Let me begin with a few words about the University of Georgia, as the feasibility of offering summer intensive Greek is bound to be closely tied up with the mission of the college or university involved and directly affected by the character of the community and region. UGA is the primary research university for the University System of Georgia, a conglomerate of about 26 institutions governed by a Board of Regents in Atlanta. Presently, the enrollment stands at about 31,000 students with pressure to increase that number to 35,000. In large part this pressure has come about because of the extremely popular Hope Scholarship Program, funded by the Georgia State Lottery and providing all Georgia High School Graduates with four years of paid education. A second consequence of the Hope Scholarship Program, coupled with relatively stable enrollments, has been a significant increase in admissions standards and a tendency for exceptional students, who previously migrated to elite universities in other states, to remain in Georgia. Thus the student population in general is quite strong, with a significant percentage of exceptional students.
The undergraduate Classics program has grown steadily over the last decade, from a total of about 30 majors in the mid-eighties to 70 by my most recent count--to go with 10 minors. The success of the program is attributable to a number of factors, but most importantly the large cumulative effect has been the result of important individual contributions made by a large number of faculty members. Generally speaking, I think you could say that we aim to create on the departmental level the same kind of chemistry that exists in small private liberal arts colleges and probably does not conform to the stereotype of a large public university, where anonymity is the general rule rather than the exception.
At the same time, we are not magicians, and the aspects of our program that have contributed to its strength in recent years have been effective more as a result of their consistent application than their intrinsic importance. For example, all majors and minors have individual mailboxes in the main office. This has the effect of not only establishing better publicity for departmental events but it also gets the students into the habit of visiting the department regularly whether they are taking classes or not. As a result, the Classics Department becomes one of the relatively few domesticated spaces on a large campus where students feel comfortable just hanging out--and generally getting in the way of the faculty. We are in the process of getting them a little bit less under foot. As a result of Comparative Literature vacating the building we occupy Classics is about to acquire a certain amount of badly-needed space. Our Space Allocation Committee recommended (and this was ratified by the Dep t. as a whole) that we create a separate lounge area. This decision was not easy to make, for we still have pressing space needs, but the members of the faculty felt that this was a high priority item, and one that would make an important contribution in the long run to the success of the department
Despite these successes of the Classics program, our Greek enrollments have remained relatively low, up from 3 or four majors in the mid-eighties to 7-10 now. The presence of graduate M.A. students in our Greek program has allowed us to continue to offer a full slate of Greek courses: an introductory sequence beginning in the fall and continuing through the school year, an intermediate prose course taught Fall quarter, a newly-created advanced intermediate course in the Winter, three split-level advanced undergraduate/graduate courses, and an undergraduate course. These offerings provide all the basic courses necessary to learn Greek well and we have attempted to reduce the various problems that our introductory students invariably face, for example, by monitoring to make sure that beginning and intermediate Greek classes do not conflict with upper division Latin classes since, as probably in most places, the majority of our students already have a background in Latin. At the same time, our off erings lack flexibility, particularly at the elementary level. If a student is unable to fit the basic sequence into his or her schedule Fall, then the student must wait until the next year to take the class. Here also we have tried to alter the regular schedule to minimize the effects of this problem. Last year we instituted a second section of elementary Greek in the Fall quarter with good success. Intermediate Greek enrollments are in very good shape with about 10 students entering the advance intermediate class Winter quarter. Still, the scheduling problem remains.
This lack of flexibility in scheduling Greek has affected our M.A. program as well. Historically, the function of our program was to train high school Latin teachers, a group for which the acquisition of Greek was rewarding but not a sine qua non. In recent years, however, the aspirations of our M.A. students have changed. Approximately half of our M.A. students enter our program with the intention of continuing (or returning) to secondary school teaching. The other half, however, are a type of student increasingly common in the late 20th century, students who have come to classics rather late and who, in the course of their undergraduate training either did not have the inclination or the opportunity to learn Greek. Many of them are very gifted intellectually and extremely well-trained in Latin but it was only late in their undergraduate careers that they became aware that they wanted to pursue classics as a vocation. As a result of their deficiencies in Greek, however, many have found the competition for spaces in Ph.D. programs very stiff. Such students have increasingly turned to programs like ours to increase their Greek proficiency and improve their chances of getting into a Ph.D. program. Recent history has shown this strategy to be a viable one, as our M.A. students have been accepted into a number of excellent Ph.D. programs. Viable with one important qualification--if a student comes to us with intermediate Greek skills we can give them precisely the training they lack as well as increasing their abilities in Latin and introducing them to a wide range of disciplines and methodologies. If the student arrives with no Greek, however, he or she is tracked into the M.A. Latin program and becomes extremely difficult schedule elementar y Greek courses to fit an already demanding schedule of graduate courses in Latin and Classical Culture.
