July 27, 2010
Dear Dean Gertler,
I am writing this letter in the hope that the Strategic Planning Committee is to strengthen the higher education of East Asia and comparative scholarship, rather than weakening them. Please forgive me if I haven’t seen any academic field has been “strengthened” by ceasing to exist as an institutional entity, a department. To me, as it is so obvious to my colleagues, the irreversible loses caused by the removal of EAS and Comp. Lit will be much greater than the million which the SPC believes will be saving by amalgamation.
I would like to bring the following points to your attention.
1), East Asian studies is a fruitful academic field of its own, not a series of courses on literature, history, philosophy and religious studies. The cultural categories and primary sources of East Asian studies do not fit the European disciplinary boundaries of literature, history, arts and so on, and naturally require transdisciplinary methodological trainings. From this perspective, the Plan of New School of Language and Literature risks supporting a rather Euro-centric disciplinary regime that many East Asian (as well as comparative) scholars have worked very hard for decades to depart from. The good news is that by now, there has been rather solid academic field of studying the humanities of East Asia. In fact as East Asian humanities and Comparative Literature have freed themselves from an older disciplinary regime, the two fields have become some of the most fruitful fields of research and teaching in the past two decades. That is way they have been in expansion in most of the research universities in North America, Europe, China, Australia, Korea, to name just a few. I hope you and the SPC members be very cautious not to usher an administrative denial to two successful academic fields to which EAS and comparative scholars across the world have devoted many years of efforts?
2), East Asian Studies department at U of T is a thriving, promising department. One of the privilege of being a faculty member at EAS is to be a colleague with brilliant, top-level scholars -- thanks especially to the successful recruitment in the past few years. Beside the good collaboration I have had with Graham Sanders, Atsuko Sakaki, and Andre Schmid, as a China scholar I am particularly happy to have new colleagues such as Yiching Wu, Linda Rui Feng, Janet Poole and Tom Keirstead. Yiching Wu’s work, for example, was widely respected by many senior scholars in the China field around the world even before he completed his Ph. D. Linda R. Feng’s work is so smartly unique that she was able to get some of the best young and senior scholars in China studies to come to Toronto and speak at the city workshop she organized last spring. They and other colleagues have made the department a home of inspiration for me. We share common academic interests and enjoy good working relationship in many aspects ranging from undergraduate and graduate teaching, supervising dissertation, to reading each other’s works. Even the small China reading group that started by 5-6 people in the Purple Lounge of EAS a couple years ago has tripled its size and now involves many in and out of the department. My point is that few EAS departments enjoy such talented faculties, good chemistry and shared intellectual focus at once. And these sure signs of future success make EAS at U of T a promising, exciting place to be. But it takes a department to hold these qualities together and to ensure their future existence. I hope you foresee that if we are dispersed into different departments, each of us will achieve much less in terms contributing to an “EAS program.” In fact my true worry is that the new faculty we have been so lucky to recruit will seek better future elsewhere, in school that provides a research- level EAS program, that is, a department.
3), At a personal level, I feel the Plan will take away the two homes of my research and teaching at once. My graduate training (my Ph.D. is in History), and my research interests on urban culture and environment-related topics are quite removed from language and literature. So are my teaching interests. (I taught EAS undergrads Chinese literature in the past couple years partially to balance the department’s China program where professor Guisso taught history and professor Shen philosophy.) Since professor Guisso retired, my teaching interests have moved back to fields I am more comfortable and qualified to teach, such as the culture of environment. My new undergraduate course in 2010-11 will be offered with greater dependence on curriculum that combines philosophy, environment events, Buddhist culture and modern cultural history of East Asia. These are subjects which EAS department colleagues have already shared an interest in teaching. I also plan to collaborate with cultural institutions and organizations in the East Asian community in courses like this. I simply cannot imagine I will find greater (or even equal) intellectual, curriculum-related and institutional support from the school of language and literature than from East Asian Studies department. It simply does not fit.
4) My graduate teaching is in the similar situation. But my biggest issue is about the trouble the Plan will bring to the current students. The removal of EAS department will bring more harm than benefits to the future work of my graduate students. The 5 Ph. D students under my supervision work on different research topics ranging from the urban transformation of Beijing to the Manchuria film industry in the 1940s. Only one to them is pursuing a topic that falls within the disciplinary boundaries of the new school of language and literature. In fact the faculty and graduate body of a school of language and literature cannot give the students the necessary intellectual environment and academic advices in terms of graduate study, dissertation writing, as well as job search. Most of these students came a long way from US and China, and had given up other good choices to be here. The sudden announcement of the Plan has already stirred fear among students and distracted them from what they should be doing with 100% focus. If the intention of SPC is to eliminate EAS graduate program and stop students from coming, then I must say it has done a good job. And to tell you the truth, I certainly lost some good sleep thinking what is more responsible for the students: to encourage them to stay in a weakened program of the new school or to suggest that they apply to other schools with true East Asian Studies program before it’s too late.
5) Finally, it will be very hard to persuade the international community and scholars and students in China that U of T by any chance supports its China program if Department of East Asian Studies ceases to exist. They will very likely see that education programs of their cultures at U of T are being willingly sacrificed by the policy makers. They will be questions about the logic of amalgamating Department of East Asia Studies -- why not Near and Middle Eastern Studies, English and French -- etc. These doubts need not be true to generate impact. It does not take much to turn potential investors and incoming students away from a school that seems to cut its East Asian Department so willingly.
I hope you and SPC members consider to revise the plan so that EAS can continue exists as a departmental unit. It will prosper in time.
Yours truly
Meng, Yue
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Darcy Gauthier, University of Toronto
Dear Dean Gertler,
I am writing to you as a concerned PhD student at the Centre for Comparative Literature. I have just read through your 40 page outline of the changes you intend to make to the Faculty of Arts and Science. Though I believe that this is a valuable document that highlights many of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the Faculty, I would like to express my deepest disappointment towards your proposal to amalgamate several independent programs into a School of Languages and Literatures. I realize you have received many letters already, and so I apologize for your time in reading this one meagre addition to the mounting protest. However, as a student, I would like to implore you to consider my pleas and the pleas of many others -- both within the University and without, from students and professors, graduates and undergraduates, locally and internationally -- to consider a different way of resolving the financial problems of the Faculty that will not devastate the research and teaching that is being done in these disciplines.
I am disappointed to see many progressive suggestions within your document compromised elsewhere by the proposed new School. For one, you have rightly written in your document that “the most challenging problems of our complex, interconnected world do not always fall neatly into academic disciplines, or even professions” (14), and I agree upon the importance of “exploiting the breadth across the University through strong interdivisional partnerships” (18). The argument for ‘interdivisional partnerships’ is a convincing one. In this respect, your proposed courses in “Big Ideas” are interesting and valuable and I trust that first year undergraduates will benefit from being immersed in scholarship coming from diverse “disciplinary streams” (14). Linda Hutcheon’s own groundbreaking work with her husband, Michael Hutcheon, on the intersection of opera and medicine would be a valuable model for such an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to teaching and research. Your suggestion for a course showcasing how neuroscience, economics, and philosophy each approach “the mind” could also be a fascinating and important point of departure for new students to the University, one that rightly highlights the fragility and permeability of various disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, as Linda Hutcheon writes in a recent article on the dismantling of Comparative Literature, “to deal with the complex realities of today's world, we need to be able to think outside our disciplinary silos, to think across those borders that separate us from speaking to and learning from others in diverse fields with fruitfully differing perspectives” (truth-out.org, July 19, 2010). Of course, interdisciplinary research and teaching of this kind is already being pioneered at several places in the UofT: EAS for one is already a successful interdisciplinary department, and Comparative Literature by definition is interdisciplinary as well.
As an aside, I notice that you do not in fact use the term “interdisciplinary”, and opt instead to use “multidisciplinary”. I would like to know if you are drawing a distinction here between ‘multi-’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’, or whether these terms are interchangeable. I wonder because the Faculty of Arts and Science is in the most obvious sense already multi-disciplinary -- in the sense that it houses multiple disciplines. Multidisciplinarity is not, however, necessarily interdisciplinary. Perhaps it is a small point, but when I think of this term ‘multidisciplinary’, I imagine multiple yet discrete disciplines whose “ideas” are not always conversant with each other in a meaningful, mutually implicating way. They perhaps reside side-by-side, but their conversations run parallel to each other rather than overlapping. Interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, addresses the connections between these disciplines, as well as their inscrutable differences. Rebecca Comay frames the distinction quite well in the context of Comparative Literature when she says that “it’s not just about multiplying the number of disciplines you can juggle -- it’s about experimenting with different frames of reference” (rabble.ca, July 12, 2010). I trust that the “Big Ideas” program will keep this distinction in mind when it attempts to negotiate various disciplinary frameworks.
Let me reiterate that I applaud your efforts to promote “interdivisional partnerships”. However, I would also like to express my serious misgivings about whether or not the proposed School of Languages and Literatures will be contributing to this program of ‘interdivisionality’, or interdisciplinarity, or even multidisciplinarity -- unless by multiple disciplines we mean two: Literatures and Languages. I cannot understand how sending non-literature and non-language professors back to their respective disciplines -- history, philosophy, French, Latin American Studies, etc. -- can be fostering, in your own words, “the multidisciplinary comprehensiveness and strength of the faculty” (14). It seems instead that this will be reversing the progress made towards a more interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research at the UofT. As Linda Hutcheon has said in the same article quoted above, “the move back to departmental disciplinary hegemony and what will be perceived as a Eurocentric focus will be seen by many as a retrograde step for an institution that had prided itself, and rightly so, on its vibrant interdisciplinary and transnational/global intellectual environment of cultural exchange”. Narrowing the interdisciplinary focus down to mere instruction in languages and literatures is far from a championing of, and more like an attack on, interdisciplinary studies. It goes without saying that Comparative Literature in this proposed school will cease to function as a nexus of interdisciplinary work. Hutcheon goes on to argue that language departments, such as EAS, do not just teach language, and Comparative literature does not just teach literature: “neither language nor literature exists in a vacuum”. How could a school of Languages and Literatures, one that is very explicit about its intentions to send faculty who teach neither languages nor literatures back to their respective disciplines, be anything but such a vacuum?
There are other areas of your document with which I am in agreement. For one, you have written that “we are well recognized as a research powerhouse in all three major sectors of the Faculty,” and that “[a] large number of our graduate units enjoy very strong reputations internationally for the excellence of their programs” (4). I could not agree more. Our strengths in research and our international reputation are without question. Indeed, the Centre for Comparative Literature is one of the University’s strongest internationally recognized programs. Its annual graduate colloquium attracts scholars from around the world. Its students garner prestigious government scholarships, including the addition of a Vanier scholar this year. Well respected professors of international renown have come to the Centre to teach seminars -- for example Julia Kristeva, who has already written you a letter protesting the closure of the Centre.
