Enduring
Principles
Leadership, democracy and diversity courses merge the past with the
present
By Nicole St.Pierre
In one classroom, a lively discussion takes place about the
intellectual and moral dilemmas that challenged Republican leaders like
Thomas Jefferson.
Down the hall, students pore over “The Federalist Papers,” written by
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, which highlight the
republican and democratic principles that trace back to Athenian
democracy, the Roman republic and city-republics of early modern Italy.
Meanwhile, in another nearby class, students look to the writings of
Herman Melville to understand how the difference between white and
black became a social rather than a biological distinction.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget this is a classics department. In
intellectual circles, USC College has gained a reputation as being a
laboratory for the future of classics. “We strive to be innovative,
without sacrificing the disciplinary core,” says department chair
Thomas Habinek.
Indicative of this politically and socially engaged approach are three
courses in which students look to the ancient world to explore the
timeless concepts of leadership, democracy and diversity.
Several years ago, when the College created a new minor called Critical
Approaches to Leadership, associate professor of classics and
comparative literature Vincent Farenga was intent on incorporating the
classics. “You can’t fully understand contemporary leadership without
first examining the political and moral leadership qualities of
history’s tyrants, lawgivers, oligarchs, demagogues and autocratic
emperors,” he says.
Out of Farenga’s vision grew the undergraduate course “Leaders and
Communities: Classical Models.” Greek philosophers like Socrates and
Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism) are compared to leaders like
Pericles and Alexander the Great. Students question how political
counselor Niccolo Machiavelli redefined the morality of successful
leadership and community in the early modern age. They also dissect the
writings of Roman intellectuals like Cicero, Sallust and Seneca, to
better evaluate powerful generals and emperors like Julius Caesar and
Augustus.
Integrating the classic and contemporary into one syllabus seems to be
old hat for Farenga. Five years prior to his creation of the leadership
course, he pioneered a course in the College called “Democracies
Ancient and Modern,” in which students explore the formations,
achievements and ideologies of democratic and republican societies in
Athens, Rome, early modern Italy, the new American republic and the
contemporary world.
In the course, students study how Athenian democracy and the Roman
republic served as positive and negative models for later societies.
“I believe knowledge of the Greeks and Romans is only worth pursuing
for what it can tell us about ourselves and our societies today,” says
Farenga.
Farenga’s colleagues in the College embrace this approach, too. In the
general education course “Diversity and the Classical Western
Tradition,” Habinek’s teachings also look to the past to understand
modern-day challenges. In this course, which was one of the first
approved to the meet the university’s diversity requirement in 1992,
students examine the readings of Sophocles, Melville, William
Shakespeare and Karl Marx. As the texts are read—then re-read—they
become windows to analyze race, ethnicity, nationality, gender,
sexuality and religious differences within the Western tradition.
“Every society has grappled with a fault line of how to handle
diversity,” says Habinek, who came to USC from UC Berkeley thrilled to
find that USC encouraged a broad historical perspective on diversity in
its general education program. “Contemporary configurations of
diversity are not natural, but the result of complex historical
processes. Knowing how a category came into being, and how it has
transformed over time, helps us understand its use or abuse today.”
For example, students spend time reflecting on Herodotus’ depiction of
the ancient peoples of the Near East, asking questions such as: Does he
regard them as different ethnicities? Different races? And how is this
definition tied up with the power struggles between Greece and Persia
in his day and age?
“I think a real advantage of the course is that it allows students to
get some perspective on issues that too often spark only emotional or
defensive reactions.”
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