Features Profiles

By Peggy Townsend

It had been a grueling 17 weeks of training, but Caroline Carpenter was on track to graduate from the Los Angeles Fire Department Academy—what recruits call “the Drill Tower”—when the unthinkable happened.

The 2013 Cowell College classical studies graduate had gotten high marks on skills like setting up 186-pound ladders and chopping holes into smoldering roofs when it came time for her last test. She was supposed to cut her way into a building using a heavy rotary saw. She fired up the tool and began to cut, realizing seconds into the maneuver that she’d forgotten to put on her safety glasses. Read the entire article here.

Michelle Plouse is a new Classical Studies student at UC Santa Cruz.  She grew up in Cupertino, and attended Monte Vista High School for two years and then finished at De Anza Middle College, from which she graduated in 2013. She likes history, and is especially interested in the neolithic, ancient, and medieval periods. She also loves the outdoors. She says enjoys “being outside in the trees, going on hikes, playing frisbee, running around in rivers, stuff like that.” She also likes to travel. Michelle visited South Africa and England as a child, and Singapore and India in the summer of 2013. 

Michelle says, “I started reading about ancient Greece and Rome in the third grade and it just kept getting more interesting. I obsessively read books and watched documentaries for my whole childhood. Then when I was a freshman in high school I read Herodotus and Thucydides and decided I had to learn Greek. So I spent the rest of high school studying classics on my own, waiting to get to a place with a Classical Studies program.” When noting reason why she chose to come study at UC Santa Cruz, Michelle said, “everyone I asked raved about the Classical Studies program and how close knit and full of awesome professors it was. I think I was really lucky to find a program where everyone is so passionate and really enjoys studying classics as much as I do. It’s a really fun and special group to be a part of.”

Patrick Stange grew up in Huntington Beach, California and after graduating from Mater Dei High School (Class of ’08) he came to UC Santa Cruz, knowing from the start that Classical Studies would be his major. Patrick quickly found a home among the students of the UC Santa Cruz Classical Studies program.

Unlike many UC Santa Cruz students, Patrick had already begun his study of Latin in high school, and was able to enroll in upper-division Latin classes as a freshman. He was selected by Professor Dan Selden to receive the student scholarship associated with the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in his sophomore year. He also began his study of Ancient Greek at UC Santa Cruz as a sophomore, and in 2011 received the Sol and Esther Draznin Classics Endowed Scholarship for an outstanding student of Ancient Greek. In 2012, he graduated with highest honors, intending to continue his studies in Latin and Greek literature. After completing the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Classics at UC Los Angeles in 2013, Patrick is now happily (and coldly) beginning a Ph.D. program in the Religion Department at the University of Toronto.

Patrick calls the years he spent at UC Santa Cruz “some of the happiest and most formative of my life.” Managing to combine excellence in his studies with “surfing perfect winter swells fired in from the north Pacific,” Patrick is an example of how UC Santa Cruz Classical Studies majors can combine broad interests in the Ancient world with extracurricular pursuits. He is still in touch with old professors and students and strives to see them and to visit Santa Cruz whenever possible. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without the guidance and encouragement offered by the faculty and atmosphere of UC Santa Cruz Classical Studies. I couldn’t think of a better place for anyone to grow and to discover both the past and themselves.”

Alex Clayden was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, spending most of his formative years in Danville, CA. He attended San Ramon Valley High School, where he graduated in 2009, hoping at the time to become a medical professional. His fallback plan was to be an actor. He had enjoyed great success in acting during his high school years, starring in many productions and winning awards. 

Alex came to UC Santa Cruz as a freshman, and spent his first years here preparing for a medical career, only to find he was far better suited to the study of history. He learned both Latin and Egyptian Hieroglyphs while at UC Santa Cruz, and graduated with a double major in History and Classical Studies with honors in 2013. He was the producer and director of the Classical Studies program’s productions of scenes from Aristophanes’ Clouds in Ancient Greek as part of the UC Santa Cruz International Playhouse in the spring of 2012. In 2013, he was the genius behind a wildly successful outdoor production of scenes from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Hrotsvitha’s Calimachus, and Egyptian Contendings of Horus and Seth, all performed in the original languages. Remarkable for his energy and leadership, Alex managed to hold down several jobs while excelling in his studies, and was a central figure in his cohort of Classical Studies majors. 

After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, Alex began a Master’s Degree in Ancient History at University College London, for which his dissertation will be written on the treatment of the corpse in Roman Europe. In London, he volunteers with a charity teaching Latin to underprivileged public school children, and works as a walking tour guide giving tours of Roman London and the Ancient Egyptian wing of the British Museum.

Alex says, “I blame the Classics program at UCSC entirely for my current career aspirations as a researcher and educator in the field, and couldn’t be happier about it.” After completing his MA at University College London, Alex plans to go on to get his PhD. Of his time at UC Santa Cruz, he says, “The warm, familial community of Classicists studying there was a highlight of the major…the professors, lecturers, and students at UC Santa Cruz would tell you no major could better endow a humanities scholar with a well-rounded and competent grasp of historical issues and skills in language which can be applied to the modern era.”