For these reasons and many more, I am certain that the dismantling of the Centre will undermine the Faculty’s international -- not to mention domestic -- prestige, which we both agree is one of its key strengths. Letters of protest from many highly reputable international -- as well as local -- sources attest to this fact. Moreover, I gather that the widely held opinion of students within the program now is that they would not have considered applying to the University of Toronto, or would have accepted admissions offers from other serious Comparative Literature programs, had they known that the University of Toronto’s program would lose its autonomous status and be transformed into a mere collaborative degree. Such a program does not present itself as a very attractive offer to students who are serious about studying Comparative Literature. I know I speak for many students in the program when I say that I worry about the value my degree will have coming from the death throes of a soon to be defunct centre. Could you honestly say that as a member of a hiring committee looking for a Professor of East Asian Studies, or German, or Comparative Literature, you would choose an applicant with a degree in “Languages and Literatures” over one with a more specialized degree in those fields?
I also worry that the new school will not allow for the same research and teaching opportunities as the Centre for Comparative Literature. The research that I do as a PhD student does not fall neatly into any national literature, and actually extends beyond literature into theatre and cinema. Moreover, it draws upon the contributions of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and phenomenological discourses, and where would I find the theoretical guidance for this project without any body within the school dedicated to issues of theory and criticism? I don’t see how my project can be continued meaningfully without the scholarly ethos of the Centre for Comparative Literature as support.
You need only look at the course offerings of the Centre to see that what it offers would not be possible elsewhere. Where, for example, would a course on Lacanian psychoanalysis, or on Benjamin’s Arcades Project, or in Neoprimitivist discourses, fit in the School of Languages and Literatures? And if it could fit, why not call it the School of Comparative Literature? For, it seems that this flexibility regarding national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries would indeed make it into a large Comparative Literature department. If you admit that this sort of work will not not fit, then you must concede that you are diminishing the humanities, not enriching them; if you admit that these projects will fit, then you will have to concede that the focus of this school ought to be much broader than Language and Literature, and would in fact be no different from a Comparative Literature program, in which case you should not be dismantling the Centre, but making it the focal point of the School. Indeed, you say that the new School intends to enrich students’ language comprehension and their appreciation of “multiple literatures in a broadly comparative perspective” (15), which would lead one to draw the conclusion that Comparative Literature, which has comparativity and excellence in languages as its guiding principles, would hold a key position within this school. Thus it is surprising to see that Comparative Literature is the one discipline that is being dissolved and made peripheral. The argument that Comparative Literature has already succeeded in its mission and that its methodologies have successfully been disseminated to other disciplines, thus rendering it redundant, is a faulty argument, as well. The ‘mission’ of Comparative Literature is constantly evolving and adapting, and so is never really definitively accomplished.
I am also in agreement when you write that “we are fortunate to be situated in the middle of Canada’s largest metropolis and one of the world’s most culturally diverse and vibrant urban regions” (5). However, I find that the validity of this statement to be compromised by the creation of this School of Languages and Literatures. The cultural diversity of the UofT is one of the very reasons why I chose to do my graduate work here in Toronto. This is why I find it so upsetting that you are deciding to turn many of its unique, culturally diverse programs into a melting pot of languages and literatures. It should be evident from the protest arising out of Japanese and Chinese language media that the Asian community, for one, is skeptical of the “global community” that this school proposes to be manufacturing. I would like to argue that what makes Toronto such a vibrant and culturally diverse urban region is its tolerance towards a diversity of local communities, no matter how small or fledgling. If we appreciate this, should we not adopt the same tolerance towards the proliferation of smaller units on campus (6)?
In fact, your document explicitly mentions “the large size of the institution” as being a challenge to “student engagement and a sense of community amongst our students” (10). For this reason, I find it difficult to see how further enlarging and homogenizing the Faculty of Arts and Science can do anything other than aggravate this problem. The individual units you intend to dismantle already have their own communities. I can serve as witness to the communities present already at the Centre of Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Studies. I am speaking not only of graduate communities: you will notice from the heavy undergraduate contingency in our protests in the department of EAS that there is not only a community already in existence at the undergraduate level, but that this community is in fact very engaged, and strongly opposed to what you believe will be “enhancing” their academic experience. I for one don’t think that a sense of community will be fostered by gutting current communities that have developed on campus. On the contrary, creating a mega-school of languages and literatures will be posing a threat to the communities that have already developed around and between the local home-bases of the various units you intend to dismantle.
You draw attention to weaknesses in “active and collaborative learning” (6), but I do not believe this new School will create new synergies between the different programs involved. Assuming that by corralling them all into one administrative umbrella you will be fostering an environment for collaborative learning is an overly simplistic and naive understanding of the complexity -- the history, the methodologies, the identities -- of each of these unique disciplines. For example, I am a student who studies Japanese literature. Why would arbitrary administrative and even physical proximity to other units inspire or influence me to take courses in their field, or to incorporate them into my research? Slavic Languages and Literatures, despite being present in the same room, would still be as distant from my research as it is now. This is not to disparage other literatures and languages. Far from it. I think that what is most disparaging is to assume that the study of these literatures and languages is so superficial as to be easily assimilated into a single body of research and teaching. To assume that they are all in some fundamental way the ‘same’ and assimilable is at best naive, at worst imperialist. Those who are serious about studying a few well-chosen literatures for their research will not be enticed by the sort of literary and linguistic dilettantism that assumes one can simply jump from one to the other with ease just because the space between them has been made more compact.
Respect for the diversity between and even within the plurality of studies being amalgamated would be a good start towards a more subtle vision of global community. It would require that we respect the local and the peripheral, and respect the particularities of all these valuable disciplines, rather than heavy-handedly lumping them together in a way that, I must say, seems rather haphazard and disrespectful of their very divergent histories, projects, and identities. Much like all languages and literatures, not all Centres and Departments are alike.
I realize I am straddling a paradox here: I applaud interdisciplinarity and comparativity, while I also affirm the inherent differences that separate cultures, languages, and disciplines. This paradox is one that that is carefully walked by all students of Comparative Literature. As Eva Kushner has written, “from their earliest days comparative literature studies have lived in a paradox: they presuppose universals at work within human literatures and cultures, and seek to bring them to light through the examination of the diversity of these literatures and cultures” (“Literature in the Global Village”, Journal of Intercultural Studies, no.19, 1992: 54-61). Kushner proposes that Comparative Literature has evolved beyond its original methodologies -- ones of simple binary opposition, comparison and contrast, between Europe and its Other, between centre and periphery -- to adopt a more flexible method with “respect for the diversity and for the differentials of specific objects.” Comparative Literature has evolved into a discipline that respects the “permanence of cultural specificities.” With this methodological emphasis, Comparative Literature is indeed one of the disciplines most able to negotiate the true complexities and paradoxes of “global citizenship.” This is why I believe that especially without the guidance of Comparative Literature, this new School of Languages and Literatures will be nothing other than a placeless and disarticulated melting-pot of cultural homogeneity -- one wherein, just as in the actual global sphere, asymmetrical or oppressively homogenizing forces at work on the economic level will trump any superficial celebratory optimism regarding the pluralization and hybridization of cultural contents.
I don’t know if any of my concerns will be of any influence to your decision. In fact, I have my doubts, despite your emphatic assurance, that these “organizational changes” are even for the purpose of “preserving -- and indeed, strengthening -- scholarship and teaching in these fields”. For, are they not also explicitly for the purpose of “reducing overhead costs” (16)? It is true that you are saying we can have it both ways, that “the current conjuncture presents us with a number of promising opportunities to enhance our strengths and address our weaknesses” (7). Your report is full of such dialectical compromises: small-group and large-group learning; graduate and undergraduate education; international and local opportunities for community involvement; and so on. The dialectic most fundamental to this proposal, however, is the one that I find most difficult to reconcile: that of “academic excellence” and “financial constraint.” That is not to say that I believe fiscal frugality and academic rigor are incompatible, but rather that I believe a true compromise between the two has not yet been presented. In other words, I am sure a solution can be reached in which no program needs to be bluntly sacrificed wholesale in the name of fiscal prudence.
I apologize in advance for the use of such a cliched analogy, but I am sure you are familiar with Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Therein, Swift laments that the number of children born to poor Irish families has become an economic burden on the state. Therefore, as they are of no worth alive, he satirically recommends that they be made economically productive by being sold as food to the rich. It is my belief that you are making a similar proposal that the University of Toronto lighten its economic burden by devouring its young. I entreat you to see the absurdity of this decision and to attempt, instead, to form a truly modest proposal, one in which no program need be devoured. Perhaps your School will save some money, but by liquidating all of these programs, the long term effects to the University -- its intellectual, as well as, in the long term, its financial worth -- will be devastating.
Yours,
Darcy Gauthier,
Centre for Comparative Literature, PhD student
Toronto, Canada
CC:
David Naylor, President, University of Toronto
Cheryl Misak, Provost, Faculty of Arts and Science
Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Save Comparative Literature Campaign
Paper letter to follow
I am writing to you as a concerned PhD student at the Centre for Comparative Literature. I have just read through your 40 page outline of the changes you intend to make to the Faculty of Arts and Science. Though I believe that this is a valuable document that highlights many of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the Faculty, I would like to express my deepest disappointment towards your proposal to amalgamate several independent programs into a School of Languages and Literatures. I realize you have received many letters already, and so I apologize for your time in reading this one meagre addition to the mounting protest. However, as a student, I would like to implore you to consider my pleas and the pleas of many others -- both within the University and without, from students and professors, graduates and undergraduates, locally and internationally -- to consider a different way of resolving the financial problems of the Faculty that will not devastate the research and teaching that is being done in these disciplines.
I am disappointed to see many progressive suggestions within your document compromised elsewhere by the proposed new School. For one, you have rightly written in your document that “the most challenging problems of our complex, interconnected world do not always fall neatly into academic disciplines, or even professions” (14), and I agree upon the importance of “exploiting the breadth across the University through strong interdivisional partnerships” (18). The argument for ‘interdivisional partnerships’ is a convincing one. In this respect, your proposed courses in “Big Ideas” are interesting and valuable and I trust that first year undergraduates will benefit from being immersed in scholarship coming from diverse “disciplinary streams” (14). Linda Hutcheon’s own groundbreaking work with her husband, Michael Hutcheon, on the intersection of opera and medicine would be a valuable model for such an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to teaching and research. Your suggestion for a course showcasing how neuroscience, economics, and philosophy each approach “the mind” could also be a fascinating and important point of departure for new students to the University, one that rightly highlights the fragility and permeability of various disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, as Linda Hutcheon writes in a recent article on the dismantling of Comparative Literature, “to deal with the complex realities of today's world, we need to be able to think outside our disciplinary silos, to think across those borders that separate us from speaking to and learning from others in diverse fields with fruitfully differing perspectives” (truth-out.org, July 19, 2010). Of course, interdisciplinary research and teaching of this kind is already being pioneered at several places in the UofT: EAS for one is already a successful interdisciplinary department, and Comparative Literature by definition is interdisciplinary as well.
