While the recession and its resultant budgetary issues hang over all of UIC, they may loom greatest over the Department of Classics and Mediterranean Studies. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is considering severe cuts to this department, which would result in the termination of its major in Latin and all instruction in Ancient Greek.

To cut costs, the College of LAS just last year had been forced to suspend the major in Italian, though Italian's faculty had shrunk to a point where the major would've been difficult to sustain. However, the classics program has stayed strong over the years with a full faculty of professors dedicated to this often-overlooked department and its students.

Created almost four decades ago by a few professors from the English department, UIC's classics curriculum is Chicago's only publicly funded college program in the classics. It is staffed by a regular faculty of PhDs, as there is no graduate program. As with all classics programs, classes are small compared to other areas of study, which has made it a prime target for cutbacks. Yet according to Professor Nanno Marinatos, Ancient Greek costs "very little to the university," as over half the classes have been taught since 1981 as "free overload" by professors on their own unpaid time.

Although this year has been a strong one for the department with the some of the highest enrollment sizes and the most majors it has ever seen, the department appears to have seen the need to revitalize its program. There are plans underfoot to stress the program's connection with Chicago's Greek community and to appeal to Greek-speaking students at UIC, to whom the difficult language of Ancient Greek would be more accessible. Most importantly, it will stress the academic and professional success that many classics majors attribute to their study of Latin and Greek.

Ancient Greek, for example, would be an invaluable asset to a student learning the philosophy of Plato, the poetry of Homer, or the theology of the New Testament, as many of the concepts in the original texts would be lost in translation. Marinatos says, "Greek is a highly conceptual language. And reading these authors in the original language is very rewarding for my students. They can appreciate its immense beauty and the tightness of its thought."

Classics majors often move on to very diverse fields, proving the value of their learning experience as being beyond just an expanded vocabulary. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, students with majors in the classics have higher acceptance rates into medical schools than those with solely biology or other science majors. In addition, they consistently score the highest on the GRE and according to Harvard Magazine, are more successful at getting into law school than those with political science, economics, and pre-law degrees.

According to professor and department head John Ramsey, studying the classics helps students become "good problem solvers, think accurately, and make good arguments," as having to decipher another language and comprehend its grammar would force the reader to sharpen their own thoughts.

Though often overlooked, the Department of Classics and Mediterranean Studies provides a 'pillar of support' to the rest of the university as the interdisciplinary nature of its field often makes it overlap with other areas of study, such as history, literature and philosophy. In fact, understanding Ancient Greek is absolutely integral to the teaching of ancient philosophy, and there's often collaboration between the classics and philosophy departments at UIC.

UIC is a campus that prides itself in its commitment to cultural diversity, and it appears that there can be as much to learn from ancient Greek and Roman politics, architecture, oratories, and histories as there is from any other culture present at the university.