UCI to Share Classics Program : Education: Three UC campuses will offer courses by teleconference as part of effort to pool system’s resources.

In a sign of things to come, some UC Irvine students soon will share professors by teleconference with students at two other University of California campuses, officials said Monday.

The universities at Irvine, Riverside and San Diego will offer a common program to teach the classics to graduate students who will share teachers in topics ranging from ancient art history to Latin prose.

Instructors will be based mainly at UC Irvine, but students at any one of the campuses may take courses from professors of the other two participating campuses by teleconference.

It’s part of a nascent UC-wide initiative that encourages campuses to share resources in a time of tight budgets.

“There’s quite a pool of Mediterranean experts” among the three campuses, said Walter Donlan, chairman of UCI’s classics department. “It just makes sense in this day and age to combine those resources into a single program.”

According to university grant documents, the university system’s “fiscal crisis” and waves of faculty retirements have forced the UC to find ways to “fill gaps” in teaching.

Distance learning--educating students remotely by using technology such as video transmissions--is often controversial in academia, where some professors doubt it can replace the traditional classroom.

But professors said the classics project goes beyond using newfangled communications: it’s about revising the way people study Western civilization.

Just as classicists have done at universities nationwide, classics experts at the three campuses are proposing changes in curriculum that take into account how works such as “The Iliad” reflect issues people care about today.

The project was born in 1993, when classics gurus from various UC campuses met in Irvine to talk about the state of their field and how to update it.

“Some perceive it [classics] as a bastion of dead, white European males, but it’s actually very much in step with things today,” UC Riverside Prof. Thomas Scanlon said.

“Instead of reading how Caesar conquered all of Europe and how wonderful that was,” Scanlon said with a chuckle, “we look at other things of concern today: the role of women in the ancient world, the use of slavery and the origin of that evil, [and] the origins of democracy.”

The three campuses will have a unified core of classics courses for graduates, which may also be taken by undergraduates. Those students will also master skills in computer research.

UCI, which has had more than three dozen students majoring in classical subjects each year for the last three years, already offers graduate degrees in classics, but the program will enable UC Riverside and UC San Diego to offer graduate degrees as well.

The first teleconference course is scheduled for next winter, but the program awaits final approval by university committees, professors noted.