As an aside, I notice that you do not in fact use the term “interdisciplinary”, and opt instead to use “multidisciplinary”. I would like to know if you are drawing a distinction here between ‘multi-’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’, or whether these terms are interchangeable. I wonder because the Faculty of Arts and Science is in the most obvious sense already multi-disciplinary -- in the sense that it houses multiple disciplines. Multidisciplinarity is not, however, necessarily interdisciplinary. Perhaps it is a small point, but when I think of this term ‘multidisciplinary’, I imagine multiple yet discrete disciplines whose “ideas” are not always conversant with each other in a meaningful, mutually implicating way. They perhaps reside side-by-side, but their conversations run parallel to each other rather than overlapping. Interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, addresses the connections between these disciplines, as well as their inscrutable differences. Rebecca Comay frames the distinction quite well in the context of Comparative Literature when she says that “it’s not just about multiplying the number of disciplines you can juggle -- it’s about experimenting with different frames of reference” (rabble.ca, July 12, 2010). I trust that the “Big Ideas” program will keep this distinction in mind when it attempts to negotiate various disciplinary frameworks.
Let me reiterate that I applaud your efforts to promote “interdivisional partnerships”. However, I would also like to express my serious misgivings about whether or not the proposed School of Languages and Literatures will be contributing to this program of ‘interdivisionality’, or interdisciplinarity, or even multidisciplinarity -- unless by multiple disciplines we mean two: Literatures and Languages. I cannot understand how sending non-literature and non-language professors back to their respective disciplines -- history, philosophy, French, Latin American Studies, etc. -- can be fostering, in your own words, “the multidisciplinary comprehensiveness and strength of the faculty” (14). It seems instead that this will be reversing the progress made towards a more interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research at the UofT. As Linda Hutcheon has said in the same article quoted above, “the move back to departmental disciplinary hegemony and what will be perceived as a Eurocentric focus will be seen by many as a retrograde step for an institution that had prided itself, and rightly so, on its vibrant interdisciplinary and transnational/global intellectual environment of cultural exchange”. Narrowing the interdisciplinary focus down to mere instruction in languages and literatures is far from a championing of, and more like an attack on, interdisciplinary studies. It goes without saying that Comparative Literature in this proposed school will cease to function as a nexus of interdisciplinary work. Hutcheon goes on to argue that language departments, such as EAS, do not just teach language, and Comparative literature does not just teach literature: “neither language nor literature exists in a vacuum”. How could a school of Languages and Literatures, one that is very explicit about its intentions to send faculty who teach neither languages nor literatures back to their respective disciplines, be anything but such a vacuum?
There are other areas of your document with which I am in agreement. For one, you have written that “we are well recognized as a research powerhouse in all three major sectors of the Faculty,” and that “[a] large number of our graduate units enjoy very strong reputations internationally for the excellence of their programs” (4). I could not agree more. Our strengths in research and our international reputation are without question. Indeed, the Centre for Comparative Literature is one of the University’s strongest internationally recognized programs. Its annual graduate colloquium attracts scholars from around the world. Its students garner prestigious government scholarships, including the addition of a Vanier scholar this year. Well respected professors of international renown have come to the Centre to teach seminars -- for example Julia Kristeva, who has already written you a letter protesting the closure of the Centre.
For these reasons and many more, I am certain that the dismantling of the Centre will undermine the Faculty’s international -- not to mention domestic -- prestige, which we both agree is one of its key strengths. Letters of protest from many highly reputable international -- as well as local -- sources attest to this fact. Moreover, I gather that the widely held opinion of students within the program now is that they would not have considered applying to the University of Toronto, or would have accepted admissions offers from other serious Comparative Literature programs, had they known that the University of Toronto’s program would lose its autonomous status and be transformed into a mere collaborative degree. Such a program does not present itself as a very attractive offer to students who are serious about studying Comparative Literature. I know I speak for many students in the program when I say that I worry about the value my degree will have coming from the death throes of a soon to be defunct centre. Could you honestly say that as a member of a hiring committee looking for a Professor of East Asian Studies, or German, or Comparative Literature, you would choose an applicant with a degree in “Languages and Literatures” over one with a more specialized degree in those fields?
I also worry that the new school will not allow for the same research and teaching opportunities as the Centre for Comparative Literature. The research that I do as a PhD student does not fall neatly into any national literature, and actually extends beyond literature into theatre and cinema. Moreover, it draws upon the contributions of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and phenomenological discourses, and where would I find the theoretical guidance for this project without any body within the school dedicated to issues of theory and criticism? I don’t see how my project can be continued meaningfully without the scholarly ethos of the Centre for Comparative Literature as support.
You need only look at the course offerings of the Centre to see that what it offers would not be possible elsewhere. Where, for example, would a course on Lacanian psychoanalysis, or on Benjamin’s Arcades Project, or in Neoprimitivist discourses, fit in the School of Languages and Literatures? And if it could fit, why not call it the School of Comparative Literature? For, it seems that this flexibility regarding national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries would indeed make it into a large Comparative Literature department. If you admit that this sort of work will not not fit, then you must concede that you are diminishing the humanities, not enriching them; if you admit that these projects will fit, then you will have to concede that the focus of this school ought to be much broader than Language and Literature, and would in fact be no different from a Comparative Literature program, in which case you should not be dismantling the Centre, but making it the focal point of the School. Indeed, you say that the new School intends to enrich students’ language comprehension and their appreciation of “multiple literatures in a broadly comparative perspective” (15), which would lead one to draw the conclusion that Comparative Literature, which has comparativity and excellence in languages as its guiding principles, would hold a key position within this school. Thus it is surprising to see that Comparative Literature is the one discipline that is being dissolved and made peripheral. The argument that Comparative Literature has already succeeded in its mission and that its methodologies have successfully been disseminated to other disciplines, thus rendering it redundant, is a faulty argument, as well. The ‘mission’ of Comparative Literature is constantly evolving and adapting, and so is never really definitively accomplished.
I am also in agreement when you write that “we are fortunate to be situated in the middle of Canada’s largest metropolis and one of the world’s most culturally diverse and vibrant urban regions” (5). However, I find that the validity of this statement to be compromised by the creation of this School of Languages and Literatures. The cultural diversity of the UofT is one of the very reasons why I chose to do my graduate work here in Toronto. This is why I find it so upsetting that you are deciding to turn many of its unique, culturally diverse programs into a melting pot of languages and literatures. It should be evident from the protest arising out of Japanese and Chinese language media that the Asian community, for one, is skeptical of the “global community” that this school proposes to be manufacturing. I would like to argue that what makes Toronto such a vibrant and culturally diverse urban region is its tolerance towards a diversity of local communities, no matter how small or fledgling. If we appreciate this, should we not adopt the same tolerance towards the proliferation of smaller units on campus (6)?
In fact, your document explicitly mentions “the large size of the institution” as being a challenge to “student engagement and a sense of community amongst our students” (10). For this reason, I find it difficult to see how further enlarging and homogenizing the Faculty of Arts and Science can do anything other than aggravate this problem. The individual units you intend to dismantle already have their own communities. I can serve as witness to the communities present already at the Centre of Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Studies. I am speaking not only of graduate communities: you will notice from the heavy undergraduate contingency in our protests in the department of EAS that there is not only a community already in existence at the undergraduate level, but that this community is in fact very engaged, and strongly opposed to what you believe will be “enhancing” their academic experience. I for one don’t think that a sense of community will be fostered by gutting current communities that have developed on campus. On the contrary, creating a mega-school of languages and literatures will be posing a threat to the communities that have already developed around and between the local home-bases of the various units you intend to dismantle.
You draw attention to weaknesses in “active and collaborative learning” (6), but I do not believe this new School will create new synergies between the different programs involved. Assuming that by corralling them all into one administrative umbrella you will be fostering an environment for collaborative learning is an overly simplistic and naive understanding of the complexity -- the history, the methodologies, the identities -- of each of these unique disciplines. For example, I am a student who studies Japanese literature. Why would arbitrary administrative and even physical proximity to other units inspire or influence me to take courses in their field, or to incorporate them into my research? Slavic Languages and Literatures, despite being present in the same room, would still be as distant from my research as it is now. This is not to disparage other literatures and languages. Far from it. I think that what is most disparaging is to assume that the study of these literatures and languages is so superficial as to be easily assimilated into a single body of research and teaching. To assume that they are all in some fundamental way the ‘same’ and assimilable is at best naive, at worst imperialist. Those who are serious about studying a few well-chosen literatures for their research will not be enticed by the sort of literary and linguistic dilettantism that assumes one can simply jump from one to the other with ease just because the space between them has been made more compact.
Respect for the diversity between and even within the plurality of studies being amalgamated would be a good start towards a more subtle vision of global community. It would require that we respect the local and the peripheral, and respect the particularities of all these valuable disciplines, rather than heavy-handedly lumping them together in a way that, I must say, seems rather haphazard and disrespectful of their very divergent histories, projects, and identities. Much like all languages and literatures, not all Centres and Departments are alike.
I realize I am straddling a paradox here: I applaud interdisciplinarity and comparativity, while I also affirm the inherent differences that separate cultures, languages, and disciplines. This paradox is one that that is carefully walked by all students of Comparative Literature. As Eva Kushner has written, “from their earliest days comparative literature studies have lived in a paradox: they presuppose universals at work within human literatures and cultures, and seek to bring them to light through the examination of the diversity of these literatures and cultures” (“Literature in the Global Village”, Journal of Intercultural Studies, no.19, 1992: 54-61). Kushner proposes that Comparative Literature has evolved beyond its original methodologies -- ones of simple binary opposition, comparison and contrast, between Europe and its Other, between centre and periphery -- to adopt a more flexible method with “respect for the diversity and for the differentials of specific objects.” Comparative Literature has evolved into a discipline that respects the “permanence of cultural specificities.” With this methodological emphasis, Comparative Literature is indeed one of the disciplines most able to negotiate the true complexities and paradoxes of “global citizenship.” This is why I believe that especially without the guidance of Comparative Literature, this new School of Languages and Literatures will be nothing other than a placeless and disarticulated melting-pot of cultural homogeneity -- one wherein, just as in the actual global sphere, asymmetrical or oppressively homogenizing forces at work on the economic level will trump any superficial celebratory optimism regarding the pluralization and hybridization of cultural contents.
