The Van Dyke of Classics

He was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a college professor of music, and he was raised on an American college campus after a brief stint in Toronto. He is one of the country's foremost scholars in Greek and Latin and is currently leading a new movement in the study of the classics. In 1980, Boston magazine named him one of the 10 sexiest professors in the Boston area.

The biography seems quite cosmopolitan, so it is somewhat surprising that Gregory J. Nagy (pronounced "Nazh"), professor of Latin and Greek, calls himself "by temperment, a Midwesterner." He was raised in the heartland--not on a farm, but on the campus of the University of Indiana, which he attended. "I find Indiana, and the Midwest in general just a very friendly place, having most of the cultural benefits that you get elsewhere," he says. "Maybe you just have to work more for it."

Perhaps it is the odd combination of Eastern European, intellectual and Midwestern values that accounts for Nagy's vast popularity at Harvard. In contrast to the elitism and even eccentricism which seems to afflict so many scholars. Nagy is both self-assured and self-effacing. He speaks with great knowledge and conviction about his work, but always with an undertone of modesty.

Best known to undergraduates for his Core curriculum course, Literature and Arts C-14. "The Concept of the Hero in Hellenic Civilization," Nagy has earned an unmatched reputation for concern for his students. Two years ago, his colleagues elected him to a three-year term on the Faculty Council. He is chairman of the Committee on Folklore and Mythology and a member of two other departments.

Married for seven years and father of two children, Nagy calls himself a family man "with a vengeance." He once took "a paternity leave" to become the primary parent for his son while his wife, Holly Davidson, pursued her Ph.D. at Princeton. "We still think we are newlyweds, but I guess we're not," he says. "As Dick Van Dyke would say, we're very happily married."

Nagy's small Widener Library office--located behind one of those forbidding iron fences--is sparsely decorated, mostly with pictures reflecting not his interest in Roman and Greek cultures, but the culture of Pakistan, a fascination of his wife's. There are few books, the desk is uncluttered, and there is a small clock radio for diversion.

The professor projects a very relaxed image, dressed in blue jeans and sneakers, his curly brown hair comfortably mussed. He reflects on his college days, on how a young student at the University of Indiana became hypnotized by the classics and linguistics. "Quite honestly, I drifted into it. It just seemed to go well." He says he was not one of those who grew up reading Homer and Plato and indeed found himself lacking in his knowledge of the basic classics when he came to Harvard as a graduate student in 1962.

As an undergraduate, he says, he merely took courses that interested him--usually having something to do with Greece or Rome--and was not anxious to fulfill his general education requirements. One memorable course was titled, "The Greek Erotic Novel."

"That was what college was all about, taking a lot of interesting topics," he says, adding quickly, "not that I had any clear professional notion of what I would do with it."

It is with this philosophy still intact that Nagy says he worries about what he perceives is an over-emphasis on academic success. While not blaming either students or professors directly, he says the current emphasis could be preventing students from fully benefiting from their years at Harvard:

"The University really expects students to work hard, and I like that....but I can also see various dangers, the most important of which is that students become so concerned with having a good record that they can be tempted to lose track of what they are here for primarily, which is to learn how to think effectively and creatively."

"One of the few things I can do," adds Nagy, "is to make sure that when students read, they read slowly and carefully, and to make sure people have the opportunity to read things more than once."

"Opportunity" is a word that Nagy uses quite frequently in reference to Harvard. He says that the University offers so many educational opportunities to both students and professors that most do not take full advantage of them.

"A lot of times, I think students and professors don't put enough research into what opportunities are available," he explains. "I know a lot of undergraduates, who by their senior year, it is so clear what additional courses they might have taken--should have taken."

Nagy encourages students to seek out professors whose work they admire in order to establish a closer working relationship that the average lecture course provides. He also recommends that students take time off from conventional studies: "Undergraduate life is not something to be rushed."

Nagy says his attitude towards student education is reflected in his teaching of Lit. and Arts C-14, where he has purposely kept the quantity of reading down in the hope that students will use the extra time for a careful analysis of the texts. But he says he is aware that some students have misinterpreted the weight of the workload and labeled the course a "gut."

"I know it's not a gut--how's that?" he responds. "That particular criticism may bother me, but there's not much I can do about it. If people perceive a reading load with fewer pieces of literature but where I try to insist on having that read carefully and really mastered, if they perceive that as a gut, fine."

