OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON THE HISTORY OF BOSTON COLLEGE BOSTON COLLEGE’S CLASSICAL CURRICULUM Rev. Charles F. Donovan, S.J. University Historian Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/bostoncollegesclOOdono For nearly a century after its founding Boston College made Latin and Greek a required and substantial part of the curriculum for the Bachelor of Arts degree. For example in 1898 freshmen and sophomores had five classes a week in Latin and four in Greek. Juniors had two classes a week in both Latin and Greek. Seniors had two classes a week in Latin and two classes a week in Classical Literature. Such emphasis on a classical curriculum was the norm rather than the exception in Ameri- can colleges at the time the Jesuit fathers welcomed the first collegians to James Street. Early nineteenth century catalogues of Har- vard and Yale show that Harvard freshmen spent two thirds of each day, sophomores near- ly half of each day, and juniors a quarter of each day in Latin and Greek classes, and that Greek and Latin classes had comparable prom- inence in the Yale curriculum. 1 The ancient languages and philosophy were the principal studies for the bachelor’s degree in the medieval and Renaissance universities of Europe and England and that curriculum was brought by graduates of Cambridge Uni- versity to Cambridge in New England when the Puritan colonists decided they should have a college. The curriculum model of Harvard was followed at the other colleges established in the colonial period and by the burgeoning number of colleges that sprang up in the decades before the Civil War. But in estab- lishing its classical curriculum Boston College was not imitating the course of studies prev- alent in American colleges of the time nor was it simply copying the plan of studies in vogue in the eleven American Jesuit colleges founded prior to 1863. Rather Boston College and the other Jesuit colleges were adhering to the pre- scriptions of the Ratio Studiorum, the official guidebook for Jesuit education, the first edition of which appeared not many decades after the death in 1556 of the Jesuits’ founder, Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The Ratio Studiorum was faithful to the founder’s directive that Jesuit institutions be structured juxta ordinem et modum Parisiensem, on the model of his alma mater, the University of Paris. 2 Cambridge University is an academic de- scendant of Paris through Oxford so the Jesuit colleges and the American colleges on the Harvard-Cambridge model derived from a common tradition. Thus the Boston College curriculum, rich in Cicero, Pliny, Plato and Aeschylus, though today it might seem anti- quarian or monastic or ‘alien’ to anyone under thirty, was in fact in the early decades of the College’s history as ‘American’ as baseball and church on Sunday. In 1870 not just some but all candidates for the A.B. degree at Prince- ton or Muhlenberg or Rutgers or Wooster or Hamilton spent a substantial part of their time on the same classical studies as all students at Boston College or Georgetown. There were some challenges to the domi- nance of the prescribed classics curriculum. In the early 1820’s George Ticknor, the first of the influential German-educated scholars, won a minor victory at Harvard as professor of Modern Languages. A partial elective sys- tem was adopted whereby modern languages could be substituted for some previously prescribed parts of the curriculum. 3 This anticipated President Eliot’s sweeping cur- riculum changes by fifty years but it was a weak and short-lived assault on the fixed cur- riculum. It was at Yale that the most serious re-evaluation of the classical course took place. In 1827 the Connecticut legislature criticized the ‘unpracticality’ of Yale’s classical curric- ulum. 4 The Yale faculty set up a committee to look into the criticism and after a year of deliberation issued the famous Yale Report, an uncompromising defense of the traditional classics curriculum. The Report became an educational Bible for the smaller colleges of the country and established for Yale a con- servative role that led to a major Yale-Harvard confrontation later in the century when Eliot introduced electivism at Harvard. Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869, five years after the opening of Boston College and eight years before the College granted its first Bachelor of Arts degree. Eliot’s establish- ment of the elective system at Harvard set off an academic debate unique in educational his- tory for its intensity and public involvement. As one historian notes, “Every journal opened [ 2 ] its pages to the controversy — Atlantic Monthly, Century, Princeton Review, North American Review, Bibliotheca Sacra. Special bulletins came from Noah Porter [President of Yale] and Daniel H. Chamberlain [Governor of South Carolina] both in 1884. The same year at a meeting of the National Education Association, John Bascom, then president of the University of Wisconsin, concluded that Greek and Latin were antidotes to the mater- ialism of the Age.” 5 Charles Francis Adams came out on Eliot’s side, attacking the Greek curriculum in an 1885 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, A College Fetich, [sic] which earned him a rebuke from Harvard’s retired professor of moral philosophy, Andrew Preston Peabody, and a strong dissent from the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Amherst. 