Prometheus Bound: The State of the Classics at Wabash
Last semester Wabash’s administration was forced to make necessary but difficult decisions. Faced with a much-depleted endowment, the College needed to act in order to sustain itself for the future, and eventually it realized that the total number of professors must decrease. It is, of course, a sad thing to cut faculty members from any college, but it is especially so at Wabash College. Wabash is unique in that its students, faculty, and administration form deep relationships, but in times of hardship this camaraderie makes tough decisions even tougher.
The responsibility of deciding which faculty to cut was placed on the shoulders of Dean Gary Phillips and the division chairs. After much deliberation, they submitted their reports and the final decisions were made. The College is decreasing the faculty in two ways. On the one hand, current faculty members are being let go, and on the other hand, retiring faculty are purposefully not being replaced.
The department alterations are obviously not equal across the entire curriculum or even by division. The cuts were certainly not satisfactory to everyone, and no one would have expected them to be. Any rational person would not have been excited about the decision-making process as if it was like choosing which ride to take at an amusement park, but the simple fact of the process being “hard” does not exempt the changes from scrutiny. The committee made each change based upon some idea about the value of different subjects for the liberal arts. The purpose of this article is to examine the method used by Dean Phillips and the division chairs to decide what departments would be reduced. I, as a Classics and Latin major, was of course disappointed to hear that my beloved subject was included in the cuts. Therefore, I will concurrently analyze the Dean’s process and how well Classics meets the standards.
In considering the cuts, we must also keep in mind the particular Classics department that was targeted for decrease. We are not talking about an ailing or even average portion of the college, rather one that has grown and produced over time. For instance, a few years ago a section of Latin 101 had to be removed, because the department did not have the resources to support it. The professors in the department are all internationally renowned in their fields, and the department has sent students to prestigious graduate schools like Brown University and the University of Michigan. This semester the department had six senior majors.
Due to the cuts, the Classics department will be lowered from three professors to two. The dynamic of this department is interesting, because Professors Leslie and Joe Day count as only “one” professor, although their contribution to the college far exceeds that of one person. Also, for the last three semesters Professor Claudia Zatta has been teaching as a visiting professor. So very soon the department will go from having five people to only two. The cuts to the Classics department will certainly damage the three majors it offers (Greek, Latin, Classical Civilization), and furthermore the overall education provided by Wabash College will be worse in the future. Hopefully, by observing the process chosen by Dean Phillips we can understand more thoroughly how the decision to shrink the Classics department was made and then determine whether this choice was wise for Wabash College.
In December, I sat down for an interview with Dean Phillips to discuss what exactly occurred last semester. After the interview, he supplied me with a list of the criteria the committee considered for different departments over the course of the decision-making process. Throughout the rest of this article, I will consider their criteria and use them to determine the value of classics to the liberal arts compared to other subjects. The criteria are provided below.
- The overall mission of the College to provide students with an excellent, high quality liberal arts education for the 21st century;
- College-wide commitment to maintain maximum, high quality student engagement in classes, labs, and studios with the lowest possible student/faculty ratios;
- The 2008 Strategic Plan goals to strengthen interdisciplinary and international teaching and learning at the College;
- The historic strengths of the College in attracting and retaining students;
- The financial needs and opportunities of the College;
- The needs and interests of students attracted to departments and programs across the College;
- The need for a diverse faculty
- The need to support three strong academic divisions;
- The need to support general education and all college courses;
- The need to support majors and minors;
- The potential of individual faculty members to contribute to the College’s mission;
- AAUP guidelines regarding renewal of appointments
* I will exclude criteria 7,9,11, and 12, as my ignorance concerning them is too great for me to say anything.
I will address the first criterion last as it requires the most attention, so I will begin with the second. The quality of class size will necessarily become weaker when faculty are cut, so the question here is which subjects by nature can survive with larger classes. Classics struggles with a larger class size more than most subjects, like physics, for example. The difference between ten and twenty students does not really alter what goes on in your average physics class, because most courses are lectured-based. A classics course, however, is significantly altered by even small additions, because the classes are discussion based and involve significant student participation. According to this criterion, the Classics department should be supported more than other departments, because the effect of an increased class size is more severe for classics students.
