jobs) like for the 2nd and 3rd tier schools over, say, the last decade? Does anyone have any idea?
How we do define 2nd and 3rd tier?
My guess is any place not Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, Berkeley, and Stanford.
Sorry, Yale, but you are 2nd tier no matter the school's overall rep. And I do think Harvard is teetering on the edge of going 2nd tier.
My guess is that placement data, especially in the last six or seven years, is mostly hidden, and for good reason.
50% of PhDs over the last *15* years are in TT or identifiably renewable positions--meaning that 50% have either left the field or are still job-hopping and may not even have health insurance--and this is supposed to be a laudable statistic.
Sweet Jesus, are we fucked.
Not only are statistics usually kept hidden, but some places shamelessly advertise the success of what amounts to 1-3 people from their program from the last decade. Prospectives are liable to be fooled, no one else.
And that 50% only counts those who actually finish.
I would also bet that statistics for Classics are worse, as this 50% includes fields with much stronger placement. Sobering
We complain about statistics, but it would be quite easy to come up with very accurate ones. If three or four people from each Ph.D. program, ideally spaced out in different cohorts, were to track the fates of everybody they knew over the past ten years or so, we'd have our answers. And they would be unassailable. Why don't we do this?
We're scrambling to find an ocean to dive into so we can try to keep our heads above water? I can't even find an ocean so I'm beyond fucked.
I don't know if people would feel comfortable identifying their university on a semi-public forum like this. It's a small world, and our departments would consider it a betrayal, which would leave us even more screwed than we already are. Is there any way to get around that?
Presumably a large (and ever-increasing) number of us have no hope of a career in Classics, and would therefore have nothing to lose by disclosing such information.
Wake up Classics-types - the party is over. Time to turn out the lights. Tell the dinosaurs that the 19th century is over and they should just quietly become extinct as soon as conveniently possible. You can argue about stats as long as you want to no avail - you are only rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic hoping against hope that you have one in which to sit. For most (good, mediocre, or awful), there is not a chair now - nor ever. The discipline we all shackled ourselves to has stubbornly resisted sensible change, growth, and development. It still maintains its colonial and post-colonial barricades in most cases. It touts the fallacy of Greco-Roman exceptionalism. And to what end? To defend a pigeon-holed, marginalized discipline that could, in fact, be the cat's meow but is, instead, a dog's breakfast.
Party? You must be one of the archys who takes part in your Bacchanalia every summer.
Yeah, I'm fucking jealous.
lol lol. So much time spent commenting on this site. So much time not spent working on getting a job, in Classics or elsewhere. Way more useful to debate the merits and rank of programs you didn't attend than to write an article...
No one gives a fuck about articles. I wrote lots of articles, but I sure as fuck didn't get a TT job.
If you actually want a job, you should be doing something that prepares you for a career unrelated to Classics.
And shame on you for suggesting that we should all care about our own employment so much that we simply don't have time to point out that WUSTL is trying to sucker a few poor souls a year into a dead-end career path just so that they can say they have a PhD program.
Judging from some of the comments here, Classics has a pretty high number of people who are pretty damn sure they deserve the best of everything. Maybe some of that attitude seeps out in interviews and non tenure-track jobs? Just saying.
Fuck you. We have PhDs. We deserve better than being unemployed and without health insurance without even being eligible for unemployment because seven years of being a TA doesn't count for anything.
And we are entirely correct to be castigating departments for actively trying to recruit more people to enhance their prestige and teach their courses, then be discarded as outlined above.
i think maybe we need to move in a different direction with the reception side of things. let's start here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxkr4wS7XqY
Keep an eye out for ya, Stingray.
"Judging from some of the comments here, Classics has a pretty high number of people who are pretty damn sure they deserve the best of everything. Maybe some of that attitude seeps out in interviews and non tenure-track jobs? Just saying."
Says someone who was probably put on third base by an advisor's phone call and thinks he did it by his sparkling personality and brilliant intellect.
Anon 7:32 for the win!
What's more depressing than having no job after 8 years of this nonsense is checking up on who DID get them.
The people who get the jobs are the long-term losers; they're still going to be in this field years from now, and things are only going to get worse.
Be glad you can't get anything; use it as an opportunity to break out of Classics Stockholm Syndrome and pursue an actual career that exists in the world we live in.
I know many friends who were in TT jobs and said fuck it before going up for tenure. I would say most of those who are tenured are fairly unhappy to downright miserable from terrible colleagues, poor pay, adapting to region, suffering family life, overwork, etc. Move on. There are plenty of jobs that offer a better lifestyle and they usually pay more.
Data collection is crucial. If we want people to understand what it is like to undergo a grad program in Classics, we need clear figures.
Here are the figures for the University of Toronto. I have collected the data from the early 2002 to the late 2012.
In those years, a total of 26 people were awarded a PhD. I know of at least 4 people who went close to getting a PhD but never did. They dropped out of the program.
8 of the 26 grads are in a continuing position: they are either Assistant or Associate Professors, typically in a Canadian University.
An additional 5 are in fixed-term positions.
It remains unclear to me if 4 out of the remaining 13 have a permanent academic position. They are teaching somewhere, but are not listed as Assistant or Associate Professors.
I can tell for sure that 5 of the original 26 do not hold an academic position.
To sum up, the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto managed to place one-third or, if count fixed positions, half of its grads between the years 2002 and 2012.
I count 15 Phds from my upper-second tier east coast university between 2005 and today. Five have TT jobs, nearly all of those placed at the beginning of that time period.
UNC-Chapel Hill posts their placement here: https://classics.unc.edu/academics/graduate-programs/graduate-placement/classics-graduates-on-the-job-market-2001-to-present/
They do not indicate the fairly high rate of attrition and non-completion they have experienced over the past decade or so.
In order for this data to be useful we need all of it, including attrition/non-completion. Prospectives need to understand exactly what they are getting into. For that reason the UNC stats are completely misleading. Surely we have some recent UNC grads, and not-so-recent grads checking in here? Can you all fix the numbers based on your inside knowledge?
