Classical Studies at Dickinson

See Dickinson alumnus Dave Hewett (currently in graduate school for classical studies at the University of Virginia) bust a move at the famous Conventiculum Latinum in Lexington, KY:

Ecce Viri Atri

I hope Will Smith and his copyright dogs don’t get wind this.

The video about the Conventiculum itself (linked above) is fascinating, and gives you a chance to hear the great Terence Tunberg, founder of the conventiculum, speaking Latin with the amazing crystal clarity that I imagine only he can attain these days. Prof. Tunberg will be visiting Dickinson in November, 2009 with his colleauge Milena Minkova to give a full day teacher workshop on using active Latin in the classroom. Watch this space for a more detailed announcement coming soon.

The 2009 Summer Dickinson Latin Workshop, affectionately known as Latin Camp, is now done. 12 Latin teachers came this year to read Cicero’s De Republica in Latin. They came from as close as Harrisburg and Lancaster, and from as far away as San Francisco, McAllen, TX,  and Comano, Switzerland. A last minute addition was Letizia Palladini, a Latin teacher from Modena, Italy, who happened to arrive in Carlisle this summer with her husband, an Italian colonel visiting the US Army War College for the year, and their four children. So it was a truly intercontinental group.

The workshop is a chance to improve one’s Latin skills in a friendly, non-threatening, yet disciplined environment. As I look over the anonymous evaluations, it seems everybody had a good time and learned a lot. The Latin was fun, but the camaraderie was even better. The whole experience was very energizing, and got us in touch with why we liked Latin in the first place.

The Cicero proved challenging for everybody, I think, certainly for me. But it gave us time to have a good think about the pros and cons of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, and about Cicero’s own distinctive blend of practical experience in statecraft and knowledge of Greek theory. The motto for the week on the t-shirts ended up coming from the preface: virtus in usu sui tota posita est, “virtue consists entirely in the use of itself,” that is, there is no such thing as having a virtue and not actually using in the real world. Very Roman!

Here’s one for the “why study Latin” file. Dickinson’s graduation speaker this year was Christiane Amanpour, and like many others she gave me a gentle reproof for writing my recent editorial about Latin diplomas. She said that she had found her own study of Latin very valuable. I was able to reach her through her personal assistant and request that she put it in writing, so here it is:

Dear Professor Francese,

Latin has helped me immeasurably through life. If I could, I would mandate it to be taught in all Anglo-Saxon and Romance language schools, because while Latin is no longer a spoken language, it is the root of so many of the languages we do speak. Not only did I love my Latin classes at the time, but in the 35-years since, I have found great comfort and satisfaction in being able to know just about any word. For whenever I grope for the meaning of one I don’t know, I usually succeed by referring back to Latin!

So Professor, Latin Lives even though it’s dead! Don’t knock it!

Best,

Christiane Amanpour, CBE

Chief International Correspondent

CNN International

One Time Warner Center

New York, NY  10019

The reference to “Anglo-Saxon and romance schools” derives from the fact that she was brought up in Iran until the age of 20. Her Latin came at British boarding schools, not in Iran.

My editorial in the May 15 New York Times calling for the end of Latin

"I can't understand this, either."

Diplomas has turned out to be something of an (unintended) exercise in reverse psychology. Defenders of the Latin diploma, and Latin in general, have emerged everywhere, to eviscerate me on dyspeptic blogs, in letters to the editor, via email, and even the odd cold call to my house.

I confess to feeling like a bit of a traitor, but it certainly touched a nerve, and all the attention has been a thrill. It was on the Times’ most emailed list for two days. Christiane Amanpour, Dickinson’s commencement speaker this year, mentioned it in her speech. My friend Rob Hardy, a classically trained writer and poet from Minnesota, correctly divined the shadow of educational reformer and Dickinson founder Benjamin Rush lurking behind the argument, and pointed that I was assassinated beneath his statue recently. Coincidence? A big thank you to Bob Winston of Dickinson’s English dept. for coming up with the idea for the slogan in the art that went with the piece.

One interesting strain in the emails I have been getting is that the Latin diploma, in all its opacity,  is an appropriate symbol of what colleges in fact do. Frederick Dennis Williams writes that what most students are really after is not mental improvement but the piece of paper itself:

“When I was working on a Ph.D. in the 1960s, we used to call it a ‘union card.’ It still is. The ‘clear communication’ being taught is the arcane language of the elite — the modern version of the priestly language, the hieroglyphics, of the Egyptians . . . Latin carries the real message — tradition, not innovation; class status, not education. Latin is not a contradiction. It is an indication.”

