When President
E. P. Tenney took over the inchoate Colorado
College in 1876 (the summer of Custer’s Last Stand, of the Nation’s
Centennial
and of Colorado’s statehood), his first educational move was to hire W. D.
Sheldon and send him to Colorado Springs to begin instruction in classics.
Sheldon taught mostly preparatory students (it was six years before anyone
graduated with a bachelor’s degree) and he gave himself to the general
educational development of the new state with op/ed pieces on compulsory
education and a leadership role in the state education association. Tenney
built Cutler Hall and pushed a very ambitious, evangelical program for the
College that came to grief over his land speculations in 1884. Sheldon stayed
through the subsequent interregnum and the start of W.F.Slocum’s long
administration, departing for the East in 1890. He later published a nice
translation of works of Lucian : A second-century satirist : or, Dialogues and
stories from Lucian of Samosata (San Francisco, 1901, copy in the Special
Collections, Tutt Library).
Slocum, in turn,
led the College into its first golden age (1888-1917). Classics in his time was
headed by Prof. M. C. Gile, who taught from 1892 until his death in 1916. Gile
was a classic classics teacher: grammatically precise and demanding, gentle and
understanding. He was also a community leader, a pillar of the First Baptist
Church (his background was Andover and Brown) and a founder of the Colorado
Springs National Bank with Willis Armstrong ’99 as head teller (subsequently
CEO and a long-time CC trustee): after several buy-outs the bank has joined
Wells Fargo, but the Gile and Armstrong descendants continue strong in Colorado
Springs and in support of CC.
Another Slocum-era
professor was Ernest Bréhaut, who taught Latin and history and, after leaving
CC in 1911, published what was for long the standard translation of Cato the Censor on Farming (New York,
1933).
When the Slocum
presidency crashed and burned in 1917, with loss of many of the golden age
faculty, Gile’s successor, Princetonian Charles Christopher Mierow became a
faculty leader, Acting President (1923-25) and President (1925-33). Mierow, a
disciple of Andrew Fleming West of the Princeton Graduate College, studied
classics as part of a tradition of Christian humanism. He
worked on Jordanes' Gothic History, of
which he published the standard English translation (Princeton, 1908), Isidore
of Seville and Otto of Freising (The two
cities; a chronicle of universal history to the year 1146 A.D., translated
with commentary, New York, 1928). He celebrated the 12th century
Renaissance in the construction of Shove Chapel (1931), and he also,
incidentally, presided over the end of the College’s Latin requirement (also
1931).
Mierow’s other
duties meant that classics was taught in his time largely by others: his
younger brother Herbert from 1918-43, Dorothy Printup from 1921 (when she left
her University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation project on Plautine comedy to
replace Herbert Mierow as he worked on his M.A. at Princeton) until 1925 when,
now married to the historian Archer
Hulbert, she relinquished the duties to
Marjorie Davis ’19 (who taught from 1925-28 and whose M. A. thesis on Roman
mining is in Special Collections). Dorothy Printup Hulbert, after her first
husband’s death in 1933, gave her scholarly attention to his unpublished work
on western history, continuing in that field through many years and, as Dorothy
Bryson, receiving an honorary LLD degree in 1989. Meanwhile the Gile
descendants began the endowment of a professorship in his honor, which was held
first by Herbert Mierow from 1925-43.
The second golden
age of Colorado College did not begin until the1950s. Meanwhile, minus a Latin
requirement, classics teaching was suspended from Herbert Mierow’s retirement
in 1943 until Stephanie Jakimowitz came in 1946. She represented a new
generation of scholarship, with a Cornell dissertation on
andreia (courage:
that series of dissertations included also Helen North's well-known treatment of
sophrosyne moderation). She, however, left the College
with her husband, Ed Benton ’50, in 1951, leading to an era of intermittent
classics at CC. In 1955, the great Louis Benezet assumed the Presidency, with
the stated purpose of bringing the College program, faculty and campus to a new
level. He was, however, convinced that “the world’s classic treasures” had been
sufficiently translated into English, and he was content for Pres. Mierow, retired after two decades at
Carleton College, to teach some courses in Greek and history, and for Bob
Ormes, outdoorsman and English prof., to teach Latin some of the time. Until
1965 CC had no full-time Classics Department.
CC’s
longest-running classics faculty is the current department: Owen Cramer 1965-
and Marcia Dobson 1976- , both of whom have served longer than any other
classics faculty person. (Charles Mierow’s 45 years of association with the
College were interrupted by decades of service at Carleton). Owen was hired after
several years of discussion among faculty including philosopher J. Glenn Gray.
A Homerist with training in the literary/Poundian graduate program at the
University of Texas (Arrowsmith,
Sullivan), Owen has produced CC curriculum rather
than classical scholarship. After a decade as a single-person department with
no major, he was joined in 1976 by Marcia, a Harvard Ph.D. specializing in
oracular language in Aeschylus, on a base of Renaissance studies (M.A. Tufts),
who has gone on to deepen her interest and training in psychoanalysis with a
second Ph.D. from the Pacifica Graduate Institute.
They reintroduced
a department major in 1980, joined in the formation of the
Classics-History-Politics major in 1983 and the Comparative Literature major in
1986, and have worked with about 100 classics majors, some of whom are now
faculty members themselves. On sabbaticals they have been replaced by Paul Roth
(1980-81), Jim Tucker (1987-90), Lisa Hughes (1995-97 and again 2002- in a
visiting and then adjunct role) and Craig Dethloff (2003). Trish FitzGibbon joined the
department in 1999 as a part-time instructor in Latin and has gone on to teach
nearly full time as a “Visiting Assistant Professor” and to direct the Summer
Latin Institute.
With the fall of 2006, classics faculty ended a 40-year stay in Armstrong Hall, moving to offices in Cossitt.
--page created by Owen Cramer 2005, revised October 2006