I don’t know if any of my concerns will be of any influence to your decision. In fact, I have my doubts, despite your emphatic assurance, that these “organizational changes” are even for the purpose of “preserving -- and indeed, strengthening -- scholarship and teaching in these fields”. For, are they not also explicitly for the purpose of “reducing overhead costs” (16)? It is true that you are saying we can have it both ways, that “the current conjuncture presents us with a number of promising opportunities to enhance our strengths and address our weaknesses” (7). Your report is full of such dialectical compromises: small-group and large-group learning; graduate and undergraduate education; international and local opportunities for community involvement; and so on. The dialectic most fundamental to this proposal, however, is the one that I find most difficult to reconcile: that of “academic excellence” and “financial constraint.” That is not to say that I believe fiscal frugality and academic rigor are incompatible, but rather that I believe a true compromise between the two has not yet been presented. In other words, I am sure a solution can be reached in which no program needs to be bluntly sacrificed wholesale in the name of fiscal prudence.
I apologize in advance for the use of such a cliched analogy, but I am sure you are familiar with Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Therein, Swift laments that the number of children born to poor Irish families has become an economic burden on the state. Therefore, as they are of no worth alive, he satirically recommends that they be made economically productive by being sold as food to the rich. It is my belief that you are making a similar proposal that the University of Toronto lighten its economic burden by devouring its young. I entreat you to see the absurdity of this decision and to attempt, instead, to form a truly modest proposal, one in which no program need be devoured. Perhaps your School will save some money, but by liquidating all of these programs, the long term effects to the University -- its intellectual, as well as, in the long term, its financial worth -- will be devastating.
Yours,
Darcy Gauthier,
Centre for Comparative Literature, PhD student
Toronto, Canada
CC:
David Naylor, President, University of Toronto
Cheryl Misak, Provost, Faculty of Arts and Science
Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Save Comparative Literature Campaign
Paper letter to follow
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Julia Kristeva, Université Paris 7 --TRANSLATION
Monsieur le Président, Cher Collègue,
I have just learned, to my great dismay, that the University of Toronto is considering the elimination of its Centre for Comparative Literature. I am writing to you because my connection to this Centre goes back many years. I first came to the Centre in 1992 as the holder of the Northrop Frye Professorship. My seminar, entitled “Proust et le temps sensible”, and its ensuing lectures formed the basis of my book of the same title, which came out the following year. I subsequently returned several times as a Visiting Professor to give lectures which led to two other books in my trilogy on the female gender: Hannah Arendt (1999) and Colette (2002). Finally, in 2000, I had the honor of being named Doctor Honoris Causa at your university.
I am convinced that the role Northrop Frye played in literary studies, and more widely in the global understanding of literature as a particular type of thought (and not merely as a hobby or affectation) merits an interdisciplinary approach that Canadian academics and the international academic community must develop and deepen as part of his legacy.
Frye initiated a research perspective that is urgently contemporary in its relevance: the idea of literature as sharing the same space as the aesthetic (both the perceptible and the beautiful) and the need to believe (spiritualities and religions). Comparative Literature thus has a heretofore unexpected role to play in a time of religious clashes.
UNESCO passed a resolution in favour of cultural diversity that both France and Canada inspired and actively support. This policy, which is intended to be a new social contract for globalization, based on the interaction amongst diversities—against banality as a “radical evil” (Arendt)—must be supported by a precise knowledge of languages of their cultural expressions , a knowledge that Comparative Literature and the humanities can indeed deepen and provide.
Mr. Naylor, please understand my worry concerning these proposed administrative changes. They appear drastic and they carry with them an implication of obscurantism. I hope with all my heart that the University of Toronto will not accept the recommendation "disestablish" its Centre for Comparative Literature.
En vous remerciant de l’attention que vous voudriez bien porter à cette lettre,
Recevez, Monsieur le Président et Cher Collègue, l’expression de ma haute considération à de mes meilleures pensées,
Julia Kristeva
[Translation of Julia Kristeva's letter of July 21 by Adleen Crapo, PhD student, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto]
I have just learned, to my great dismay, that the University of Toronto is considering the elimination of its Centre for Comparative Literature. I am writing to you because my connection to this Centre goes back many years. I first came to the Centre in 1992 as the holder of the Northrop Frye Professorship. My seminar, entitled “Proust et le temps sensible”, and its ensuing lectures formed the basis of my book of the same title, which came out the following year. I subsequently returned several times as a Visiting Professor to give lectures which led to two other books in my trilogy on the female gender: Hannah Arendt (1999) and Colette (2002). Finally, in 2000, I had the honor of being named Doctor Honoris Causa at your university.
I am convinced that the role Northrop Frye played in literary studies, and more widely in the global understanding of literature as a particular type of thought (and not merely as a hobby or affectation) merits an interdisciplinary approach that Canadian academics and the international academic community must develop and deepen as part of his legacy.
Frye initiated a research perspective that is urgently contemporary in its relevance: the idea of literature as sharing the same space as the aesthetic (both the perceptible and the beautiful) and the need to believe (spiritualities and religions). Comparative Literature thus has a heretofore unexpected role to play in a time of religious clashes.
UNESCO passed a resolution in favour of cultural diversity that both France and Canada inspired and actively support. This policy, which is intended to be a new social contract for globalization, based on the interaction amongst diversities—against banality as a “radical evil” (Arendt)—must be supported by a precise knowledge of languages of their cultural expressions , a knowledge that Comparative Literature and the humanities can indeed deepen and provide.
Mr. Naylor, please understand my worry concerning these proposed administrative changes. They appear drastic and they carry with them an implication of obscurantism. I hope with all my heart that the University of Toronto will not accept the recommendation "disestablish" its Centre for Comparative Literature.
En vous remerciant de l’attention que vous voudriez bien porter à cette lettre,
Recevez, Monsieur le Président et Cher Collègue, l’expression de ma haute considération à de mes meilleures pensées,
Julia Kristeva
[Translation of Julia Kristeva's letter of July 21 by Adleen Crapo, PhD student, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto]
Haun Saussy, Yale University
Yale University
Department of Comparative Literature
P. O. Box 208299
451 College Street
New Haven, CT 06520-8299
Department of Comparative Literature
P. O. Box 208299
451 College Street
New Haven, CT 06520-8299
July 27, 2010
President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto M5S 1A1 CANADA.
Dear President Naylor:
I was dismayed to hear of the planned closing of the University’s Centre for Comparative Literature and the dismantling of the department of East Asian Studies. I hope you will not take it amiss if I explain as briefly as I can why I think this plan, if carried out, is likely to be harmful to the University and to Canada’s national interest.
You will certainly have received a number of letters asking you to reconsider this reorganization. Perhaps a strategic planning committee thinks of people like me as obstacles to clear practical thinking, as anarchic throwbacks always ready to join a parade to Save the Dodo, as wasters of the University’s time and money. In these typecast debates, the sentimental humanists are always supposed to lack the tough business sense that tough times require. I would prefer to take the business analogy from another side, and ask: What are you doing to preserve the University’s brand?
Saving money is not the only activity that goes on in the managerial culture of successful businesses. If your business is founded on a unique or valuable product, you will try everything else before you cheapen its reputation.
The reputation of the University of Toronto has been a long time in the making. You are fortunate, as President, to have inherited a reputation for serious scholarship that is at once specialized and highly contagious, research that changes conditions in its own field and goes on to affect other fields. Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan are two Toronto thinkers whose work is received as an inspiration in every area of the humanities and social sciences. I could name other living Torontonians whose work will count in a similar way for future generations, but I’ll spare the parties the embarrassment of direct nomination. This reputation for intellect is what makes the University’s name. Reputation makes the University attractive to professors and students, gives credibility to the research done there, and thus makes it a resource for the nation. If I were in your position, I would be extremely careful not to tamper with this formula.
Academic departments are not just cost centers. They are niches in which a certain culture of inquiry can flourish. A department is a set of people, at various stages of their careers, who are able to judge one another’s work usefully (the basis of exams, hiring, publication and promotion). Where this structure exists, you should support it (thus I am surprised to hear of the plans to dismantle the East Asian Studies department, a place where linguists, literary scholars, historians and sociologists have long been engaged in a common conversation with a geographic basis). Where it does not exist, you cannot count on being able to create it by administrative fiat.
A department composed of people who do not share this ability to judge one another’s work atrophies, because judgments will be made on weak grounds. But this is precisely what has been recommended in the case of the new School of Languages and Literatures. “Future faculty appointments will be managed by the School,” and not by the “individual language groups” (the former departments) of which the School consists. That means, if I may put forth a few imaginary examples, that a committee containing few, or no, persons literate in Russian will be making decisions about whom to hire in Russian futurism; colleagues unable to read a word of Japanese will be voting on the merits of a junior faculty member whose research might bear on the semantics of verb aspect in the Genji monogatari; and so forth. I can’t believe that this situation would be very satisfactory to anyone inside the School. Discussions and judgments would become perfunctory (“well, the book is 480 pages long and was published by Cambridge, so it must be good enough”); faculty members might find they have very little stake in retaining their colleagues, once the sense of a common enterprise has vanished; niceness might become the major criterion for promotion; or worse yet perhaps, a standard of uniformity might impose itself, so that only people who wrote about language and literature from a predetermined thematic or theoretical angle were perceived as doing “important” work. Language and literature people devote themselves intensively to pursuing the specific differences of their field. The languages are not interchangeable, nor are the cultures; diversity is here not a vague moral imperative, but a fact of life and the chief object of study. This is why the administrative convenience of lumping languages and literatures into a common unit serves the larger aims of the discipline so poorly.
In this context, I should say a word about Comparative Literature. It seems that the planning committee thought that, once the School of Languages and Literatures had been formed, Comparative Literature would have no reason to exist; for isn’t Comparative Literature what you get when you combine two or three different literatures? This way of thinking, if indeed it did motivate the disestablishment of the Centre founded in 1969 by Northrop Frye, is erroneous. Comparative Literature has as its object the interactions of different literary traditions. It is a product, not a lowest common denominator. To do it well, you need to be immersed in several different literary cultures and have, on top of all that learning, a theoretical or analogical imagination that will enable you to see meaningful parallels. As the study of interactions and interchanges, this field reflects on historical and cultural specificity; it does not negate them. Comparative Literature needs a diverse and vital community of specialists in the different languages and literatures in order to be successful: otherwise, the commonalities that it discovers will run the risk of being banal or provincial. The fact that members of other departments (e.g., English) now sometimes work in a comparative mode does not mean that Comparative Literature can be dispensed with as an institutional structure. Rather, it is a sign of the seriousness and adventurousness of Toronto at its best that Comparative Literature has for so long had a home there and produced so many renowned scholars.