6 Along with Yale’s Noah Porter, Princeton’s president James McCosh took up the cudgels against Eliot in defense of the classical curriculum. One of the highlights of the controversy, wide- ly reported in the press, was a debate spon- sored in 1885 by the Nineteenth Century Club in New York between McCosh and Eliot on the Eliot reforms. 7 In 1887, when Greek was about to be dropped as an entrance require- ment at Harvard, the presidents of eight New England colleges begged the Harvard Over- seers to overrule Eliot. 8 It was against this background of curriculum controversy, but also in an academic milieu in which the traditional classics courses re- mained entrenched, that Boston College spent its early decades. That the Boston College community was aware of the controversy is clear from an article that appeared in the stu- dent publication, the Stylus, in 1886 en- titled “ ‘A College Fetich’ Vindicated” in which the author praised an address by James Russell Lowell at the commemoration of Harvard’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary which the author interpreted as a reply to Adams’ Phi Beta Kappa address three years earlier. As the nineteenth century wound down the Jesuits at Boston College must have felt the need of an explanation, if not a defense, of the traditional curriculum. For as soon as he became president in July 1894, Father Timothy [ 3 ] Brosnahan drew up a statement concerning the nature and method of Jesuit education which appeared in the catalogue for the aca- demic year 1894-1895. The statement was ex- panded for the catalogue of the following year and in that form it appeared yearly in the catalogue of Boston College until 1952. It was borrowed or adapted by a number of Jesuit colleges from coast to coast so that it had for Jesuit colleges something of the standing of the earlier Yale Report. Brosnahan’s four page statement presents a rationale for the entire curriculum and method of Jesuit educa- tion, indicating its derivation from the Ratio Studiorum. It contains the following succinct justification of the classical curriculum: The acquisition of Language especially calls for delicacy of judgment, and fineness of perception, and for a constant, keen, and quick use of the reasoning powers. A special importance is attached to the classic tongues of Rome and Greece. As they are languages with a structure and idiom remote from the language of the student, the study of them lays bare before him the laws of thought and logic, and requires attention, reflection, and an analysis of the fundamental relations between thought and grammar. In studying them the student is led to the fundamental recesses of language. They exercise him in exactness of conception in grasping the foreign thought, and in delicacy of expres- sion in clothing that thought in the dis- similar garb of the mother tongue. While recognizing, then, in education the necessity and importance of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, which unfold the inter- dependence and laws of the world of time and space, the Jesuit system of education has unwaveringly kept Language in a posi- tion of honor as an instrument of culture. Brosnahan stressed the disciplinary value of the ancient languages rather than their cul- tural content, a line of argument that had been used in the Yale Report and, in Brosnahan’s day, particularly by President McCosh of Princeton. While the classical curriculum remained a sine qua non for the A.B. degree in most [ 4 ] nineteenth century colleges, alternate curricula leading to some other degree were introduced by many institutions. Starting in 1851 Brown offered a three-year program in practical sub- jects, without Latin or Greek, for the comple- tion of which the Bachelor of Philosophy (Ph.B.) degree was awarded. 9 The following year Yale began granting the Ph.B. to students following the non-classical scientific course in Sheffield Scientific School. The Ph.B. became quite common. Harvard chose the B.S. degree in 1851 for graduates of its Lawrence Scien- tific School. 10 As will be seen, Boston College, at different periods of the present century, employed both the Ph.B. and the B.S. degrees for various non-classical curricula. The non-classical or English curriculum was often called the commercial or mercantile curriculum because it included book-keeping. Many of the Jesuit colleges — among them Holy Cross, Fordham, and St. Louis — had such a curriculum dating from the first half of the nineteenth century. 