When Randall Nichols recently received a major award for his achievements as a high school classics teacher, it brought back fond memories of his former professors at UCSC.

In fact, the Cowell ’80 alum firmly believes that his experience at UCSC significantly changed the course of his life.

“Whenever I am asked why I became a high school classics teacher, I remember three professors from my undergraduate days at the University of California at Santa Cruz: John Lynch, Mary-Kay Gamel and Gary Miles,” Nichols wrote in a recent issue of the classics journal Amphora.

“The excellence of their teaching drew me to classics. They encouraged me along the way and their educational beliefs and practices have influenced mine.” 

Nichols is now in his 19th year of teaching Latin and Greek to 8th-12th graders at the Westminster Schools of Augusta, Georgia. He has been named STAR teacher in his county and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to study Greek and Latin lyric poetry in the summer under classics scholar Gregory Nagy at Harvard. He also serves on the Advisory Committee for the National Latin Exam.

But more important to Nichols are the awards that his students have received. On the 2003 National Latin Exam, 32 percent of them had perfect scores, 80 percent earned gold medals, 18 percent received silver medals, and 100 percent scored above the national average and received awards. His students have won National Greek and Latin Exam scholarships and they regularly place out of the first two years of Latin and Greek in college. Many of them go on to major in classics at prominent universities throughout the country. 

“I am equally proud of the fact that I rarely lose a student,” Nichols observed. “One can achieve high scores by ‘weeding out’ some students, or one can achieve low rates of attrition by lowering standards. I believe that the art of teaching rests in maintaining high standards without losing students.”

Nichols noted that the educational atmosphere at UCSC played a major role in his original decision to study at the campus.

“There was an emphasis on undergraduate teaching, which attracted me to it over some other better-known campuses,” Nichols said. “I was taught elementary Greek and Latin by experienced and knowledgeable faculty, not by graduate students or junior faculty.”

Nichols had particular praise for the “effectiveness of John Lynch’s remarkable teaching,” noting that Lynch made learning easier through his high standards, clear expectations, thorough preparation, compassion, and engaging style. “The mention of his name all these years later still evokes strong emotions,” Nichols said.

As he took more courses in the classics at UCSC, Nichols found that other faculty in the department shared Lynch’s gift for teaching. “Professor Mary-Kay Gamel provided me with a model of how to guide and encourage students inexperienced in literary interpretation,” he recalled. After recently coming across the first paper he ever wrote for her classics course, Nichols resolved to “make my future comments on students’ papers as merciful, judicious, and instructive as Professor Gamel’s were on mine.”

Nichols said that he has carried in his memory the images of his former classics professors at UCSC (who are all still at the campus) for more than two decades. In turn, he wonders what kind of images he is forming in the minds of his own students.

“It is humbling to think of the power that we wield, for better or for worse,” Nichols confided at the end of his journal article in Amphora. “I intend to provide my students with challenging and rigorous training, but I hope the image that I fashion will convey the patience, kindness, and respect that I experienced from John Lynch, Mary-Kay Gamel, and Gary Miles. Such images have the power to change a student’s life. They have changed mine.”

Article by Scott Rappaport

Victor Davis Hanson graduated from U.C. Santa Cruz in 1975, receiving a B.A. in Classical Studies with Highest Honors in his major and College Honors from Cowell. Currently, he is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Insititution at Stanford University. In addition, he is Professor Emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, and a syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

Victor Davis Hanson has attracted wide public and scholarly acclaim for his provocative perspectives on the demise of the family farm; the role of the humanities; war and military history; and the global role of the U.S. He is a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson, who is the fifth successive generation to live in the same house on his family’s farm, was a full-time orchard and vineyard grower from 1980 to 1984. He is the author of hundreds of articles, reviews, scholarly papers, and editorials on a wide range of topics and has written or edited 19 books, including Carnage and Culture (2001), a New York Times bestseller.

Hanson’s recently released book The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (2010) is an anthology of essays and reviews from the past decade. He also edited Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (2010), bringing top scholars together to explore warfare, strategy, and foreign policy in the Greco-Roman world.

“UCSC was an anomaly between 1971 and 1975,” says Hanson. “In those days, socially, culturally, and politically, campus life was unstructured, anarchistic, pure chaos. Yet educationally, the classics program, especially Greek and Latin language and literature, was traditional, philological, and structured. In other words, a wonderful 19th century Oxford sort of education amid 1970s Northern California. I learned a great deal from that odd marriage, namely that knowledge comes in many forms and that accepted conventions, hierarchy, titles, and certificates are not necessarily a guide to wisdom. At 18 that was a valuable lesson that has stayed with me the last 40 years.”