random_classicist

I respect your opinion, Veilside - I just think it's a little extreme to say that anyone who gets a PhD at a school outside of your "top 12" list is most likely going to teach at a community college or prep school. ... And I agree with you that these debates are largely pointless (which makes me wonder why I am participating in it - oh well). A historian's list of the best graduate programs, the "obvious schools," is generally going to be quite different from that of a philologist's or an archaeologists.

I have to say that I disagree with almost the entirety of Veilside's post. First of all, how can you say that there is "nobody ... of any real significance [at Harvard]"? What about Ziolkowski, Thomas, and Tarrant, to name but a few? Do they not count? And how did Yale come to be ranked 4th in your list? They have been in decline for years - they just lost Celia Schultz to Michigan because of the constant rancor within their department. Stanford has almost no Latinists to speak of, with the notable exception of Barchiesi, and he is only there six months out of the year. Lastly, I would say that UCLA and UT Austin are easily on par with UNC, Duke, Brown/Cornell/Columbia. The Department of Classics at UT Austin has a decent ranking of the top graduate programs on their website. Here is the URL: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/orgs/lacs/_files/pdf/GS%20Handbooks/CLA%20Handbook.pdf