Elite classics PhDs could not translate basic Latin and Greek, professor says
The final candidate threatened to report him for harassment.
Uncommon Knowledge · Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Stephen Kotkin: Three Historians Debate the Era of TrumpVictor Davis Hanson, a historian who taught for 21 years at California State University, Fresno, had hired nine professors in classics, the study of ancient Greece and Rome. The applicants came with doctorates from elite universities, and Hanson started giving them a simple test when they came for interviews.
Hanson asked, "could you please, when you come, translate a page from Caesar and a page from Lysias?" Caesar wrote Latin and Lysias wrote Greek, two ancient authors whose work students learn to read in the language they were written in.
None of them could do it, Hanson said. The last candidate put him over the edge. She told him, "if you ask me to do that, I'm going to complain to the American Philological Association that you're harassing me."
He framed it as part of a decline he had seen in his own teaching. When he arrived in 1984, he said, his introductory Western Humanities course, an introductory course on Western books and ideas, assigned 10 authors. By 2004, he was down to two, because students could not finish the work.
He said he was told he was giving too many C's. "They should have been D's and F's," he said.
When he failed particular students, he said, people from a center or program, what he described as a prototype of DEI, would telephone him saying the student was a very nice person, the first in the family to attend college, and that an F would ruin a life.
Hanson said the excellence of the university was not static. Of the job candidates and their training in ancient languages, he said, "They could not read it."
Questions people ask
Who are Caesar and Lysias, and why would a professor pick them for a test?
Classics is the study of ancient Greece and Rome, centered on reading Latin and ancient Greek in the original. Caesar, the Roman general, wrote plain military prose that has long been a first test in Latin, and Lysias, an Athenian speechwriter, wrote clear prose often used as a first test in Greek.
What is the American Philological Association?
It is now called the Society for Classical Studies, after a 2013 name change, and it is the main professional association for classicists in the United States and Canada. It publishes journals, holds an annual meeting where colleges interview job candidates, and sets standards for the field.
Do classics PhDs still have to learn Latin and Greek?
Requirements vary by program, but many doctoral programs reduced language demands in recent decades and allowed more work in translation, theory, or reception. Supporters say this opened the field to more students and questions, while critics like Hanson say it produced PhDs who cannot read fluently.