Classicists, Your Name is Legion

The Paideia Institute announces the Legion Project

Jacques-Louis David, “The Oath of the Horatii” (1784–5)

Paideia alumnus Ted Scheinman once wrote, “Like its nouns, Latin continues to decline.” He was right. According to the MLA’s most recent survey of foreign language enrollments at the college level, the study of Latin is down 16% from 2008, while Greek has experienced a 37% decline. At the secondary level, according to ACTFL’s most recent survey, enrollment in Latin dropped by 9% between 2004 and 2008 in American high schools, the largest percentage decrease of any commonly studied language.

Those are frightening numbers, and many classicists are seeking to reverse the trends by engaging in public outreach. Scholars like Mary Beard, Bryan Doerries, Edith Hall, and Daniel Mendelsohn earn deserved praise for helping the general public see the continuing relevance of the ancient world. Universities and learned societies have also started to make efforts in this direction: Oxford University has created a position of Classics Outreach Officer, while the Society for Classical Studies elects a Vice President for Outreach.

These initiatives are an excellent start, but there is another rich, untapped resource we seem to be forgetting: those who have pursued advanced degrees in Classics but did not go on to a career in academia. The statistics (which I will analyze further in a moment) suggest that there are thousands of such individuals, and hundreds more join them every year. These people have devoted years of their lives to studying the ancient world. Continuing to engage their interest should be one of our discipline’s top priorities, especially as interest in Classics nationwide wanes. The entering cohorts of graduate students in Classics over the past 30 years constitute a legion of interest in the classical world, and most of them are not academics.

Building a community of classicists across a broad spectrum of professions would be useful in many ways. In an era when the practical applicability of a degree in Classics is so often questioned, their stories would serve as a powerful example for students considering Classics at the undergraduate level: living proof that the study of Classics can lead to professional success in a variety of ways. This community could also provide a support network for graduate students struggling on the job market and help them land on their feet professionally, because they would understand that Classics graduates have a highly transferable skill set. An engaged group of non-academic classicists could be our field’s greatest ally. But we need to remember that they are classicists, make an effort to connect with them, and engage their interest in the Classics community. And in order to do that, we need to know who they are.

For all these reasons, the Paideia Institute is proud to announce the Legion Project, an outreach campaign that aims to connect classicists from all walks of life. Using publicly available data, the Paideia Institute is researching thousands of records to determine the career outcomes of people who have earned Ph.D.s in Classics since 1970. As we work, we will publish and expand an online database of “Legionnaires” — Classicists working in careers outside of academia who choose to have their stories featured and explain how their education in Classics informs their current life and work.

To learn more about the Legion Project, or to nominate a Legionnaire (which can be yourself!), visit the project’s website.

In today’s fast-paced world, there are many interesting subjects to occupy the public’s interest and students’ intellectual bandwidth. With college tuition rates soaring and student debt at crisis levels, it makes sense that more students are choosing majors with clear career applications. For many students, treating one’s time in college as an investment in pre-professional training rather than a period of personal formation informed by humanistic study seems like an obvious choice.

Gone are the days when the inherent value of a classical education is taken for granted by society at large. Most Americans don’t even know what the fields of Classics and Classical Studies are. How many of us have introduced ourselves as a teacher of Classics, only to receive the response: “Oh, you mean like Mozart?”

Nevertheless, humanistic disciplines like Classics survive, selected by those who see value in spending their time at university exploring reality via the productions of the human spirit which the litterae humaniores offer. According to the Humanities Indicator Project, 2240 students graduated with bachelor’s degrees in Classics in 2012 and another 1920 with a Classics minor.

The numbers of graduate students are also not insignificant: in 2012, 1000 graduate students were enrolled in 57 Ph.D. programs (the Society for Classical Studies currently list 59 on its website), and 300 in 24 masters programs. If the average time to complete a Ph.D. may be estimated at about 8 years, as suggested by this New York Times article, and one assumes a 30% attrition rate over those eight years, that would mean that more than 300 students enter Ph.D. programs in Classics each year, with an average size of about 5 students per cohort. (This is probably a slightly inflated figure, but let’s work with it for argument’s sake.)

