The first six months of 2021 were tough for the classics. In April, Howard University announced its decision to reorganize its Classics department and instead offer its courses as a minor within its Interdisciplinary Humanities and World Languages departments. In late May, Princeton University changed its degree requirements to no longer require Latin and Greek proficiency as a degree qualification in its Classics department. In February — in an unrelated moment — the New York Times ran an article about Princeton professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta and his view that the classics might have to be abolished as a discipline because of underlying racism and sexism within the field. According to Times Higher Education later that year, the number of annual graduating classics majors has fallen steadily, as has the number of universities offering classics programs.
Howard’s announcement sparked widespread news coverage, much of it ranging from disappointed to furious, in USA Today, The Economist, The Washington Post, and a host of other publications. The event and subsequent reaction are illustrative of the moment, as classics programs in secondary schools, colleges, and universities are under scrutiny. Nevertheless, as the events of spring 2021 continue to ripple, one thing remains clear: Far from fading, dying, or being reduced to political talking points, the classics are thriving.
In April, I spoke with Howard professor Dr. Molly Levine, who has taught classics, particularly Latin, at Howard since 1984. Our conversation made clear that, contrary to much of the initial, vituperative coverage, Howard did not eliminate the likes of Virgil and Sappho wholesale. The classics are indelible. As long as professors are excited to teach and students are eager to study, the material will flourish.
Dr. Levine stated that, regardless of departmental reorganization, the core elements of the classics remain just as true today as they did long before 2021, and Howard remains staunchly committed to intellectual inquiry. “Students come to the classics for the same reasons they’ve always done,” she told the HPR. “They fell in love with it, and that has not changed and will never change.” Moreover, she says, classics departments are special because of generally small enrollments and associated opportunities for mentorship and the feeling of a home away from home. “Good teaching and small [class] sizes make for a good education.”
Nevertheless, Dr. Levine says enrollment in her Latin courses has risen steadily since 2021, as has the number of other classics-related curricular options. Even though classics courses are dispersed between Howard’s Interdisciplinary Studies and World Languages departments, Dr. Levine is confident that Latin, Greek, and the history, philosophy, and literature of the ancient world will always have a place at Howard. “You can’t kill the classics.”
Illustrative of this sentiment is an article in the New York Times from May 2, 2021 that argued against a piece written by former philosophy professor Cornel West. West claimed that the loss of classics was a harbinger for the collapse of humanistic inquiry at Howard. In other words, losing the department would cause irreparable harm to the university. The Times authors — who work at Howard — fired back, writing that “there is no spiritual catastrophe unfolding on Howard’s campus … students and faculty are in the midst of a Renaissance replete with all the accompanying spiritual and intellectual affirmations.”
It is worth remembering, as Dr. Levine often says, that Latin and Ancient Greek were among the university’s first curricular offerings when Howard was founded in 1867. The Latin and Ancient Greek departments merged in the 20th century to constitute a unified classics unit. Classics have been a core component of American education since its earliest beginnings, so the decision to dissolve the department and disperse its offerings was understandably challenging.
Funding matters. Enrollment matters. The number of tenured faculty and the academic vitality in a department — how much research is being published — matter. The university administrations making the hard choices are not at fault. As many commentators rightly noted in 2021, Howard, as a Historically Black College and University (HBCU), has never had access to the same financial luxuries as its much older, historically White, all-male peer institutions. Howard’s endowment is just under a billion dollars, while Harvard’s is fifty times larger. With money comes the ability to attract new professors, pay generously, and retain a sizable teaching faculty, even if the department does not attract massive numbers of students. In this very real sense, the wealth and resources of the university can determine the available classics options for students.
The classics are not uniformly accessible to students, but Dr. Levine is right. Where they do exist, they exist because of the organic passion the professors and students bring to the seminar room. She says, “if you love teaching it, the students will love learning it.”
A particularly bright spot in Howard’s Classics landscape is student engagement. Dr. Levine noted that her students are passionate and increasing in number; one of these is Mila Hill, a junior at Howard who double majors in classics and English while pursuing a minor in Latin.
When I spoke to Hill, she was about to walk her dog. She told the HPR that she became interested in the classics after reading the Percy Jackson books, Rick Riordan’s pair of famous book series about Greek and Roman mythology, and though she took Spanish in high school she launched into Latin at Howard.
“I have had the opportunity to get a solid Classics education,” Hill told the HPR. “All our professors are very hands-on in making sure that the Classics we have are as strong as they can be. They know their material and are doing their best to provide as much of a traditional experience as they can for us.” According to Hill, classics at Howard are thriving because of the dedicated efforts of a handful of tenured faculty members, including Dr. Levine, who do their best to enrich students’ academic journeys. “It’s more of a bottom-up effort than it would be if we had more institutional support,” she says, but the indelibility of classics and the faculty’s constant commitment have made her time at Howard positive.
