Dr. Robin Greene — Making the Ancient Accessible

Show Notes

Dr. Robin Greene, associate professor of history and classics and this year's recipient of the Joseph R. Accinno Award, the college's highest teaching honor, joins us on the Providence College Podcast to expand on some of the anecdotes she told during her keynote address at Academic Convocation. Greene describes how she went from the late-night "drunk shift" at Denny's to scholar of Greek and Latin, and how she inspires her students to critique the great thinkers of human history and to consider how ancient texts influence their lives today.

Missed the livestream of Convocation? Watch them now:
∙ Greene's keynote: https://prov.ly/2YqOqpr
∙ Full video of Convocation: https://prov.ly/2X03zO7

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Creators & Guests

Host

Liz Kay

Director of Social Media & Special Projects

Producer

Chris Judge

Multimedia and Live Event Producer

What is Providence College Podcast?

The Providence College Podcast features interviews with interesting members of the Friar Family. These in-depth conversations with PC students, Dominicans, faculty, staff, and alumni provide a rich look into the lives of noteworthy Friars. Occasionally we will also bring you on-campus lectures and presentations. Go Friars!

Hello and welcome to the Providence College podcast. I'm your host, Liz Kay, and I'm joined by producer Chris Judge of the Class of 2005 here on the Providence College podcast. We bring you interesting stories from the Frier family.

This week, we're talking with Dr. Robin Greene, associate professor of history and classics and this year's winner of the Joseph R. Akina Award, the college's highest teaching honor. She teaches in the development of Western Civilization program now in its fiftieth year, as well as courses in ancient history, literature, mythology, Latin and Greek.

On Wednesday, Green presented the keynote address at Academic Convocation, an event welcoming new students and faculty to the community at the start of the school year. Dr. Green, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

So during your talk, you told some very relatable anecdotes about getting acclimated to college, including listing off your grades for that first semester. So we have to ask, how did you turn things around and what led you to study classics?

First of all, I've learned already not to list my grades ever again. My teammates keep telling all the students, no matter how bad you do, you can't do as bad as Greene did. So, you know, turning it around, I, I, I just kept trying new things like I didn't like all my papers were terrible because I kept

repeating what my professor said. And I thought that meant I was thinking. And so I did go to some of them, you know, what's wrong with me? And they said, well, you're not saying anything new. And that was really terrifying, I don't think we're used to having to say our own thoughts in a new way.

So my second semester, I did much better. Still not great, but I just kept trying new approaches to every assignment and figuring out, oh, this is what they want, because sometimes it's hard for us to tell you what we want.

For students, it's like a student. Be like, what's wrong with us? Like it's just it's not good. And sometimes it's very difficult to sort of pinpoint exactly the approach a certain student should take. So I forget your other question already.

I'm sorry. Well, I think the the glass half full approach to your colleagues commentary on your grades is that, look, you can redeem yourself after having a lousy first year semester.

Absolutely. I mean, if your life is over after one semester, you know, I'd still be at Denny's and I would not be here as a professor. So it's absolutely possible. You just have to take the time to figure out what do I need to do to get what I want.

Precisely. So what brought you to from that first semester to a career in classics?

Yeah. See, at the University of Kansas, where I went, we had a language requirement. And everybody, no matter what your major was, had to take two years of language. I really, really bad at conversational language. At least I was back then.

I've gotten better. I knew whatever I did, I did not want have to like actually speak the language. And so that left Latin or Greek for me to take just to fulfill that. And Latin was really early in the morning.

So I took Greek and I ended up really disliking it. And I discovered I was good at it. And my mind sort of worked along that really well. I'd originally thought, I'm going to be in the sciences, but I'm terrible at math.

So I discovered that at math, but I'm good at Greek. And that's how I, I ended up doing it.

So kind of the courses of the scheduling system, if a Latin had been in the afternoon and Greek had been in the morning, could have all been different.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I loved my Greek teacher. I wanted to take more classes with her, and that turned into a major.

So you teach development of Western civilization, otherwise known as Soof. And during your talk, you shared some of your expertize in Latin with your students and faculty colleagues there. I'm sure today you get challenged by people who ask about the value and relevance of learning the classics and an education in classics.

How do you respond to them?

You know, there's a lot of different ways to do that. One of the ways that I think is truest is that learning another language, especially a dead language, requires you to really understand it, to think about a culture more holistically than we're used to.

We can't go ask an ancient Greek person what they really mean by something. And so to understand a text or understand a language, you have to look at the history, look at the religion, look at the culture, look at the art from a lot of different perspectives to put it together.