There are PhDs in Archaeology, History, Philosophy and Whatnot competing on the Classics job market. In some universities they fall under the Classics umbrella, in others not. I'm not sure how they fit into the picture, data-wise.
Not sure what you are looking for in the stats or what they can tell us. But one thing we can do is use proxy data. For example:
http://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/career-diversity-for-historians/the-many-careers-of-history-phds
According to this, 50% of history Phds end up in TT jobs. Let's assume that classics is about the same, for the sake of argument. What does that tell us?
The key is how you interpret the figure. Like the old joke says, two hairs in my soup is too many, two hairs on my head is too few.
Here, the issue is that if you are writing a dissertation a 50% placement rate is terrifyingly low. But if you're a 21-year old who has no idea what to do with her life, it sounds not too bad.
@Dec 15, 12:56
Note that the sample from which the 50% number is drawn is from History PhDs who filed their dissertation between 1998-2009.
What you have done is exactly the way in which faculty mislead their undergraduates. First, you conflate PhD completion with enrollment in a graduate program (not in your own head, but in the slippage of your speech). You don't identify that 50% of those who enroll complete and 50% of those landed a TT job. Second, you use statistics which are not only woefully out of date, but which specifically and explicitly predate the major watershed in our employment. Yes, there are figures from 2009 in there, but they are greatly outweighed by the 1998-2008 period. This is intellectually dishonest (if I give you intelligence the benefit of the doubt) or incredibly shoddy method (if I give your morality the benefit of the doubt).
Thank you for reading my comment carefully and for not insulting my intelligence or morality.
First, proportion of enrolled in phd program vs. completed and proportion of completed vs. employed in t-t jobs are different metrics. They measure different things and should not be conflated.
Second, I cited that study "for the sake of the argument." We can take a different number. Let's assume that the true proportion, right now, of classics phd completed vs. employed in t-t jobs within 5 years of completion is closer to 30%, which is actually what I would estimate.
My argument is that even if the true number is that low, it's not low enough to deter the typical classics undergrad intending to pursue graduate training.
Based on a couple calculations done in my head with two really darn good programs (maybe not top 3 but definitely top 10 and arguably top 5), I see around a 30-40% placement into TT jobs out of those who became ABD during the hey day (1995-2005 graduates). I think it might be a bit lower if you include all matriculants but we had very few drop out before ABD status.
My guestimate is that we're around 20% for 2005-2014 graduates. It's tougher to say since it's standard now for people to do several post-docs and VAPs, which was quite uncommon in the past. It might become as high as 30% for this group if you give it several more years, approaching the hey day, but I think it will hover around 20%.
20% success? To a typical high-achieving 21-year old that sounds like pretty good odds. After all, they have already gotten into Dartmouth (11%) or Chicago (8%) or Berkeley (17%). Heck, getting a TT job is easier than getting into any top school. Sign me up!!
I joke of course. 20% is horrible, but I don't think it will sound horrible to a naive and ambitious college junior or senior simply because they have beaten what seemed like worse odds before. They just don't realize the importance of competition pools in making these distinctions.
I agree but I don't think using acceptance rates at elite universities is the best analogy. The fact is that there are hundreds of great universities and colleges to choose from and a top 10% student is bound to get into a top 100 school, however defined.
The closer analogy would be telling a student that s/he has a 20% of getting into any university, or on the flipside, saying that your chance of landing an advertised classics job at Dartmouth (really any university) is less than 1% statistically speaking. The reality is that it's much less since it's not nearly the level playing field or relatively straightforward formulaic process that college admissions is.
Anon. Dec. 14, 11:06,
You wrote:
"Is WUSTL really trying to say only that they now offer the best Ph.D. program in Missouri and the western half of Illinois? Plus, the idea that an upstart program like WUSTL is automatically better than Illinois, simply because WUSTL is a wealthier school, is stupid. Illinois has a long tradition of producing good students, especially of the more philological bent... What niche is WUSTL filling here?"
Do you know what you're talking about? I myself have NEVER met a recent Illinois PhD, nor can I remember even hearing of the existence of one -- since they do exist, it appears they must not amount to much. A search of the wikis from the past four years lists just two as having gotten jobs: a decent one-year VAP and a rather poor tenure-track position. (The Illinois department does not list its alumni, unlike so many other PhD programs, so better info is not available.) You must have in mind the program's past -- indeed, storied -- reputation, since today it is nothing special. Only 2-3 of the current faculty would be worth studying with -- hardly a program that merits your praise. Which is a shame, since they are reputed to have an amazing library collection, which is rather wasted. (If you do not believe me, just go through the CV's of the tenured faculty, paying attention both to the type of scholarship and the length of their articles, and you will see few who seem ideal mentors for young scholars. The link: http://www.classics.illinois.edu/people)
Overall, putting aside all issues of whether it is right or wrong for Washington University to have a new PhD program -- I personally do not care -- I think one would have to conclude that their program will be superior to that of Illinois the moment it materializes. (Not know much about archaeology, I have no opinion of Missouri, to which Wash. U. was also being compared.)
Article measuring contests should be kept to SCS interviews, in dimly lit hotel rooms.
Something tells me Anon 8:10 has a grudge against Illinois...failed job candidate there?
Nah, I think they're just trying to get us off the track of justly berating WUSTL by distracting us with tangential assholery.
"Your chance of landing an advertised classics job at Dartmouth" is especially slim if they really got 1700 applications for the three-year post doc position advertised this year.
Anon. 8:10 here. I have not been rejected once by Illinois. Believe it or not, it is possible to form a negative opinion of the program without having attempted to be hired there.
Anon 8:10's ex-girlfriend, who dumped him for a particularly good-looking, Mizzou-trained archaeologist, is an Illinois Ph.D.
Confirmed.
I think he was bullied by an Illinois as a child.
Illini. Bullied by an Illini.
I think is it truly stupid to think that someone who thinks little of Illinois or any other school failed a job search. NB: I am not the person who posted the original comment. I will say that I did fail at places where I applied out of sheer desperation. This does not mean I cannot have an honest opinion of the school and its faculty.
Yeah, yeah. You were clearly also bullied by an Illinite.
