With Archaeology and a New Vision, Macalester Students Dig the Classics

Enrollment is up in a once-moribund department invigorated by a new view of antiquity

By PETER MONAGHAN

Students who wander to the third floor of Old Main at Macalester College

ALSO SEE: Colloquy Live: Join a live, online discussion with J. Andrew Overman, chairman of the classics department at Macalester College, about how classics departments can attract more undergraduates, on Thursday, May 24, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

may end up having to upset their parents.

Heather Huber did.

When she came by the classics department as a freshman, she was a biology major preparing for medical school, intending to enroll in just one classics course to fulfill a humanities requirement.

That's when Jeremiah Reedy, the department's 30-year stalwart, pounced. "You should be a classics major," he said. "Think about it."

Ms. Huber's eyes brighten as she recalls that day. "They suck you into this department," she says. "If you appear, any time, on the floor, somebody will stop you, and then. ..."

On a visit home to McFarland, Wis., she told her parents of her decision to change majors. "My father's eyes got a little bit big when I said, 'Oh, by the way, my major isn't pre-med any more. It's classics.'"

Many Macalester parents have experienced a similar shock. In a striking demonstration that students will flock to classics if the pitch is right, 35 students are currently enrolled as classics majors out of a college enrollment of only 1,870. While 35 majors may not seem huge, many other colleges of Macalester's size, even liberal-arts colleges, are lucky to have a dozen majors.

At Macalester, however, what attracts students is a new emphasis on archaeology -- with an opportunity to help uncover a Roman temple in Israel. But the classroom also has become less forbidding since the parents of today's students took classics -- or avoided it.

Macalester combines courses in traditional classical subjects -- languages, history, literature -- with interdisciplinary courses that reflect current students' interests in issues of ethnicity, gender, and class. Students choose from offerings of a kind that classicists of an earlier era consider insufficiently august: "Women in Antiquity"; "Pagans, Jews, and Christians"; "The Ancient Economy."

It's a far cry from the days when the daunting magister ludi, rod in hand, drilled harried school students in irregular declensions.

A decade ago, hardly any students came to Old Main for classics. In 1990, the moribund department had one major, and the college seriously considered pulling the plug. Since then, it has emerged as one of the healthiest classics departments in the country.

Its resuscitation is one of several hopeful signs for classicists, who perennially fret about whether they will attract enough students to survive as a discipline. Nationally, even though some departments are suffering, enrollments are up. At Macalester, classicists are, for the first time in three decades, able to presume that students will come to their courses.

And they come for all kinds of reasons.

They come because courses are compelling, accessible, and even fun. In a recent session of an ancient-civilization course, one of the department's four professors, Beth Severy, showed her students excerpts from Gladiator, the Academy Award-winning film. She then asked the students to reflect on the irony of Hollywood making a big-budget costume drama about grand Roman spectacles.

She also asked them to note ways in which the film strayed from one of their texts, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a key figure in Gladiator.

No wonder Macalester students eschew classics' reputation for dryness -- "people sitting around thinking about how great Livy is," as one student, Patrick D'Silva, puts it. Instructors like Ms. Severy "push things from a lot of other perspectives," he says. "She uses a lot of critical theory, like gender studies."

Including perspectives from feminism and other late-20th-century theoretical movements was one part of a concerted effort J. Andrew Overman, the chairman, made to revive the department. He was hired away from the University of Rochester in 1993 with a charge "to reconfigure classics and reposition it within the broader curriculum," he says.

He adds: "Since times change and it's not 1965 now, we tried to look at what classics meant in a liberal-arts context at the close of the century." The department began to offer courses that embraced, he says, "more of the ancient world than Greece and Rome" -- those civilizations' contacts with, and existence amid, those of the Islamic Near East, the Nile basin of North Africa, and all the lands bordering the Mediterranean.

Under Mr. Overman, classics instructors also began to team-teach courses with colleagues from other departments -- even a course with a biologist on genetic and historical ideas about race and identity in ancient Rome.

The changes permitted the classics department to play a role in a new interdepartmental program in humanities and cultural studies -- an effort to thwart the "culture wars" of the 1980's and 1990's by avoiding the poles of the debates in favor of a middle ground.

Traditionalists may be reassured to learn that enrollments in bedrock language courses -- Latin, Greek, and biblical Hebrew -- are healthy here, too.

Last year, 25 students enrolled in elementary Greek. This year, intermediate Greek has more than a dozen, and almost all the enrolled students plan to take the third-year course. Intermediate Latin, which in years past was lucky to attract four or five takers, this year is bulging with 12.

Classical-language majors -- the successors to the philologists who until recently ruled the discipline -- must take seven semesters, including four in one language, and two in another. Mr. D'Silva, who grew up in East Africa and is concentrating on Greek, has also enrolled in Arabic at the nearby Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota. With that, he plans to travel next spring to the Moroccan interior, tracing the incursion of Christianity into the country along ancient trade routes.

Some students simply love languages. Alex Plionis took eight years of Latin, beginning in the fourth grade, before arriving at Macalester, where he has taken up Greek, too. Like many of his fellow classics majors, he is exploring other fields -- in his case, with a triple major, in classics, chemistry, and physics. He reports: "If Latin provides 63 percent of the English language, and Greek 27 percent, that gives you command over about 90 percent of the English language."

