The current political season has provided more than one object lesson for Calvin College classics students. The rhetoric of the candidates and even the word candidate have their roots in the Greek and Roman civilizations that classics majors at Calvin study. 
"Candidate," says Calvin classics professor Mark Williams (above), "actually comes from a Latin word which literally meant clean clothes. In the ancient world those running for office would put on their best and cleanest clothes when they went out seeking the support of the people. They were quite easily distinguished from the common working man, for example the blacksmith. The Latin word used to describe them is our modern word candidate." 
Williams adds that political rhetoric too has its roots in the ancient civilizations. 
"The art of persuasion," he says, "was invented by the Greeks and the Romans perfected it. And they knew all about dirty politics and smear campaigns. Cicero could smear with the best of them. We tell political science students 'if you want to know about the ancient versions of Lee Atwater, talk to us.'" 
But, Williams is quick to point out, classics is much more than ancient politics. He points to politics as an example of how classics relates to current events, but he is proud of his field not just for those connections, but rather what it imparts to those who study and steep themselves in the craft of classics. 
"The scary thing about a humanities major such as classics," he says, "is that you don't know what you'll be doing in four or five years. But that's also the nice thing. You're not roped into one specific thing. And we've found that classics majors go into all sorts of interesting careers, everything from law to marketing to politics. What classics does is help students think outside the box. When you study the ancient world long enough you begin to think inside its box. But what you realize is that their boxes are not the same as our boxes. When you're in the ancient box you're outside the modern box. So classics students tend to be very interesting and analytical thinkers." 
Williams says that classics is a significant part of a liberal arts education, but thinks the discipline has a special function at a Christian college such as Calvin. 
"That world is the milieu in which the early church developed and thrived," he says. "If you don't understand the pagan world in which Christianity took root and flourished you don't understand the roots of our own faith. Studying classics is like tracing the family tree of Christianity." 
In fact there was a time when classics majors at Calvin College tended to be pre-seminary students. Williams notes those days are long gone, effectively ended when seminaries began eliminating the Latin and Greek requirements for seminary entrance. Williams admits that the drop off in seminary students hurt his department for a while. 
"This department had some real lean years," he says, "but now we're really doing well. We have about 40 majors which makes us one of the biggest undergrad classics departments in the entire state. This year we had two full sections of first-year Greek and most of those students are sticking with Greek." 
Williams says there are two factors at work in Calvin's rising classics enrollments. The first is local; the second national. 
"The one thing we did at Calvin," he says, "which might seem anathema to academia is we put a business plan together. My dad ran a pretty successful tire business and I went through some of his old business plans and put together a plan for the Calvin classics department. So, for example, we now concentrate pretty heavily on our introductory Greek and Latin classes because we want students to have their first experience be a good one. We try to make our department not just an academic place but also a social place. We have field trips, picnics and dinners. Profs and students have coffee together. The idea is that we want to create a learning community." 
The Calvin classics department also is benefiting from an increased interest in classics at a national level. In the early 1960s almost 750,00 students were enrolled in Latin at U.S. colleges and universities. As the 60s unfolded enrollment was cut in half as, says Williams, the counterculture spurned what it considered an elitist and irrelevant discipline. But, in the early 1980s the pendulum swung back as parents pushed hard to keep Latin in the high schools, a trend, says Williams, that continues today. 
Enrollment in high school Latin classes has doubled since the late 1960s and early 1970s and colleges are benefiting from a percolation up into the post-secondary ranks. 
Calvin now has four full-time professors in the Classics department. 
Ken Bratt, with a Ph.D. from Princeton, represents the old guard and teaches an array of classes, including those on ancient art and architecture. Williams, the department chair, owns a Ph.D. from Illinois and has been at Calvin for 15 years while teaching Latin, Greek, classical mythology and other courses. Mark Gustafson, who has a Ph.D. from Minnesota, is an expert on ancient tattoos and brandings and also teaches Latin, Greek and other courses. And Karalee Harding, who has a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley, joined the department in 1997 and is an expert in Homer who teaches Latin, Greek and classical literature.