I do think the attitude expressed by Anon 8:10 is a part of the problem though. if you're that contemptuous of the work of others, the odds are good that attitude seeps into your interactions. Or, if you've "made it" in the profession, that you're conveying that attitude to your graduate students.
why a negative opinion on a dept has to be sour grapes? shall we just be in awe of those who secured a job anywhere? or think that just because they do have a job they are stellar scholars working in stellar places? I do not mean to be disparaging, I am just raising s a few points.
7:50am, you're never going to be able to move past this unless you forgive your Illinanian oppressors.
This, a thousand times:
I do think the attitude expressed by Anon 8:10 is a part of the problem though. if you're that contemptuous of the work of others, the odds are good that attitude seeps into your interactions. Or, if you've "made it" in the profession, that you're conveying that attitude to your graduate students.
Surely by now we have all realized just how random job placement is? I have friends who were finalists, as in on-campus, final two or three, for tenure-track jobs at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Michigan, UCLA, Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and UNC.
Some of these people are now out of the profession because they couldn't find anything. Some are now at places like Illinois. Some are at places like Little Sisters of the Holy Corn Circle College of Northeast Iowa, Dubuque Satellite Campus. Some of them may have bombed their on-campus chances. But most of them didn't get that hot-shot job simply because they were narrowly not chosen due to "fit," or the fact that the department chair didn't like the flashy belt buckle one of them wore that day, or another really liked the flashy bolo tie the other candidate wore the previous day, etc. etc. etc. etc.
Have a hot-shot position? Congratulations, you probably earned it. Have a not-so hot-shot position, congratulations, you probably earned it, and you are lucky to have a job.
Illinois? That's a fucking hot-shot position that any one of us on the market now would be pleased as fucking punch to land. So spare us the bullshit language of hierarchy and prestige. That shit is toxic garbage. Yes, the WUSTL faculty are every bit as good as the Illinois faculty. And the Illinois faculty are every bit as good as the Wisconsin faculty. And so on and so forth.
All that doesn't mean we need a new, tiny Ph.D. program in Classics. By that measure then places like Baylor and UMass should be offering Ph.D. programs.
I don't know why WUSTL has decided to do this. I suspect the faculty thinks it will get them some prestige, and goodies from the university. But for all of the extra work entailed, and the fact that they are going to be responsible for placing students in a horrible job market, I think it was a raw deal for them, and a horrible deal for their students. But the die is cast, so best of luck to them.
Illinese?
You're absolutely correct about the prestige BS and job placement, but, just to be fair, Anon. at 8:10 did base his/her judgement of Illinois on the scholarship its people are producing, not their location.
I found Anon 8:10's remarks about scholarship more objectionable than the pedigree comments. What s/he really meant was, "They're not doing the sort of work I'd do, and therefore they'd be bad mentors."
I found the whole of 8:10's remarks objectionable, but also fairly representative of a broad swath of classicists. FWIW, I know a few recent Illinois Ph.D. holders, and they are every bit as good as the few Stanford Ph.D. holders I also know.
Anon. 8:10 here, posting on this subject for the last time.
Most of the guesses regarding me are way off the mark. But this is fine, since I did not exactly give you a lot to go on.
All I want to add is that after one has been around for a bit--going to conferences, spending time on digs or at research institutes, and of course having conversations with departmental colleagues--one gets to hear about what is right and wrong with certain programs. That can include stuff that is widely known, stuff that can be learned by a bit of digging, and (not infrequently) some juicy stuff one is not supposed to know about. (People do like to talk, after all...) Illinois is one of a few places about which I have a negative opinion, and I was in a giving mood so I decided to share it. I did not criticize any of the other programs because I was responding to a post specifically about Illinois and Missouri. If one of the other places is mentioned perhaps I will criticize them; I have also posted positive comments on Famae Volent, and likewise might do so again.
Bullied by an Illinought, eh?
For some reason, Illinois classics gets a rep that's probably more indicative of the overall environment of the university. Compared to a department like Texas, Illinois is full of pussycats.
Bullied by a Texahoosit, I see.
Damn, I guess some of guys will go to the APA again this year, probably sometime soon.
I for one am glad to be rid of it! Enjoy your uncomfortable moments in suits.
haters gonna hate
How many Classicists does it take to change a lightbulb?
n?
Support our brethren on the other side:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/894/968/678/make-the-next-ref-an-incentive-for-long-term-employment-not-short-term-exploitation/
You guys should check out the previous posted Chronicle forum. There's some idiot historian on there disparaging classics. Time to help out and fight back guys.
That Chronicle forum commenter actually thinks that because Classics was the center of the curriculum in the 19th century but then just one field among many in the 20th, the discipline must have been in inexorable institutional decline for more than 100 years. Because as we all know, the number of students enrolled in higher education did not undergo an astronomical expansion during the 20th century, especially after WWII, increasing the absolute numbers of faculty positions and students broadly across disciplines.
FWIW, Classics in the US underwent a serious, maybe even epochal, crisis in the *1970s*, if HS Latin enrollments are any indication: #s dropped from >700,000 in 1960 to 150,500 in 1976. (Source: Benario's handy-dandy history of CAMWS: The First 80 years. B. blames the shift to the sciences during the space race and attendant changes in apportionment of public education funding.) Cf. the subsequent disastrous job market of the 1980s. We could see some of the same dynamics today with the focus on "STEM" and pre-professional training. Or we could do the easy thing and keep harping on the Victorians.
Do we care? We're up shit creek without a paddle any way you slice it.
At this point, no. If Classics has taught me anything, it's not do give a shit about anything.
Regarding Cincinnati: sure, they're philology side is smaller than many philology-only departments, but have you looked at them recently? The senior scholars are doing top, interdisciplinary work and the junior people hired over the past six years seem to be good scholars as well from what I have seen/heard. Combine that with an immense amount of funding for graduate students and a program ethos that believes that philologists should have rigorous training in the fields/methodologies of ancient history and archaeology as well... I'd send my students there. But that's because I train my students see philology less narrowly than many.
Drat! 'They're smaller' went to 'they're philology side'. Attack me my philology brethren. I deserve it. But I stand by what I said.