The dismantling of the East Asian Studies department would have a further unfortunate effect, with practical consequences for the University and the nation. China, Japan and Korea are countries with a long past, with a great deal of historical and cultural complexity, and their interactions with the countries of North America increase daily in intensity and significance. I am not familiar with the specifics of Canada’s East Asian relations, whether political, economic or military, but I can hardly believe that they differ greatly in essence from the relations that the United States and Mexico hold with that part of the world. Our industry and commerce are deeply rooted in their productive capabilities; our finances depend on the willingness of East Asian bankers to continue buying our bonds; such political order as presently exists across the globe will increasingly rely on the desire of East Asian governments to preserve the peace (indeed, the definition of this “peace” will increasingly reflect the interests of those governments). If there is any part of the world on which North Americans would be ill-advised to turn their backs, it is East Asia. But this is what is planned: a deskilling of the present multidisciplinary department, resulting in the severing of linguistic and philological training from its applications in history, philosophy, history of science, politics and sociology. This must be stopped. Canada needs intelligent, critically-aware, polyglot diplomats, soldiers and businesspeople with the ability to engage as equals in the East Asian conversation through mastery of culture and history, which so profoundly influence present interests and behavior. Students who can chatter away in modern Chinese but have never plunged into the history of the Song Dynasty, or students whose analysis of the North Korean strategic posture is unclouded by any knowledge of the Korean language or traditions, are less valuable to Canada and to the world than students who can integrate many forms of knowledge. The better-informed students will also make fewer mistakes.
These are hard financial times for universities. I know that too. But there’s a category of things worth preserving through the hard times. I write as an admirer and well-wisher of the University of Toronto, as someone whose professional life is enriched by the existence of impressive rivals across Lake Ontario. I share with you, I believe, the desire to see the University of Toronto continue to recruit the very best students and teachers. Wholesale reorganization and deskilling, I fear, will weaken Toronto’s reputation and cause it to lose its place in the first rank of North American research universities.
Yours very truly,
Haun Saussy
Bird White Housum Professor of Comparative
Literature and East Asian Languages & Literatures;
Chair, Council on East Asian Studies
Yale University
Marie Vautier, University of Victoria
Victoria, B.C.
July 25th, 2010
President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27, King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor,
I am writing to encourage you to reverse the decision to close the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.
I am a professor of comparative Canadian Literature, working between the departments of French and English at the University of Victoria, B.C. I obtained my BA from the Université d’Ottawa, my MA from Université Laval, and my PhD from the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. I walked right out of the Centre into a tenure-track position here at UVic. I was hired to run a programme which is unique in the country, the “Combined Major in French and English (Canadian Literature).” I would not have been able to meet the requirements of this position had I not graduated from the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.
When I learned that the reasons given for closing the Centre included the fact that other literature departments “now teach theory,” I realized that you may not know enough about the Centre, the role the Centre has played in the discipline, and the many ways in which it serves the academic communities of the western world.
“Comparative literature” as a programme of study is in a class of its own. It is widely considered to be “la crème de la crème” of literary studies. There is no doubt that this Centre puts the University of Toronto at the level of the American Ivy League universities and major European universities within the discipline of literary studies. Last year, I was an invited scholar at the prestigious Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, UK, and there is no doubt in my mind that my training in comparative literature at the University of Toronto, along with the door-opening name of my thesis supervisor, Dr. Linda Hutcheon, were among the primary reasons I was invited to pursue my research in this renowned interdisciplinary institute.
Interdisciplinary studies are necessary to today’s world; the Centre for Comparative Literature is at the very centre of interdisciplinary studies in Canada and beyond. When I was a student at the Centre, I met several of the best known theorists in the world on an almost weekly basis, as they were invited to give talks to our small international group of students in the Centre’s first year class. These students now work and publish in Canada, Australia, the UK, Sweden, and elsewhere, and their training at the Centre enhances its international reputation.
All across the country—indeed, all across the world, graduates of the Centre walk straight into tenure-track positions, and continue to highlight the advantages of having studied at the Centre as they become scholars with national and international reputations.
This Centre is crucial to the discipline of comparative literature in this country. It is important that it remain active, vibrant, and that it continue to bring credit to the University of Toronto.
Please reconsider your decision.
Respectfully yours,
Dr. Marie Vautier
Director, Combined Major in Canadian Literature
French and English Departments,
University of Victoria
P.O. Box 3045 STN CSC
Victoria, BC
V8W 3P4
July 25th, 2010
President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27, King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor,
I am writing to encourage you to reverse the decision to close the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.
I am a professor of comparative Canadian Literature, working between the departments of French and English at the University of Victoria, B.C. I obtained my BA from the Université d’Ottawa, my MA from Université Laval, and my PhD from the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. I walked right out of the Centre into a tenure-track position here at UVic. I was hired to run a programme which is unique in the country, the “Combined Major in French and English (Canadian Literature).” I would not have been able to meet the requirements of this position had I not graduated from the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.
When I learned that the reasons given for closing the Centre included the fact that other literature departments “now teach theory,” I realized that you may not know enough about the Centre, the role the Centre has played in the discipline, and the many ways in which it serves the academic communities of the western world.
“Comparative literature” as a programme of study is in a class of its own. It is widely considered to be “la crème de la crème” of literary studies. There is no doubt that this Centre puts the University of Toronto at the level of the American Ivy League universities and major European universities within the discipline of literary studies. Last year, I was an invited scholar at the prestigious Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, UK, and there is no doubt in my mind that my training in comparative literature at the University of Toronto, along with the door-opening name of my thesis supervisor, Dr. Linda Hutcheon, were among the primary reasons I was invited to pursue my research in this renowned interdisciplinary institute.
Interdisciplinary studies are necessary to today’s world; the Centre for Comparative Literature is at the very centre of interdisciplinary studies in Canada and beyond. When I was a student at the Centre, I met several of the best known theorists in the world on an almost weekly basis, as they were invited to give talks to our small international group of students in the Centre’s first year class. These students now work and publish in Canada, Australia, the UK, Sweden, and elsewhere, and their training at the Centre enhances its international reputation.
All across the country—indeed, all across the world, graduates of the Centre walk straight into tenure-track positions, and continue to highlight the advantages of having studied at the Centre as they become scholars with national and international reputations.
This Centre is crucial to the discipline of comparative literature in this country. It is important that it remain active, vibrant, and that it continue to bring credit to the University of Toronto.
Please reconsider your decision.
Respectfully yours,
Dr. Marie Vautier
Director, Combined Major in Canadian Literature
French and English Departments,
University of Victoria
P.O. Box 3045 STN CSC
Victoria, BC
V8W 3P4
Monday, July 26, 2010
Karin Beeler, on behalf of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association
Date: July 21, 2010
To: President David Naylor, University of Toronto
Provost Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
Dean Meric Gertler, University of Toronto
From: Dr. Karin Beeler, President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and Members of the CCLA Executive Board
Re: Proposed Closure of the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Toronto
As members of the board of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, we were astonished to hear of the proposal to close the internationally and nationally recognized Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. The Centre, was founded by the eminent scholar, Dr. Northrop Frye in 1969, and his vision helped develop the Centre as a site for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies. The Toronto Centre has been a cornerstone of Comparative Literature studies in Canada. Faculty have excelled in their research in this field, as is evident in the international and national reputations of faculty associated with the Centre. Dr. Linda Hutcheon, a professor affiliated with the Centre, is a 2010 recipient of the prestigious Molson Prize which recognizes her outstanding contributions to the intellectual and cultural life of Canada; she has been one of the leading supervisors of graduate students in this program. Two of the Centre’s faculty, Dr. Rebecca Comay and Dr. J.E. Chamberlain have delivered keynote addresses for Canadian Comparative Literature Association conferences to large groups of scholars from a variety of disciplines. Graduate students from the Centre for Comparative Literature have also had a significant presence in the annual Canadian Comparative Literature Association conferences held in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, thus demonstrating that there is a new generation of Comparatists who are building on the foundation of the discipline of Comparative literature in Canada.
We as members of the board of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association therefore urge the University administration to reconsider the proposal to close this Centre. The discipline of Comparative literature continues to have a strong future in Canada as is evident in the ongoing interest in the field by new generations of scholars. The national journal of the CCLA, the /Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ edited by Dr. Jonathan Hart, also enjoys one of the highest SSHRC ratings for humanities journals. For some time now, Comparative Literature has been the driving force behind scholarship aimed at understanding the complexity of connections across national languages, cultural traditions and various artistic forms and media. It has been able to exert such a lasting influence thanks to an established network of units, departments and programs which, at the regional, national and international levels, provides students and scholars with sound institutional structures for training, teaching and research purposes. The belief that other disciplines now offer, here and there, the very same possibility for exploring cultural connections fails to recognize how crucial established academic frameworks are to the purposeful and concerted development of scholarship and knowledge. At a time when such connections are increasingly instrumental in fostering a mutual understanding of different cultures in local and global contexts, we need to strengthen rather than weaken the position enjoyed by comparative literature, as a discipline in the humanities aptly focused on understanding complex cultural interactions. We believe that if you decide to proceed with the dismantling of the Centre for Comparative Literature, you will be eroding not only the reputation of the University of Toronto as a leader in cross-cultural studies but also, at a national level, the well-established network of programs and centres which positions Canadian academic institutions at the forefront of comparative studies.
Sincerely,
Dr. Karin Beeler, President, CCLA
Dr. Susan Ingram, Vice President, CCLA
Dr. Markus Reisenleitner, Treasurer and Webmaster, CCLA
Dr. Pascal Gin, Secretary, CCLA
Dr. Jonathan Hart, CCLA Board Member and Editor of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature
To: President David Naylor, University of Toronto
Provost Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
Dean Meric Gertler, University of Toronto
From: Dr. Karin Beeler, President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and Members of the CCLA Executive Board
Re: Proposed Closure of the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Toronto
As members of the board of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, we were astonished to hear of the proposal to close the internationally and nationally recognized Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. The Centre, was founded by the eminent scholar, Dr. Northrop Frye in 1969, and his vision helped develop the Centre as a site for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies. The Toronto Centre has been a cornerstone of Comparative Literature studies in Canada. Faculty have excelled in their research in this field, as is evident in the international and national reputations of faculty associated with the Centre. Dr. Linda Hutcheon, a professor affiliated with the Centre, is a 2010 recipient of the prestigious Molson Prize which recognizes her outstanding contributions to the intellectual and cultural life of Canada; she has been one of the leading supervisors of graduate students in this program. Two of the Centre’s faculty, Dr. Rebecca Comay and Dr. J.E. Chamberlain have delivered keynote addresses for Canadian Comparative Literature Association conferences to large groups of scholars from a variety of disciplines. Graduate students from the Centre for Comparative Literature have also had a significant presence in the annual Canadian Comparative Literature Association conferences held in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, thus demonstrating that there is a new generation of Comparatists who are building on the foundation of the discipline of Comparative literature in Canada.
