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Can we address the cruelty and violence of many Classics programs' language expectations and translation exams? This colonial legacy is doing a great job at harming students' mh + sense of self-worth, & has been consistently (r)ejecting talented peoples from the field.
The almost pathological resistance of large swaths of the field to disrupt 1. the Greek-Latin hegemony 2. the orthodoxy whereby all Classicists ought to have a philological-level mastery of these 2 languages - might actually be the most serious threat to Classics' endurance.
What are we training students to be? How do we want them to think? And with whom do we want them to engage? "But we have to make sure they can teach Greek and Latin for when they apply on the job market" is the usual response to such conversations. Well that logic is delusional.
I have some scoop: Narrowly trained Classicists whose life revolves around citing and recycling the same pool of antiquarian scholarship, peppered at times w 1960s French theorist to look "allumé" won't find much work nor interlocutors beyond Classics departments.
In contrast, theoretically, interdisciplinary and historically engaged scholars and out-of-the-box minded teachers will, *even though they are not walking Liddell-Scotts*.
I'm pretty sure noone outside of a Classics cares how many Greek verbs one can parse on the spot at a cocktail party. I certainly don't. However people might care about what you and your work have to say about the Anthropocene, BLM, or settler colonialism.
Language abilities DO matter. But up to a point, and in differing ways depending on what students and scholars work on. They are not an end, but a tool. And they should not be an agent of trauma. Now the thing is, they currently are for many CLA students, and it breaks my heart.
I end w this example: The current search in Late Antiquity/early Islam in my UTSC dpt aims to recruit someone who will teach CLA courses + develop the program with me (I've been the only Antiquity-person there for 12 yrs - among a great team of Historians et al. scholars)...
We have kept the graduate appointment open for now because we agree as a team that we will NOT exclude candidates who work on i.e. Arabo-Syriac material or material culture but cannot teach Greek+Latin at the grad level (=the condition to be in Classics dpt downtown).
In sum: If your position allows you to disrupt the Greco-Latin orthodoxy (and at times institutional violence) of your curriculum and programs, give it a shot. This might reduce the harm done to students, and ultimately do better justice to past and present (hi)stories 