11 It was partly at a high school and partly at a collegiate level and, if completed, led to a diploma not a degree. Particularly in midwest Jesuit schools the commercial course was popular. For example, the catalogues of St. Louis, Detroit and Xavier towards the end of the century show that at times the enrollment in the com- mercial course was larger than the classical collegiate enrollment. But particularly in the eastern Jesuit colleges there was opposition to the inclusion of the commercial course. Ten years before Boston College opened, the Pro- vincial of the eastern Jesuits, Father Charles Stonestreet, wrote Holy Cross College: “I wish you would confine yourself to the clas- sics. . . . The English course, or Commercial, is humbugging. . . .” 12 While Holy Cross and Fordham continued the commercial course for some decades. Father Stonestreefs lofty dismissal of that curriculum may have ac- counted for no commercial course being offered by Boston College in its early years. But in 1879 the Archbishop of Boston, Most Reverend John Williams, asked the Jesuits to include a non-classical course. There was a somewhat apologetic tone in the announce- ment of the new curriculum in the catalogue of 1879-80: “To the original classical course was added, September, 1879, at the special instance of the Most Reverend Archbishop, a department in which the study of the ancient languages is superseded by exclusive applica- tion to English, the modern languages and the sciences.” That reference to the special in- stance of the Archbishop was repeated in each subsequent catalogue for the twenty years the so-called English course was offered. To the above announcement of the English curriculum was added in the catalogues of 1880 and fol- lowing years: “This course is intended to offer the advantages of a thorough English and business education to that large class of our youth, who, not intending to follow the pro- fessions, stand in no immediate need of clas- sical training; but for whom it is of such vast importance that they be well grounded in their faith, and spend a few years at least under healthy religious influence.” The English curriculum consisted of courses taken by the classical students in English composition and Rhetoric, French, German, History, Mathematics through Calculus, Physics and Chemistry. It included courses in Logic, Metaphysics and Ethics, but these were taught in English, whereas Latin was the language of the philosophy classes for A.B. candidates, a feature that lasted until 1917. The only ‘commericaF subject was book-keep- ing, to which were added in the 1890’s steno- graphy and typewriting. The enrollment in the English course at Boston College was never large. It reached a high of 36 in 1887 and averaged 24 during the two decades of the program’s existence. Not only was the enrollment small but very few completed the four year course. The great majority of students in the English course stayed only one or two years, a circumstance possibly related to the fact that the business courses were all in the first two years. The poor response to the College’s English curriculum led to a rather plaintive addition to the course description in the catalogue of 1893 and the ensuing three yearly catalogues: [ 6 ] Although this course has been open for four years, and nothing has been spared that could be availed of to make it success- ful, comparatively few have patronized it; and, so far, the foundation has not been laid for the regular succession of graded classes, as in the longer, classical course. It is hoped that friends of the College will call the attention of the large number of the community, who have sons intended for business, to the fact that a first-class busi- ness, literary, and Christian, Catholic educa- tion may be had in the English and Com- mercial course at Boston College. In the catalogue for the academic year 1888-9 on the page outlining the curriculum of the “English Department” after the courses of the Fourth Year there appeared the words: “when will be conferred the degree of B.S.” The same addition appeared for the next four years. One B.S. was awarded at Commence- ment in June 1889, one in June 1890, and one each in 1892 and 1893. In 1887 the Jesuit colleges of the Missouri Province reduced their commercial courses to the status of terminal high schools. 13 Since the midwest colleges had been the early exponents of the non-classical curriculum, the elimina- tion of the so-called English program from their colleges must have been unsettling to the Jesuits along the east coast. In 1895 Boston College took collegiate status away from the commercial program. The catalogue of that year noted: “At present the [English] Course consists of four years, during which the stu- dent is engaged in the studies of an English High School. On completion of the Course a diploma of graduation is given, but no degrees are conferred.” The catalogues for 1900-01 and for the three succeeding years contained this statement: “The College offers at present only one course, that leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. The faculty, however, is preparing to establish another course leading to the degree of Bach- elor of Science.” There are no documents to throw light on