We as members of the board of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association therefore urge the University administration to reconsider the proposal to close this Centre. The discipline of Comparative literature continues to have a strong future in Canada as is evident in the ongoing interest in the field by new generations of scholars. The national journal of the CCLA, the /Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ edited by Dr. Jonathan Hart, also enjoys one of the highest SSHRC ratings for humanities journals. For some time now, Comparative Literature has been the driving force behind scholarship aimed at understanding the complexity of connections across national languages, cultural traditions and various artistic forms and media. It has been able to exert such a lasting influence thanks to an established network of units, departments and programs which, at the regional, national and international levels, provides students and scholars with sound institutional structures for training, teaching and research purposes. The belief that other disciplines now offer, here and there, the very same possibility for exploring cultural connections fails to recognize how crucial established academic frameworks are to the purposeful and concerted development of scholarship and knowledge. At a time when such connections are increasingly instrumental in fostering a mutual understanding of different cultures in local and global contexts, we need to strengthen rather than weaken the position enjoyed by comparative literature, as a discipline in the humanities aptly focused on understanding complex cultural interactions. We believe that if you decide to proceed with the dismantling of the Centre for Comparative Literature, you will be eroding not only the reputation of the University of Toronto as a leader in cross-cultural studies but also, at a national level, the well-established network of programs and centres which positions Canadian academic institutions at the forefront of comparative studies.
Sincerely,
Dr. Karin Beeler, President, CCLA
Dr. Susan Ingram, Vice President, CCLA
Dr. Markus Reisenleitner, Treasurer and Webmaster, CCLA
Dr. Pascal Gin, Secretary, CCLA
Dr. Jonathan Hart, CCLA Board Member and Editor of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Daniel Lamont, University of Central Lancashire
25th July, 2010
Dean Meric Gertler
University of Toronto
100 St. George St., Room 2005
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G3
Dear Professor Gertler,
I have seen the news story in The Globe and Mail that it is your intention to close the Centre for Comparative Literature in the University. As an academic based in the United Kingdom but also one who studied in Canada and is very familiar with the University of Toronto, I write both to express my shock at this intention and also to protest vigorously. As a sometime Dean of Faculty myself, I recognise and sympathise with the need to make savings but there are surely ways of doing this without doing serious damage and long-term to a faculty or to a discipline.
The University of Toronto has an international reputation and the Centre for Comparative Literature is a factor in this. The Centre is well regarded in Great Britain. It has attracted students from all over the world and this valuable addition (and income!) to the University will be lost. In a country such as Canada, and a city such as Toronto, with its huge cultural and intellectual diversity, it essential both for intellectual credibility and also for the realisation of the University’s mission that the Centre continues to provide a space and a framework for the study of literary texts in a comparative context and within an appropriate and demanding intellectual framework. It is not simple piety that has led to the association of the Centre with Northrop Frye but because Frye’s work over his whole career was so crucial in establishing the proper critical discipline for such work.
I am afraid that I am wholly unconvinced by your reported comment that: “The centre has been so successful that it has seeded interest in literary theory and comparative studies across humanities departments . . . our judgment it is no longer necessary.” Not to put too fine a point on it, this strikes me as a convenient rationalisation. If interest has reputedly been sown in other departments, the seed has fallen on stony ground. It simply is not the case that the kind of literary theory which Frye established is generating significant and important work in a genuinely comparative
sense in other departments. I don’t see too many people of the range and intelligence of Professor Hutcheon nor do I see any evidence of the comparative and carefully theorised work in other departments. If you close the Centre for Comparative Literature you will do substantial harm not only the intellectual strength of the University of Toronto but also to its international reputation.
I understand the need to make savings but academic vandalism where you destroy something does not seem the best way to go about it. I am still painfully aware of the enormous and long-lasting damage the Thatcher cuts did to British Universities in the 1980s. I cannot believe that it is not possible to find savings in the way that the Centre for Comparative Literature is run at the moment while securing its future. . I strongly suspect on past experience that you won’t make the savings on administrative costs that you hope for and these will be offset by the loss of student and other income. It is fatally easy to go for the dramatic gesture of closing a unit such as the Centre for Comparative Literature rather than adopt the more painstaking way of looking for alternatives. I know that this is possible because I have done it.
I beg of you, Professor Gertler, to review your decision and look for savings in the way the Centre currently operates but still keep it open. In the long term this will be the better decision for the Faculty and the University and will sustain an important and vibrant Centre.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel R. Lamont
Daniel R. Lamont, MA, MA, MA, PhD
Dean of the Faculty of Cultural, Legal and Social Studies (retired)
The University of Central Lancashire
Dean Meric Gertler
University of Toronto
100 St. George St., Room 2005
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G3
Dear Professor Gertler,
I have seen the news story in The Globe and Mail that it is your intention to close the Centre for Comparative Literature in the University. As an academic based in the United Kingdom but also one who studied in Canada and is very familiar with the University of Toronto, I write both to express my shock at this intention and also to protest vigorously. As a sometime Dean of Faculty myself, I recognise and sympathise with the need to make savings but there are surely ways of doing this without doing serious damage and long-term to a faculty or to a discipline.
The University of Toronto has an international reputation and the Centre for Comparative Literature is a factor in this. The Centre is well regarded in Great Britain. It has attracted students from all over the world and this valuable addition (and income!) to the University will be lost. In a country such as Canada, and a city such as Toronto, with its huge cultural and intellectual diversity, it essential both for intellectual credibility and also for the realisation of the University’s mission that the Centre continues to provide a space and a framework for the study of literary texts in a comparative context and within an appropriate and demanding intellectual framework. It is not simple piety that has led to the association of the Centre with Northrop Frye but because Frye’s work over his whole career was so crucial in establishing the proper critical discipline for such work.
I am afraid that I am wholly unconvinced by your reported comment that: “The centre has been so successful that it has seeded interest in literary theory and comparative studies across humanities departments . . . our judgment it is no longer necessary.” Not to put too fine a point on it, this strikes me as a convenient rationalisation. If interest has reputedly been sown in other departments, the seed has fallen on stony ground. It simply is not the case that the kind of literary theory which Frye established is generating significant and important work in a genuinely comparative
sense in other departments. I don’t see too many people of the range and intelligence of Professor Hutcheon nor do I see any evidence of the comparative and carefully theorised work in other departments. If you close the Centre for Comparative Literature you will do substantial harm not only the intellectual strength of the University of Toronto but also to its international reputation.
I understand the need to make savings but academic vandalism where you destroy something does not seem the best way to go about it. I am still painfully aware of the enormous and long-lasting damage the Thatcher cuts did to British Universities in the 1980s. I cannot believe that it is not possible to find savings in the way that the Centre for Comparative Literature is run at the moment while securing its future. . I strongly suspect on past experience that you won’t make the savings on administrative costs that you hope for and these will be offset by the loss of student and other income. It is fatally easy to go for the dramatic gesture of closing a unit such as the Centre for Comparative Literature rather than adopt the more painstaking way of looking for alternatives. I know that this is possible because I have done it.
I beg of you, Professor Gertler, to review your decision and look for savings in the way the Centre currently operates but still keep it open. In the long term this will be the better decision for the Faculty and the University and will sustain an important and vibrant Centre.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel R. Lamont
Daniel R. Lamont, MA, MA, MA, PhD
Dean of the Faculty of Cultural, Legal and Social Studies (retired)
The University of Central Lancashire
Friday, July 23, 2010
Ann Rigney, Utrecht University
18 July 2010
President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 2006
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario,
CANADA M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor,
As a graduate of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto (PhD, 1987), I was deeply disturbed to hear of the proposed disestablishment of the Centre. I knew it directly as an inspiring, world-class institution in the 1980s and my awareness of its uniqueness and importance has, if anything, grown with time as I have been able to compare it with other similar programmes and institutions. The centre, founded by the internationally renowned Northrop Frye, has been a shining light in the field of Comparative Literature and within the broader field of the Humanities over the last four decades, and it continues to be a beacon programme at the present time with a leading role in the field of comparative literary studies (witness the fact that no fewer than two of its members have been one-time presidents of the Modern Language Association). Through its summer schools, visiting professorships and the contribution of many eminent staff members, it has offered a platform for critical reflection on cultural change and cultural diversity that is unparalleled. In the course of decades, the Centre has continued to accommodate students like myself from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds from all corners of the world, offering them a rigorous and multidisciplinary training in literary and cultural criticism that (in my case, and that of many of my peers) has been a password to academic success.
Unlike some similar programmes elsewhere, moreover, the Centre has managed to adapt and change with the times, expanding its horizons into new linguistic areas so that cultural comparison as well as the study of cultural differences on a global scale has continued to be fostered in ways that play into contemporary realities. Evolving over the years, the Centre has thus played a vital role in promoting cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural exchange that adds a completely new and vitally reflective dimension to Humanities research and graduate teaching that cannot be achieved without a strong identity as a Centre and as a degree-awarding body. In short: the Centre is one of the jewels in the crown of the University of Toronto and a key aspect of its international reputation in the field of Humanities.
I have always been proud to be a graduate of the University of Toronto, and of the Centre for Comparative Literature in particular. If the University is truly committed to excellence, as I know it has been in the past, then it should seriously reconsider this ill-advised recommendation to disestablish the Centre for Comparative Literature.
Sincerely,
Professor Ann Rigney
Chair of Comparative Literature
Member Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
www.Rigney.nl
President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 2006
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario,
CANADA M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor,
As a graduate of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto (PhD, 1987), I was deeply disturbed to hear of the proposed disestablishment of the Centre. I knew it directly as an inspiring, world-class institution in the 1980s and my awareness of its uniqueness and importance has, if anything, grown with time as I have been able to compare it with other similar programmes and institutions. The centre, founded by the internationally renowned Northrop Frye, has been a shining light in the field of Comparative Literature and within the broader field of the Humanities over the last four decades, and it continues to be a beacon programme at the present time with a leading role in the field of comparative literary studies (witness the fact that no fewer than two of its members have been one-time presidents of the Modern Language Association). Through its summer schools, visiting professorships and the contribution of many eminent staff members, it has offered a platform for critical reflection on cultural change and cultural diversity that is unparalleled. In the course of decades, the Centre has continued to accommodate students like myself from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds from all corners of the world, offering them a rigorous and multidisciplinary training in literary and cultural criticism that (in my case, and that of many of my peers) has been a password to academic success.
Unlike some similar programmes elsewhere, moreover, the Centre has managed to adapt and change with the times, expanding its horizons into new linguistic areas so that cultural comparison as well as the study of cultural differences on a global scale has continued to be fostered in ways that play into contemporary realities. Evolving over the years, the Centre has thus played a vital role in promoting cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural exchange that adds a completely new and vitally reflective dimension to Humanities research and graduate teaching that cannot be achieved without a strong identity as a Centre and as a degree-awarding body. In short: the Centre is one of the jewels in the crown of the University of Toronto and a key aspect of its international reputation in the field of Humanities.