And those skills that sort of like I think of it like, can I CSI where you have to look at all the little details to get a composite picture of what actually happened. Those skills translate really well into a lot of different careers.

I've got students, yes, students who go on to become academics, but I have students, a lot of them who are lawyers. Actually, the classics earns the highest LSAT grade in the in the country for more than a decade now, I believe, because we train you to look at all those little details, to put together a case.

So a lot of analytic fields. We also a lot of we've been really successful with finance, which really sort of shocked me. But there's a lot of financial firms that wants people to have these sort of hunting skills that we really have people do.

So I've had several classics and finance double majors, which was a huge surprise to me. But so there's all sorts of careers that the skills we're teaching our X and the last one. The last one, if I wasn't going to be a professor, I was going to work for the the Foreign Service.

Because once you prove you can learn a language like Greek, they think they can teach you any language and you go be a diplomat.

So you also discussed the value of USCIRF education in your talk. Well, what are some examples of things that might impact us now that people might not realize have those influences from the past?

Oh, geez, almost everything, really. For example, I mean, we think of a couple of good ones here. Well, certainly when we're taught the way we talk about fashioning political fashioning today, that's unfortunately a really big hot button issue in the states right now.

But the history of political fashioning, particularly within sort of globalized empires, this is, you know, fundamental to understanding what the Athenians were doing, what happened to ancient Rome, what happened to Europe at at several different points in the Middle Ages.

And so I think that students sort of looking at the way that fashioning worked early on it divorcées. Itself a little bit from all the high emotions we have now. Like you don't nobody identifies personally with the the optin, the noblemen versus the popular popular politicians in Rome like they're not.

Oh, no, I hate those guys. They're kind of neutral. And so it lets us explore the same mechanisms that are playing out today in a little more of a neutral ground. And so then when they apply it to their own world, I think they see perspectives that they would not have seen otherwise.

The Aquino Award is presented annually to the faculty member who best exhibits excellence in teaching, passion and enthusiasm for learning and genuine concern for students, academic and personal growth. Could you tell us a little about your approach to teaching?

What motivates

you? You know, I, I feel like I should have some sort of like well thought out plan or like science or teaching. But really what I do is I want to be the teacher that I wanted to have had.

There's things about my subject that are just fascinating and interesting. And in the hands of a bad teacher, they lose all of that. And I don't want them to I feel like they either I owe the things I'm teaching more than to be bored by them, even though I do it every year.

So sometimes I would say, you know, 10 years, so let's do Plato again. But they're intrinsically fascinating. And I don't want to I want to do them justice. So for me, in terms of teaching, my ultimate goal is to do them justice.

You know, not every student is going to fall in love with Homer, but I want to try. And so every year I do different. I do a different experimental things, just trying to see what works and what doesn't.

And like last year, I had this whole new approach to one or two I was using using all these little tiny sources that, you know, we could really dig into. And I thought it was going be awesome. And I was really excited to get them into that.

And they hated it. They really they just they they just killed me on reviews. But I think, again, for, you know, I want to be the teacher that does these things justice. And so I think the other important component is listening to students.

Yeah. Sometimes we have to make them do things they don't want to do and they're important to do. But when everybody hates something that tells me up, I have to be able to adapt and to change and to try new things, but recognize that's a big failure.

And I think we often don't want to do that. We want to not we want everything to not be a failure. And so we're like, oh, the students just didn't like it, but now it failed. So.

Well, speaking of lieTo, could you tell us about some of those assignments that you mentioned in your reflection for the AKINO Award?

Well, yeah. I mean, I'll use the Plato example. I mean, students grow up hearing a lot of these names. You know, Plato, Homer, they they come invested with a certain weight. And students, I think, are really kind of afraid to criticize these names.

You know, you can't say anything bad about Plato. You can't say anything is off in the way the New Testament is constructed. That's wrong. We can't we can't read. Who are we to do that? Seems to be the prevailing attitude.

So I try to construct assignments that require students to criticize, not, you know, they're horrible, but to actually really think in a critical way about what these authors are saying, because, yes, Plato is the philosopher, but he wasn't the last philosopher.

And that means that a lot of people after him found something to find fault with. And so I have like assignments where I try to teach students about logical fallacies or argumentation. That's often something we find in, you know, sort one on one paper papers is they don't really know what fallacies are.

And so they fall into them quickly. So to teach them that I actually make them go hunting through Plato for his logical fallacy, like where is his argument? Crappy. And so that way, I'm trying to sort of do two things at once, get them to learn about fallacies, but also have them build confidence in realizing that they're

allowed to criticize these big names of Western Civ.

Could you tell us about your translation exercise?