Why so defensive, Cincinnati? It's not very becoming. Yeah, it's a nice little program. Its archaeology is exceptional, possibly top 5. I still would pick 20 other programs for my philologically oriented students to attend. There's nothing wrong with this as my own department doesn't even have a MA program, but let's call it as it is. If you would send your own students there instead of at least ten other programs, you're full of shit.
Yeah, it's pretty easy to name twenty without even going over to Europe.
Brown
Berkeley
Chicago
Columbia
Cornell
Duke
Harvard
JHU
Michigan
NYU
Penn
Princeton
Stanford
Texas
Toronto
UCLA
UNC
USC
UVa
Yale
And here's another twenty in the same ballpark, many I would still put above Cincinnati:
BU
BMC
Colorado
CUNY Graduate Center
Emory
FLorida
FSU
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
McMaster
Minnesota
Northwestern
OSU
SUNY-Buffalo
UBC
UC-Santa Barbara
Washington
Wash U
Wisconsin
I'm sure I'm forgetting some.
The good news is that with a load of money, a couple generations of superstars, and some good luck Wash U *might* have a chance to sneak into the top 20. There is no way in hell it will ever break into the top 15 in the next century. I doubt they survive into the next generation once the job market is littered with their jobless grads.
the poster above is clearly a Cincinnati alum...
If it's one person, it's pretty pathetic since there was at least one earlier post doing the same thing.
I think he was bullied by a Cincinnatus as a child.
Top 5 in archaeology? Doubtful. Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago, UNC, Brown are clearly a cut above and it's highly likely several more programs are as well.
How ass-backwards does a "university" have to be to get called on the carpet before the entire Placement Service?
Well the archaeology rankings cut several ways. Top training does not equal the top placement records. Take it from one who knows the bloody, painful truth. And that list above is a bit whacky on ranking programs.
Whacky? You mean that obscure thing called alphabetizing? Sheesh, you must be one of the archys who can't tell an alpha from an omega unless it's capitalized in front of a frat house. You probably would have a job if you knew Greek and Latin like a proper classicist.
hey ass hat, how is this list "Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago, UNC, Brown" in alphabetical order? no wonder people hate classicists.
Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!
To be fair, people don't hate Classicists. Granted, they probably would if they knew we existed or what Classics is, but no one knows those things.
"You guys should check out the previous posted Chronicle forum. There's some idiot historian on there disparaging classics. Time to help out and fight back guys."
Well I might be in the small minority here on FV, but I agree much more with the "idiot" than with the traditional "real classicist" going by the handle kaysixteen. If this person is under the age of 60, which it sounds like s/he is, I can't believe a traditional "real classicist" like this still exists in my generation. Classics truly does deserve a quick death if you have people this blind representing the field in any number. For the record, I'm a Hellenist and not a "fake" historian or archaeologist.
I wouldn't put too much stock in this person. Yeah, there are still people like this around, and even some of recent vintage, but I think most classicists from the last 20 years believe in a balanced department where it's allowable, and even welcome, to have faculty less experienced in Greek or Latin if it means other assets are brought to the table. The real/fake classicist perspective perpetuated by this individual is so out there that I can't even comment on it. The person in question entered graduate school in 1993 so they graduated around 2000, right as the market was peaking. He's bitter about not landing a job as a Roman historian in a classics department during the halycon days and it obviously colours his worldview.
Open and earnest question:
Traditional training in Latin and Greek usually doesn't give a student true reading fluency, and almost never gives her even basic conversational ability. So on what basis are we philologists entitled to claim that our training is rigorous?
Nobody who's gone through a couple of Classics degrees would deny that our training is difficult, exacting, and time-consuming. And there are some obvious gains: it's clear we teach a firmer grammatical understanding than other lang and lit departments manage to pass on to their majors/grads.
Then again, modern language departments can train their undergrads to speak and read fluently within the course of a bachelor's degree, even when the language in question is morphologically/grammatically as complex as Greek and Latin (e.g. Russian). I've met a few people who can speak Latin and Greek fluently, so it's not like it's impossible: they are, after all, natural languages just like all the others.
Since we can't speak the languages we study, and since most of us don't read them as well as a PhD in Russian reads Russian, what is the basis for our usual bromides about the exceptional rigor of Classics? Do the abilities provided by our training justify our praise of it?
If there are Classics PhDs who can't read ancient Greek fluently, shame on them. I certainly don't know any.
As far as our undergraduates not being able to speak these languages, they shouldn't be trained to do so. That would be silly. These languages are for reading ancient texts, and not only is there no benefit to be had from learning to speak them, but it can even be detrimental, since it will force them to focus their efforts on turns of phrase often found in speech but rarely if ever in the texts that actually exist in these languages. This is time that could be used actually learning to read Latin or Greek. "Spoken Latin" is laughable pedagogical quackery, apparently based on a facile analogy with the pedagogy of living languages; luckily "spoken Greek" is not even a thing.
In small Classics departments (e.g. mine, with 2.75 full-time positions), each professor MUST be able to teach both languages at all levels. The much-maligned poster on the Chronicle is exactly right, at least for small departments. All of us teach both languages at all levels (undergraduate; we have no grad. students); what we teach varies from year to year. One year we may be teaching 1st-year Greek and 4th-year Latin; the next year, it may be reversed. We could not even consider hiring someone who was not capable of teaching the languages with complete facility at all levels. Our individual research specialities really don't matter for our teaching here; we teach languages and basic civ. courses and that's all we have room for. We never teach our research specialities--when/how could we?
11:10: You don't know a single Classics PhD who reads Greek with greater difficulty than they read English?
"If there are Classics PhDs who can't read ancient Greek fluently, shame on them. I certainly don't know any."
Uh, I have a PhD in Classics, and I'm even a Hellenist, and I can't honestly say that read Greek fluently. Not even close. I suspect I am not alone.
Or, maybe I am and everybody is laughing at me.
I know many older classicists who can think back to when they were 30 and thought they knew Greek and Latin well, and did not realize they had decades ahead of them of learning to read Greek and Latin a little bit better every year, and still would not understand them particularly well.