what kind of program, obviously non-classical, the faculty were thinking of. Indeed since Archbishop Williams, who had [ 7 ] inspired the English course, was still active and since the English course was abandoned entirely at this time even at the high school level, perhaps the vague and unproductive promise of an alternative collegiate degree program was intended to assuage the Arch- bishop. It was not until the 1920’s that formal alternatives to the classical A.B. program were introduced. While liberal arts colleges were tinkering with various non-classical, non-A.B. degree programs, the battle for and against the classics themselves continued. Since Yale was the most vocal exponent of the traditional curriculum, the struggle between conservative and liberal forces at Yale is illuminating. Yale’s historian, George Pierson, presents the growing faculty uprising against the domina- tion of the classical curriculum — he refers to it as the Thirty Years War 14 — in epic terms and perhaps rightly since this was undoubted- ly the clearest, best focused educational debate in American collegiate history. After recounting the preliminary strategies and skirmishes of the anti-classics faction in the post-Civil War period, Pierson summed up the trend of the battle by the title he gave to Chapter 1 1 of the history of modern Yale: “Farewell to Greek”. He starts the chapter with the following statement of the anti-Greek case: Greek was the nub of the problem. With philosophy out of the way, Greek, Latin, and mathematics stood as the last survivors of the ancient disciplines. And of these Greek had been singled out as the crucial, symbolic study — the most irritating, the most vulnerable, the next victim of the elective movement. It was difficult, “use- less,” and aristocratic. It represented the private schools and the well-to-do classes, the old order of privilege in the professions. To the swelling high school systems Greek was the club held over their head by the exclusive colleges: it prevented new studies and stood for interference in their con- cerns. To more and more parents, who had made their way in business and who sought for their sons a social rather than an intel- [ 8 ] lectual training, Greek seemed old-fashioned and quite impractical. 15 The reference to the high schools is signif- icant. The reason the eight New England presidents protested Eliot’s proposal to drop Greek as an entrance requirement was that they felt many high schools would seize Har- vard’s decision as an excuse to downgrade or drop Greek and thus limit the applicant pool for those colleges still insisting on Greek as an entrance requirement. Pierson comments: “Most of the church schools and the smaller denominational col- leges were still not prepared to abandon the language of Protestantism and the Renais- sance — this study that for three hundred years had been used to turn plowboys and towns- men into a responsible leadership. Yet with the rise of the newer studies and the modern multipurpose universities, the pressure from within as well as from below had become al- most intolerable.” 16 Harvard dropped Greek as a required part of its curriculum in 1884, seven years after Boston College issued its first A.B.s; and in 1887 Harvard dropped Greek as an entrance requirement. Yale held on for a while longer but in 1904 said “Fare- well” to the Greek requirement. Boston College maintained the Greek re- quirement just a half century longer than Yale, but in the year of Yale’s capitulation on Greek the College had to recognize the fact of applicants for admission without any preparatory studies in Greek — just what the non-Jesuit New England college presidents had predicted. In outlining requirements for admission the 1904-5 Boston College catalogue added this important concession as a footnote: “In the case of students from High Schools, who have had no Greek, but have pursued an equivalent branch, special arrangements may be made by which they may enter the ’Freshman class, and take Greek in the special Greek class. The quality of the degree which they receive will depend on the amount of Greek in their first three years of college.” The public high schools are singled out here as curricular culprits, since no prepara- tory school or preparatory division of a Jesuit [ 9 ] College would graduate a young man without Greek. But Boston College decided not to cut off graduates of the high schools. Still, even though three years of Greek at the college level were insisted on for all applicants with- out Greek, the A.B. degree was not guaran- teed. The superior standing of the A.B. degree is underscored by the phrase about the “qual- ity” of the degree. In other words if a student were not to master enough Greek in his three college years, the A.B. would be denied and a degree of lower quality, e.g. Ph.B., would be awarded. In establishing this discrimina- tion between the A.B. degree and all other degrees Boston College was following an educational view that the A.B. was sacrosanct and special, a view enshrined in the thought of most college