How do you see the nexus of problems associated with grad and undergrad education relating tothe general state of the discipline?
Most saw the need for some broadening of the undergraduate curriculum: language, sure, but also more by way of classical humanities. B. Cape was concerned to keep a strong stress on language teaching; B. Kaster felt more urgently the need to do expend effort and time on the portion of the curriculum that serves the non-pre-professional students, but pointed out the inherent difficulty of doing both things well with limited resources.
To this initial set of responses we attached a couple of resuming paragraphs leading to further questions. An edited version follows:
The question facing Classics departments in this last decade of the millenium is not whether the languages, history, and intellectual legacy of Graeco-Roman antiquity any longer matter, but how we make the ways in which they clearly do matter a central part of the perspectives and understandings of (all) our students. We are not talking exclusively about technical training but about the kind of experience and learning and knowledge and curiosity, a breadth of intellectual experience, that one takes from school through work into the evening hours of life. How we make that possible for greater numbers of students is, as has been pointed out, a challenge.
In specific curricular terms, Bob Kaster has pointed out what strikes most of us as a dilemma. With the resources we have, how can we "do" the two major jobs of undergrad education? It may be an historical problem. Students come to Classics far later than they used to, with the result that students, with the limited time they have these days (generally 2-3 years as undergraduates), "choose" one or the other aspect of what used to be a unified disciplinary model: languages or "lit/civ." In earlier days, when Latin and in some cases Greek were standards of the secondary school curriculum, there was luxurious time for language acquisition, and history and culture were natural college or university developments of linguistic knowledge. Are we now, in contrast, in the situation of having two different "kinds" of Classics to teach, with small, good schools specializing in one (language) and large state institutions specializing in the other (Civ.)? This may be a healthy division of labor, but not a few may find it disturbing.