The Ludi Romani

All hail the mighty Juppiter Optimus Maximus!

This photo was taken in 2002 as a feature of a news article from Utah State University's Hard News Cafe about the annual Ludi Romani (Roman Games) held at USU. Juppiter a.k.a. Dr. Mark Damen and his wife Juno a.k.a. Dr. Fran Titchener host the Games every year for the last approximately 20 years. I assure you, if Juppiter does not inspire fear in you from this picture, it is only because he's waiting to surprise you later.

The Ludi Romani is a cross between Risk and role-playing where students are able to take on roles of Senators, kings, generals, noble women, etc and plot, scheme, betray, ally, and generally have fun with and against each other until one faction comes out on top at the Battle of Actium. Traditionally the factions have been based around the first and second year Latin students, but in years past you just never know who's going to team up. In addition to the students playing the roles of mortals faculty and alumni play the part of deities each with their own power and abilities. Often while the mortals are plotting against themselves the deities are plotting against everybody. All in all, it is a fun experience.

As the Ludi Romani is put on by my old department my musing for this week deals with my education and its worth. In addition, as part of my career advising class I had to do it for an assignment. I have a BA in History with a minor in Russian. My senior capstone paper was entitled The White Tigers of Tianjin: fascist elements in the  propaganda of the Anti-Communist  Committee of Russian Emigrants in Northern China from 1937 to 1941. I presented it at the regional Phi Alpha Theta conference and won two awards, Best Asian Paper and Longest Title. I'm proud of both of them. You can guess how many times people have asked me to read that paper. (Twice - which is probably twice more than you thought.)

Many people question what you can do with a degree in history. I've even heard it implied that a definition of a successful history graduate is one that has a job. Most people think that the only occupation for history majors is in education. While I work in education, I do not teach in a classroom. In general, the humanities and arts tend to be "the degrees you can't do anything with." To this I say, quoting an old employer, "No, these are the degrees you can do what ever you want with."

As a bearer of one of a "degree to nowhere" I realized fairly early on that my degree did not fit into a nice little career. Accountants get jobs as accountants. Engineers get engineering jobs (I know - I've got six of them in my close family). Business majors go into business. History......well, there's teaching? To be fair, when I first started, I wanted to go into teaching. That is why I choose history. However, as I learned that I didn't want to teach, it didn't make me want to change my major. Perhaps that was because I was planning on graduate school (I wanted to teach college). But I also think it had something to do with my boss at the time - the one I quoted above. In many ways you can do whatever you want with degrees in humanities and art. This is because it's not the facts that you learn that are important. It's the skills.

Going back to my capstone paper as an example. As I've mentioned, I've only been asked to read that paper twice - once for my class and once for the conference I attend. No one else has been interested in the facts that I learned when I did it. The ACCRENC has not had a meeting in decades  The parades are done, the fascist propaganda has not stirred anyone in ages. However the research and consolidating I did in order to write that paper has enabled me to secure employment. That paper is the result of over 100 pages of translated newspapers (I was not the only translator, but I knew them all), three published works on fascism and it's tenants, and a semesters worth of critical thinking, extrapolation, and reflection. The end result: 10 pages and 51 footnotes of concise material. That is a skill that can be used almost anywhere. It doesn't matter the topic, the skill is the same.

I think that this skill is particularly useful in this day and age as the world is changing so rapidly. You may be familiar with the Did you Know video on YouTube. While there raise many points, perhaps one of the most relevant is the one made at the 38 seconds mark:

The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet.

 How is anybody going to be able to keep up with the demand of this changing world unless they can learn and adapt? The skills learned in the humanities and arts allow students to look at the world around them and make sense of it. To see what is there and how it has changed and is changing. These skills are not to be discounted quickly as many would. These skills are not unique to a limited number of disciplines. They can be developed by anyone. I will say that many of these "degrees to nowhere" do indeed lead to critical skills that are important to the future.