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The classics major and liberal education.

Article Excerpt
OVER THE COURSE OF EIGHTEEN MONTHS, a project based at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, studied undergraduate programs in classics with the goal of developing a better sense of how a major in classics fit within the broader agenda of liberal education. The study adopted a student-centered approach, employing a team of six undergraduates and one first-year graduate student to conduct the research, (1) and began with two empirical questions: what constitutes a major in classics, and what kind of department offers such a major?

To answer these questions, a team of undergraduates collected information about major programs of study in classics, starting with an initial survey of colleges and universities that yielded a list of 305 institutions where students could major in the field. The team narrowed the sample and focused primarily on programs at sixty-nine liberal arts colleges, five institutions that offer a terminal master's degree in classics and ten universities that offer a PhD.

The first part of this article discusses what we learned from assembling this information. The second part focuses on what members of the classics community--especially the students--at four of the liberal arts colleges in the sample had to say about liberal education and the classics. Both parts include some ideas, based on our observations, about improving programs of study in general or, at the very least, providing undergraduate students with a better understanding of how engagement in a particular field of study fits within the overall experience of gaining a liberal education.

Survey of major programs

For approximately six weeks during the summers of 2007 and 2008, two undergraduates "mined" information on the Internet. The use of online sources was deliberate for two reasons. First, colleges now use the Web as the primary vehicle for publishing institutional information. This is particularly true for two audiences colleges are anxious to reach. The first consists of prospective and incoming students who lack access to other sources of information, such as advice from other students and members of the faculty. The second consists of students themselves, especially the generation of "digital natives" who rely predominantly on the Internet whether seeking "official" information--for example, what they find on college Web sites--or staying connected with a network of "unofficial" sources who report on the current state of affairs through tweets and updates to pages on Facebook and MySpace.

The students developed a database to manage the information, collecting information in 130 fields divided into nine categories: institutional profile, program scheduling, enrollment, demographics, graduation requirements, departmental profile, major, faculty, and courses. We developed the fields for the first four categories based on what a college reports in its Common Data Set (CDS), thinking that colleges would provide fairly ready access to that information--if not in the form of the CDSs themselves, then in other areas of their Web sites. As it turned out, however, that was not the case at all. Only twenty-two institutions made their CDS available online--or more accurately, perhaps, the students found CDSs on only twenty-two Web sites. To offer just one example of their success using college Web sites, the students were able to collect complete data on the number of applicants (male and female), the number of accepted applicants (male and female), and the number of students enrolled (male and female) for...

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