Princeton of all places plans to do this. What do you think of the idea? Here is an article from the Atlantic:
Edit: And another interesting article on the history of Latin pedagogy. It takes as its starting point the deficiencies the so called “classical” school movement but lots of information about pedagogy historically.
My tuppence worth: Josh Billings is right that you can ask interesting questions of texts in languages you can’t read, but that doesn’t mean you can answer them.
Cambridge has introduced a four-year Classics tripos (as opposed to the usual three) with a preliminary year for those who have no experience of Latin or Greek. I think I read that someone who did the prelim year then went on to get the top mark of any student, including those who’d learnt the languages at school, in the ‘first’ year of the regular course. That seems like a better system to me, but then as Robert Frost famously said “Poetry is quite good in translation these days so I don’t bother reading in the original.”
FYI, there’s a thread already started on this in the Academy. (I won’t bring it up and merge into this thread, unless asked by the author, as the Academy has Google-shielding.)
Seems to me to be a storm in a teacup.
See the explanation of the new arrangements here.
https://classics.princeton.edu/department/news/statement-community-undergraduate-concentration
Surely we want to encourage more people to take an interest in and study the ancient world? It is not as if Princeton is going to abandon teaching classical languages.
I get the impression that the author of the Atlantic article wants to frame this development in a political and divisive way. The very first sentence of the article seems to be untrue. “The classics department at Princeton University recently decided that the idea that classics majors ought to know Latin or Greek has been a mistake.” It was downhill all of the way from there.
I was pretty upset when I first heard about this, but after reading the article I agree with Seneca. The author appears to be mainly concerned with making a political point. Googling the author only confirms that intent.
Thanks, Seneca for the link to Princeton’s site.
I heard about it last week, from the following article from Princeton’s Alumni Weekly.
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/curriculum-changed-add-flexibility-race-and-identity-track
They describe it as:
The Princeton faculty approved curriculum changes in the departments of politics, religion, and classics in April. Politics added a track in race and identity, while religion and classics increased flexibility for concentrators, including eliminating the requirement for classics majors to take Greek or Latin.
And further:
In classics, two major changes were made. The “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, was eliminated, as was the requirement for students to take Greek or Latin. Students still are encouraged to take either language if it is relevant to their interests in the department. The breadth of offerings remains the same, said Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics. The changes ultimately give students more opportunities to major in classics.
If they now do not like the (entirely deserved) flak that they’re getting for this decision, and want to issue a new statement to muddy the waters, that’s fine. But turning their classics degree into a ghetto lit degree is, in my opinion, just scamming a large amount of money from kids, the poorest often debt-financing.
The discussions about these changes predate Eisgruber’s call to address systemic racism at the University, Billings said, but were given new urgency by this and the events around race that occurred last summer. “We think that having new perspectives in the field will make the field better,” he said. “Having people who come in who might not have studied classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.”
Yeah, well it’s exactly these students who are hurt the most by this sort of thing.
A colleague of mine who has been in the loop sent round the first of the Atlantic pieces under the heading “Princeton discovers the 21st century.” A battle royal is under way between Columbia and Princeton faculty members.. We’ll be hearing more of this, Much more. Everyone in and out of Academe is sounding off and censuring, as we’re seeing for ourselves here on Textkit.
But heels were dug in, and it’s a done deal. Send flowers, and prepare for a different future.
I want to encourage more people to take an interest in human biology, but that doesn’t mean I think you should award a degree in Medicine to someone who has opted not to study anatomy.
If people want to study ancient literature without learning another language then they should absolutely be able to do that if a university is willing to teach it, but call it something other than Classics, which everyone associates with ability in Greek and Latin. If I read a book on Euripides by J. Bloggs “who read Classics at Princeton” I would like to assume that they are more familiar with the Greek text than a non-Classicist like me.
Personally, I think the word “horrific” applies. I fully agree that courses in translation are a good thing, especially at the undergraduate level. Most classics departments have a few such courses. But not learning the original languages means that the so called classics major is essentially crippled in his understanding and exploration of the text.
I had the same reaction to seminaries dropping their Greek and Hebrew requirements. At one point, the languages in such institutions were considered propaedeutic – you were expected to have at least Greek and Latin before starting, and Hebrew and German if you could get them. That stopped being a thing well over a half century ago. And further down hill it goes…
jeidsath wrote:
FYI, there’s a thread already started on this in the Academy. (I won’t bring it up and merge into this thread, unless asked by the author, as the Academy has Google-shielding.)
Thanks, probably not worth doing, since there wasn’t much content in my post that isn’t already in this thread.
