Practical Ways of Saving a Classics Program: A Report from the Front

Since 1885, the University of North Dakota (UND) has provided instruction in classics. During the early years of the institution, B.A. students were required to take three years of both Latin and Greek,' and by the 1920s, there were two professors in classics.2 When the UND switched to a major and minor system, students had three classics-related majors. and three minors from which to choose: Greek, Latin and Classical Languages. But the Greek and Classical Languages majors and minors were eventually eliminated, leaving only the major and minor in Latin, and by the mid-1990s, even Latin was in peril due to lower-than-required enrollments and low numbers of graduates, endangering the very existence of classics at the University. The truth was that the Latin major and minor no longer met the needs of students, who did not want a degree that was almost entirely literature-based. This situation-which may strike readers of this journal as all too familiar-required a creative solution and the assistance of other departments. The University of North Dakota now offers a stable program in Classical Studies, which may provide a model for other institutions faced with similar challenges. After the UND administration proposed eliminating classics from the University's curriculum, a letter-writing campaign mounted by the American Philological Association brought in countless expressions of support for the program from members of the profession at other institutions. As a consequence, the administration radically modified its course and encouraged the University's classics faculty to develop a new program that would satisfy their desiderata and rescue classics from elimination. In the late 1990s, a task force consisting of faculty from the Departments of English, History, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, Philosophy and Religion, and Visual Arts was formed to study the problem of classics at the UND. After much discussion, the Task Force concluded that the solution might be a flexible Classical Studies program that would draw in students more interested in classical civilization than literature, but that would nonetheless still require students to develop core competence in the Classical Languages. The new major would require 36 semes-