Bill Lumberg

I was kindly rejected today by Colorado through email. Frankly, I am puzzled-- since when were they a primadonna program? I have been admitted to several other second tier programs and I don't know of any Colorado Classics PhDs in the field.

Admissions Committees! Whaaaaat's happening. You know, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and get back to me about all those applications I sent... yeah. If you could just go ahead and do that, that would be great. Thaaaaaanks.

Do you know if UVA has made decisions on straight Classics applications yet?

Boooooooo.

Congratulations to you and all others who have received official offers! I will assume, then, from the information given that I have been de-facto rejected by Yale and Chicago. And I received an official rejection from Duke this afternoon. Also, was rejected by Wisconsin last week. One acceptance, however: University of Kansas' MA program. I will keep all of you posted and I look forward to reading more news from all ye other posters as well.

No problem, those are some really good questions. First, I failed to get a recommendation from Thomas in spite of the fact that he gave me an A in the course. He was always extremely pleasant but has not responded to either of 2 emails I sent this fall (the emails were two months apart from each other). I was banking on this as part of my application strategy-- major failure on that count. And 2580 down the drain (plus the expenses of living near Boston for a summer). As for number of lines, we were assigned Eclogues 1-6 and 9-10, as well as the entire Georgics. While I read all the Eclogues assigned (about 500-600 lines?), I only managed to read about half of Georgics Book I, half of Book II, 3/4 of III, and all of IV. For the final exam, he required only certain lines, although even these were substantial. However, my biggest complaint about the class is that we didn't read enough Latin during class. Whether you had read much of the assignment before class or not ended up not mattering. Too much time was spent on him putting other passages from Latin literature on the projector from his laptop and translating them at sight, showing off in front of us, and then commenting on how they related to what we were looking at in the Eclogues or Georgics. This, I hear, is the major weakness of ivy-league classics deparments-- pretending like everyone can read the Latin and Greek and spending lots of time on literary and interpretive questions. I heard Victor Davis Hanson say once that when he was still at UC Fresno he eventually grew tired of interviewing candidates for Classics jobs from Berkeley and Harvard who could not read Latin or Greek. Those were probably rare cases, but it goes to show what they emphasize these days-- PC scholarship rather than real language skills. As for the paper, all he required was a 5-7 page essay without secondary sources. Most of the students were high school students and high school Latin teachers; I was the only grad student; there was one Harvard undergrad doing a Classics minor. So in short the paper requirements were totally pathetic. I nonetheless wrote a 15 pager with a few secondary source references and have been trying to spruce it up this fall with more secondary source material to serve as a writing sample. All in all, given the Latin required, the course was basically equivalent to a second-tier upper level Latin course (i.e. 300 level instead of 400) at the undergraduate level. That is my opinion, anyhow, whatever the actual course number was. So if you've got the money to spend, it's fun to read Latin around Harvard during the summer and get to listen to a world-famous scholar-- but if you don't have a lot of expendable cash, then I wouldn't recommend it. Nevertheless, it might look good on your transcript to have studied Latin and Greek at Harvard-- in any case, that's one or two more upper level Latin courses.

Hi! Which terminal MA program are you in (if you don't mind mentioning it) and would you recommend it? Rather, I'll put it this way: is it among these three, to which I will be applying: Vanderbilt, Kansas University, and Tufts? Like you, I will be applying to about a billion programs this fall, but I don't have an MA yet-- so it'll be several PhD programs and a few MAs. I am seriously going to apply to about 20 schools-- perhaps more. I am determined to get full funding somewhere!!!

Hi! The Harvard Extension School offered two advanced courses in the ancient languages this past summer. One was a Greek course on the Homeric Hymns for 4 credits, meeting for 6 weeks ($for 2580 tuition.) The other course, at the same price and for the same amount of time, was a Latin course on Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics taught by Richard Thomas. I took the course and enjoyed it, but it only met twice a week, for 3 hours each time, so that the meetings were too long in themselves, yet too infrequent. I certainly improved my Latin, but I don't think it was worth the price. Better to take a course where you'll learn just as much but at a lower cost. For instance, Tufts University (also in the Boston area) offers an advanced Latin course every summer, as does UT Austin (this past summer, on Caesar and Catullus respectively). So there are a few options for you. Perhaps UT Austin will offer an advanced Greek class next summer. Just check out the websites of these different schools starting in January or February. Hope this helps.

Have you considered the University of Dallas? I was a politics major there as an undergrad. They have an excellent program, although not as high profile as the places you're talking about-- the department was recently ranked 30th in the nation in a survey of college professors on which political theory PhD they thought was best. They have Dr. Thomas G. West, who got his degree from Claremont Graduate School in the 70s studying with Dr. Harry Jaffa, who was a student of Leo Strauss. Also, as an undergrad at Cornell, Dr. West was a student of Allan Bloom, another student of Strauss. U Dallas also has Dr. de Alvarez, who specializes in Aristotle and Plato. They also recently hired Dr. Jonathan Culp, who completed his doctorate in political theory at Boston College just a few years ago.

This just in: I met in person with a Notre Dame Classics professor earlier this week, and the person told me that Notre Dame will be starting an MA program in Classics in the fall of 2011. Their Classics faculty seem fairly reputable, and they have some particularly well-known scholars such as Sabine MacCormack. The department also seems strong for those interested in studying Late Antiquity.