There is a more general issue that language study is devalued in the US. There’s an arrogant attitude that English is the world’s lingua franca, so we don’t need to study other languages. My wife teaches French at Cal State LA, and the university for example has eliminated the language requirement that they used to have for students majoring in international business.
At many schools, language classes function as ways for students to connect with their heritage language. For example, at CSULA virtually all Spanish majors are people who grew up speaking Spanish, but may not be operating at an educated level in that language. Among non-majors, there is an expectation that although they speak Spanish fluently, they should be allowed to enroll in Spanish 1, not study all semester, and be rewarded with an A and some credits toward graduation. Many students, especially those from less educated backgrounds, are completely unfamiliar with the idea that anyone would take a language that is not their heritage language. There is also a tendency among administrators to want to be trendy, so they want to eliminate programs like German and create new ones like Korean and Chinese. This could be OK in principle, but non-heritage speakers generally don’t enroll in large numbers in classes in hard languages that lack English-cognate vocabulary or have difficult writing systems. And finally, language study is hard work, and there are right and wrong answers, which makes languages a hard sell to students who are used to liberal arts classes where you get an A by doing a group presentation. (Studies have shown that liberal arts classes these days actually require less reading and writing than STEM classes.)
Given these general trends, I don’t know that there’s a solution for Greek and Latin. Maybe their faculty and curricula should be absorbed into history or literature departments, their degree programs eliminated, and their first-year classes taught online by consortia of universities. Online language study is generally horrible, but could conceivably work well if you threw resources at it and didn’t lower standards. A student at an ivy league school who wanted to be a Latinist would major in history there with a concentration in ancient literature and languages. A student who wanted to study ancient Chinese poetry would do the same thing. A student with more of an interest in ancient social history on the Italian peninsula might read Homer and Sappho in translation. This type of setup would defuse the well-justified criticism of classics departments as ethnocentrist and would also provide an on-ramp for freshmen who didn’t have an opportunity to take Latin and Greek at some kind of icky New England boarding school.
In the Philadelphia Classical Society, we have a little over 40 area schools. About 10, as I recall, are public schools with strong Latin programs. The rest are independent schools, including yes, some traditional prep schools. Some of these students will go on to become classics majors, and I’ve never met a single “icky” student in the whole process. Just normal kids who happen to have taken a liking to Latin and ancient literature.
As for your suggestions, I have no comments, but I agree with MWH that changes are coming, and not all of them will be pleasant or any help to Classics overall.
Barry Hofstetter wrote:
Some of these students will go on to become classics majors, and I’ve never met a single “icky” student in the whole process.
If you look back at my text, which you quoted, you’ll see that my adjective “icky” applied to the schools, not to their students.
You narrow-minded reactionary!
Interesting comment by Ben about heritage languages. There’s a somewhat similar trend in Europe in many countries, where local more-or-less threatened or, in some cases, almost extinct minority languages are studied at school and are allocated news broadcasting time in TV etc. I’m talking about languages like Provençal and Breton in France, Sami (several varieties, actually) in Finland etc. (then you have e.g. Spain where the minority languages (Basque etc) are in fact quite well and alive, so the questions are bit different). Debates around these languages are typically tightly interwoven with questions of ethnicity, identity, discrimination etc. I have the impression that a many (most?) of the people who identify themselves as Sami in Finland nowadays and report a Sami language as their mother language are in reality native in Finnish, especially as far as younger people are concerned. I suppose that there must be some parallels with Spanish in the US.
However, I fear that study of languages in general is diminishing trend worldwide, with the exception of English. I live in Finland, where 5 million people speak Finnish as their native language (plus a Swedish speaking minority and very few Sami - these are the official languages). Finnish is a quite vital language with an army to back it up, universities, a corpus of literature, a native press etc. Well, there are some people (engineers and other technocrats, mostly) who think (to exaggerate a bit) that we should revert to (bad) English in almost all except domestic situations - i.e. business lives, university – but in general, the language is quite well. However, you’d expect that when we are such a small number of people speaking Finnish, it would be a good idea to learn other languages. And we do, but more and more other it’s just English, English, English. The number of high school students who learn French, Spanish, Russian etc since the 90’s when I was there has come crashing down. In this context, I don’t know what room there can possibly be for classical languages.
Some happier news to report! At my high school back in the 60’s, the following languages were available:
French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Latin. Chinese was available through a partnership program with a local prep school.
Here we are in 2021 and the all of the above (except Chinese) are still available. They’ve actually added 3 yrs. of Classical Greek!