Marble head of a youth (back view) from Kerameikos, Athens, Greece, circa 600 BC.Illustration by PUBLIC DOMAIN
Daryn Lehoux is a professor and head of the Department of Classics and Archaeology at Queen’s University.
How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
I have the incredible privilege to think about it daily. Not just to think about it, but to study it, to analyze it, to teach a new generation of curious minds about it and, above all, to bring antiquity to life as an important way to understand our contemporary world and some of its longest-lasting, most deep-set problems. I am, in short, a classics professor.
There’s a stereotype out there, that what I study is “useless.” To make things worse, I don’t just study “the ancient world” in some broad sense – I actually study one very small corner of it: Greek and Roman science. If there are any direct-access job prospects for my undergraduate students, I don’t know of them. And to be honest, I don’t see career prospects in any one, predetermined field as the primary point of their time spent studying with me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy to hear of all the successes my students have had in their lives. They have become lawyers, teachers, small-business owners, doctors, tech workers, publishing professionals, HR reps, bankers, musicians, artists, professors – people who have gone on to do amazing things with their humanities degree.
But the end goal of studying the humanities is never some specific, preordained job in some mythical “humanities” industry. Instead, the point is to prepare students to tackle the complex, unpredictable and novel situations they will encounter in the world after graduation.
How do we do that? We work with them on really hard problems that often have no obvious solution: human problems, societal problems. Together, we learn to talk about difficult topics in a room filled with diverse people who disagree with one another. And we learn to do so civilly, clearly and productively. And when I say we learn together, I mean that in the best, most focused courses (typically small ones), I learn every bit as much as my students do in the process.
It doesn’t matter which humanities discipline we are talking about. I happen to be one specific kind of geek (the ancient history, science, and language kind), but the world is full of proudly geeky, incredibly smart students discovering their own unique niches. In any case, it’s not the topic of study that matters – it’s the study of humanity itself. It’s the close examination, careful analysis, creative reconfiguring and constructive debating of challenging questions that have no easy, right-or-wrong answers. Those are critical job skills, are they not?
But there is more. For me, there’s something truly profound, something sublime, about holding a 2,000-year-old human-made object in my bare hands – some shard of pottery, graffiti-covered piece of marble, or even just a set of words in a text, handed down from generation to generation. What an unbelievable honour it is for me to think about that object and the work of the person who made it, to reflect on it, to try to find the words to articulate what it means and what that ancestor was trying to do. To think about how deeply precious that pricelessly unique object is.
Now imagine passing it along – just handing over that mind-numbing object to an 18-year-old who’s never encountered such an object up close and who just happens to be in your class, saying “Here – be careful with it.”
That is a major life moment for most people, and is a moment of real meaning to my students. And you simply can’t do that in a class of 120 people.
In November, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his government made some disdainful comments about universities needing to find more “efficiencies,” including by culling smaller class sizes. Somehow, in one of the richest provinces, in one of the most prosperous countries that has ever existed in the history of the world, we are being told we can’t afford to pay for these kinds of experiences. Never mind that my average class size is still north of 80 students.
People say to me that at some level, universities are businesses, and businesses need to maximize efficiency wherever they can. But I will stress this to my last breath: a university is not like a business in one very important way – education is a value, and education has value, all by itself. That’s it. That’s the deal. Its true worth can’t be displayed in a financial report.
At universities, we are educating citizens to think critically and to participate intelligently in our democracy, in our society, and in our world. And if money, and money alone, now becomes the top priority of Canada’s research and teaching institutions, then our country and our world are in deep trouble.