I have always been proud to be a graduate of the University of Toronto, and of the Centre for Comparative Literature in particular. If the University is truly committed to excellence, as I know it has been in the past, then it should seriously reconsider this ill-advised recommendation to disestablish the Centre for Comparative Literature.
Sincerely,
Professor Ann Rigney
Chair of Comparative Literature
Member Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
www.Rigney.nl
Jonathan Allan, University of Toronto
Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Meric Gertler:
This letter is with respect to the Strategic Planning Committee’s recommendation to dis-establish the Centre for Comparative Literature. In previous correspondence regarding similar but different matters (email regarding Conferences at the Centre for Comparative Literature, July 15, 2010), I have been referred to the report presented to the academic community at large. Admittedly this is a very interesting and important position paper being proposed by the Faculty of Arts and Science and its Strategic Planning Committee. But, let me propose one question about this document, though surely more will arise. In the report, we are told: “we have continued to add new units to the Faculty [of Arts and Science] over the past several years, most of them centres, institutes or programs, without due regard to our limited ability to support these initiatives. The risk is that we have spread our finite resources too thinly, to the possible detriment of all programs throughout the Faculty” (6). I would agree with the report that this is a concern; but my question becomes: if the Faculty of Arts and Science is genuinely concerned with these “finite resources,” why then are we told, pages later (cf. pp. 23-24), of the creation of a new department?
Let us consider this proposal further, “In making this recommendation,” the authors of the report write, “the Committee believes the proposed new department will succeed in attracting more students to work in an area where the Faculty offers real strengths” (23). Is this not already what is happening in the Centre for Comparative Literature? But more to the point, would this opening of a new department, which is already predicted to be very successful, not just end up being dis-established in a matter of years? Consider the case of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies as an example, the report reads, “the Committee noted that issues pertaining to transnationalism and diasporic communities have now attained a high level of prominence within research and teaching activities of many individual units. In effect, the Committee concluded that the Centre has succeeded in its mandate to inspire greater interest in the study and teaching of these phenomena” (19).
I am not arguing against the proposed Department of Earth Sciences, but my questions are two-fold: 1) if the department is predicted to be a success, will it not be dis-established within due-course, perhaps as quickly as CDTS?; 2) if the Faculty of Arts and Science has limited “finite resources” (6), how can it afford to be opening new programs whilst dis-establishing others?
In this spirit, I want to urge the Strategic Planning Committee, the President and the Provost of the University to seriously consider the plans that they are proposing. The Centre for Comparative Literature is a phenomenon unto itself. It has been home to the greatest Canadian intellectuals and now most of us are sent into exile and will suddenly represent a (pseudo-) diasporic community of our own. I feel no need to reiterate the history and success of the Centre for Comparative Literature as I am sure enough letters have already illustrated this point. I urge the Strategic Planning Committee, the Dean of Arts and Science, the President, and the Provost to sit down and seriously consider what the loss of the Centre for Comparative Literature will mean to the University of Toronto and how this loss will undoubtedly affect the University of Toronto’s reputation at home and abroad.
Yours truly,
Jonathan A. Allan
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
CC: Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Ato Quayson, Director, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies
Save Comparative Literature Campaign
This letter is with respect to the Strategic Planning Committee’s recommendation to dis-establish the Centre for Comparative Literature. In previous correspondence regarding similar but different matters (email regarding Conferences at the Centre for Comparative Literature, July 15, 2010), I have been referred to the report presented to the academic community at large. Admittedly this is a very interesting and important position paper being proposed by the Faculty of Arts and Science and its Strategic Planning Committee. But, let me propose one question about this document, though surely more will arise. In the report, we are told: “we have continued to add new units to the Faculty [of Arts and Science] over the past several years, most of them centres, institutes or programs, without due regard to our limited ability to support these initiatives. The risk is that we have spread our finite resources too thinly, to the possible detriment of all programs throughout the Faculty” (6). I would agree with the report that this is a concern; but my question becomes: if the Faculty of Arts and Science is genuinely concerned with these “finite resources,” why then are we told, pages later (cf. pp. 23-24), of the creation of a new department?
Let us consider this proposal further, “In making this recommendation,” the authors of the report write, “the Committee believes the proposed new department will succeed in attracting more students to work in an area where the Faculty offers real strengths” (23). Is this not already what is happening in the Centre for Comparative Literature? But more to the point, would this opening of a new department, which is already predicted to be very successful, not just end up being dis-established in a matter of years? Consider the case of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies as an example, the report reads, “the Committee noted that issues pertaining to transnationalism and diasporic communities have now attained a high level of prominence within research and teaching activities of many individual units. In effect, the Committee concluded that the Centre has succeeded in its mandate to inspire greater interest in the study and teaching of these phenomena” (19).
I am not arguing against the proposed Department of Earth Sciences, but my questions are two-fold: 1) if the department is predicted to be a success, will it not be dis-established within due-course, perhaps as quickly as CDTS?; 2) if the Faculty of Arts and Science has limited “finite resources” (6), how can it afford to be opening new programs whilst dis-establishing others?
In this spirit, I want to urge the Strategic Planning Committee, the President and the Provost of the University to seriously consider the plans that they are proposing. The Centre for Comparative Literature is a phenomenon unto itself. It has been home to the greatest Canadian intellectuals and now most of us are sent into exile and will suddenly represent a (pseudo-) diasporic community of our own. I feel no need to reiterate the history and success of the Centre for Comparative Literature as I am sure enough letters have already illustrated this point. I urge the Strategic Planning Committee, the Dean of Arts and Science, the President, and the Provost to sit down and seriously consider what the loss of the Centre for Comparative Literature will mean to the University of Toronto and how this loss will undoubtedly affect the University of Toronto’s reputation at home and abroad.
Yours truly,
Jonathan A. Allan
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
CC: Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Ato Quayson, Director, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies
Save Comparative Literature Campaign
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Natalie Pendergast. University of Toronto
Dear President Naylor, Dean Meric Gertler and Members of the Strategic Planning Committee:
Professor Meric S. Gertler (Chair) Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science
Professor Parth Bhatt Chair, Department of French
Professor Arthur Hosios Chair, Department of Economics
Professor Janet Paterson Principal, Innis College
Professor Craig Boutilier Chair, Department of Computer Science
Professor John Magee Director, Centre for Medieval Studies
Professor Robert Baker Vice-Dean, Research and Graduate Programs
Professor Stephen Rupp Vice-Dean, Faculty and Academic Life
Professor Suzanne Stevenson Vice-Dean, Teaching and Learning
Ms. Nadina Jamison Assistant Dean and Executive Director, Office of Advancement
Ms. Vera Melnyk Assistant Dean and Director, Office of the Dean
Mr. Isaak Siboni Assistant Dean and Chief Financial Officer
I write this letter with the hope that you will consider why I believe that by closing the Centre for Comparative Literature, the University of Toronto will lose a very vibrant intellectual community of scholars.
I have been dwelling recently on a passage from In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The narrator is confronted with the choice of taking one road or another on his daily walk. Although the passage seems insignificant in this early chapter, the trauma of having to choose one way or the other, whilst knowing that neither suits him perfectly, stays with him over the course of the seven novels in the series. With regard to Proust’s own lifestyle, some critics have wondered whether the two unfitting options symbolized the famous writer’s feelings toward the binary of homosexuality and heterosexuality.
If I consider my situation as a student at the Centre for Comparative Literature through this passage in Proust, I too feel what the narrator feels: that none of the (proposed) choices suit me. If given the option of studying the national languages of French or English, I will be faced with a trauma that will stay with me long after I complete my academic promenade. No, like Proust, like my comparatist colleagues, the only path that suits exists somewhere in the savage pasture between these roads, somewhere in between national literature departments. For, we do not place our feet neatly into the footprints provided by the shoes of our forebears, on a smooth and well-trodden road, already cemented to the earth. No, we would rather wade through the thicker, thornier areas and see what may be hiding in the longer grass. Some of us need to forge our own, new paths.
I am certain that the academic growth of many of my colleagues would be stunted were the Centre transformed into a collaborative program at the School of Languages and Literatures for several reasons.
The Strategic Planning Committee has from the onset claimed that due to financial constraints it will be necessary to close the Centre of Comparative Literature. I then would like the committee to explain how they are planning to finance the building of a "new" school of Languages and Literatures?
Please understand that by closing the Centre for Comparative Literature you will be closing some of the most open minds in the humanities. Please do not leave us with the undesirable Proustian choice of no right direction. Do you, in good faith and in your heart of hearts, think that closing the Centre for Comparative Literature is what is best for the continuation of comparative scholarship at the University of Toronto? If so, please, convince me how.
Sincerely,
Natalie Pendergast
Ph.D. Student, year 1
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
Professor Meric S. Gertler (Chair) Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science
Professor Parth Bhatt Chair, Department of French
Professor Arthur Hosios Chair, Department of Economics
Professor Janet Paterson Principal, Innis College
Professor Craig Boutilier Chair, Department of Computer Science
Professor John Magee Director, Centre for Medieval Studies
Professor Robert Baker Vice-Dean, Research and Graduate Programs
Professor Stephen Rupp Vice-Dean, Faculty and Academic Life
Professor Suzanne Stevenson Vice-Dean, Teaching and Learning
Ms. Nadina Jamison Assistant Dean and Executive Director, Office of Advancement
Ms. Vera Melnyk Assistant Dean and Director, Office of the Dean
Mr. Isaak Siboni Assistant Dean and Chief Financial Officer
I write this letter with the hope that you will consider why I believe that by closing the Centre for Comparative Literature, the University of Toronto will lose a very vibrant intellectual community of scholars.
I have been dwelling recently on a passage from In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The narrator is confronted with the choice of taking one road or another on his daily walk. Although the passage seems insignificant in this early chapter, the trauma of having to choose one way or the other, whilst knowing that neither suits him perfectly, stays with him over the course of the seven novels in the series. With regard to Proust’s own lifestyle, some critics have wondered whether the two unfitting options symbolized the famous writer’s feelings toward the binary of homosexuality and heterosexuality.
If I consider my situation as a student at the Centre for Comparative Literature through this passage in Proust, I too feel what the narrator feels: that none of the (proposed) choices suit me. If given the option of studying the national languages of French or English, I will be faced with a trauma that will stay with me long after I complete my academic promenade. No, like Proust, like my comparatist colleagues, the only path that suits exists somewhere in the savage pasture between these roads, somewhere in between national literature departments. For, we do not place our feet neatly into the footprints provided by the shoes of our forebears, on a smooth and well-trodden road, already cemented to the earth. No, we would rather wade through the thicker, thornier areas and see what may be hiding in the longer grass. Some of us need to forge our own, new paths.
I am certain that the academic growth of many of my colleagues would be stunted were the Centre transformed into a collaborative program at the School of Languages and Literatures for several reasons.