The third criterion, which focuses on interdisciplinary courses, is vital for the current state of the College. With an overall reduced faculty size, it is necessary for departments to become more flexible, so that the curriculum can use them more broadly. Classics is by far one of the most interdisciplinary departments on campus. A plethora of its classes are cross-listed as art, language, and history because by nature classics studies broad areas of inquiry. Furthermore, the classics courses could potentially function as rhetoric, philosophy, religion, and political science. Again, the Classics department meets the criterion used by the Dean better than the majority of other departments on campus.
The fourth criterion involves the historic strengths of the college. When I asked Dean Phillips what these strengths were, he responded, “The sciences…, those that support pre-law, the strong liberal arts, preparation for business…, the religion department, and teacher education.” Obviously, Classics is not listed among these, but should it be? To answer that question, I will turn to the very beginning of Wabash’s history. The College’s current website states that Caleb Mills founded Wabash with the goal “that the institution be at first a classical and English high school, rising into a college as soon as the wants of the country demand”. As far as history is concerned, no stronger evidence for Wabash as a classical institution might be found than the words of the College’s founder.
The fifth criterion does not seem to apply to specific departments throughout the college, unless you consider the cost of the “capital” needed to sustain a certain department. If we judge the departments by how much it costs to run them, Classics would be the ideal department, for it needs no technology, instruments, supplies, or laboratory, and can be taught in any building on campus. Other departments, however, take up greater space and require much more energy for equipment.
Criterion six essentially asks how many students take classes in different departments across the curriculum. I do not believe distilling the value of a subject to the number of people who patronize it is wise, but, as the Dean said in our interview, it is necessary to do so when making the decisions he did. In the future, Biology, Chemistry, Math, and English will have at least three times more professors than Classics. Are three times as many students taking classes in these departments? Religion, History, Economy, and Political Science will have at least twice as many. Again, I ask are twice as many students in these classes? Furthermore, the Physics department will have three professors, so do they have more students as well?
In order to compare the utilization of different departments by students, I formulated data with the “search for sections” program on “Ask Wally”. The website provides the number of students for each class taken in a semester. These numbers are in no way exact, but they at least give a decent approximation of how many people take classes in different departments throughout the curriculum. I have compiled data on the number of students in different departments from the last five semesters. I found the total number of students who took a course in a certain department during each semester and then averaged the five totals. Also note that I counted each half-credit class as half of one student.
The data demonstrate that in fact the Chemistry, Biology, and Math departments do not have three times as many students as the Classics department (Chemistry and Biology do not even have twice as many). The data for History, Religion, Economics, and Political Science is consistent with the future ratios. Physics actually has fewer students than classics. Therefore, on the basis of this criterion, either the Classics department should have a greater number of professors or many of the others should have been cut as well.
In order to consider criterion eight I will need to look at the cuts more generally. The teaching core at Wabash has decreased by eight professors, but the cuts were aimed disproportionately at Division II with five professors being removed. Division I lost two, while Division III lost one. Division II must now bear 63% of the cuts. The reality of the cuts hardly seems to speak to maintaining “three strong academic divisions”.
Criterion ten focuses on supporting majors and minors. The only other departments that contain more than one major as Classics does are Math, Art, and Modern Languages. Because the Classics department is unique in having three majors, it will suffer even more than the other departments that were cut. As Professor Leslie Day said in a Bachelor article, “New Plan Cuts Faculty” (10/23/09), written last semester, “We are dismayed about the department because [the plan] means that we have been cut by 30%, which means that when we’re offering three majors we can’t do it. Something’s got to give.” The Classics department will not be able to support the three majors that it does now with only two professors. Dean Phillips said in the interview that this time of changes is “interesting and exciting, and the suffering departments, who might not agree, need to imagine how it can be interesting and exciting”. The Classics department has been bound by these cuts, and will not have the capacity to achieve what it is capable of with the proper resources. The remaining classics professors will hardly be able to imagine how the future of their curriculum will be interesting and exciting, because so much of their curriculum has been severed entirely!
Now we turn to the first criterion, which is very open, because it depends on what definition of the liberal arts the adjudicator uses. Classics, however, would fit into any reasonable definition that could be produced. I asked Dean Phillips what his definition is during our interview, and he provided me with a two-fold explanation. He said, “I think it depends upon where you start. I like to start with the ancients. Liberal arts are at the root those fields of study, those inquiries, those questions, and that knowledge that frees people. If you go back to classical Rome, you find the distinction between those who are free and those who are in servitude. The liberal arts is that training, that experience, that knowledge, that awareness, that capacity that makes for free human beings.” We see immediately that studying classics is at the heart of what makes Wabash College a liberal arts institution. If our aim is to understand how we might become free, then we need to study how the Romans tried to free themselves. As ancient Rome is a major focus of the classical studies, Dean Phillips’ own definition relies completely on the Classics department.
