Release Date: March 22, 2005

Dorothy Long, executrix for the Bernice Fox estate (second from right), presents a check for $400,000 to Monmouth College president Richard Giese. The bequest completes funding for a chair in classics, currently held by professor Tom Sienkewicz. Also participating in the ceremony were, from left: MC senior Wyatt Preul, president of Gamma Omicron chapter of Eta Sigma Phi; Sienkewicz; and Jane Pratt, attorney for the estate.

MONMOUTH, Ill. — During the 1970s, when many colleges were abandoning the teaching of Latin and Greek, a Monmouth College classics professor fought successfully to preserve her department. Now, her legacy is helping to keep it that way.

Bernice Fox, a diminutive but determined woman, was Monmouth’s one-person classics department in the ’70s, teaching all levels of Latin language and literature, classical mythology, word elements and elementary Greek. Shortly after her retirement in 1981, she ensured that the department she had helped build over three decades would be preserved, stipulating in her will that the bulk of her estate should support a professorship in classics.

Recently, Monmouth College received a $400,000 check from the estate of Fox, who died in 2003 at age 92. The bequest completes funding for the Minnie Billings Capron Chair of Classical Languages, which had its beginnings in 1979 with a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The professorship received its name in 1985 when the son of a former classics student made a significant gift to honor his mother’s memory.

“The classics are important,” Fox once wrote, “because they give people a deeper understanding of the world around them – the cultural, historical and linguistic background of our whole civilization. They develop well-rounded human beings, bringing wisdom, not just knowledge.”

Professor Tom Sienkewicz, who has occupied the classics chair at Monmouth for the past 20 years, said that even after her death, Fox is well remembered not just at Monmouth but in classics circles everywhere. “Bernice inspired so many students to pursue careers teaching Latin and the classics that her influence is still being felt in classrooms across the United States,” he said. “She also provided 36 years of leadership to Eta Sigma Phi, the national classics honorary, and left a substantial bequest to that organization, which she did much to shape.”

Fox’s name lives on in an annual classics lecture and a nationwide writing contest for high school students. For the past 20 years, the Bernice L. Fox Lecture has brought experts to Monmouth College to speak on such topics as Greek and Roman history, archaeology, linguistics and ancient culture. The Fox Classics Writing Contest annually awards a cash prize for the best student essay on a topic related to the classics.

Following Fox’s death, Richard Lederer, a nationally-known author and columnist who delivered the 1992 Fox Lecture, wrote: “Bernice Fox was the truest of teachers, one who, in the words of Henry Brook Adams, ‘affects eternity. No one knows where [her] influence stops.’ I quickly came to see how many devotees she gathered into her circle of the love of learning. Certainly I was one of them.”

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