From mcmahon@mail.lemoyne.edu Sun May 25 05:48:29 2003 Received: from mxu7.u.washington.edu (mxu7.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.165]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW03.04/8.12.1+UW03.02) with ESMTP id h4PCmS1M061020 for ; Sun, 25 May 2003 05:48:28 -0700 Received: from KIWI.LEMOYNE.EDU (kiwi.lemoyne.edu [192.231.122.6]) by mxu7.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW03.04/8.12.1+UW03.02) with ESMTP id h4PCmRf7023289 for ; Sun, 25 May 2003 05:48:27 -0700 Received: from mail.lemoyne.edu ([192.168.250.182]) by KIWI.LEMOYNE.EDU; Sun, 25 May 2003 08:48:07 -0400 Message-ID: <3ED0BB58.B0415B5E@mail.lemoyne.edu> Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 08:47:21 -0400 From: "John M. McMahon" Reply-To: mcmahon@mail.lemoyne.edu X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 (Macintosh; U; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: Another pre-mortem on classics References: <3ED100BB.28556.1AB6DB8F@localhost> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Some personal reflections on same ... "Steven J. Willett" wrote: > > The latest BMCR (2003.05.24) carries a review by T. Davina McClain of > Jerry Toner's _Rethinking Roman History_. As McClain summarizes ... [snip] > > Although McClain gives Toner a strong negative review, his survival > recommendation seems to indicate the de facto direction of Classics, as > much of the Greco-Roman heritage is now taught in translation for > general graduation requirements ... The overwhelming impression I > have from friends and colleagues is that only a small fraction of a > Classicist's undergradute course load goes to Greek and Latin. Toner's > pre-mortem joins Homer's post-mortem, so clearly the smell of decay-- > whether true or false--is clearly in the air. I, too, read the BMCR review last night with both !s and ?s floating in the air around my head. As SJW suggests, my recent personal experiences indicate that there is an intentional shift toward translation-digested and similar non-language Classics material and, sadly, away from the languages themselves. The intentionality of the drift comes from both the administrative and the faculty sectors, though; the former predicated on the productivity model, the latter on professional survival. Expectedly, while enrollments in my LAT 101-102 classes regularly average 20 +/- over the course of an AY and while those numbers are significantly higher than the lit-in-trans/mythology course numbers (despite their xlisting in ENG) I offer alongside them, Intermediate levels drop; and the 200 level courses in Vergil, Lyric, etc. set off alarms among those who are now aiming for a universal 20:1 student/faculty ratio across the board. In my case, then, the "small fraction" spin does not hold as far as LAT 101-102 goes. That said, however, my revival of two long-dead Roman History courses (xlisted with HST and coming with great support from my HST colleagues) for the next year has met with a surge of enrollments for the Fall offering that forced us to raise the 20 enrollment cap even before the initial registration period was over. I assume that the same will hold for the follow-on course in the Spring. The result? The HST folks are delighted, middle managers feel productive, I'm enthused and excited ... and can actually look forward to semesters where I am not constantly craning my neck over my shoulder to watch my back. Whether or not this development indicates "decay" is open to question, and, believe me, it comes about not entirely guilt-free. Indeed, others may be able to address the issue differently in other circumstances. But going back to my remark about intentionality, I can see where much of this is all going and suspect more and more that the old arguments for Classics are losing ground. That's the reality, I'm afraid, from where I sit. John McMahon LMC .