So we see that classics fits perfectly into the Dean’s first explanation, but simply inquiring into what the Romans studied is much different than actually being educated in those areas. Dean Phillips’ second explanation addresses the other aspect of how certain subjects bring people to freedom. “[The liberal arts] expand the capacity of men (speaking of course about Wabash) to engage the world in a variety of ways that enable them to have capacities to deal with the challenges of the world. To do that effectively, you need to know something about the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the fine arts.”
The focus of the Dean’s definition is a multiplicity of different studies, and would consist of exposing students to many ideas in general. With this definition, however, no differentiations can be made between subjects at all. Rather than certain fields of study being more or less beneficial to the liberal arts, it would seem that we should just study a hodgepodge of different subjects.
This supposed equality of the contributions of different subjects to the liberal arts makes the importance of every department relative to what the student desires, which is usually based on his career goals. The Dean seems to be attuned to the effects of qualifying the value of different departments, because he said that, “what our students need was a driving question in all of this [the decision-making process]”. If we distill the essence of our college into accommodating the fancies of eighteen-year-old boys, then we will become a trade school specializing in pre-law and pre-med. The shortsightedness of this logic is exposed when we ask what the college would do if the majority of students demanded classics rather than pre-med in ten years. Would we then fire chemistry and biology professors and hire more classicists?
The Dean’s explanations of the liberal arts miss its most crucial element entirely, that we are at Wabash College to become excellent men. The true value of the liberal arts is that it forces those under its tutelage to grow in mind, body, and spirit. How does it do that? The liberal arts shapes average men into outstanding members of society by challenging them. All of our beliefs and opinions are scrutinized and tested throughout our four years here, and it is this trial that makes the liberal arts incredible.
As Dean Phillips said, we are here to learn how to think and address the challenges of the world. But what are these challenges? They are many and varied, but most fundamentally they are those questions that perplex us and yet must be answered. Herein lies the importance of studying classics.
The important questions of life have been around as long as man has, and therefore countless numbers of men and women have been faced with the same questions about life that we do everyday. We must study how ancient peoples dealt with issues of, for instance, morality, politics, and sex in order to understand our own relationship to these issues. To ignore the wealth of knowledge and experience that comes before us is unwise, and therefore we must explore the passions, hopes and dreams of ancient peoples.
This aspiration to understand our world and ourselves separates classics from many other departments on campus. The other departments are important in their own right, but a math class for instance will never address the question of what it means to be a good father, as classics might while reading Homer. Regardless of what profession we will one day practice, whether doctor, lawyer, businessman, or artist, the majority of us will be a father, and we will certainly not turn to mathematics for advice. This disparity between subjects demonstrates the importance of classics in each of our lives for addressing vital issues of humanity.
Finally, we must turn once more to the history of our college for guidance about how classics contributes to the liberal arts. Rev. Elihu Baldwin, the first president of Wabash College, explicitly addressed the importance of studying the classics in his inaugural address. “It is quite unnecessary to illustrate the influence of the ancient classics, in imparting a natural, lucid and eloquent style of composition. The literature of Christendom is in truth, so radically founded upon them, that their study is all but indispensable to a perfect acquaintance with the most modern treatises. And then how impossible to appreciate the giant struggles of these distinguished ancients in conquering civil freedom, or the defences which their forecast planted around it, without consulting their authors in their own language!”
Throughout this article, I have shown how Classics stands according to each of the criteria that Dean Phillips used to make decisions about which departments would be changed. In each of the categories, Classics met the criterion valiantly and demonstrated its overall value to our College. Further than this simple abstract value, the Classics department at Wabash College has done nothing but produce and grow. And yet, this beloved department was still punished. The College has bound the Classics department with chains that will inevitably inhibit its fecundity. If the administration has not dealt with classics as our founders would have it, I must ask if the value of the department has been grossly missed. And if the administration is acting without wisdom, what will be the cost for dear old Wabash?
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