2006 Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of the Classics

2006 Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics

Once every year classics majors and minors at Loyola Marymount University are fortunate enough to be invited to "Getty-Spaghetti," which consists of a visit to the Getty Museum followed by a spaghetti dinner at the home of Professor Matthew Dillon. If that were not enough, Dillon also holds annual "Beginning of Semester" and "End of the Semester" barbeques at his home. Additionally, Dillon serves annually as the Master of Ceremonies for the Classics Department's Dionysus Festival, which he founded fifteen years ago. Known more familiarly as D-Fest, this student-run extravaganza has grown under Dillon's leadership into a major university-wide event. This kind dedication to his students and his profession lead both colleagues and students to praise Matthew Dillon as an exemplary in many ways.

In his twenty year career at Loyola Marymount Dillon has not only managed to be productive scholar, especially in the area of ancient drama, but he has also become an active archaeologist with his work on the Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey Project. Yet, in the past five years alone he has taught seventeen different courses in addition to a variety of independent studies. These courses include titles like "Myth in Literature," "Latin in Fascist Italy," and "Cilician Pottery Studies," as well as more prosaic courses like "Latin Reading Comprehension" and "Ancient Historians in Translation."

It is no surprise then, that one of his students describes him as a "Renaissance man. Another calls him "a true role model and friend." A third explains with enthusiasm how Dillon transforms classics into "a subject that is both complete relevant to our day and time, and also absolutely enjoyable." Because of this commitment to teaching, Dillon was named this year as Special Assistant to the Chief Academic Officer with special responsibility for faculty teaching and the University core curriculum.

At Loyola Marymount Dillon has served as departmental chair for the last four years and, previously, served as the chair of Loyola Marymount's Interdisciplinary Studies program. For this program Dillon organized and helped teach a remarkably original course entitled "The Axial Age" which studies cultural interconnections among China, India, Persia and Greece in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. His responsibilities as chair of this interdisciplinary program included appropriate public presentations. So in 2002 he organized a symposium entitled "Ancient Crossroads: Greece and India" and in 2004 he himself became dramaturg for an elaborate production of Aeschylus' Persians.

Even more noteworthy, perhaps, are his outreach activities. He was the Latin language consultant for Sony Pictures' De Vinci Code. He is an active member of the Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin Literature and is well-known both in this Golden State and nationally for his public readings. At the same time he has served the California Classical Association-South as president, vice-president, newsletter editor and program organizer. When he finds time to sleep is hard to imagine!

Yet he has managed to reach out even further into his community with In Africa, an introductory Latin course designed for the College Bound Program and intended to help minority high-school students gain entrance to the college of their choice. Dillon is in the process of producing his own textbook for this course which promises to an impact beyond Los Angeles and California and to bring the classics to a broader constituency throughout the United States.

In the words of one of his students, Dillon is best described not in the saccharine style of Hollywood-this is no "Dead Poet's Society"-but as an earnest Classicist doing his job well."

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Few in our profession perform at the highest levels of both scholarship and teaching. Our various roles of researchers, mentors, and purveyors of the value of classical culture to the modern world are often viewed as discreet, with one area sometimes obscuring the others. Lunchtime discussions often reflect the difficulty of finding a balance between these three areas.

However, one winner of this year’s teaching award took his PhD from Berkeley, a Santa Barbara MA, and his undergraduate degree from Brown, and not surprisingly enjoys numerous awards and honors, such as a Rome Prize. A mid-career associate professor, until recently he served as chair of his department. He has been called by one of his colleagues, “extraordinary and inspiring”, while another writes of his “extraordinary… commitment to the undergraduate program”, and a third speaks of his “unparalleled contributions” to the same program. Yet more extraordinarily, perhaps, he has found a very natural way to keep all aspects of his work and life in proper equilibrium. In one part of that equilibrium, service to his community, he is an associate docent for the Gamble House in Pasadena, where he inspires appreciation of historic architecture. He has also selflessly worked in several capacities for the AIDS Project of Los Angeles, for which volunteerism he garnered a service award. While doing all this, he has thrived as a scholar, having published several articles and having given numerous papers. His crowning scholarly achievement is his 1997 book, Actium and Augustus, about which one reviewer notes that it “displays an enviable control of Roman history, numismatics, archaeology, art history, topography, and literature….” The book, then, like its author, reflects the proper balance of a number of different sources of knowledge and inspiration.

But his teaching emerges for featured consideration here. He has offered numerous undergraduate and graduate classes on a variety of topics, from “Film and Society: The Hollywood Myth of Ancient Rome” to “Reading Horace: Poetry, Politics, and Augustus.” His range is truly impressive, and he has shown remarkable dexterity in moving easily from various Honors collegia to classics classes per se, some with archeological titles such as “Re-Discovering Pompeii,” and others socio-historical or highly philological (e.g. “Male Identity and Sexuality in Ancient Rome,” and “Latin Prose Composition,” to take an example from each category). In addition, he frequently teaches graduate seminars.