Unfortunately, no accurate data seems to be available on completion rates for these 300 graduate students per year in Classics. The admirable Ph.D. Completion Project, which measures the number of students who finish their Ph.D.s in the humanities at participating universities, finds that slightly fewer than 50% of students who enter Ph.D. programs have finished ten years later. But the Ph.D. Completion Project’s data comes from a selection of participating departments, of which only two were Classics departments.

The Modern Language Association published a study in 2014 based on a random sample of dissertations from their MLA International Bibliography. Other disciplines, such as History, have embarked on their own studies, which yield similar results: approximately half of the 2500 Ph.D.s researched by the American Historical Association had tenure track jobs. Although these trends are suggestive, it is impossible to know whether the numbers are similar for Classics.

By remaining ignorant of this information, we are losing opportunities for outreach to people who have demonstrated a deep interest in the ancient world. To say nothing of our undergraduate majors, let’s take the assumed 300 people who cared enough about Classics to dedicate their twenties to lonely nights in the library and life on a near-poverty-level stipend (if they were lucky!) by enrolling in an American Ph.D. program. Of that group, if we follow the trends observed above, approximately 150 will finish graduate school, and of those who do, approximately 75 will eventually find gainful employment in academia. The other 225 people — people who do not think Classics means studying Mozart — vanish into the big wide world.

Where do these people go, what do they do, and why do we let them escape our notice? The answer to the last question may relate to what many identify as a culture of shame in the humanities associated with not completing a Ph.D. or choosing not to enter academia once one does. Culturally, completion of the Ph.D. and attainment of a tenure-track teaching position is perceived as the successful outcome of graduate study. The further one’s story diverges from this outcome, the more one may feel the need to disappear.

There are many reasons people might choose to leave a graduate program in Classics or not enter academia upon completing a Ph.D. Some realize the life of an academic is not for them. Others undergo major life changes like marriage, children, or the loss of a loved one, and their priorities change. Others try their hardest to make it to the tenure track but don’t, not necessarily because they don’t deserve to, but because there simply aren’t enough jobs for all the qualified candidates. Yet almost all of these people could observe the priamelic structure of this paragraph. They are all still classicists, and we shouldn’t forget about them.

For many graduate students, the biggest obstacles to finishing graduate school are psychological, not intellectual. Laboring in the face of such overwhelming probability of “failure,” it is easy to get discouraged. Consider the telos of graduate school, both de facto and de jure. De jure, as least as the process is currently understood, one might say that the purpose of Ph.D. programs is to produce professors. But when all the data available suggests that de facto only about 25% of the people who enter graduate school experience that outcome, isn’t it time to reevaluate our teleology?

A number of the people who leave graduate school never leave the field of Classics, because they go on to become secondary school teachers. Both the MLA and AHA studies found that about 3% of Ph.D.s enter K-12 education — a disturbingly low statistic, in my mind. The gap between the professoriate and secondary school teachers is too wide, and more collegiality and communication between these two groups would help the discipline.

But professors and high school teachers tend to be seen as two different species: the former are primarily researchers, the latter pedagogues, and the professor/researcher is often seen as the more prestigious position. As Leonard Cassuto shows in the first chapter of his recent book, The Graduate School Mess, this dichotomy goes back to the founding days of graduate education in this country. It may explain why the choice to enter secondary teaching upon the completion of a Ph.D. is often perceived as a “failure” by freshly minted Ph.D.s as well as by their peers and advisors. If more than 3% of Classics Ph.D.s. are found to be teaching in K-12 education, that is a statistic that we should be proud of as a discipline.