Oh, I forget which one I wrote about. One of them, I think, though, I think that my favorite is the biblical one. Yes. When referring to. Yeah. See it. I think a lot of students don't really think about the language difference between what they're reading in Cive and what was originally written on the page.

And whenever you translate, you do come at it from a certain bias. You're thinking, what language do I need to speak to my contemporary readers to get them to understand this? But every language choice has within it, you know, sort of hidden meanings.

And so what I have them do sometimes with. The Bible, as I have them pick a certain passage, usually one that's important, I think my favorite is to use the punishment or the consequences of Eve's actions in Genesis three.

And I have them look at multiple translations from multiple time periods. So things like the King James Bible verses the new American Bible versus Hebrew of translations aimed at a Jewish audience. And the differences are amazing. And given that, you know, we do continue to base a lot of our moral and legal standpoints from the Bible, it's

not just, you know, God's word. It's some guy from the 16th century who's also infecting contemporary American policies with his point of view. And I really want students to understand that

there's no way that students in the first two years at PC, most students would not be reading the the primary texts.

No, no. And and so like when they're reading Homer, when they're reading Virgil, when they're reading anything up until really two oh one, when you start getting modern English a little bit in one or two with Shakespeare. But all of it has been through several hands that all have their own perspectives.

And I think that students need to be aware of that.

Oh, absolutely. I imagine things were a little different during the pandemic. Sort of the question we ask every faculty member, you know, how do you how were you able to adapt some of your teaching? I forget.

You know, I'm still kind of shocked. I won the award for the pandemic year because it was so it was so hard and so sort of terrible in many ways, because I really rely in class on a lot of, you know, close discussion.

I could do a lot of it. It wasn't like I work in a lab where I couldn't access materials so I could do everything I needed to do. But that forging of connection between myself and the participants and the participants in each other was a lot more difficult.

So I really experimented. I don't think I came up with a good decision. I think I need another year of the pandemic to maybe do that. You know, fingers crossed, that's not going to happen. But I tried to do a lot of group work.

I tried to do a lot of in and out of classwork. I tried to do things was like going to museums virtually. And so I feel like I tried. I don't feel like I succeeded. I don't know if anybody does.

I think all of us are pretty sort of down on the whole experience.

I think I think anything that was done is a success and we market as such.

And I think the students recognize that we were all trying. I think they knew that. So it was cooperative in helpful ways.

All right. So when we talk about Cive, I mean, many people outside of D.C. might be surprised to learn that its team taught and there's not one some some syllabus carved in stone that every team, you know, uses in their classes.

So what are some of the texts that you go to, some of the more surprising texts that people would be surprised or part of SEFF?

Well, you know, for my text, because I do the Greek and Latin stuff, most of it is pretty standard. What you know, of Plato and Homer and all of these what I do think is interesting is how little people know about the authors.

And so I think that the surprise comes actually with some of the authors. For example, when I like to teach is a guy called Epictetus, and he was a stoic. And their philosophy was, you can't control the world.

All you can do is control your reactions to it, which is, you know, sort of timely lately. But the thing about Epictetus and some that, you know, he'll even say, you know, if your family dies, just don't be sad.

You're just giving it back to the universe. Don't be affected. And students are often like, yeah, you know, that's horrible. How dare this? And they all expect Epictetus to be some sort of rich white Roman nobleman. And he's a slave, and I often hold off talking is saying, you know what, if anything, about his identity until they've

gotten mad at him, you know, who is this guy to tell us? He doesn't understand pain and stuff. He was a slave. And he was also afflicted with lifelong disease that left him often unable to move and in terrible pain.

So if any guy, you know, could have sort of the pedigree to talk about, you know, life sucks, but just deal with it, it's this guy. And so I think a lot of the other authors that we do in Incisive, you know, you know their name, but a lot of people don't know their backgrounds.

Another surprising one is the La Cosa CEDO. He's somebody I do in one or two. He's a guy. I'm surprised more people haven't heard of. But Barthelemy. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe they'll catch us.

Could you give us the the snapshot of Bartholdi for those readers who don't know? Because the

Dominican. Yeah, he's a Dominican and he is a Dominican who is in the new world during the decades of Spanish colonization. And he is horrified by the way that the Spanish colonizers are treating the indigenous peoples. And he starts this like letter writing campaign to the king, and he spends most of his life.

He ends up writing a history which my students read. But he spends most of his life campaigning for the rights. He doesn't quite use that language, but the rights of the indigenous peoples. And I don't think that many people outside, at least I've never even heard of him before I came here.

He's for some reason not typically taught. It is fundamental to the history of human rights. And so I like I that's my favorite text to teach in one or two, because I think students tend to believe that up until the Civil War, everybody thought slavery was cool.

