"'What is the greatest weakness one sees in new faculty . . .?' Not weakness in the languages, but weakness in general humanistic education--being able to conduct intelligent conversations about the state of humanistic inquiry with members of other humanities depts. Grad. training in any field is a narrowing process (again, for reasons that are not all pernicious); but it's my general impression (emph. because it's not more than that, and there are surely exceptions) that grad. students in Classics emerge from the process more narrow than most, able to talk about matters beyond their specialty only to the extent that they've picked up bits of borrowed theory while writing their dissertations. I'm concerned about this because I'm convinced that over the next 20-30 years (as long as I'm likely to be around) the well-being of Classics as a field, both intellectually and politically, will depend on classicists' being able to conduct those conversations and thereby build bridges."