This is the second in a three-part series focusing on the seven faculty members who will retire at the end of the year.

Classics professor Jeremiah Reedy came to Macalester in 1968. In his 36 years at Macalester he has served as chair of the department and coordinator of the Humanities Program. He also spent a year as a visiting scholar in philosophy at Oxford University. He began Macalester’s phased retirement program (MSFEO) several years ago and will be taking his full retirement at the end of this year.

Prior to coming to Macalester, Reedy studied at Gregorian University in Rome and the University of South Dakota. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Reedy’s research and teaching focuses on the Latin and Greek languages, classical mythology, Greek philosophy and Greek civilization.

He said that during his career at Macalester he saw the Classics department nearly disappear three times.

“With the coming of multiculturalism and feminism, the Classics department was being criticized for only studying DWEM [Dead White European Males],” he said. “Some people felt that classics wasn’t relevant enough.”

Reedy said that in 1971 Macalester was experiencing financial problems and had to cut 114 faculty and staff. At that time, the Classics department had three faculty members, all of whom were in danger of being fired, but at the last minute the college decided to keep the entire Classics faculty.

The most recent controversy over the department was in the early 1990s when two of its three faculty members retired. Reedy, the remaining professor, could have been moved to another department but the president intervened and the college kept the Classics department.

“[Today] we have one of the most flourishing classics programs in the country,” he said.

“People might think that teaching dead languages would be boring, but if my career had been any more exciting I wouldn’t have survived it!” he said. “The entire time [the department was] always involved in controversies and we had to defend what we were doing.”

Reedy said that although he had problems with Macalester in the 1960s and 1970s, he is happy with the college today.

“As a classicist, I’m a traditionalist when it comes to a liberal arts education,” he said. “After all, the liberal arts education was invented by the Greeks. For two millennia a liberal arts education was an education in Latin and Greek.”

Reedy is also the Executive Director of the Minnesota Association of Scholars, an organization that advocates higher education reform. He said that he supports a traditional, content-rich style of education as opposed to the increasingly common process-based education. A broad liberal arts base, objective testing and intellectual freedom regardless of political perspective are some of the reforms he advocates. He said that he will continue to work on these issues after his retirement through his work with the organization and by writing opinion pieces and letters to the editor to the local media.

Reedy is the author of 25 articles, eight books and he is currently writing two papers—one on the philosophy of education and the other a defense of capitalism—that he will present at conferences in Greece this summer.