Two people independently invoked the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to refute my contention that the goal of education is the creation and transmission of knowledge–not the creation and transmission of prestige. Au contraire, says Bourdieu, according to Anthony McKeown, who wrote, “Education is the institution par excellence for the transmission of prestige.” And my colleague in the Sociology dept. Dan Schubert writes, “by design, degrees are to separate all those who receive them from all those who never will. Thus, Latin helps?”

Needless to say there is some truth here, but this seems like an excessively cynical view, especially given the triumphs of American education in creating upward mobility. This is not the middle ages, though Latin diplomas do give off a whiff of nostalgia for the middle ages.
One relevant fact that I found in my research but did not put in the article: the Minneapolis firm Jostens, the largest printer of diplomas in America, printed 2035 college diplomas this year, and only 16 were in Latin. For high schools, the figure was less than one half of one per cent, according to Jostens. So this is an issue that has largely been decided, and it also helps to rebut the criticism I have gotten from some Latin teachers that the demise of the Latin diploma would somehow hurt Latin programs. Having two English diplomas on my wall from institutions with great classics programs, it doesn’t seem to me that the two things are directly related.

This year’s Beginning Ancient Greek class showed off their skills this year by reading aloud their translation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in the shadow of the monument that marks the spot where Lincoln first gave the speech. Reminiscent of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, riddled with

purpose clauses, ripe for using -mi verbs, Lincoln’s 272 words proved to be an excellent way to practise creating Greek sentences and think about the importance of Greek literature in American political thought of the nineteenth century all at once.    Here are more photos of the event.

The 2009 classics dept. bowling shirt (and companion tee) has been selling like crazy around campus and beyond. Designed by Prof. Meghan Reedy, her husband Chris Stamas, and the students of Prof. Reedy’s

Lucretius seminar, the shirt is emblazoned on the back with the merman from the tower of the winds in Athens (a classical answer to the historic Dickinson mermaid atop Old West), and a line from Catullus that you may have heard: pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo (16.1). Ah, how to translate this? “Screw you and shut up” would be one possible approach. Others insist on a more literal rendering, “I will penetrate you anally and orally.” It depends in part on how you understand the context and the tone of Catullus 16. In other words, it’s not just a shirt, it’s a philological controversy.

Want one? Contact Prof. Reedy at reedym@dickinson.edu

The officers of the classics honorary society headed to Memphis over the last weekend in March to attend the Eta Sigma Phi annual national conference.  We had a great weekend meeting undergraduate classicists from across the country and hearing what they’re all up to – and visiting Memphis, Tennessee’s most famous hero-cult site, Graceland.

This year’s conference was especially rewarding for Delta Theta chapter.  Our treasurer won a scholarship from the society to help her attend a seminar on teaching Latin later this summer.  This semester’s major event for our chapter – a staging of the assassination of Caesar at the feet of ‘Pompey’ (our college’s founder appropriately dressed in toga and wreath) – also won special mention at the conference’s formal dinner.  The event, which got the attention of campus and local media, has inspired a new Eta Sigma Phi Outreach Prize!  Check out the ‘Eta Sigma Phi’ link on the department homepage for more on this year’s annual conference.

The students came home inspired by the projects they heard about and the people they met, and determined to enter the costume contest next time around : )

Prof. Reedy’s mentor and Propertius scholar extraordinaire Stephen Heyworth paid a visit to Dickinson on February 21-23, 2009. He was visiting the US on the heels of the publication of his major works, the Oxford Classical Text of Propertius, and Cynthia, a commentary on the Latin that explains many of the difficult choices he had to make in editing this notoriously corrupt but incomparably beautiful text. We promptly put him to work, first teaching Prof. Reedy’s advanced Latin poetry students. He walked through Ovid’s creation narrative in the beginning of the Metamorphoses, stimulating a lively discussion on Ovid’s style and his relationship with Lucretius, who is the main subject of that class. On Saturday he taught a workshop for high school teachers of Latin on Roman mythology. Attendance was excellent, about 45 from all over the eastern seaboard, and the reception enthusiastic. I hope to have a picture or two up of that in a bit. Then he spent a generous couple hours advising me and Prof. Mastrangelo on the finer points of writing commentary on Latin texts. We are working on a commentary on Prudentius’ Psychomachia, and the advice was invaluable. Finally, he had his well-earned fancy dinner, and on Sunday paid a visit to the Gettysburg battlefield.

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