You know, and it's the history is far more complex than that. And he's a great entrance to it. And he also makes us think about how do we define the West? Because once, you know, America opens up, where is the West on a map?

And so I can get students thinking about that with him as well.

We've talked a lot about teaching. Let's turn to your research. What are you digging into right now?

I so I do I do two things. I work on am I my main period, it's called Hellenistic period has nothing to do with hell. It just means the Greek affine period. But it's the time, the literature and culture after Alexander the Great conquered pretty much the whole ancient world.

And he dies and it gets divided up into these big sort of globalized empires. And my research is centered at the Egyptian one, where the great Library of Alexandria was and where it was founded. So once some of my research looks at the poetry of the period, and you can really see them trying to create sort of

new ethnic identity now that the old city states, Athens, Sparta, are sort of gone, they're subsumed into this big empire. The Greeks are left wondering, well, who who are we there? And so you can see the poets trying to create a new identity in this world that aligns with new values, you know.

No longer are people in control of their own government. It's not democracy anymore. We have an emperor. So what does that make us? And so I work on that. And the other thing I work on is probably something that one on campus has ever said.

It's called Paradoxal Graphy. It's something else that happened at the great library. But they catered all the books together and they were really interested in the broader world. The world got bigger after Alexander the Great. And so what paradoxal griefers did, they're sort of like armchair historians.

They never went anywhere, but they would cull through all these new texts to find unexplained mysteries. It's sort of like the X Files. I know it's a dated reference, but the X Files of the ancient world. And so they'd make these books of examples of weird stuff that can't be explained, like there's this lake in Persia that

if you jump into it, you and you're a man, your bits will fall off. And it's just weird little things. And so I actually I wrote a book on one of the paradox sógor for his sort of tracing the, you know, what's going on with this weird sort of X Files, natural science.

It's popular literature. It's stuff people read for fun. It's not the highs of the homer, you know, going to go home after a hard day at work. I'm like, I'm going to read some homer. If you're an ancient Greek, you're going to read something fun.

So it sort of opens the door for popular literature in the ancient world.

It almost sounds like these are like the Wikipedia editors of their time.

Yes. Yes. Or like I compared it in one of my articles. I compared it to, you know, there's cracked lists like ten places in the world that want to kill you is the one. But it's kind of like that.

And they're they're about the same length, too. You just check it out like, oh, that's interesting. And then go on with your day. And so it really, I think, speaks to sort of the modern. I think we all tend to think that they're sitting back home, you know, reading big, long scrolls of tragedy and hand doing that

. They're reading fun stuff.

That is

fascinating. Yeah, it's good. It's a good time. I mean, I get paid to look at Paradoks orthography.

It's a good thank you for being the one to pronounce that.

And it's just a word paradox. Plus our graphy at the end.

OK, during your talk, you told an anecdote about your path to college, a path to take you directly from high school to college, but had a pit stop for two years at a Denny's. Yes. You mentioned learning some key life lessons during that time for you.

Tell us them. Tell us some of them.

Oh, I have to think of some that I can actually say on the radio, because, you know, I worked the third shift. That's 10:00 at night to 6:00 in the morning. So we were the drunk shift. You have all the bars let out.

I like one or two and the bar rush comes in and then two or three hours later, the early church rush comes in. So there's always a really sort of big shift in one's expectations. But I think one one's coming to my mind that I can tell.

I, I, I think that like many people when I was younger, I sort of sort of stratified wisdom. I thought, you know, people like professors and rich people in New York City or something, they're wise and smart. And then people like, you know, garbagemen, they're not.

I think we we rely on these sort of easy stereotypes. And there was this group of truck drivers that came in every week like any of their names. They came in every week and they sat at the bar and they you know, they drove all around the Midwest, dropping off truck stuff.

And they were they looked like truck drivers, but they would come in every week to talk about philosophy with each other. And they read it in the original language. So remember, the first time I saw them, they were reading Kont in German and like talking about Kont in German.

And and I don't remember the discussion, but I remember being very impressive thing. This is how professors talk. And they would do that with. There it was mostly German, Italian and French philosophy. Remember, they didn't need ship at one point, but they would sit there for three or four hours, starting at like four in the morning and

going until we kicked them out, because we need we need the space and just have these arguments with each other and then open up my eyes to just getting past the sort of childish view of the world that only certain types of people can find these things important and interesting.

And that's they're actually they're one of the reasons I went back to college, because they kept telling me, oh, you're smart, and I would start discussing things with them. I started reading for the group, the truck driver group.

Like, you should go to college green like God for lemmings.

I thought this picture of, you know, continuing these discussions on the ham radios like, yes, we've been using handle's.

