Schools for Classics and/or Ancient History

warblersrule
Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:00:29 +0000

Classics at Harvard is an interesting case, and I’ve yet to quite figure out what’s going on there. At the graduate level, it’s strong but would definitely not make my top 5 and maybe not my top 10 list for classics. In the past you had people like Emily Vermeule, Glen Bowersock, etc., but besides Gregory Nagy and maybe Emma Dench, the department has fewer big names these days and has been accused of running on the fumes of past prestige. (I’m aware the NRC gave it a high rank, but I’m presumptuous enough to disagree. I also disagree with their highly dubious ranking of Chicago above the IFA for art history and UCLA above Scripps for oceanography, among others.) At the undergraduate (and most pertinent for the OP) level, Harvard has a much better track record, and the OP could hardly do better but certainly a great deal worse.



slipper1234:

At the graduate level. At the undergrad level I feel places like Cal are not ideal for liberal arts majors like Classics.

I disagree. In fact, a field like classics is one of the instances in which I would recommend some publics along with smaller private schools. While it’s all too easy to fade into the background in political science or biology at many medium and large schools, even the largest universities tend to have relatively few majors and small classes in programs like classics and geology.

What I said earlier about UCLA also applies to Berkeley, however; though I consider it to have the finest classics program in the country, it is certainly not worth the cost for an OOS student needing financial aid.



Apeiron:

So, what exactly makes Chicago a much stronger school than Princeton for classics? I know that their liberal arts requirement probably strengthens them quite a bit, so I am seriously considering them for undergraduate studies.

Both schools have a focus on the liberal arts. I would not say that Chicago has a stronger classics program than Princeton; it’s actually the other around, I think. What makes Chicago appealing to many students is that it has offerings in a wide variety of areas - it has Mesopotamian archaeologists, Assyriologists, Hittitologists, Semiticists, Egyptologists of all stripes, etc. It also has an exceptionally fine museum of antiquities that were excavated by the university and thus have proper provenance, multiple dictionaries under publication, multiple excavations underway, etc. Princeton has none of the above.