CLAS Students

Majors and minors in the CLAS department consistently rank among the brightest who attend Gonzaga. 

In our small program over the past four years, four of our graduating majors have achieved summa cum laude honors, while another three have completed their degrees magna cum laude.  While some of the department's majors continue on to seek advance degrees (MAs, PhDs) in Classics, archaeology and art history, other recent graduates have gone on to successful careers in law, business, and politics.

Students are drawn to the program for several reasons:

A commitment to teaching excellence. 

The faculty of the Classical Civilizations program remains committed to accommodating the educational needs of its undergraduates both in and outside of the classroom environment. Graduating students have ranked this dedication and passion for teaching as among their most important reasons for joining the program.  

Small classes and high attention to individual students.

The low faculty-student ratio has created a program with a sense of community in our classrooms, in which the instructors come to know the students and their interests with more than a passing familiarity, and vice versa. This environment allows us not only to tailor an undergraduate's studies to suit his or her needs and interests, but also permits us to monitor her or his progress closely and provide appropriate academic support.

Strong library collection and academic resources.

One remarkable asset of the program is the outstanding caliber of the library's collection in the Classical fields and the continuing support given to it through generous endowments.  The collection is considered the best in eastern Washington and one of the finest in the region. Our reference collection includes some of the most important resources in the discipline, including L'Annee Philologique, Paulys Real-encyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Der Kleine Pauly, Brill's New Pauly, Lexicon iconographicum mythologie classicae, and Lexicon topographicum urbis Romae.  We also possess access to English-language and foreign journals in the library holdings or online (e.g. JSTOR, Proquest).  Other areas in which we excel include patristics and early Christianity, with numerous reference tools and journals in those fields as well.  Finally, we have significant collections of primary texts in Latin and Greek, with substantial editions of Loeb Classical Library, Oxford Classical Texts and Teubner volumes, among others.