If Loyola University of Chicago drops its classics department, as it plans to, it should also drop its façade as a university. It will have become instead a technical college. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's not a university and shouldn't call itself one.
At first glance it might appear that market forces are responsible for the impending demise of classics at Loyola. By dumping classics Loyola will can get rid of several tenure-track professors, and will not lose very many tuition-paying students. Classics is a small department that doesn't attract students who come to college primarily as preparation for a job in corporate America. And few classics alumni go on to become the kind of wealthy donors that university bureaucrats covet. Classics, the study of Greek and Latin, is not profitable either for the university or its students, and therefore what purpose does it serve?
Of course there's more to the story than market forces. The very nature of higher education in America has changed irrevocably because of government intervention. Student loans and financial aid programs have distorted the market, making it possible for everyone to attend college. So everyone now does. What could be wrong with that? Only that most people do not want to live lives of scholarship, they want to make ends meet. That was never the purpose for which universities were instituted. The very word "scholarship" derives from the Greek word for leisure, "schole." You became a scholar if you already had the means to support yourself (or be supported by an institution like the Church) and could therefore devote yourself to the contemplative life.
It should not be offensive to say the obvious, which is that the contemplative life is not for everyone. Unfortunately the State and the leveling ideology that grows alongside it have convinced too many Americans otherwise. At least, they've convinced Americans that everyone needs – or is even entitled to – a university education. And as always leveling has been achieved not by raising anyone up, but by bringing everyone down, starting with the most refined. Classics, as the least "working class" (or "marketable") of all disciplines, is naturally one of the first to go.
The greatest diagnostician of the American character, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw the need for classical education in America and also knew that it would be a pursuit of the few not the many. In the second volume of his Democracy in America he wrote:
"It is evident that in democratic communities the interest of individuals as well as the security of the commonwealth demands that the education of the greater number should be scientific, commercial and industrial rather than literary. Greek and Latin should not be taught in all the schools; but it is important that those who, by their natural disposition or their fortune, are destined to cultivate letters or prepared to relish them should find schools where a complete knowledge of ancient literature may be acquired and where the true scholar may be formed."
The real value of classical education in the American republic is beyond even what the passage above indicates. Taken in the context of Democracy in America as a whole it's clear that one use of classics is as an antidote to the tyranny of the majority over opinion. In a democracy public opinion tends to impress itself on the private mind, and what is not popular is often literally unthinkable. Classical literature, especially classical history and philosophy, provides the theory and precedent for alternative ways of thinking. Significantly, classics provides an alternative but one which is also part of our heritage, rather than one completely alien and incommensurable to us.
Classics as a discipline is in no danger. As long as Western civilization survives, and as long as anyone wishes to read the New Testament in the language in which it was written, Latin and Greek will live. On the other hand, if the influence of leveling ideology and the State continues to grow, then other universities may soon follow in Loyola's footsteps. And if that happens, not only can the technical schools drop the faade of being universities, but we as a culture will have to drop the faade of civilization.
March 17, 2001
Daniel McCarthy is a graduate student in classics at Washington University in St. Louis.