people during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So Greek remained a required subject for the A.B. degree for both students with a high school Greek background and for students entering without Greek. The first breech in the solid Greek-Latin wall at Boston College came in 1935 when the catalogue announced that as of June 1937 the Ph.B. degree would be discontinued and that only two degrees would be granted, the A.B. and the B.S. However, there would be several paths to the A.B., the most distinguished being A.B. Honors, the traditional Greek-Latin course with special standards of admission and performance. There would also be the A.B. with Greek but without honors, covering the same curriculum as the honors A.B. but less intensively. Finally, the innovation was to be the A.B. without Greek. Concerning this the catalogue stated: “Hitherto, following the Classical Tradition in liberal education, and accepting the traditional significance of the Bachelor of Arts degree, the College auth- orities have considered the study of the Greek language and literature as a necessary subject in the curriculum leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. . . . However, following the practice now generally ac- cepted in American colleges, beginning in June 1938, the College will confer the degree of Bachelor of Arts without required Greek as a necessary subject in the curriculum.” The announcement went on to explain that premedical students, who for several decades had been taking a non-classical B.S. degree, might pursue an A.B. curriculum if they wished. The A.B. Honors program lasted twenty years. In 1954 the ‘Honors’ designation was dropped and through 1956 there were two A. B.s, Program 1 with Greek and Program 2 without Greek. Starting in September 1957 there was no program requiring Greek. Boston College had valiantly sought to pro- long and preserve the ancient Greek-Latin curriculum. Indeed the battle for Greek was longer and more elaborate than the defense of Latin, as will be seen. But students pre- pared to follow the intensive Greek program of the A.B. honors course diminished in numbers. In 1940 50 of the 299 graduates took the A.B. Honors degree, 159 the A.B., and 90 the B.S. Ten years later 29 graduates or only 3% of the class of 865 were A.B. Honors and 626 of that class earned the B.S. degree. So in 1957 Boston College bade its “Farewell” to Greek. Back in 1904 Boston College had men- tioned degrees of lesser quality than the A.B. for students unable to meet appropriate stan- dards in the classical curriculum. In 1918 the College announced a B.S. program without classics, for premedical students, but prior to 1923 there was no mention of any Ph.B. program although 14 graduates had received that degree. The 1923 catalogue stated under the heading, “The Ph.B. Course”: This course is intended for those who have not studied Latin and Greek in High School, and who are consequently ineligible to pursue the A.B. Course. As alternatives for Latin and Greek in Freshman and Sophomore, they study Modern Language, Analytic Geometry and General Chemistry in Freshman; Modern Language, Analytic Chemistry, College Algebra in Sophomore. The course in Junior and Senior is identical with the A.B. course. Thus the Ph.B. as an alternate to the A.B. was formalized and lasted for some fourteen years. But it did not become a dominant factor in the College. In the class of 1935, for example, only 29 graduates earned the Ph.B. in contrast to 359 A.B. and 15 B.S. degrees. After 1937, successors to the Ph.B. became various kinds of B.S. degrees (Educa- tion, History, Social Studies) for, though an A.B. curriculum without Greek began in 1935, Latin was required for the A.B. and suddenly Latin became the bone of contention rather than Greek and the number of graduates earning B.S. degrees greatly surpassed the A. B.s. In a chapter titled “The Passing of Latin and the Ph.B.” Pierson writes of Yale: In the spring of 1931, after a month or two of quiet debate, the College pro- ceeded to drop both the requirement of Latin for the B.A. and the degree for non- Latinists, the Ph.B. . . . From the pedagogical point of view it seems astonishing that so practiced a schoolmaster, so knowing a pilot to the arts of living should now be dropped overboard — still more astonishing that he could be dropped so quietly, with hardly a cry heard. 17 Maybe not a cry but at least a whimper. Hearing of Yale’s decision on Latin the New York Herald Tribune editorialized under the caption “Et Tu, Eli!”: “This ancient univer- sity is merely mimicking a general tendency in American education. . . . Henceforth her bachelor of arts need have no taint of classi- cism to interfere with his salesmanship.” 