A National Stage, A St. Andrew's Classroom

The American Classical League (ACL), the national nonprofit that champions the teaching and study of Latin, Greek, and the ancient Mediterranean world for students from kindergarten through college, has found its new president in Classics Department Chair Philip Walsh. Walsh, whose tenure kicked off July 1, was elected in a November vote that included a national field of candidates. It’s a distinction that puts St. Andrew’s at the center of the national conversation on classics education.

Walsh’s path to the presidency ran through the ACL’s flagship publication, The Classical Outlook. From 2023 to 2026, thanks to Walsh’s role as editor, St. Andrew’s served as the Outlook’s institutional home. Walsh's term as editor ran through 2026, but ACL leaders encouraged him to run for the top job.

The two roles couldn’t be more different, he says. Editing meant managing manuscripts and deadlines. The presidency means governance: sitting as chair of the ACL’s board of governors, working alongside the organization’s executive director on strategy, membership, and finances, and building relationships with teachers and professors across the country. It also means advocating for the humanities and, in particular, making the case for studying ancient Greece and Rome.

For St. Andrew’s, his presidency positions a member of our faculty at the top of the classical studies'  leading professional organization for teachers—a rare vantage point from which the best ideas, Walsh believes, will flow back into his own classroom. “The relationships that I'm building—their innovative classroom approaches and research questions will find its way into my classroom,” he says. In practice, that means new readings, new comparisons, new ways of connecting ancient texts to what his students are studying elsewhere—ideas he says he wouldn’t have access to without a seat at the national table.

That cross-pollination is already part of how Walsh teaches. He describes his approach to Latin and Greek as a balance between creativity and precision. He asks students to synthesize what they learn in Latin and ancient Greek and apply those lessons in other contexts. It’s also, he says, what distinguishes how the ancient world gets taught at St. Andrew’s in the first place. “I understand what’s happening on a tactical level, day-to-day, in other classrooms,” says Walsh, who teaches across the classics, English, and history departments. For example, Walsh saw a natural bridge between this year’s rising juniors, who were assigned Homer’s Odyssey as summer reading, and his own Latin students, who read Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil’s poem was a provocative artistic response to Homer’s epic, not unlike Christopher Nolan’s big-screen adaptation of The Odyssey. “Our students who see the film and then read Aeneid will develop nuanced perspectives on the human costs of war and the enduring power of art," he says.

As ACL president, Walsh’s priority is growing membership and closing a gap he’s watched persist for years: K-12 teachers and college classicists who rarely talk to each other, despite doing adjacent work. He wants the organization to be more deliberate about connecting the two—high schools partnering with colleges as a matter of national strategy.

To this end, he is leading a year-long public humanities initiative called What Is Your Odyssey? Launching in October 2026, What Is Your Odyssey? will invite students, teachers, writers, artists, doctors, service workers, scholars, and lifelong learners to reflect on the following questions: What is your odyssey? What journey—literal or metaphorical—has shaped who you are? What might others learn from it?  

The same instinct that shapes his classroom is what animates this public project: helping people find the connections between ancient and modern that are personally meaningful and intellectually surprising. “There’s something so pertinent about The Odyssey in 2026,” Walsh says, noting the film's record-breaking summer box-office numbers.

Ask him where that instinct comes from, and Walsh points back to St. Andrew’s itself—to teaching in a place small enough that he understands how students exploring a text about coming home from war may relate to ideas considered in a philosophy class down the hall. “Meaningful engagement begins,” Walsh says, “when students confront vital questions in an environment where the academic walls are low and the love of learning is high.”