While arbitrating family arguments and settling bets over aspects of Georgetown history does not appear as a stated area of responsibility anywhere in my job description as University Archivist, it is something that I find myself called upon to do multiple times each year. In this vein, I received a phone call from a faculty member at a New England college who was seeking to settle a long-running argument with her husband who is a GU alum. He had repeatedly mentioned how, as a student in the College of Arts and Sciences in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he avoided required mathematics classes by studying Greek instead. She found this somewhat difficult to believe and asked me to investigate. I did so and reported back that her husband was quite correct - College catalogs, like the one from 1960-1961, show that students who were on the Bachelor of Arts classical track were, indeed, able to substitute Greek for math in their freshmen and sophomore years.
--Lynn Conway, University Archivist
June 3, 2015
