We are the future of this profession

[lucan]

Hey guys,

I'm new to the board, but seeing so many aspiring classicists (I'm applying to grad schools this year too) inspired me to ask a general question:

Where do you want to see the classics profession in 10, 20, 50 years? What kind of research should or will we be doing? What new approaches to classical literature will emerge? How will we fit into the university context?

Or is it just too early to start thinking about all this?

[Joe001]

hoo boy that's a little beyond my personal purview :/ I'm just trying to get into a grad program. I'll worry about changing the profession later

[LateAntique]

I'd like to see more text critics, undergrads who know the languages better, more generalists and less people who spend their entire careers giving a feminist reading of line 2 in some Catullus poem.

[Ardea]

Who Killed Homer? is a must-read, if you're pondering this. It's 10 years old but still oh so true. My favorite line: We are a busy profession in our eleventh hour.

[LateAntique]

Who Killed Homer? is a must-read, if you're pondering this. It's 10 years old but still oh so true. My favorite line: We are a busy profession in our eleventh hour.

I liked WKH? and Bonfire of the Humanities. Also good is The Devil Knows Latin. Peter Green's Classical Bearings is old (I believe he wrote it about the state of Classics in the 80's - when most of us were born) but still a very insightful book. I just read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which made me very happy to be in Classics.

Also - I'm not a neo-con (as Hanson and Heath are often labeled), I just think they've got good points concerning the woeful state of education today.