In other ways, too, the pull of antiquity remains strong. Benjamin Rubin learned that one day in the sweltering heat at the department's dig site in Omrit, in northern Israel. The senior from Madison, Wis., who is about to go off to a Ph.D. program in archaeology at the University of Michigan with a Mellon fellowship, elicits nods of agreement at a gathering of fellow classics majors when he explains how an afternoon at Omrit assured him of the importance of the classics: "You realize that something has slipped in society. We're losing something. It frightens me."

Participating in a dig, and classics in general, encourages students to think about issues in the modern world, says Ms. Severy, the Macalester professor. In fact, while billed by some conservatives as the essential bulwark against new approaches like feminism and gender studies, classics can claim that it laid the groundwork, not just for modern multiculturalism, but also for fields that study whole areas of the globe.

The Macalester students agree. Says Jason Schlude, a tall, baseball-capped junior from St. Louis: "I see so many connections between what was going on then and what's going on now."

Mr. Schlude began as a religious-studies major, and then decided he would like to be able to read the New Testament in the original, demotic koine Greek. Soon he went on the classics department's annual dig at Omrit in summer 1999.

He joined about 35 other students who rose each day at 4 a.m. to beat blazing heat as they helped uncover a Roman temple. In 1998, Israeli antiquities authorities had entrusted its excavation to Mr. Overman. A seasoned archaeologist, he made a splash in 1990 with the first of two books in which he offered a radical reinterpretation of the Gospel of Matthew.

In 1998, a fire cleared undergrowth and revealed remnants of the vast temple complex at Omrit, which was built in the time of Jesus and probably fell during a powerful earthquake in the year 363. Scholars consider it one of the last great unexcavated Roman temples. To date, Mr. Overman and his Macalester students have uncovered one wall of the temple. Staying at a nearby kibbutz, the students study the social context of the late Roman Empire and visit holy sites in Jerusalem.

Mr. Overman says his goal has been to make the department "the place at this college where material culture -- in contrast to the textual world we're all familiar with -- is studied."

His students don't mind. Even in the era of Xena, the Greek warrior princess played by a zaftig, aerobics-togged New Zealander, classics has only limited cool cachet. Says Mr. Rubin, the senior who is heading for graduate study at the University of Michigan: "If I tell people I'm a classics major, they tend to say, 'Oh, you're very erudite.' But if I say I'm an archaeology major, they warm up to you all of a sudden and say, 'Oh, that's very exciting; where do you excavate?' They have this image of Indiana Jones in the back of their minds."

Since 1994, almost 300 students, faculty members, and staff members have taken part in the Omrit program and in others in Rome and the Crimea.

Says Mr. Schlude, the classics and religious-studies major: "It's one thing to sit in a library and read a book, or have professors present these things to you. But it's totally another thing to actually go out and excavate these different sites. You're creating this fresh information that's going to be in those books that people are going to read 50 years from now."

With all its success, Macalester can boast that it has outperformed some other well-endowed colleges, where there are almost as many classics professors as majors. Now, it can boast of having as many classics majors, and full courses, as other prestigious liberal-arts colleges, like Oberlin and Wellesley. Some of those, too, have experienced swelling classics enrollments. Oberlin's number of majors has doubled in the last several years -- it now has 35 majors, with only three faculty members. Wellesley has 33 classics majors, and eight faculty members.

Macalester's enrollment, which is handled by only three full-time faculty members and one part-timer, "is a very, very good number," says Richard A. LaFleur, the chairman of the University of Georgia's classics department, who has been tracking enrollments nationwide for many years.

He says classics is holding its own at some large state institutions, too. His own department, at Georgia, has some 100 majors, more than 30 graduate students, and 16 full-time faculty members. The University of California at Los Angeles has another of the healthiest departments in the country, with 60 majors and some 2,500 enrollments in classics courses, the most in its history.

Nonetheless, as if inspired by the oracle at Delphi, college classicists regularly issue portents of doom for themselves: They will end up working in departments without students. And warning signs are always to be found. This spring, Loyola University Chicago, a Jesuit institution that might have been expected to maintain its classics department come hell or high water, announced that it was on the verge of dispersing eight full-time classics faculty members to other departments.

At Macalester, the specter of elimination has long since passed. That has done wonders for faculty satisfaction. It marks a success for Mr. Overman, who set out to reinvigorate his faculty members as soon as he arrived here -- a task aided by the fact that only one of three longtime instructors was planning to stay. "If departments are dysfunctional ... kids pick up on that," says Mr. Overman, who is now "Andy" and "a student magnet" to students and colleagues alike.

The veteran Mr. Reedy, although not a fan of the poststructuralist approaches that have fused classics with fields like cultural and gender studies, has said that classicists should welcome challenges that provoke them to think anew about classical studies' goals. He even volunteered to teach the first courses here on women in antiquity.

He says, "Until the last few years, we've been fighting for our very survival and existence as a discipline and as a department, but there have been intellectual controversies, too, that have made this a very exciting field."

The department's willingness to take the controversies on, rather than dig in, as many classicists have, has led to his career's most enjoyable chapter, says the 67-year-old professor. "For most of my career here, I hoped and prayed for a flourishing program. It looks like my prayers have been answered."

He now arrives at the campus from his home, four blocks away, at 5:30 a.m. each morning.

Ms. Huber, the student who went from pre-med to digging the classics, calls Mr. Reedy "really cool." "The faculty are all so animated," she says. "They're all excited."

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