The Toga Party Problem

A plight common to students of the Classics is something I like to refer to as the “Toga Party Problem.” This name came about when, upon excitedly telling a friend of mine about the classes I would be taking the next semester, a course load heavy in the Classics department, she responded, “That sounds fun. It’ll be like one big toga party!” Somehow, she was picturing my semester as one long “TOGA, TOGA, TOGA!” scene from Animal House. Not exactly what I was thinking of.

I have received this same response, in some form or another, from a wide variety of people – classmates, family friends, and (most frighteningly) recruiters at career fairs. I find that it is easy to get discouraged by all this. However, I think there are a few key points about a major in the Classics, or any of the liberal arts or, as I have often heard them called, "unemployable majors," that must be kept in mind when faced with such situations.

Firstly, Classics is not an easy concentration. True, we are not cooped up in labs for hours upon hours, nor are we pounding away at calculators. This does not mean, however, that we are not working, and not working hard. The most obvious place where this is true is in the languages. Latin and Ancient Greek are not simple subjects to be easily picked up. And reading ancient, stylistically-challenging texts, such as those by Thucydides, requires a level of language proficiency that I could only dream about at this point in my studies.

Languages aside, there is nothing easy about the rest of the courses in any Classics department. Most people are far more unfamiliar with the ancient world than they are with more modern history. By modern, here, I’m talking anything more than a few hundred years after the birth of Christ. This means that a lot of time needs to be spent learning the basics of the various classical cultures. Not simple.

Secondly, there are countless sources of information about the relevance of a classical education in the modern world. This, most certainly, will be the subject of many future posts, and has already been addressed on the surface in a previous post, so I don’t want to go too much into it here. Suffice to say, it is most definitely relevant.

Most importantly, when discussing an undergraduate major, it all comes down to what you are expecting from your college education. It seems to me that a majority – I hesitate to preface that with vast, although it is tempting – of college students today, not to mention their parents, view their college years merely as something necessary for getting that premier job and increasing their earning potential. I am most certainly not condemning this. We need money to live. And who wouldn’t want some prestigious, high-paying, power-trip of a job on Wall Street? But who ever said you had to sacrifice all the fun and intellectual excitement of college for that?

I want to first acknowledge that some kids do, legitimately, enjoy business classes, and finance courses, and the like. More power to them. But others, too many I think, suffer through four years of dry lectures and endless problem sets because they think without that they will never get hired by anyone after graduation. This is disheartening.

Call me an idealist, but this is not what I think college is for. This is a time when you can study what ever your heart desires to whatever extent you wish. The only time, really, that this is possible. Leave the rest of your life to worry about how you will get hired, and where the money will come from. Some company will hire you. I promise. Even, gasp, if you have an “unemployable” major in the liberal arts. So live it up while you can.