Professors and students seek to widen the appeal of classics

YAAMIR BADHE is looking forward to his final year as an Oxford classics student. He finds Latin and Greek texts a source of “wisdom, joy and consolation” and is dismayed by the idea that his degree course, taken by generations of grandees, might slacken its language requirements. He was among the students who objected last year when some faculty members floated the idea of dropping the compulsory study, in the original, of Homer and Virgil. The proposal was part of a discussion on how to make classics more accessible to students who did not attend high-powered schools.