18 But that was outside criticism probably written by a journalist who appreciated the richness of his own classical education twenty or thirty years earlier. Pierson is right that Yale’s action in dropping Latin caused no outcry in academe similar to that which greeted Har- vard’s dropping of Greek almost a half cen- tury earlier. The passing of required Latin at Boston College in 1958 just one year after the demise of required Greek seems more sudden and unexpected than what happened at Yale. But Boston College’s action on Latin came after a decade of earnest but quiet discussion and negotiation on the subject involving all of the Jesuit colleges in the country. The Jesuit Education Association was established in 1934 and under its auspices college represen- tatives met annually to discuss mutual inter- ests and problems. In 1948 the representa- tives of the Jesuit colleges at the annual JEA meeting voted to ask the Board of Gov- ernors (the Provincials of the American Jesuit Provinces) to allow each Province to decide independently what to do about requiring Latin for the A.B. degree. 19 The liberal arts deans meeting the following summer dis- cussed the Latin requirement and were even- ly split on it pro and con. 20 The Provincials set in motion a factual and theoretical in- quiry on the subject which revealed a drastic decline in enrollment in the A.B. (that is, the Latin) curriculum between 1940 and 1948, a drop from 41% to 17%. 21 The war and the special arrangements for returned veterans may have had something to do with this decline. The study also showed consid- erable variation nationally, with the A.B. enrollment higher in the east than in other parts of the country, as was shown by the following table 22 which reports the percen- tages of seniors in the A.B. program by Prov- ince for 1940 and 1948. 1940 1948 California 22 2 Chicago 18 10 Maryland 54 14 Missouri 30 12 New England 67 33 New Orleans 26 23 New York 37 21 Oregon 8 14 A similar study in 1955 showed only Holy Cross and Boston College with more than 30% of their students enrolled in the A.B. program. The national average had slipped to under 1 1% 23 . The deans of Jesuit liberal arts col- leges met for a ten day institute at Santa Clara in August, 1955. After prolonged debate on the Latin requirement for the A.B. degree, the deans voted: “Resolved: that the mem- bers of the Institute respectfully request the Fathers Provincial of the American Assistancy to seek explicit permission of Very Reverend Father General to change the current regula- tion which requires Latin for the A.B. through- out the Assistancy, so that the place of Latin in the A.B. program may hereafter be deter- mined on a Province basis as are other major changes in the curriculum .” 24 In the various formal discussions on the topic, principal reasons advanced for keeping the Latin requirement for the A.B. were the following . 25 The classical curriculum is identified with Jesuit education and Jesuit tradition. Latin is a key to Catholic culture as well as the language of the Church and its liturgy. (Of course these arguments were ad- vanced before Vatican II and the vernacular liturgies.) Jesuit colleges, it was pointed out, are the last stronghold of Latin and stand out as unique among American colleges in pre- serving the Latin requirement. Furthermore, because of the intercommunication among Jesuit colleges, abandonment of the Latin requirement in some regions would make it hard for colleges in other regions to main- tain it, since abandonment anywhere would be seen as a sign of Jesuit disbelief in the value of Latin. Indeed if Jesuit colleges were to give up the Latin requirement, the Latin curriculum of Jesuit high schools might be put in jeopardy. It was argued that dropping the Latin requirement would be an unpraise- worthy yielding to pressure. Finally, there were those who characterized advocates of abandonment of the Latin requirement as “futurists” and anti-traditionalists. Those who favored dropping the Latin re- quirement contended that it seemed odd for Jesuit colleges to grant their most prized degree (A.B.) to so few graduates, while the majority of students were enrolled in programs for which the A.B. degree was given else- where. Indeed the B.S. degree earned by many Jesuit college graduates was deceptive since it represented little science. It was argued that the requirement of Latin for the A.B. kept many students from attending Jesuit colleges because they wanted an A.B. degree. The Jesuits, it was said, could not stand alone t 14] against the national understanding of what an A.B. degree is. Besides few high schools were any longer graduating students with four years of Latin. To the argument that Latin is the language of the Church the reply was given that Latin is the pagan parent of mod- ern languages and the study of modern lan- guages can give both language discipline and Christian cultural content. Finally, the Latin requirement was criticized as a fossilized and nonfunctional curriculum. During these years of discussion of the Latin requirement for the A.B., the A.B. pro- gram was in a healthier state at Boston Col- lege and Holy Cross than in many of the other Jesuit colleges. But the problem was handled on the national level and after weigh- ing the matter for ten years, the Fathers Provincial petitioned Father General John Janssens in January 1958 that the American Jesuit colleges be allowed to offer the A.B. degree for programs not including Latin. 