Another unaccounted-for group affected by the so-called culture of shame are adjuncts. Psychologists have shown that psychological factors related to professional identity and self-worth often outweigh financial compensation when it comes to employee motivation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the 15–20% of Ph.D. graduates found by the AHA and MLA studies to be working in non-tenure track, contingent employment as adjuncts (who are not counted in the aforementioned surveys among the 50% gainfully employed in academia, by the way). The adjunct crisis is a complicated, insidious issue, but we cannot deny that part of the reason people choose to accept its difficult lifestyle is because they cannot bear the thought of “failing” to achieve the telos of university professor, which was unrealistically set for them when they entered graduate school.

Other people have much happier outcomes. I personally know several lawyers, a Silicon Valley tech engineer, a management consultant, a CEO, a speechwriter, and numerous high school teachers who either left graduate school or chose not to enter academia after receiving a Ph.D. in Classics. These people are also classicists. We should do more to reach out to them and support their interest in our discipline, and we should tell their story to the 300-odd people entering graduate programs in Classics this year. Entering a Ph.D. program in Classics and not getting a job as a professor could be the greatest career move they ever make.

While the results of the MLA survey and Ph.D. Completion Project are a good place to start, they are of limited relevance to Classics. Only two Classics Departments (Fordham and Cornell) participated in the Ph.D. Completion Project, and we have no way of knowing how many of the dissertations randomly selected by the MLA were written by classicists. Secondly, the data set itself is incomplete and subject to various survey biases. The MLA itself admits that its sample size is “too small to be representative” and its methods for collecting and verifying the data are not clear from the information provided on its website. The Ph.D. Completion Project, on the other hand, depends on university participation and accurate self-reporting.

The AHA’s research methodology is stated on its website. It is scrappy and labor-intensive, but it takes advantage of the data available in the Information Age in a fresh, exciting way:

“We located people through digital research using publicly available data, most often gleaning a person’s employment information from university, company, or organization websites and directories. For stay-at-home parents and those who had retired, information was found through volunteer organizations, Facebook, newspaper stories, and personal blogs. We supplemented this data with academic and government conference programs and publications. We made limited use of LinkedIn and departmental newsletters; these are good places to start, but self-titled employment may differ from organization or university categories. For example, an adjunct faculty member identified as a “professor” on LinkedIn may not be employed as full-time, permanent faculty at their institution.”

Classics, a much smaller discipline, has the opportunity to paint a much fuller picture of its own identity. Over the past 30 years, even by the wildest of exaggerations, the number of people who entered graduate programs in Classics is probably fewer than 10,000. Therefore, a sample size similar to the AHA or MLA study over the same time period would produce a much more complete picture.

Researching Ph.D. holders is the first step and most straightforward phase of the Legion Project, because this data is the most easily available. But there is much more work to be done. As mentioned above, comparable statistics in other fields suggest that 50% of graduate students in Classics leave graduate school before earning their Ph.D. All of these people cared enough about Classics to enter graduate school, with many of them spending years on advanced study and earning a Master’s degree along the way. Unfortunately, finding this group of people is much more difficult.

While a number of graduate programs publicize the names of those who finish their Ph.D.s and make the names of current graduate students available on department websites, the names of students in entering cohorts are harder to come by, even if they leave with a Master’s degree. Departments are understandably cautious about providing data that could reveal their attrition and placement rates, because in today’s hostile environment, many face pressure from administrators who might use this data to justify cutting programs. There are also confidentiality concerns, since many who choose not to finish Ph.D. programs might not want their names publicized. There is undoubtedly some anger and bitterness out there, and some who left — under whatever circumstances — may want nothing more to do with Classics. My hunch, though, is that a significant number of people would welcome opportunities to reconnect with and support the study of Classics, if we just start providing them.

Even if universities cannot provide the names of students in entering graduate cohorts, individual readers can help expand the Legion Project by nominating a Legionnaire. If you are or know someone with an advanced degree in Classics who has found success outside of academia, please let us know and we will follow up and offer to feature you or that person on the Project Legion section of our website. By doing so, you will be helping to build a rich, diverse network of classicists that will support Classics and help ensure its survival and relevance in the future.