A department with less than three attempting to teach all facets of Greek and Latin? You should be added to the endangered species list. Good luck.
Hi I was just noticing that UNC's placement page was mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
It might be useful to look at the page before the page that cited (you can see the link on the page cited) which states
""Anyone considering pursuing a Ph.D. in Classics and a career in college or university teaching should know that prospects for employment in Classics or in academics more generally are always uncertain. No one should apply to graduate school in Classics whose advisors have not told them at length and in detail how difficult and uncertain the job market can be."
I am doing my PhD at a 'good' school and feel like I barely know Latin and Greek, despite years of training, passing my program's brutal qualifying exams and having my work on literature being modestly well received.
The author that I specialized in I am pretty quick at reading now, and I can get through Virgil/Ovid/Cicero fairly quickly... but many other Latin authors I am shamefully slow in and just end up resorting to a dictionary or commentary. And despite having dedicated a year of my life to Greek a couple of years ago in preparation for the qualifying exam (and in order to finally feel like I was getting somewhere) it is still less than pointless for me to pick up any of the works I love so much (tragedy, Homer, let alone Pindar or any other lyric poet) without a dictionary, grammar book, commentary, and an entire afternoon.
I find it extremely distressing and embarrassing, and I think that I am probably slightly towards the lower ability end of the spectrum language wise, but actually, it can't be that uncommon. There are a couple of real language geniuses among the students on my program, but I think most of them are probably like me, possibly to a lesser extent.
I too always rejected as spoken Latin (and Greek! it exists!) as nerdy and unintellectual, but actually, I can happily pick up a novel or have a chat in French, German and Italian, languages that I've learned on the side and dedicated little time or brainspace to. whereas I have essentially a 6 year old's reading ability in the languages I've (ostensibly) devoted my life to.
I wonder if immersive language programs would be the way forward for Latin and Greek. In the UK it's compulsory for undergraduates studying modern languages to spend a year studying at a university in a linguistically appropriate country - imagine if we could send Classics majors for a year to an institute where they not only read and wrote Latin and Greek but were forced Middlebury-style to speak them outside the classroom. Unrealistic but wouldn't it be amazing to actually know the languages we study??
For fuck's sake, just sit down with the big LSJ and Smyth until you have them memorized. There, done. It isn't that hard.
ha, ok for that cri de coeur i deserved that...
This is fine for philologists and even recommended from my point of view if time exists, but you want archaeologists and historians to go through this to satisfy some bullshit "real classics" requirement? No wonder most classical archaeologists and historians can't dialogue with other archaeologists and historians at even a basic level.
Well I might be in the small minority here on FV, but I agree much more with the "idiot" than with the traditional "real classicist" going by the handle kaysixteen. For the record, I'm a Hellenist and not a "fake" historian or archaeologist.
Fucking traitor.
Stone him! Bob Dylan commands it!
Yeah, I resemble the description of a philologist playing archaeologist. Sue me, it's how I was trained. Now I'm unemployed and both sides think I'm a fucking mutt. What a harsh epiphany to realize so late in the game. For those aspiring archaeologists still unscarred and idealistic, train to be a Latinist or archaeologist, not some fucking mutt. Learn as much Latin as practical but pay attention to all the trends - agency, entanglement, etc.
Better yet, get the fuck out and don't start grad school.
"Better yet, get the fuck out and don't start grad school."
This needs to be the official slogan of the APA, or whatever the fuck they call themselves now.
Whatever one might say in criticism of a school not getting in its short lists before the conference, am I alone in thinking it's pretty rich of a certain placement coordinator to be calling anyone out for not doing a job expeditiously? Then again not surprising given said person's history of rudeness.
10:46, maybe you have a comment? Newbie here so this is a question not a comment: I see there are jobs where the schools would presumably be interviewing at the SCS, but the wiki suggests nothing has happened for them at all. No interviews, no Skyping, no cancelled search. Are committees still working on interviews lists for those, then, even at this very late date?
Most likely they have contacted candidates but those people didn't update the wiki; Placement sent out an email a while back saying that all places conducting interviews in New Orleans except Dallas have already scheduled them. But you should check to see if the schools you're interested in are interviewing there. Not all are, and it should say on the original job ad.
Classics is over, finished. It's ancient history.
Come now! It's also philology and archaeology or whatnot. Or maybe only philology, if you believe the manic ravings of cato the idiot over on the Chronicle fora.
This field died when the APA or whatever they call themselves now ditched the simple and elegant brown hardbacks for the cheaply made journals they overcharge for that get beat up in the mail.
Wait, TAPA is no longer published in hardback?
I always thought of them as having a more reddish tinge than brown. They had a nice feel to them.
can someone provide the link to the chronicle forum?
O Cinncinnatus.
@12:06 pm
Here it is:
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,175073.msg3258583.html
Be safe.
and they all went down with the ship ...
http://apaclassics.org/apa-blog/letter-president-expanding-audience-classics
I think the above initiative is wonderful, as long as they don't intend to try to increase the number or size of *graduate* programs.
Classics is a wonderful thing to take classes in, or even to major in as an undergraduate, because these are the places where someone can be personally fulfilled without staking a career (and therefore their livelihood) on incredibly long odds.
This field needed this initiative long ago. Now it sounds more than a day late and a dollar short. Yes - branch out. Are Classicists good at branching out? Uh, no. Many of the gray hairs who presided in my graduate program looked down their noses at anyone who had not read Greek at some rarified place with crimson robes, so I don't see them holding hands with the people in their cognate departments.
Yeah, I think the Chronicle discussions portend as much. There's an underemployed philologist on there who demonstrates that there are even younger classicists hell bent on defending classics=philology to the grave.
While the initiative sounds like a good idea, I have my doubts about this committee they've formed. One, because we haven't been shown who else is on it. Two, because while I mean no disrespect, I have my doubts that a retired college president has the best perspective for leading such a effort, rather than an early to early-middle career professor who is at one of these institutions they are thinking of (community college, HBCU, or a regional comprehensive that likely has no independent classics department). Sure, people from these places are invited to send in their thoughts, but it feels like the same old, same old collection of elite institution bigwigs will then sit around and come up with useless ideas which are mainly intended just to expand the languages when at many places that is a complete non-starter.