26 In September of that year Father General granted the permission. 27 The Boston Col- lege catalogue for the College of Arts and Sciences for 1958-9 omitted any reference to Latin as a requirement for admission or for graduation. The following is a summary timetable of the retreat at Boston College from the original full Greek-Latin curriculum. 1905 Greek may be begun at Boston College. 1935 A.B. with Honors started — a degree with Greek and Latin. An alternate A.B. program without Greek but requiring Latin started. 1954 Latin required for A.B. but may be begun at Boston College. A.B. Honors dropped, replaced by A.B. Program 1, requiring Latin and Greek, with A.B. Program 2 as an alternate, requiring Latin but not Greek. 1957 Greek required in no A.B. program. 1958 Latin not required for entrance or for A.B. Harvard’s historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, had this to say of the passing of the old curriculum: It was due to Eliot’s insistent pressure that the Harvard faculty abolished the Greek requirement for entrance in 1887, after dropping required Latin and Greek for freshman year. His and Harvard’s reputation, the pressure of teachers trained in the new learning, and of parents wanting ‘practical’ instruction for their sons, soon had the classics on the run, in schools as well as colleges; and no equiv- alent to the classics, for mental training, cultural background, or solid satisfaction in after life, has yet been discovered. It is a hard saying, but Mr. Eliot, more than any other man, is responsible for the great- est educational crime of the century against American youth — depriving him of his classical heritage. 28 It was probably inevitable that the required Greek-Latin part of the curriculum would suc- cumb, particularly in the twentieth century, because of a perception of the classical cur- riculum as elite in an egalitarian society, be- cause of a general antipathy to anything pre- scribed, because of the inability or unwilling- ness of preparatory schooling to teach ‘hard’ subjects, because of the knowledge explosion, because of the growing necessity of graduate education and the perceived need to devote more and more undergraduate time to pre- professional studies. But to those who experi- enced it, the passing of classical education is cause for lament not just for a particular alma mater but for western civilization. The old classical course was a great education and instrument of education. It fostered literacy, cultural perspective, and mastery of one’s own tongue. Morison’s judgment is still valid: no substitute has been found which does for students what the classics did. NOTES •Miguel A. Bernad, S.J., “The Faculty of Arts in the Jesuit Colleges in the Eastern Part of the United States” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale, 1951), pp. 139, 143. 2 Allan P. Farrell, S.J., The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education (Milwaukee: Bruce Pub- lishing Co., 1938), pp. 13-17, 359. 3 Charles A. Wagner, Harvard: Four Cen- turies and Freedoms (New York, E.P. Dutton, 1950), p. 103. Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey- Bass Publishers, 1977), p. 66. 5 Rudolph, p. 184. 6 Rudolph, p. 183. 7 Rudolph, p. 194. 8 Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard 1636-1936 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1946), p. 359. 9 Rudolph, p. 109. 10 Walter Crosby Eells, Academic Degrees (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 24. "Bernad, Chapter V. 12 Bernad, p. 259. "Bernad, p. 267. "George Wilson Pierson, Yale College: An Educational History, 1871-1921 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 46. "Pierson, p. 186. "Pierson, p. 187. "George Wilson Pierson, Yale: The Uni- versity College, 1921-1937 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 315. "Pierson, p. 315. "Proceedings of the Institute for Jesuit Deans, August 3-13, 1948, Denver, Colorado (Printed for private circulation by the Jesuit Education Association), p. 165. Boston Col- lege Archives. 20 Jesuit Education Association, Denver, p. 164. 2l Jesuit Education Association, Minutes of the Executive Committee Meeting of April, 1949, p. 6. Boston College Archives. 22 Jesuit Education Association, Executive Committee, p. 7. 23 Jesuit Education Association, Minutes of the Executive Committee Meeting of April 1955, p. 26. Boston College Archives. 24 Proceedings of the Santa Clara Institute for Jesuit College Deans, August 3-13, 1955 (Printed for private circulation by the Jesuit Education Association), p. 188. Boston Col- lege Archives. 25 See principally Proceedings of Institute for Jesuit Deans, Denver, 1948, p. 164; also Minutes of JEA Executive Committee Meet- ing, April 1949, pp. 9-10. Boston College Archives. 26 Report of the President of the Jesuit Education Association to the Board of Gov- ernors, April, 1958, p. 18. Boston College Archives. 27 Jesuit Education Association, Report of President, p. 23. 28 Morison, p. 389.