His graduate seminars demonstrate not simply his range in teaching but also his range in mentoring. It is one thing to stand before one’s students and with wit and wisdom make an undergraduate class fun—although that is itself not always an easy task!—and another thing also to find the time to help graduate students develop and thrive within the pressures and long haul of a top-flight graduate program. Yet such mentoring has been another of his hallmarks, and he has done it and numerous administrative tasks with apparent effortlessness that obscures countless hours spent preparing for classes and doing research. If asked, he would undoubtedly say without hesitation that his administrative work and his scholarship are simply extensions of his natural didactic impulse.

His students certainly speak about him without hesitation. One called his Augustan Literature class “easily the hardest class I ever took,” while another quipped (rather poetically) about his “courteous but strict evaluation… which acts as an emollient to the language’s chafing ambiguity.” One of his Age of Nero students (presumably a freshman) called him “awesome,” at least one member of every one of his classes called him “excellent,” and no small number said that he was “the best” that they had had in their collegiate career. For example, one of his Tacitus students said that he is among “the finest instructors,” while another in that same class called him, “a courageous scholar who actually gives a [expletive] about teaching. And he’s helpful,” the quote goes on, “and personable, which I guess makes him just about perfect.” While nearly everyone in this room has had good course evaluations, very few of us have been called “just about perfect.”

And who is this almost perfect instructor who has managed to combine the poles of the professional life, integrating in an entirely natural way what many see as merely synthetic components of our discipline, such as teaching and research, graduate and undergraduate education, service and professional responsibility, humor and seriousness, rigorously high standards and extremely high popularity? UCLA’s Robert Alan Gurval is a very deserving winner of one of the 2006 APA Prizes for Excellence in Teaching.

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The University of Missouri is blessed with a large Department of Classical Studies, with about a dozen faculty and a PhD program. So we take special notice when a recent chair singles out one of his colleagues as “the keystone of this department,” the department’s top teacher, and the man who revitalized the program. That man is David Schenker.

Schenker is an academic triple threat, excelling in large lecture classes, small discussion groups, and graduate seminars. At every level, he brings to his work a passion for Classics and a desire to connect with students and make a difference in their lives. Students describe him as one who “makes the class laugh and want to learn at the same time”; who can excite and entertain students, and do it with enough substance to keep them taking notes all the while. One even goes so far as to write, “I can honestly say I enjoyed waking up and attending such a wonderful class.”

Schenker’s ability to dazzle is coupled with a rare ability to meet students on their own level, high or low. He spurs his best students on to win top university awards. For those who struggle, he provides continual encouragement and a comfortable classroom atmosphere. “No question was a bad question,” says one of his students, “and even the questions with obvious answers were turned into good lessons.” Another credits him with doing “a brilliant job of always working with whatever translation, no matter how bizarre, students put forward.” Says another, “I have never been a part of a class where every student so willingly, indeed so enthusiastically, participated each day; truly Professor Schenker brought out the best in all of us.”

The person least impressed with Schenker’s teaching may be Schenker himself. His self-evaluations can be breezy, off-hand, and self-deprecating. Of an experiment in team teaching, he writes, “I felt we often ended up confusing the poor students, but they seemed to enjoy it.” Studying Thucydides in Greek composition was “maybe not the best idea, since he served frequently as a negative paradigm for our own compositions.” This is the voice of a modest but confident man willing to experiment, and then tear it up cheerfully and do it all differently the next time around.

Schenker’s experiments began early in his career at Missouri. He came to campus in 1991, just two years out of graduate school, and was called on to redesign the curriculum, top to bottom, for a struggling program. Since then, the number of majors in the department has doubled. He has also been active in keeping up with such more recent developments as writing across the curriculum, the senior capstone experience, and service learning.

Schenker is also active in taking Classics beyond his university’s regular programs. He volunteers his services to give talks for schools and community programs. In 1994 he started teaching Latin twice a week in elementary school. He took this new venture seriously, spending a lot of time sifting through available materials until he found what he wanted, and he brought to it his usual thoughtfulness and readiness to meet students on their own level.. His first class, he writes, was “undoubtedly the brightest group of students I have ever taught at any level . . . all of them able to draw connections with a speed and facility that often left me gasping.” Teaching college students involves a lot of effort “to rouse them from their stupor,” but with elementary schoolers the task is “to direct their stunning energies into productive or at least socially acceptable channels.”

Schenker also has kept up his research, with articles in top journals, and compiled a lengthy record of service. Activities include committee work to revise university curricular requirements, advising new faculty on teaching, and service as department chair, advisor of Phi Beta Kappa and the Classics honorary society Eta Sigma Phi, and president of the Missouri Classical Association. He is, in short, a complete classicist and a complete University citizen, fully deserving of recognition by the APA College Teaching Award.