Hill says that Howard’s decentralized model for teaching the Classics might become more common at small institutions. “The Ivies will always have classics departments, but in terms of smaller endowments, classics isn’t the only department at risk … universities might continue to devalue programs like English and the other thought-heavy disciplines that don’t produce things you can see.”
She’s completely right. All the intellectual vitality and student engagement in the world cannot help if schools lack the funds and institutional support to maintain a department. The classics are too permanent to disappear, as Dr. Levine and Hill point out, but more schools might find themselves making tough choices. Overall, Hill says, “it’s a privilege to study the classics.” Even without the infrastructure of a typical classics department, students like Hill continue to thrive in an excellent academic program.
The seeds of positive college and university experiences with the classics are sown in secondary schools, where kids first read Rick Riordan and watch Gladiator. When one talks about classics education in universities, one is usually referring to courses in Latin, Ancient Greek, Roman and Greek history, and sometimes even Sanskrit. Classics education in secondary schools, however, almost always means Latin, sometimes with ancient history tacked on. There are a few schools — mostly elite private ones — that teach Ancient Greek, but the reality is that for most students, Latin is their primary exposure to the classics before college.
The statistics suggest that secondary school Latin programs are not dying — at least not en masse, but they’re not growing explosively either. Similar to what transpired at Howard, the headline is: Nothing is changing particularly quickly or dramatically. The most recent data, however, is from 2017. Not only is it not up to date, but it’s also not comprehensive, with several states failing to report their numbers. Nevertheless, in 2017 more than 210,000 students were taking Latin, only behind Spanish, French, German, and Mandarin. While 60 schools reported that they were considering discontinuing their Latin programs, 50 said they were considering adding Latin to their curricula. French (of all languages) is losing more ground than Latin.
Even if programs aren’t fading away or growing, they are always evolving. In 2018, the administration at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. announced it was scrapping official AP classes. Although students may still register for the exams, this means their Latin program is no longer beholden to a rigid, externally imposed curriculum. I spoke with Latin teacher Leigh Gilman, who has taught in Sidwell’s Upper School for decades. Gilman told the HPR that besides the Latin AP test not being an adequate estimate of Latin learning, the AP system was disruptive to the school calendar, with half the school leaving to take exams for two weeks in May, and inhibited teacher autonomy. She says that she can better cater to student interests without the shadow of the AP exam. I enjoy being flexible and the opportunity to keep reinventing the material,” she said in an interview with the HPR.
Gilman describes her student constituency as “a small but very excited group of kids.” This sentiment mirrors those of Hill and Dr. Levine, that the excellence of classics programs comes, in part, from student passion and permanence. Part of Gilman’s students’ interest in classics stems, as Hill had also shared, from Rick Riordan and early exposure to fantastical mythology. “The classical retellings [recent books by Natalie Haynes and Madeline Miller] are breathing new life into the discipline” and attracting more students. “I am used to embracing whoever walks in my door,” Gilman says. At Sidwell, Latin class is one of many spaces where students can express themselves. The idea of an inclusive, welcoming Latin classroom is crucial to Gilman. She wants students to know that “Latin and Ancient Rome can be seen as representative … if Latin could shake its ‘dead white men’ reputation, that could do a lot for the field.” She constantly reinforces to students and parents the myriad ways Latin continues to have relevance, particularly since learning Latin can help students learn a separate Romance language in the future.
Sidwell’s Latin program is “small but mighty,” according to Gilman, but the future looks bright. Everyone interviewed for this piece expressed this same sentiment. The classics will thrive as long as students and teachers are emotionally invested in them — and there is no shortage of emotional investment, as the flurry of coverage around Howard demonstrates. Gilman says, “It ebbs and flows, but it will never go away. There will always be a place for Latin.”
Sidwell is a well-endowed, prestigious private school, and the experience there is not necessarily representative of the diversity of the classics experience in secondary schools. No article can address every standpoint or find every nuance in the issue, but those who have predicted the unilateral demise of the classics have been soundly proven wrong.
Irrespective of whether knowing Ancient Greek or the date of the Battle of Cannae becomes tangibly relevant to one’s life, the skills that one gains via the rigorous study and appreciation of texts, languages, histories, and cultures will always be relevant. There is humanistic value in any inquiry that exposes students to patterns of thought, learning, and feeling beyond their own. The hexameters of Homer have nearly made me cry, as have the fragments of Sappho and the anguished meditations of Marcus Aurelius. If these subjects have the potential to enrich souls so deeply, it cannot be that they are not worth teaching.
In my recent article for the Harvard Political Review, I argued that the American left and right, equally, should leave the classics out of their culture wars precisely because they are, like so much art is, “beautiful paeans to humanity.” Putting aside the vituperative rhetoric surrounding Howard, Professor Peralta, and that spring 2021 epoch, the work of the classics continues. In high school classrooms and university seminar rooms across the United States, students continue to learn and love the classics, in ways both new and old.
