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Over the weekend, I learned some troubling news about my beloved alma mater @HowardU. The Classics department would be dissolving. The non-tenured faculty would be fired, and those with tenure would be absorbed by other departments.
When I was at @HowardU , just a few months after I declared my major in Latin, the majors (Greek, Latin, & Classical Civ) was taken off the books. Other enthusiastic students were forced to minor in it and find other departments for their majors.
Still Classics persisted, and even though they’re restricted to minors only, the department is 4-5x larger today than when I graduated. Why close now?
This is especially concerning when you look at the trend of department closures. Nearly all of them have been in the humanities & fine arts. How can you be a liberal arts university with no liberal arts?
The closure of Classics at Howard would be a special loss. We learn these ancient text outside of the traditional Eurocentric paradigm. We take classes such as “Slavery in the Ancient World” along side our African American studies courses.
Freshmen read Euripides’ Medea in Gen Lit while studying Toni Morrison’s Beloved in English 101. Where else can you get that kind of hybrid? Literally nowhere.
When I got to medical school, I was shocked to learn how many STEM & pre-med programs had stripped their curricula of any liberal arts requirements. When I was there, natural science majors had to take at least EIGHT humanities and social science courses to fulfill grad reqs.
And we were all the better for it. I arrived at epigenetics as a research interest not because of my human genetics class, but because of what I learned in my history and social science classes.
While opportunities for training in epidemiology remain limited for undergrads, I was able to do a medical humanities research project for my senior thesis: a commentary on the social response to plague from antiquity to modernity.
At that time I didn’t realize it, but this was excellent preparation for my PhD. When it was time to think about my dissertation, I’d already gone through the exercise of identifying a topic and writing an 80 page document on it. So I knew I could do this.
I could literally go on forever about the importance of that department and why we should #SaveHUClassics. If you feel so inclined, please support the current students who are organizing to stop this. https://twitter.com/sarenastraught1/status/1381419376105172993