I believed that part of the problem of students both graduate and undergraduate unable to work Greek into their schedules could be solved by offering Greek as an intensive double-period class during our seven-week summer school session. This seem ed a logical choice for determined undergraduates but it would also offer the opportunity for newly-admitted but sadly Greekless graduate students to come to the University for the summer quarter and be ready to enter intermediate Greek by the time the ac ademic year began. With the support of the Classics Department and the Department Head I undertook to develop such a course and sent out a letter to regional departments asking colleagues if they thought their students would be interested in such a progr am. The responses I got, while not overwhelming, suggested that there would be support for intensive elementary Greek.
We announced the program as part of our Summer Institute and advertised through various professional newsletters. We received great interest from area programs in ancient philosophy (UGA and Emory) where faculty were very eager that their student s should learn Greek, while at the same time these students faced the same problem that ours did--the difficulty in scheduling elementary Greek into an already demanding schedule of graduate classes and qualifying exams.
We decided to schedule the class, contingent upon enrollments, with 12-14 being the probable minimum necessary for the class to be viable from the perspective of the Dean's Office. We worried, however, what would happen if there were a significan t number of drops. Since we were unable to predict the attrition rate and enrollments were likely to be monitored very closely by the Dean, students were required to sign up for two classes Greek 205 and 206, which ran concurrently, as opposed to consecu tive courses that might experience a significant drop-off from one to the next.. Some of our worry was misplaced. We were pleasantly surprised to have 28 students enrolled (of whom 17 finished the class). About a third of these students were graduate st udents from the University of Georgia and Emory, including one student who was entering our M.A. program in the Fall. One, the daughter of a Georgia faculty member, was from Stanford and the rest were Georgia undergraduates.
The class was demanding and taught by me alone. It met for three and one-half hours daily for 35 days and was worth 10 quarter hours. Having learned Latin and studied Greek at the Latin/Greek Institute over at the CUNY Graduate Center on 42nd St., I instituted a number of practices I learned there and had found valuable, such as daily quizzes, weekly exams, dictation, and an analytical approach to morphology and syntax. The text used was Mastronarde's Introduction to Attic Greek. At that time (Summer 1995) the electronic workbook that goes with the text had not yet been released, but with the help of Professor Mastronarde and through the kind permission of the University of California Press we were able to obtain a beta-copy of the software that the students found very useful, especially for the memorization of principle parts. We finished the first 40 chapters of Mastronarde (out of 42). Students who completed the class were prepared to enter our intermediate prose course in the fall. Several are still taking classes from us. Next quarter I will have at two of them in my Aristophanes class, while reading the Meno with at least one philosophy graduate student.
The class was a success, with high praise from students and a definite boost in Greek enrollments. Due in part to the presence of the Olympics in Athens and Atlanta during the summer of 1996, we thought it best to plan on offering the course alternate summers. Thus we will be teaching the course this summer. It is of course too soon to predict the long-range effect the summer program will have--if fact, as we at UGA prepare to convert from quarters to semesters in 1998, few of us feel confident about making firm predictions--but the immediate result of teaching intensive Greek has been extremely positive, increasing both enrollments within the department and the visibility of the Greek program overall.
Looking back on the experience, and looking ahead to teaching intensive Greek again this summer, a number of issues come to mind that would also be valuable for anyone considering setting up a similar program:
Chuck Platter
Dept. of Classics
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
706 542-9260 (o)
706 542-8503 (fax)
