Literary Forge

I recently added “amateur Classicist” to my Twitter bio, in the sense that I take a lot of interest in the classics and the Great Books, but have zero formal training. One of the big differentiators between me and an academic (apart from, well, actual academic training) is that I don’t speak Latin or Ancient Greek.

That tension (studying Classics but not knowing the languages) seems to be a flashpoint these days, since Princeton changed its requirements to no longer require intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin as a prerequisite.

Here’s John McWhorter, writing for The Atlantic, that “Classics at Princeton Will Suffer Without Latin or Greek“:

When I asked [Josh Billings, a classics professor who is the department’s head of undergraduate studies] what that meant, he wrote back, “A student who has not studied Latin or Greek but is proficient in, say, Danish literature would, I think, both pose interesting questions to classical texts and be able to do interesting research on the ways that classical texts have been read and discussed in Denmark.” This is not entirely a stretch; I recently taught a class on African languages in which one student, as it happened, made useful contributions from his knowledge of ancient Greek. Yet there are reasons to suppose that something more specific is motivating the new direction at Princeton.

I continue to be somewhat slow to stake my claim too strongly on one side or the other. (I’m reminded of Montaigne, quoting Sextus, “I cannot say which of the things proposed I should find convincing and which I should not find convincing.”) A couple of things strike me:

• It doesn’t sit right with me that we hear more from the likes of McWhorter than from the likes of Josh Billings, who is both closer to the changes and more impacted by them. There is things that don’t always translate from the university campus to the outside world, and “look what the college kids are doing!” is easy fodder that can sometimes miss important context. (I saw this first-hand with something that happened during my time as a student at NYU.)
• As is often the case here, I think anyone predicting the overall impact one way or the other is likely to be overstating things. The downstream effects of the change aren’t going to be obvious at such an early stage.
• It doesn’t strike me as outlandish, on its face, that one could be considered “classically educated” or “educated in the classics” without having studied ancient languages. It strikes me as a different education, or a different major, but not definitionally worse. Studying Italian is undoubtably different to reading the works of Elena Ferrante or Umberto Eco in translation, but not definitionally worse, to me.
• The amount of change and experimentation in the Classics should not be zero.
• I’m not saying that this is the case with McWhorter, but I’m starting to realize (in part thanks to the work of Donna Zuckerberg) that there is a class of writer who has an interest in the Classics less as pedagogy and more as a part of a larger argument.

A quick weekend edition of Literary Forge: in thinking about the ways that my Great Books Project differs from what you’d get at a traditional university. Learning ancient languages (specifically Greek & Latin, but probably also French) seems to be the biggest differentiator, in that I’m reading all of these works in translation and am at the mercy of the whims of the translator. (Thank goodness for the likes of Emily Wilson.)

And so I read with interest that Princeton is removing the requirement for Greek & Latin for classics majors.

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. […] “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.”

Zena Hitz, a tutor at St. John’s College, commented on the exact question of over-reliance on translators. She tweeted:

At @stjohnscollege, ancient Greek is required for all students. That isn’t because we expect proficiency (which you could better get elsewhere), but because we know that relying on translations without knowing what a translation is or how it works is deeply misleading. Regardless of the intention of the change, the effect will be to strengthen the authority of experts and to increase the distance between them and ordinary readers.

I am not smart enough to comment too directly on the importance of having ancient languages for studying the Classics. (It should be noted that –for now, at least– I’m not studying the Classics, I’m reading what’s usually termed “the Western Canon.”) Do people have strong thoughts? Drop ’em below.

Update, 06/01/2021: Princeton has released a statement on the changes. It reads, in part:

Our conversations with undergraduates have revealed that a minimum language requirement acts primarily as a deterrent to potential concentrators, and is not effective as a means of inducing students to embark on the study of Ancient Greek or Latin. We believe that an approach based on inclusion and persuasion will be more effective in encouraging language study than one based on compulsion. We are confident in the appeal and excitement that the study of Ancient Greek and Latin hold, and see our changes as a means of growing the field (including the study of languages) by removing barriers to entry.

It’s not crazy to me, as Kenneth Cameron pointed out on Twitter, to separate “Classic studies” and “Classics.” I’ve asked him to explain further, but the gist of it seems to be that one can be familiar with the works and the history of antiquity without being fluent in Latin and Ancient Greek. To the extent that my reading list gives me a sense of the history of the era, the “Classic studies” avenue seems similar to what I’m doing.