A current proposal to abolish the classics department at Loyola University in Chicago would limit resources for an already-small network of students and professors who study classics in the Chicago area – including those at Northwestern.
“We pool our resources,” said Dan Garrison, an NU classics professor. “The implication of this is that we will have fewer resources to pool. If we were trying to put together a symposium, for example, we would have that many fewer people to work with.”
The recommendation at Loyola stems from an internal review that weighed the academic importance of the department against financial concerns.
“The assessment was done in terms of five criteria: centrality to Loyola’s mission, internal excellence, impact on society, market demands and cost,” Timothy O’Connell, chairman of Loyola’s Committee of Academic Review and Planning, wrote in an e-mail.
Although Loyola administrators will not make a final decision regarding the classics department until May 15, faculty and students at NU and Loyola foresee a decline in interactions between the schools.
“We come to each other’s lectures and other events,” said Jacqueline Long, an assistant professor of classics at Loyola. “If the teaching of classics at Loyola were constrained, it would have an affect on those relations.”
The Chicago Consortium in Ancient History allows graduate students to receive credit for classics classes at any of four Chicago-area universities: NU, Loyola, University of Chicago and University of Illinois-Chicago.
Through the program, students at any of the four universities can register in courses at the other participating schools.
Because classics covers such a large period of history, fewer specialists in each time period exist, said Sonya Seifert, an NU graduate student in classics.
Seifert is taking a class with Long, who specializes in Seifert’s area of interest.
“There’s no professor at Northwestern who specializes in this period,” she said. “When you lose one specialist, you lose a whole chunk of history. I can’t stress how really small the classics network is.”
Siefert said she chose NU because it gave her access to the resources and faculty of the four Chicago-area universities.
Classicists at NU can rest assured that the university has no plans to make the network even smaller.
Although NU and Loyola each have about 15 undergraduate students majoring in classics, Associate Provost Stephen Fisher said NU has no plans to abolish its classics department.
“There are a lot of reasons that the university keeps small departments running,” he said. “Certainly there are no plans underfoot here to close any departments.”
NU classicists are hoping Loyola administrators will share the same mentality and not approve the proposal.
“It’s certainly a mistake from our point of view for Loyola to do something like that,” said John Wright, chairman of NU’s classics department. “I would love to see Loyola reconsider.”
