After 12 hours in a van, five classics students and Associate Professor of Classical Studies Joseph Garnjobst made it to Stockton University near Atlantic City, New Jersey, for the 87th annual convention of Eta Sigma Phi, the national classics honorary.
Seniors Josh Benjamins and LaRae Ferguson, junior Sydney Sparks, and sophomores Rachelle Ferguson and Luke Martin attended the conference and took home five out of the 18 possible awards they could win, the most of any school in attendance.
Despite Hillsdale’s great success, Garnjobst stressed that it’s never “us vs. them.”
“There aren’t winners and losers,” Garnjobst added. “This is really a celebration of great work by classicists. We are very supportive of each other and they are cheering us on.”
He said, unlike many disciplines in which your peers can be “strangely malicious,” the classicist crowd may be one of the most supportive audiences you can get.
He made certain to mention that Washington University in St. Louis took four awards and Kenyan College won Advanced Greek. Additionally, Grace Koch of St. Olaf University tied with Benjamins for first place in the advanced Latin competition.
“That’s a streak at St. Olaf that goes back 35 years,” Garnjobst said. “They have won a prize every year since 1980.”
He said he’s proud of how Hillsdale did because they can never expect to win.
“You can’t expect wins like that,” he said. “You always have hard competition and there are really talented classicists out there.”
There were six competitions: Advanced and intermediate Greek, advanced and intermediate Latin, the Latin prose competition, and the Koine Greek competition.
Senior Joshua Benjamins won first place in Latin prose, first in Koine, and third in advanced Latin. Senior LaRae Ferguson earned second in Advanced Greek and third in Koine.
Benjamins said the Latin prose is unlike the other competitions, where you translate Greek or Latin into English. This test requires students to translate an English passage into Latin.
“The prose competition was the funnest and most difficult,” Benjamins said. “We translated a speech by JFK about world peace.”
LaRae Ferguson, who also took the test, agreed about the difficulty of the exam.
“It’s very strange. In Dr. Weaire’s class, he drills into us that Latin doesn’t have abstract nouns and this was filled with them,” she said.
Students had to take abstract ideas like “love” and “happiness” and determine how Caesar or Cicero would write about them in concrete terms.
“It requires a much higher level of creativity,” Benjamins said.
In addition to winning awards, two Hillsdale students, Benjamins and Rachelle Ferguson, presented two out of three papers at the conference. Benjamins took first place with his paper on Telemachus’s maturation in the first three books of Homer’s “Odyssey.” Rachelle Ferguson said her paper was on the “mysterious pastoral” in Virgil’s Ecologues.
“I look at one image – shadows – and see it as a pastoral motif that represents what Virgil thinks of the whole genre,” she said.
In addition to winning awards, students dealt with general business, such as giving reports on what each school’s chapters are doing and voting on colleges and universities who want to start a chapter next year, Garnjobst said. They also give out scholarships to study abroad in Italy, Rome, or Athens, as well as an archeology scholarship.
They learned about a medieval handwriting app which allows students to tap on a word written in a medieval text and instantly transcribe it into English letters. There was even a session on Greek dancing.
“This is the largest collection of undergrad classicists,” Garnjobst said. “No one really questions your major at Hillsdale because they understand how the classics fit in.”
Garnjobst said a college like the University of Michigan would need 3,300 classics students in order to have a proportional representation like at Hillsdale. At a school like that, students are constantly defending their Greek or Latin majors.
“It’s nice to have the support at this conference and it’s a lot of fun to be around a group like that,” Garnjobst said.
Benjamins said it was a fun weekend and worth the many hours of tedious driving.
“It’s a great experience to get out of Michigan and meet people interested in these things,” LaRae Ferguson said.