I happen to teach at a place that has no classics department, but there is surprising demand for ancient history and classical philosophy courses, along with archaeology. There is almost no demand for Latin beyond the first year and Greek...Greek is off the radar. Frankly, we don't need a traditional classics department. Now, courses on classical literature in translation might well get filled, but we will never need someone to teach an advanced seminar in either language.
So, I am curious as to what they consider expanding the audience. If it's some lame attempt to push traditional classics courses into general education categories, other departments and the administration will laugh them off. If they genuinely want to bring forward classical antiquity as a time, place, and culture that's worthwhile for non-majors to use their precious few elective credits (sadly, the number of free electives students are given these days continues to dwindle), and perhaps even create some multidisciplinary approaches, such as examining the cultural impact of the classics throughout time up to the present day, there might be some advantage to that.
I don't know. I can't speak for many departments, but in the ones I've seen, the desire for "collaboration" and "interdisciplinary" this or that has always spelled one thing: philology becomes the last thing on the list. The historians and archaeologists end up conveying the idea to students and colleagues that language study is merely a means to an end, not a worthy or desirable pursuit in itself. The Chronicle thread is interesting for the insertion of the Biblical Greek poster who laments that at his place, the classicists were "ambivalent" about biblical studies. Because of course they'd be so wrong to want their students to read Homer and Sophocles instead of Romans and Revelation. Ditto the Medieval Latin posts.
There are a lot of reasons for the current job market, but it's not the fault of those who want to preserve philology at the core of a Classics curriculum.
December 30, 2014 at 10:04 AM
There are a lot of reasons for the current job market, but it's not the fault of those who want to preserve philology at the core of a Classics curriculum.
Yep, we're going to make it after all...but seriously, I think a lot of our Classics departments would do a lot for themselves if they acknowledged the existence of a huge corpus of Greek literature that appeals to a pretty large proportion of US students. The occasional class in biblical Greek won't necessarily force any of us to become Fundamentalist Christians, but it might allow us to keep teaching something about which we are passionate to a group of students who are also passionate about the material. Just one heretic's perspective.
Looks like kaysixteen has made it over to FV. "Real Classics": doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the world to adapt to you.
" I can't speak for many departments, but in the ones I've seen, the desire for "collaboration" and "interdisciplinary" this or that has always spelled one thing: philology becomes the last thing on the list."
So the problem is that philology won't have pride of place to suit your antiquated ideology, Mr. Cincinnati? Yeah, let's approach other departments and say, "I know you don't have any clue or care about Greek and Latin, but let's collaborate!" And "real classicists" wonder why classics is dead.
Philology should have pride of place. It's not exactly possible to do serious studies of ancient history and philosophy if you're ignorant of the languages. Archaeology is a somewhat separate case, but there too, it's pretty tough to do serious archaeology if you're ignorant of the languages of the cultures you're studying.
We're talking about collaborations with other programs, kaysixteen, not how we conduct our own research. You know that an entire world out there exists outside of "real classics," right? Enough of the mindless dogmatism. For the record, I know very few archaeologists who have any vital need for Greek or Latin outside of "real classics" cred and teaching needs assigned to them by classics departments. I know you abhor it after your experience at Cincinnati, but it's really only these external pressures and tradition that drives most "real archaeologists" to learn the languages.
You mean those "other programs" that are so eager to hire PhDs in Classics, but expect Classics Depts to roll out the red carpet for their PhDs in History and the like?
The Chronicle thread is interesting for the insertion of the Biblical Greek poster who laments that at his place, the classicists were "ambivalent" about biblical studies. Because of course they'd be so wrong to want their students to read Homer and Sophocles instead of Romans and Revelation.
You missed the point, and I'm bored enough to respond. The point was not the classicists' ambivalence, but their assumptions that (a) Biblical Greek was somehow inherently less than Classics and (b) they were too good for it. There was never a question of either Homer or Sophocles or Romans and Revelation as you put it, but rather pettiness.
And given that the Classical World runs at least from 800 BCE to 400 CE, why shouldn't Biblical Greek be a legitimate part of that, taught to students who are interested by faculty with backgrounds in it? It's one thing to focus your department on those things your faculty do well. It's quite another to exclude legitimate studies belonging to the language, literature, and culture of the appropriate time period because of some ill-defined sno(o/t)tiness.
Is it not "real Classics" because it pertains to a religion that has endured to the present day and therefore must be relegated to another department? If another department does offer it in the language with all the requisite background required by "real Classics" (again, language, literature, culture), is it still not "real Classics" because it comes from another department and therefore undermines one's own claims? That isn't a defense of education or of students--it is a defense of myopic provinciality.
As for the scorn heaped upon medieval Latin, well, just take a look at the I Tatti Renaissance Latin series. These texts are even later -- gasp -- than medieval Latin, but you'll see the names of a great many prominent "real Classicists" on the covers.
Clearly you're not in a dept where you have 2-4 undergrads who could possibly take advanced Greek...and yes, in that case, I would certainly expect them to get Homer or Herodotus or Plato or Aristophanes ahead of Romans or Clement.
Wrong again. I am in exactly a department that will have 2-4 students taking advanced Greek any given semester. My willingness to listen to why they're taking Classics and to hear how they see it fitting into their lives is strengthening the department.
I'm a philologist. Yes, I want to teach Homer and Sophocles ktl. I also want my major to mesh well with my students' goals, and so we navigate between the two. We can't do everything, but we couldn't do everything anyway, and I'm not about to make an iron-clad list of the order in which authors must be read according to my idea of their quality.
Some semesters I'll read Homer or Vergil or Sappho or Catullus. Others I'll read the Septuagint or John or Bede, if that's what sets my students' hearts to thumping. A couplet of Martial loved is a better argument for Classics than Aeschylus's Ode to Man hated.
No course of study is an end in itself: not Classics, not physics, not med. school. All of these have value only insofar as they advantageous for life.* (Something another philologist once wrote about extensively. His colleagues drummed him out of the discipline, but we know his name now, and not theirs; we read his works and not theirs.)
