Presentation to the New York Classical Club
	February 3, 2001
	Adam D. Blistein, PhD, APA Executive Director

On behalf of the Board of Directors of the American Philological Association, I want to congratulate the New York Classical Club on its 100th Anniversary. During your entire history, you have provided in your geographically small but intellectually rich area an outstanding example of how the community of classicists should interact if the study of ancient Greek and Roman civilization is to continue to thrive. For a hundred years you have found ways to draw leading academics out of their ivory towers, attract busy primary and secondary school teachers from their classrooms, and even entice nonprofessionals to your activities. Most important, from the start, through your prizes and scholarships, you have encouraged young people to study classics.

We need fora like yours where classicists from all walks of life can meet not because continued study of the classics is in peril (although that might have been true two or three decades ago) but to make sure we can take full advantage of the opportunities that the information age presents us. At first glance we are about as useless and out-of-date a bunch of enthusiasts as you could find in a time of such rapid changes. That was certainly the view of the Wall Street Journal writer who called me last year to try to get me to say that the National Football League was foolish and pretentious for insisting on attaching roman numerals to each successive Super Bowl. (I'm not paid to say that anyone is foolish to use Roman numerals; so, I'm not sure why this reporter wanted to talk to me.) More and more people, however, including a number who read the Journal faithfully, know better. Not long after my roman numeral discussion, a consortium of 30 prominent Canadian business executives issued a statement encouraging their government to promote traditional liberal arts programs as well as up-to-date technology programs. Why did these executives feel the need to issue this statement? In a related newspaper article the head of a large international recruitment firm was quoted as follows: “Techies can only do so much. They can't do the content, they can't do the graphics, and they don't easily understand how people are going to interact with the product, or the Internet, or even each other.”

This is what I mean by taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the information age. The world at large is starting to remember what we never forgot but, I think in our hubris, never felt we had to prove to anyone: that the study of the classics, particularly in the original languages, produces the careful and articulate thinkers that those Canadian business executives expect to find among graduates of liberal arts curricula. I'm not sure that we've completely lost our hubris, nor am I suggesting that your typical human resources person or business tycoon is actively seeking out classics majors (although a few smart ones are, I assure you). I do, however, see three interrelated facts that are making classical studies viable again in ways that they perhaps have not been since the 19th Century. First, the world has come to realize that it's not worth having a web site if its content is bland or (worse) incomprehensible. Second, the importance of content, of information, makes business executives seek employees who can produce interesting, comprehensible prose as eagerly as they seek employees who can use the next generation of web hosting tools. Finally, classicists are usually able to produce interesting, comprehensible prose as well as if not better than their counterparts who trained in other disciplines in the humanities. In short, if the Platonic ideal of a productive employee in the information age is a liberal arts major (and don't forget that those high-powered people in Canada said as much), a real live classicist is probably closer to that ideal than anyone else. (Having to listen to me mangle the concept of the Platonic ideal is, of course, the thanks David Sider gets for inviting me to give this talk.)

I'm not suggesting that we should get smug about our current success and repeat our past mistakes. For many years we contributed to the world's amnesia about the classics by insisting that the study of Latin and Greek is the only way to improve critical thinking and language skills and is absolutely essential to understanding our culture. No one wants to hear a bunch of know-it-alls insisting that their ancient languages are essential when it's plain that mastering those languages won't allow you to talk to your cab driver in Rome or your waiter in Athens. Further, at a time when our culture is incorporating influences from all over the world, from Asia, Africa, and the rest of the Americas as well as from Europe, it's even harder than it used to be to argue that the study of ancient Greece or Rome (or, quite frankly, of any particular civilization, however important) is essential to understanding our own. But just because we are no longer essential, doesn't mean that we aren't effective and (parents of young children will, I hope, pardon the pop culture reference) really useful.

I'm living proof of how useful classical studies can be in the wider world. Yes, I have a Ph.D. in Classics and I'm now Executive Director of the largest society of classicists in North America. But I've also successfully taken on roles as diverse as the token male faculty secretary at the Harvard Business School, bookkeeper and grant writer at a think tank for social scientists, and administrator at a professional society of cancer researchers. At Harvard I copy-edited a book on foreign exchange rate management. I brought order out of chaos in the think tank's financial reports (although I had no prior bookkeeping experience). With the cancer researchers I learned enough science to produce proposals that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to support valuable training programs. Undoubtedly, when it offered me my current position, the APA Board was comforted by the fact that I had a Classics background, but what really got me the job was my sixteen years of experience organizing meetings for and providing member services to cancer researchers. I recite my professional history not so that I can break my arm patting myself on the back but because I believe my classics background gave me the tools I needed to enter a wide variety of unfamiliar situations and master a wide variety of unfamiliar topics. The moral, with apologies to Erich Segal, is that being a classicist means never having to say you can't.

When you hear phrases like meeting planning, foreign exchange management, member services, bookkeeping, or grants management, you don't expect to find Classicists doing those jobs. But I think you should. And the great thing is that to accommodate this new thought, there's very little that classics teachers at either the high school or college level have to change. Certainly this idea requires no changes in content or method of either teaching or research; it does require some fresh thinking about advising students and promoting the discipline. It also requires classics organizations like this club and like the APA to welcome interested people who don't necessarily fit a traditional membership profile. It further requires organizations like us to do more outreach to nontraditional audiences.

At the APA we have recently created a Division of Outreach that is coordinating our efforts to make contact with people outside of our usual constituency. Jennifer Roberts, a member of this club, is our first Vice President for Outreach and we are now, to a great extent, in what the management types call the “needs assessment” stage. Exactly what aspects of classical civilization are appealing to nonprofessionals, and how can we best present those aspects to an interested audience? Projects in their early stages include a speaker's bureau and a newsletter that, we hope, will grow into a magazine. We're also devoting some of our outreach efforts to venues that are professionally “closer to home.” Jennifer's Outreach Committee is forging links with other learned societies like the Modern Language Association, and APA presidents and I are making it a point to attend meetings of regional classics associations. Guided by our Education Vice President, Kenneth Kitchell of the University of Massachusetts, we have already begun to work with other classics associations to address the increasing shortage of high school Latin teachers.

This kind of outreach, greater communication with other professionals in the classics and humanities, is being received both with enthusiasm and, quite frankly, with some astonishment. APA has had (and in some places still has) a reputation of being a collection of scholars interested only in talking to each other and (if pressed) to their graduate students. I think the APA actually outgrew such provincialism quite some time ago, but I freely admit it didn't do a very good job of telling the world it had changed. I appreciate the opportunity to come to this meeting and tell you that the APA has not abandoned its commitment to being a forum for the best scholarship in classics, and that it is committed to book and journal publishing as well as organizing an annual meeting that will achieve such an end. At the same time, the APA sees greater collaboration with others working or interested in classics as a logical extension of and not a distraction from its scholarly mission. We are convinced that the field of classics is thriving and that interest in our field is higher than it has been in a long time. At the same time we recognize that if we go back into our shells, this favorable climate could change very rapidly. We have to remain open, cooperative, and visible if the 5th Century B.C. is to continue to be interesting to people in the 21st Century A.D. As long as we continue our outreach, as long as your club continues to put on good programs like this one and encourage young people to study classics, and as long as other classicists in other organizations continue their good work, the future of the classical past is bright.