Latin Diplomas, pro and contra
May 22, 2009 at | In Uncategorized | 28 CommentsMy editorial in the May 15 New York Times calling for the end of Latin
"I can't understand this, either."
Diplomas has turned out to be something of an (unintended) exercise in reverse psychology. Defenders of the Latin diploma, and Latin in general, have emerged everywhere, to eviscerate me on dyspeptic blogs, in letters to the editor, via email, and even the odd cold call to my house.
I confess to feeling like a bit of a traitor, but it certainly touched a nerve, and all the attention has been a thrill. It was on the Times’ most emailed list for two days. Christiane Amanpour, Dickinson’s commencement speaker this year, mentioned it in her speech. My friend Rob Hardy, a classically trained writer and poet from Minnesota, correctly divined the shadow of educational reformer and Dickinson founder Benjamin Rush lurking behind the argument, and pointed that I was assassinated beneath his statue recently. Coincidence? A big thank you to Bob Winston of Dickinson’s English dept. for coming up with the idea for the slogan in the art that went with the piece.
One interesting strain in the emails I have been getting is that the Latin diploma, in all its opacity, is an appropriate symbol of what colleges in fact do. Frederick Dennis Williams writes that what most students are really after is not mental improvement but the piece of paper itself:
“When I was working on a Ph.D. in the 1960s, we used to call it a ‘union card.’ It still is. The ‘clear communication’ being taught is the arcane language of the elite — the modern version of the priestly language, the hieroglyphics, of the Egyptians . . . Latin carries the real message — tradition, not innovation; class status, not education. Latin is not a contradiction. It is an indication.”
Two people independently invoked the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to refute my contention that the goal of education is the creation and transmission of knowledge–not the creation and transmission of prestige. Au contraire, says 
Bourdieu, according to Anthony McKeown, who wrote, “Education is the institution par excellence for the transmission of prestige.” And my colleague in the Sociology dept. Dan Schubert writes, “by design, degrees are to separate all those who receive them from all those who never will. Thus, Latin helps?”
Needless to say there is some truth here, but this seems like an excessively cynical view, especially given the triumphs of American education in creating upward mobility. This is not the middle ages, though Latin diplomas do give off a whiff of nostalgia for the middle ages.
One relevant fact that I found in my research but did not put in the article: the Minneapolis firm Jostens, the largest printer of diplomas in America, printed 2035 college diplomas this year, and only 16 were in Latin. For high schools, the figure was less than one half of one per cent, according to Jostens. So this is an issue that has largely been decided, and it also helps to rebut the criticism I have gotten from some Latin teachers that the demise of the Latin diploma would somehow hurt Latin programs. Having two English diplomas on my wall from institutions with great classics programs, it doesn’t seem to me that the two things are directly related.
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