------
*Philosophers might quibble about their own discipline, but that's an argument for another time.
Definitely know my colleagues in religion won't count Horace instead of Hebrew for their major.
Not sure why Classics is supposed to count Hebrews instead of Homer.
It comes down to the simple fact that we as Classicists chose this career instead of the many more lucrative options available to us because we have a passion for teaching interesting texts, texts that should matter. The Biblical texts are frankly so boring and have taken human civilization down such a ridiculous rabbit hole that I can hardly fault someone for not wanting to spend one iota of their time not merely reading such dreck but actually teaching it to adolescents.
Definitely know my colleagues in religion won't count Horace instead of Hebrew for their major.
Not sure why Classics is supposed to count Hebrews instead of Homer.
And they shouldn't. That's a false equivalence and you know it.
My colleagues in Religion definitely will count a course in ancient religions/Greco-Roman religion/etc.
Don't know why Classics wouldn't count a course taught in Greek or Latin on an ancient topic.
Well, that's not true. I do know why. It comes down to the butts-in-seats method of counting a department's value to the university. Let's not pretend that it's anything to do with principles.
Because we actually do have a more or less fixed curriculum, and yes, I'll say it: we do think it's necessary for our majors to read Homer and Virgil, and no, not necessary to read Hebrews and Bede. Certainly not in substitute for what'd consider to be, yes, core Classics authors.
Actually, it's both numbers and principles...those aren't mutually exclusive issues. I don't really think a Classics major needs to read Paul's epistles in Greek. I do think s/he needs to read Sophocles.
@9:56
...propter angustias ire non poterant!
Lo, how narrow you have become!
@9:58
Or perhaps I should do Patrick Henry: "Give me Sophocles or give me death!"
One would think from reading some of these comments that Augustus himself had descended from the mountain, saying, "Thou shalt have no studies before these:" and bearing a list of about ten literary authors, all miraculously still-extant (Gallus be damned!).
By the way, if you don't speak "interdisciplinary", that's all terribly funny.
Not to derail this, but does anybody have an idea of the timeline for Virginia Tech?
If we can't even agree that there are classical authors all our undergrad majors should read, no wonder the field is in crisis. For me the point again remains...would the other departments ever tolerate our telling them what to do or to count for their programs? Doubtful.
The moment when one realizes...we are so fucked.
No course of study is an end in itself: not Classics, not physics, not med. school. All of these have value only insofar as they advantageous for life. (Something another philologist once wrote about extensively. His colleagues drummed him out of the discipline, but we know his name now, and not theirs; we read his works and not theirs.)
Which philologist? (Forgive a poorly-read philosophy student...)
Nietzsche.
I was not aware that we'd stopped reading Wilamowitz.
Most of the people allegedly trained in Classics these days are lucky they know someone of that name ever existed.
Which philologist? (Forgive a poorly-read philosophy student...)
And that, dear colleagues, is why Classics is circling the drain: not because some broad-minded folk are willing to read a variety of texts with their students, who blessedly have no intention of going to graduate school but who take classics courses because they are interested, no, but because too many modern-day Classicists do not hold themselves to the very standards they would insist upon for their undergraduates. Instead, they stick to an ever-diminishing canon, cloaked in the guise of principles, to hide the paucity of their own knowledge.
Fine...if it's merely a sign of the "paucity" of knowledge that I think that Classics students should read Virgil Cicero Ovid Lucretius Catullus Juvenal Horace Propertius Livy Caesar Sallust Tacitus Livy Homer Hesiod Sophocles Plato Herodotus Thucydides Pindar Aeschylus Aristophanes Euripides Aristotle Xenophon Menander Plutarch etc., rather than Paul's letters and the gospels, or Clement of Alexandria and the Shepherd of Hermas, or the Venerable Bede...then I would expect that people in other fields would also be reading from the long list of classical authors noted above.
It's also not only about what certain students want. Do chemistry and physics faculty ask their undergrad majors what they'd like to learn in general or organic chemistry? One would think we'd have a sense of what we think a Classics major should accomplish...and I don't think it's unreasonable to fix some boundaries (temporal or otherwise) for an undergrad curriculum.
It has been my experience that people in other fields do read from the list of authors you give, both personally and in their courses.
And if you're going to use "temporal" as a criterion for delineating boundaries, then you can't both include Plutarch and exclude Paul and the gospels. This sounds too much like a version of "stop liking what I don't like".
I passed over your chemistry and physics analogy. Sorry about that. It is, as you know, another false equivalence. Classics is not a science. A better comparison would be to ask whether students in English, in Spanish, in French, in German, etc. have input in what their courses study. The answer to that, of course, is a resounding yes.
There's at the same time both a fundamental curriculum, and room for negotiation at the advanced levels. No one can teach everything, so once you've gone through the sine qua non, then it's better to teach those things for which students feel a passion, if they let us know. It's part of good pedagogy. If your sine qua non is so large that there's no room for negotiation, then you need to rethink your curriculum.
Sorry. There are only so many courses a student can take. Sure, someone coming into college with tons of Latin (forget about Greek) might have many semesters in which to fit advanced offerings. Most people don't have that luxury. Someone might have only 2-4 slots for such courses. So no, I stand by my point. Those 2-4 slots should be filled with classical authors in a classics major program, not Bede or Anselm.
I note the many parts of your argument that you're abandoning.
Still, to grapple with the heart of it: one issue is that you're thinking in terms of "author" courses instead of in terms of content. Even if you stick to the authors you list, you will never read all of even a single one of them with students. You'd be lucky to read an entire, short Platonic dialogue. No chance at reading all of the Iliad or Aeneid in the original language.
So why not do what our colleagues in the modern languages have done and teach content-based and theme-based courses? A Latin course on satire that reads Archilochus (in English), Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Persius, and then spends a day looking at more recent examples like Swift and the Onion or Daily Show and how they do or do not pick up the ancient threads; or a Latin course on letters that reads Plato's letters (in English), Cicero's letters, Seneca's letters, Pliny's letters, Demetrius on style, Julius Victor on letter writing, and then compares changes in attitudes over time -- you could think of dozens more examples. And these thematic courses not only give you exposure to authors, but they allow for much more discussion of history and context and they allow for the inclusion of content of the students' choosing (anywhere from the course topic itself to a week or two's worth of readings). Or another tactic: what about sight-readings (on topics of the students' choice) you keep in reserve for the days when the students are underprepared or overwhelmed by midterms or otherwise just tired and in need of a break?