Last year, Nagy shocked a number of gut seekers by announcing paper assignments during the introductory lecture. The immediate result, he recalls, was that "about 200 people didn't show up the next time, which is not what I intended. I was more surprised than anybody."

"It's not that I wanted to make [the course] harder. I just wanted to make sure people read what I assigned, at the times that I assigned it. It's vital for communication, and I'll do anything to facilitate that." He adds, "I suppose it's no loss to people who had that superficial notion of the course.

Like another Harvard classicist, John H. Finley '25, last year's Commencement speaker, Nagy has become a true "Harvard man." He came to the University 20 years ago as a graduate student, and has served as a teaching assistant, a tutor, an assistant professor, and since 1975, a full professor. His only time away from the University was spent as a professor at Johns Hopkins from 1973 to 1975.

Recalling the "turbulent" years of Vietnam protests in the late 1960s, Nagy says he "was sympathetic of what my students were going through." But he says he perceives a definite shift in both student and faculty attitudes since that time. Referring to his colleagues, he says. "In those days, I think people felt if they signed petitions or manifestos, they were really accomplishing something. I think few of us would feel that way now, although some professors still do these things." As for students, Nagy says the emphasis on careerism has greatly lessened student activism.

Professionally, Nagy has been quite active in both student-Faculty and Faculty-administration relations, serving on the Faculty Council and the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE). He says his two years on the council have been especially interesting because "you can see first-hand how not just the Faculty but the administration is thinking about the important issues that confront the University." As a member of the CUE and as chairman of the Committee on Folklore and Mythology, Nagy says he has been able to work towards his goal of greater student-Faculty contact.

But it is in the area of the classics that Nagy says he wants to make his most important contribution. He is currently constructing a new method of studying the classics, drawing on his background in linguistics. The traditional method of study has been used since the 19th century; and while Nagy says he expects no resistance to his theories from the Classics Department, he does expect a challenge from classicists in other disciplines.

"In classics, you can't come up with something, say it's new, and expect people to fall down and worship it," Nagy says, "and that's the way it should be." Instead of dismissing potential challengers as wrong, Nagy says that upon meeting resistance, he "will want to rethink my theories and present them in a way that my classicist colleagues find acceptable. To me, you see, it is really important to maintain all lines of communication."

One thing that Nagy and his more traditional classicist colleagues have in common is their love for the subject. "You know, a lot of people think the classics--as represented by Greek and Roman literature--are simply a repository of dead literature," he says, smiling.

But Nagy explains that the classics are much more than just well-written literature: "If you focus in on Homeric poetry, one of the oldest forms of poetry in Greece, what you really have is the survival of the fittest, to put it cruelly. And you ask yourself, why did the Illiad and the Odyssey survive, and why did they become the epic for the Greek city-states. What was in them that made them such a universal expression of what it means to be Greek as opposed to barbarian. They are an expression of what it means to be educated, what it means to be wise. To us, they are narratives, but for many societies, the narrative is a way of organizing reality, what a society's values are."

Asked to recall his 1980 selection as one Boston's top 10 professorial studs, Nagy says, "As one Harvard colleague said to me, 'Frankly, its humiliating.' How's that?" He continues, "Actually, I loved it. My wife loved it. My in-laws loved it....I was very surprised; I think of myself as an inspiring person, but....I don't know why they chose me, and I think in this case, ignorance is bliss."

Nagy and his family are now settled into a comfortable home on Beacon Hill, after years of "all sorts of commuting tricks" between here and Princeton. His wife has recently finished work on her Ph.D. in Persian and Arabic literature.

Trying to raise a family while maintaining two careers, often in two cities, was predictably hectic, so much so that one semester Nagy took a leave of absence to join his wife in Princeton. He obtained a fellowship at Princeton's Center for Advanced Learning, which allowed him to work on a book at home while caring for his son, Laszlo, age five. Nagy says he was the primary parent for Laszlo, and that his wife, her academic load lightened somewhat, has done more of the work in raising their daughter, Antonia, age two.

Their two Ph.D.s aside, Nagy says he and his wife "like to think of ourselves as Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore." He laughs, adding, "Maybe that's too wholesome."