And I think they did. I think they talked about it a lot. But they you know, they actually orchestrated their schedules going all over the country just so they could meet every week at that time and talk to each other.

And I loved that group of guys. There were terrible tippers. But, you know,

they give you other

tips. They did. They did. And I you know, I really am sad. I can't remember their name because I'd kind of like to search them out and see how they are in a way.

But I didn't have to call it any since you still there. Dr. Green, this year the college is celebrating 50 years of women. You know, the fiftieth anniversary of women is enrolling as undergraduates, but also the achievements of the women, faculty, staff, students and alumni since then.

You joined the faculty a decade ago during the time. Has your gender affected your experience of the college, and if so, how?

You know, I knew you were going to ask this question and I was thinking about it a lot. And the answer is sort of a problematic yes and no. Gender always affects professors no matter where they are. I don't know if you know this, but when you're on the market, when you're trying to get a job as

a professor, they tell you to take your wedding ring off. They tell you, do not like me. I lost my wedding ring. I don't have any. But they tell you whatever you do, don't mention you have a kid.

If you have a kid, like you're supposed to hide all family affiliations and guys get the opposite advice, they're like, oh, if you have a family, make sure you talk them up. Because the idea apparently is that men with a family will want stability and will leave.

But women with a family will they'll need more time off or they'll have other obligations. It's a really problematic thing. It's not just B.S. But when I came to PC for my interview, I decided I don't care. I'm bringing up my kid and my husband.

And if they have a problem with that, I know I don't want to work here. And I did. And no, everybody was great. In fact, you know, two I think two of the faculty members in my department were pregnant at the time.

So it told me very positive things about PC. On the other hand, yeah, you know what? Especially when I started. Sometimes it's hard to tell if it's because you're new or if it's because you're a woman that you might be having some issues.

You know, it's difficult to say, but, you know, initially and this doesn't really happen anymore. I haven't heard it happen to people, but I came in right around the time I came in. Pisi was in the middle of a huge amount of hiring.

And so there was a lot of untenured women in in the feeder departments for cive like in English and history. And we all kind of had stories like this sort of Don. They weren't meant to be offensive, but they kind of were like, I remember I had one teammate introduced me to the class as well.

This little lady's going to give you a lecture. And I'm like, what do you identify? And I said, you know, this little man is going to give you a lecture, that sort of thing. So it's a lot of and I think it was spoke to not not just not a PC cultural thing, but a larger academic cultural

thing, especially, you know, academics in the 60s and 70s, it was hard for women to get into graduate school. It was hard for women to get the same sort of respect as their male colleagues. And so a lot of my current male colleagues who are, you know, a lot older than me, they went to college at a

time when it was a sort of very male dominated. So I think that their language or perspective, while not meaning to be offensive, can sometimes sort of reflect that. But in general, I've not had huge issues. Sometimes students are a little confused.

I remember when my first year, my first semester, I taught with I don't know, Sandra Kaeding and Raymond Hain't, two wonderful professors. And Raymond was in his first year of Cive like me as well. And Sandra is you know, she's been here a little longer and she's very experienced.

And we got an email address to the three of us from a student, and it said, Dear Dr. Hain, Mrs. Keating and Miss Greene, you're like Kitto or so. So there's there's I think there's a lot of students who grow up in perhaps more small C conservative households where there's more of a patriarchal perspective and they're kind

of shocked. But no, I think I had another student I was teaching with Tim Mahoney and Terry McGoldrick my second year, and they're great, but they both look very professorial. You know, they sort of fit that stereotype. And I gave the first lecture and this girl came up to me afterwards and she was just so excited and

I was. And she said to me, it is so cool that you get to teach with real professors. And then she said, What is your job? And I was like, I am a professor. But she said, no, no, your day job.

And so I told her I sold Greek and Latin emergences for the government. And I think she believed me. But so she actually couldn't. She's like, you get to teach with professors. You're so lucky. And I'm thinking this like 2012, honey.

It's OK, you know? So we are, I think, more often than we expect new for students, not so much new for faculty.

It is amazing how much how much of these sort of micro aggressions to use, perhaps the wrong word, but like you've experienced students.

It is. And again, they're all well-meaning and it just speaks to their background being very different than the one I typically expect of students. So in a way, it helps me be a better teacher, because I have to keep reminding myself, first of all, that not everybody comes from the same sort of background as me.

And second of all, that I might actually be their first female professor. And you realize that's kind of a a responsibility. And I probably I probably screw it up. But, you know, it makes me think about these things and I might not have otherwise.

Dr. Green, it has been a pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much for joining us.

You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Liz.

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