It is giving Tuesday. You might be the giving sort. You might not.
Here’s my plea. I set down a sabbatical to finish book three and picked up the chairship of my department in large part because I believe in the LGI and the right of everyone regardless of family background or economic means to learn Latin and Greek. (an earlier essay on the value of studying ancient languages)
The LGI is older than I am and has trained the best philologists in our field and enabled hundreds of others who came late to the field to pursue their dreams of studying the Greek and Roman World. There are a hundred more medievalists, and political scientists, and religious scholars, art historians and philosophers who used and continue to use the LGI to access more directly and accurately the texts relevant to their research.
It has no permanent faculty. We count on our long term PT faculty giving up their summers (and good deal of their springs in preparation) year after year to make this possible. They do. The LGI engenders deep commitment from all its faculty and staff. It is a grueling intensive program that gets results. Our students wouldn’t succeed without this dedicated faculty.
Enrollments are high. We could admit more if we could support more to study in NYC. We could admit more if we could recruit and train more faculty. If we had staff to support the back end.
This campaign is our first giving Tuesday ask. The LGI needs an endowment to protect it from the winds of fortune at a public institution of higher ed.
And, once it is more secure, I can more comfortably go back to writing books (and more blog posts along the way).
So if you are giving sort and like this blog, please chip in a little something. Each donor shows that we have supporters. Give 100. Give 10. Give 1000! Give 10,000?
Anyway. I had to ask.
Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 