At schools less wealthy than Princeton, the struggle isn't for status so much as for survival. In just the last six months, Howard University and the University of Vermont both eliminated their classics departments, citing the untenable costs of maintaining them. Other departments have survived only by making Greek and Latin optional. "We'd have fewer majors otherwise," said Eric Adler, a classicist at the University of Maryland. "We can't afford the requirements."

The scramble for students is in part a product of academia's consumerist culture, which treats education as an instrumental, customizable good. "Many institutions promise students that they can pursue their own interests and goals," said George Washington University's Samuel Goldman. "But it turns out that most students prefer pre-professional majors to the humanities and don't like prerequisites or distribution requirements, especially for language study. If we simply give the customers what they want, the liberal arts will struggle to survive."

Concessions to the customer often serve the interests of the ideological entrepreneur. Progressives are "very happy with the neoliberal curriculum," Adler told the Free Beacon, because it rejects the idea that some texts are more important than others. Meanwhile, the "strategic initiatives" that culminate in cuts to classics have also tended to culminate in the creation of diversity offices. In 2017, for example, the University of Tulsa launched a five-year plan to "empower" students to "bring value to others." Greek and Latin were deemed insufficiently valuable and axed as a result—but the university was happy to foot the bill for a "diversity outreach admissions counselor" who would advance "student recruitment."

Academic corporatization did not begin with corporate progressivism, however. Its roots date back to the mid-19th century, when universities transitioned from a prescribed curriculum to an elective-based one. That transition was spearheaded by Charles Eliot, Harvard University's 21st president, who abolished long-standing liberal arts requirements and gave students unprecedented freedom to choose their classes. In so doing, he conceived of education as a kind of free market: Disciplines that attracted sufficient student attention would prosper and live; those that didn't would die.

The result, says Adler, was "a race to the bottom in which every discipline had to act as its own salesperson." Classics could no longer take students for granted, but had to justify itself amid curricular competition.

The justification classicists settled on is still with us today: Learning Greek and Latin might not have any direct utility, they argued then, but it would promote habits of "mental discipline"—the 19th century term for "critical thinking."

This was a novel argument. From the Mayflower Compact to the Civil War, American universities had viewed classics as a means of moral formation. They did not teach Homer and Virgil to make students smarter, but to make them better. It was only after academia became a market, governed by the amoral churn of supply and demand, that classics received a market-based rationale.

The corporatization of classics may be sold as a victory for diversity. In truth, it is anything but. Contemporary humanities are obsessed with the study of different cultures, one classicist observed. "How are you going to understand ‘the other' if you don't learn their language?"

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