Some excerpts from a lengthy piece in the Boston Globe:
When Harvard was founded nearly four centuries ago, all students read and spoke Latin. They had to: Lectures were delivered primarily in the ancient tongue, and the classics was pretty much all they could study.
Today, the number of students conversant in Cicero and Plato has dwindled, with only 42 – less than 1 percent of Harvard’s 6,640 undergraduates – choosing classics as a major. Then there’s Sanskrit and Indian studies, which has three students, and astronomy and astrophysics, with five starry-eyed souls.
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To entice students to explore such subjects, Harvard has more than tripled the number of small freshman seminars taught by star professors. Among the 132 diverse classes: “The Beasts of Antiquity and their Natural History.”
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Whether Harvard can sell Latin and Byzantine Greek as marketable undergraduate degrees remains to be seen. More than 700 students major – or concentrate, in Harvard parlance – in economics each year, making it the most popular field, followed by government, with nearly 500 students.
“For students, there’s an increasing need to think of one’s education as economically viable and productive and useful,” said Anne Monius, a South Asian religions professor.
[…]While most students think of government and economics as more practical majors, leading to careers in politics and business, said classics major Veronica Koven-Matasy, “Classics is something you just want to do for its own sake.”
Koven-Matasy, president of the Harvard Classical Club, began studying Latin in seventh grade at Boston Latin School and wants to teach. Many other classics majors, though, go on to become investment bankers, doctors, and lawyers, said Mark Schiefsky, director of undergraduate studies in classics.
The classics department, where enrollment has hovered between 40 and 50 in the last eight years, is drawing up plans to preserve, perhaps even brighten, its future. Professors agreed this month to make the language-intensive field more accessible by introducing a classical civilization focus that requires four instead of eight language courses. Princeton and Yale have already taken similar steps.
Starting next year, Harvard also plans to do away with a rigorous six-hour comprehensive classics exam for seniors majoring in the subject.
“We had such Draconian requirements that really did date from another era,” said Schiefsky, who pushed for the changes, the first overhaul of the department’s requirements in about 40 years.
At Yale, where just 17 students are majoring in classics, the department offers unusual courses like “Food and Diet in Greco-Roman Antiquity” to draw undergraduates. Princeton has introduced “turbo” language courses that cram a year of Greek and Latin into one semester. The move has attracted students who are impatient to read and translate Homer without wading through an entire year of fundamental language instruction, said Denis Feeney, chairman of the classics department there.
Princeton has also embraced a decadelong university-wide effort to encourage students to be more adventurous in their choice of majors. That has lead to growth in interest in several small departments, including classics, where the number of majors has risen from 21 to 37 over the last 10 years.
“We’re really thrilled, but we still want more students,” Feeney said. “We’re empire builders here in the classics.”
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rogueclassicism 