Princeton Drops Latin and Greek Requirements for Classics Majors, Citing Systemic Racism
“the changes ultimately give students more opportunities to major in classics.”
As you can read below, while the school is dropping these requirements they are simultaneously pushing race and gender. Do you see the big picture here?
Campus Reform reports:
Citing systemic racism, Princeton scraps Latin and Greek requirements for Classics majors
Princeton University will no longer require students majoring in classics to learn Latin or Greek.
As reported in the May 2021 version of Princeton Alumni Weekly, faculty at the Ivy League school “approved curriculum changes in the departments of politics, religion, and classics” that “added a track in race and identity.” The department thereby “increased flexibility for concentrators, including eliminating the requirement for classics majors to take Greek or Latin.”
“The ‘classics’ track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, was eliminated, as was the requirement for students to take Greek or Latin,” detailed the article. “Students still are encouraged to take either language if it is relevant to their interests in the department.”
The article claims that “the changes ultimately give students more opportunities to major in classics.”
Beyond the classics department, faculty altered the politics and religion curriculum.
According to the report, professor Frances Lee — associate chair of the politics department — explained that “the idea for the new undergraduate track in race and identity was part of the larger initiative on campus launched by President Eisgruber ’83 to address systemic racism at Princeton.”
“The politics of race underlies so much of U.S. political history,” said Lee to Princeton Alumni Weekly, noting that there is “a wide array of intellectual questions as well as subjects that you need to understand if you want to understand politics at its core.”
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Comments
Let me guess: ALL langusge requirements will be dropped.
Perhaps a Princeton student or alumnus can elaborate because the Campus Reform article was not clear. How can someone obtain a BA in the Classics without studying either Greek or Latin? Doesn’t that doom them to reading only secondary sources? By definition, a Classics major studies dead white men and their language and culture, so one cannot make it more relevant to the “black experience”. It is hard to study “Rap in Ancient Greece.”
This isn’t about giving “students” (i.e., black radicals) the opportunity to study Classics, it’s about helping them get the credentials they can then use to take over the Classics Department, which is viewed, rightly or wrongly, as one of the last bastions of Western Civilization and therefore a target for destruction.
Doesn’t that doom them to reading only secondary sources?
Yes. In my Classics minor the English translation of The Iliad was so colloquial and debased I hunted up a couple of other ones until I found one that was relatively close. And even then, you’re not getting any of the poetry which is essential to understanding Homer.
One suspects that the classics department is bleeding enrollments and dropping the language requirements is a band-aid.
It won’t help.
This is simply more watering down of curricula to improve the success rates of students who were admitted under lower standards for “diversity.”
I can’t imagine anyone dumb enough to be a Classics major without at least a reading knowledge of Greek AND Latin. When I was in grad school in science, we had to demonstrate reading knowledge of two of the three: German, French, and Russian. Beginning Classics grad students had to demonstrate Greek AND Latin AND one modern foreign language.
My philosophy major friend in undergrad school said that any philosopher needed a reading knowledge of Greek, Latin, and German. I can’t imagine a Classics major who can’t even read Greek and Latin. But I guess a watered-down Classics major is better than on in Gender Studies.
Now they can not be literate in multiple languages.