There are so many ways to bring class and Classics alive that are not just another bored, pale rehash of your graduate reading list superimposed on some Germanic idea of what Classics and study must be.
Not abandoning anything. And sorry to hear that traditional advanced readings are now considered "boring."
Also never said there was an expectation to read, say, the entire Iliad with students.
My point throughout my posts has been simple: there's enough in Classics to fill and more than fill an undergrad curriculum, and a real problem when we start taking up precious time with things that aren't part of a classical canon (there, I said the bad word).
You won't read all of the Iliad under the best of circumstances. But you'll read even less of it, if any if your students are instead reading the Bible because they'd rather read it than Homer.
But again, on the day a religion program says sure, you want Homer instead of Hebrews, let's go...then I'd be happy to see the same flexibility from Classics.
On the day that you're willing to make an honest argument, you can revisit this. You know that Homer and Hebrews are a false equivalence. We've been over that exact argument already. One hopes your scholarship has more exacting standards.
I would wish you the consequences of your attitudes, but that wouldn't be fair to your students.
Here's exactly what you said:
"Some semesters I'll read Homer or Vergil or Sappho or Catullus. Others I'll read the Septuagint or John or Bede, if that's what sets my students' hearts to thumping. A couplet of Martial loved is a better argument for Classics than Aeschylus's Ode to Man hated."
In other words, some semesters, fine with ditching the classical canon, let's read the Septuagint or John or Bede. You yourself created an equivalence between that content and "Homer or Vergil or Sappho or Catullus," and that's the source of my objection.
Deck. Chairs. Titanic.
Wish I had a job so I could argue about whether I would read Aeschylus or John. Or maybe I should be thankful I don't have one.
I once again note 2:03's lack of acknowledge of the specific points raised. Your post fails the "revise resubmit" test.
As for the quotation of my earlier comment. Yep, I wrote that. You, because of your single-author myopia, chose to interpret that post to mean that those are the only texts I teach in a given class.
Your single-author method worked fine when students had a strong background coming out of high school or could take, as I did, 16 advanced reading courses in Latin and Greek as an undergraduate. (Some of my undergraduate professors took even more when they in turn were undergraduates.) That works because the student gets enough of the classical authors and their attendant context to make sense of them. But if, as you wrote, you're really only giving your majors 2-4 advanced courses, then author-courses no longer work any more for Classics than a course in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and another course one one of Corneille's plays would work for a French major's entire advanced study. If Classics is to have any relevance and any use, it must recognize the starting points of the students and reformat its courses--not double down on an old method developed for the education of a different generation.
You would have your students raise their noses high at having read a few more pages of In Catilinam I. I would have mine know who Cicero, Caesar, Catiline, and Cato were, and what exactly was going on historically. AND the context of a wide, wide variety of other persons, events, and texts.
@2:15. Yes, the arguments of those with jobs. I'm only going on at this point because I hope that seeing two bored people work out the arguments of the old guard and the new guard in print might help current job-seekers work out their own stances. If you're clear with yourself about what you believe will help Classics, and passionate about it in your job materials and with students, that will do much to help you--whether you agree with me or with my interlocutor.
Never said I had a problem reading multiple authors in a given advanced course. And certainly never said historical context and the like weren't an important part of said courses.
Definitely would say I don't think there's room for Bede or Hebrews in undergraduate Classics courses.
Definitely would say I don't think there's room for Bede[...snip...]
And so the Last Roman dies another death!
And so the Last Roman dies another death!
Welcome to the conversation. You're thinking of Boethius.
Anyway, IRL I'm an ardent proponent of the canon. I do mean about 75-80% of what I've written. Just having two to four author courses, for example, is a waste of a major's education and in no way a perpetuation of Classics, even if the authors are canonical. (What of the rest of the canon so unceremoniously cast to the curb in favor some sort of ur-canon?) Thematic courses that incorporate reception and show how Classics has continuity with the present are the way to go.
The rest has been a bit of fun at the expense of my generously cooperative interlocutor.
Yeah, because if new generations of classics students are not so good at reading Greek and Latin, it's a great idea to ask them to learn Greek and Latin + reception, history, culture, and everything else conceivably relevant to the texts they read.
Well it is true that if the students didn't learn Greek or Latin at all they would have time to read many more Classical texts in translation, including quite a few outside of the canon. Plus, undergraduates are increasingly stupid, so this would enable them to do something that doesn't hurt their brains as much, and hell, it's not like an undergraduate degree in anything has signaled any kind of competence in a long, long time. The main reason to teach Greek and Latin is because otherwise our jobs would be boring as hell.
Anyone got any good horror film recommendations for the holiday? Don't need to be classically related.
Difficulty: no references to "my career", "my video teaching statement", or anything like that.
Horror recs: a professional life in Classics. By the end you are crying and laughing hysterically. Then you drink yourself to sleep. Repeat.
Much less horrifying: Dickensian squalor. or working in a salt mine in Carthage.
Then you drink yourself to sleep. Repeat.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Sounds like Real Classicists (TM) would object to study abroad in Italy or Greece, too. After all, that time could be better spent reading a text!
I once had a prof proudly proclaim in class that he had never set foot in Italy nor Greece and there was no reason for a classicist to ever do so. I now know he was referring to a real classicist, a benchmark I shamefully can never meet as someone who regularly travels to the Mediterranean.
Yeah, Werner Jaeger was a real slouch. He probably stole a job from some really qualified candidate.
Any word on Virginia Tech? Dallas?
Yes! They're both still in places no one wants to live.
Yeah, I would have thought that Virginia Tech in particular would have it together at this point. Unless they don't see themselves competing in the first round? But I don't know why that would be. It is a great job that a lot of us would love to have.
Maybe some places are actually enjoying breaks and holidays.
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