Gabriel Parlin is a good friend of Duraiswamy, and the two make an odd, engaging pair. Parlin carries with him the air of a person not entirely at home in this world. Bespectacled, bookish, and brilliant, he speaks in perfectly formed critical appraisals of the things around him. He credits excellent teachers in high school and college for the fact that he now reads Dostoevsky in Russian and Goethe in German. But he found himself stalling in Greek class, and he came to the conclusion that he needed to read more easy texts before starting on difficult ancient literature. He was recapitulating an insight of language acquisition theorists known as “comprehensible input:” language learners are better off reading lots of picture books and fairy tales before they try to tackle Milton or Aeschylus.

Parlin has a particular vision for what good language acquisition looked like: Jamie Rankin’s German course at Princeton. “It is by far the best course I’ve ever taken in my life,” Parlin declares. Parlin is not alone in thinking this: Rankin has been considered one of Princeton’s best teachers for decades (he won the President’s Award for Teaching in 1996), and is now director of Princeton’s Center for Language Study. Rankin, the author of an excellent online textbook for German called DerDieDas, has not only thought and read deeply about language acquisition, but has become a superior instructor himself: “He knew what he was doing every single minute of that course,” Parlin says. “He had keyed out a list of the vocabulary words that are most important for acquisition, and he returned to them again and again until we had mastered them. Every single word he spoke in that classroom, for the entire length of the course, he spoke for a reason.”

Needless to say, this is a high standard — the class period as Gesamtkunstwerk — for any teacher to aspire to. But Parlin and Duraiswamy thought this was no time for Classicists — or anyone in the Humanities, really — to be complacent. They penned a five-page proposal — really a manifesto— asking Princeton to offer a spoken Latin course based on the best available pedagogical models:

As we envision it, the course would meet 5 times a week and would be conducted entirely in Latin. During class, students would do various activities to exercise the faculties of speaking and listening. Such activities might include paraphrasing and explaining easy texts, listening to stories and responding to questions about them, and discussing aspects of ancient history and culture…. Homework would emphasize the other two faculties of language, writing and reading. Writing assignments would differ from those of a traditional prose composition class in two ways. First, all assignments would be free composition in Latin rather than translation from English to Latin. Second, rather than composing small pieces of complex prose, students would write large amounts of easy prose…. The reading assignments would also differ from those of a standard reading course. Normally, students are required to read short selections of very difficult texts. In this course, following the advice of language pedagogy experts, students would read large amounts of easy texts of which they could read 10–15 pages an hour. Per week, therefore, we imagine that students would read at least 40–50 pages of Latin, if not more. Among the texts that we would recommend for this type of extensive reading are Hans Orberg’s Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata series, graded Latin readers, and possibly, if students make enough progress, easier ancient texts such as Eutropius, Hyginus, Florus, and Nepos.

They got 26 students to pledge to take such a course if offered, and five professors within the Classics Department supported and signed the petition themselves. Duraiswamy and Parlin then sent it to Andrew Feldherr, the chair of the Classics Department, who, when I asked him about the course and the petition, described himself as “impressed:”

I was impressed by their thoughtfulness about the contributions of this mode of learning Latin, and especially by the strong interest they were able to attest from their fellow students. That really is crucial for us: if we are going to try to implement a new initiative like this we need to know that it will enroll enough students, which this one certainly has.

Feldherr took the proposal to the Office of the Dean of the College, which promised to provide funding for an additional course. Most of the news in the Humanities is bad, but this is the good side of any crisis: there is strong incentive to adapt. And with any adaptation comes at least the potential for renewal.