- Not only do we have our fingers on the pulse of new criticism, but we respectfully critique new criticism. This is an ongoing process, not a one-time revolution.
- The Centre for Comparative Literature is our home department. We did not start off at a national literature department, but rather started off with the incentive to compare. We compare languages and literatures, cultures, theories, media and perspectives. If the Centre is closed, we have nowhere to go “home” to.
- Whether or not other departments “use” the literary theory that comparatists have brought to the fore of humanities scholarship, it is most evident that the way in which they approach literary/critical theory is not as progressive as that of the Centre. As I mentioned above, the loss of the Centre will signify a loss of a community that is built upon an epistemology that I have not experienced in courses at other departments. The way that we learn at the Centre is characterized by a blending of ideas and strategies that we students adopt from our eclectic faculty. We do not only improve our methods of study from reading and writing, we also learn the art of rhetoric, presentation and collective critical thought in various group settings that include different mixes of students and professors. We are encouraged to not only “use” theory critically like in other departments, but also creatively, by reinterpreting theories in parallel with other theories, or by building upon theories from different literary periods, cultural and geographical contexts and with various media, sometimes all at once.
- We are an undisciplined discipline. We are united as comparatists not because we all study literatures of different languages but because we share in common an unwillingness to limit our humanities scholarship just because providing administrators with a succinct one-line definition of Comparative Literature will appease them and make for more efficient paper work. We seek to challenge the scope of academic study by including as many different perspectives and approaches as possible—not by excluding and stifling our comparative exchange with one another for the sake of brevity. And I likewise provide you—the people who in many ways hold the fate of future students like me in your palm—with the challenge of trying to fit my own large scope of research into a tightly defined national literature department. My proposed dissertation explores conceptions of subjectivity by way of queer and feminist theory and psychoanalysis, forms such as the novel and the graphic novel, interfaces of images and text, genres such as autobiography and romance, French, English and German literatures and Berliner, Parisian, rural Pennsylvanian and San Franciscan subcultures.
The Strategic Planning Committee has from the onset claimed that due to financial constraints it will be necessary to close the Centre of Comparative Literature. I then would like the committee to explain how they are planning to finance the building of a "new" school of Languages and Literatures?
Please understand that by closing the Centre for Comparative Literature you will be closing some of the most open minds in the humanities. Please do not leave us with the undesirable Proustian choice of no right direction. Do you, in good faith and in your heart of hearts, think that closing the Centre for Comparative Literature is what is best for the continuation of comparative scholarship at the University of Toronto? If so, please, convince me how.
Sincerely,
Natalie Pendergast
Ph.D. Student, year 1
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
Harold Skulsky, Hofstra University, and emeritus, Smith College
Dear President Naylor,
I'm afraid I must agree with many of my colleagues that the dissolution of the Centre for Comparative Literature is a squalid act unworthy of a great university. In particular, it is a blow to humane studies (which are all by nature comparative) at a time when humane studies are already gravely threatened by indifference and hostility from many quarters. Being a survivor of countless planning committees in academia, I am very well aware of the superficially plausible budgetary and pragmatic arguments that inspire proposals of this kind. The arguments are, I submit, as shortsighted and philistine as they are plausible.
Toronto, as the institution we know and love, has little to gain and much to lose in the long run from this penny-wise act of self-mutilation. I will not go on at boring length about the legacy of Northrop Frye, a wise and wonderful comparatist whom I had the pleasure of welcoming to a convention at Smith many years ago, and who is commemorated by two of the Toronto Centre's essential institutions. But it should be clear to you that one of the treasures the University is in danger of losing is its reputation. But bad as that will be, it is far from all. When the Centre is no more, we will all be losers.
Our consolation, such as it is, will be that WE will not have done the deed.
Yours very truly,
Harold Skulsky
Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature
Emeritus, Smith College
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Hofstra University
I'm afraid I must agree with many of my colleagues that the dissolution of the Centre for Comparative Literature is a squalid act unworthy of a great university. In particular, it is a blow to humane studies (which are all by nature comparative) at a time when humane studies are already gravely threatened by indifference and hostility from many quarters. Being a survivor of countless planning committees in academia, I am very well aware of the superficially plausible budgetary and pragmatic arguments that inspire proposals of this kind. The arguments are, I submit, as shortsighted and philistine as they are plausible.
Toronto, as the institution we know and love, has little to gain and much to lose in the long run from this penny-wise act of self-mutilation. I will not go on at boring length about the legacy of Northrop Frye, a wise and wonderful comparatist whom I had the pleasure of welcoming to a convention at Smith many years ago, and who is commemorated by two of the Toronto Centre's essential institutions. But it should be clear to you that one of the treasures the University is in danger of losing is its reputation. But bad as that will be, it is far from all. When the Centre is no more, we will all be losers.
Our consolation, such as it is, will be that WE will not have done the deed.
Yours very truly,
Harold Skulsky
Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature
Emeritus, Smith College
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Hofstra University
Mario DiCesare, emeritus, SUNY, Binghampton
Dear President Naylor,
I write as a retired teacher of English and Comparative Literature, having taught for nearly forty years at the State University of New York at Binghamton. During my active career, I wrote or edited some twenty books in several fields, mostly comparative -- e.g., a major study of Vergil's "Aeneid" (Columbia University Press), three books on the important Renaissance Latin poet Marcus Hieronymus Vida, and collections of essays on Renaissance literature. While my major work strictly in English Literature, the edition of the Bodleian Manuscript of George Herbert's "The Temple," is perhaps my best known work, that I think speaks volumes about the narrowness of single disciplinary study.
The suggestion that a department of comparative literature might be disbanded is simply mind-boggling. Such departments seem to me not only immensely valuable in themselves for the contributions made to both teaching and scholarship; they also provide a necessary balance in humanistic study. In the last fifty or sixty years, far too much emphasis in modern literary study has been narrow, sharply focussed on smaller and smaller units of the great world of literature. Personally, were I again a department chair, I would seriously distrust the very narrow specialist, worried that his or her ignorance would dilute teaching. In my pleasant retirement, I subscribe to both the Milton and the Shakespeare lists, among others, and read all the posts, and am regularly astonished at the narrowness of outlook. I think back to the richness offered to us by such titans as Douglas Bush (a Canadian who spent almost his entire academic life at Harvard), who told me once that he read Vergil's "Aeneid" in Latin at least once a year to give body and richness to his study of Milton and other English poets.
I hope that there will be serious reconsideration of any plan to disband the department or to dilute its work.
Thank you for your consideration.
Mario A. DiCesare
Distinguished Professor (emeritus), English & Comparative Literature
State University of New York at Binghamton
I write as a retired teacher of English and Comparative Literature, having taught for nearly forty years at the State University of New York at Binghamton. During my active career, I wrote or edited some twenty books in several fields, mostly comparative -- e.g., a major study of Vergil's "Aeneid" (Columbia University Press), three books on the important Renaissance Latin poet Marcus Hieronymus Vida, and collections of essays on Renaissance literature. While my major work strictly in English Literature, the edition of the Bodleian Manuscript of George Herbert's "The Temple," is perhaps my best known work, that I think speaks volumes about the narrowness of single disciplinary study.
The suggestion that a department of comparative literature might be disbanded is simply mind-boggling. Such departments seem to me not only immensely valuable in themselves for the contributions made to both teaching and scholarship; they also provide a necessary balance in humanistic study. In the last fifty or sixty years, far too much emphasis in modern literary study has been narrow, sharply focussed on smaller and smaller units of the great world of literature. Personally, were I again a department chair, I would seriously distrust the very narrow specialist, worried that his or her ignorance would dilute teaching. In my pleasant retirement, I subscribe to both the Milton and the Shakespeare lists, among others, and read all the posts, and am regularly astonished at the narrowness of outlook. I think back to the richness offered to us by such titans as Douglas Bush (a Canadian who spent almost his entire academic life at Harvard), who told me once that he read Vergil's "Aeneid" in Latin at least once a year to give body and richness to his study of Milton and other English poets.
I hope that there will be serious reconsideration of any plan to disband the department or to dilute its work.
Thank you for your consideration.
Mario A. DiCesare
Distinguished Professor (emeritus), English & Comparative Literature
State University of New York at Binghamton
Rosa Mucignat, King's College London
Dear President Naylor,
I am writing as a young academic who has greatly benefitted from contact with the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. I have taken part in the 2008 Graduate Conference on 'Recognition' and I was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the work presented, the excellent organization and the resourcefulness of the centre's graduate students and staff. Not only did the organizers secured the participation of some of the bigger names in the CompLit world, but they also managed to find a publisher for the conference proceedings.
Initiatives such as this are crucial to the development of our discipline, and, as testified by the hundreds of letters you are receiving, the Centre itself is a point of reference for scholars of Comparative Literature worldwide.
At a time when many Universities around the world are setting up or expanding Comparative Literature Programmes, your decision to close an established Centre such as yours, with a long tradition and a high international reputation simply defies belief.
I strongly hope you will re-evaluate your decision and avoid measures which will damage not only the institution you are responsible for, but an entire community of students and scholars.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Rosa Mucignat
Lecturer in Comparative Literature
King's College London
I am writing as a young academic who has greatly benefitted from contact with the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. I have taken part in the 2008 Graduate Conference on 'Recognition' and I was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the work presented, the excellent organization and the resourcefulness of the centre's graduate students and staff. Not only did the organizers secured the participation of some of the bigger names in the CompLit world, but they also managed to find a publisher for the conference proceedings.
Initiatives such as this are crucial to the development of our discipline, and, as testified by the hundreds of letters you are receiving, the Centre itself is a point of reference for scholars of Comparative Literature worldwide.
At a time when many Universities around the world are setting up or expanding Comparative Literature Programmes, your decision to close an established Centre such as yours, with a long tradition and a high international reputation simply defies belief.
I strongly hope you will re-evaluate your decision and avoid measures which will damage not only the institution you are responsible for, but an entire community of students and scholars.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Rosa Mucignat
Lecturer in Comparative Literature
King's College London
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Uzoma Esonwanne, University of Toronto
July 15, 2010
Professor David Naylor
President
University of Toronto
27 King’s College Circle, Room 206
Toronto ON M5S 1A1
Dear Professor Naylor,
Permit me to add my voice to the flood of voices raised in dismay at the proposed disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. As a specialist in African literature and postcolonial theory, I have been very pleased to be cross–appointed at the Centre. However, when in its Plan 2009–2014 the Centre declared its intention to open our program up to “scholarly and cultural conversations” being conducted in languages around the world, including First Nations languages, I was further delighted. Comparativity at Toronto, I thought, has now chosen to keep a tryst with World Literature.
So you can imagine my consternation at learning that, by successfully proselytizing “theory” to national language literature departments, Comparative Literature has exhausted its intellectual mandate and rendered itself academically redundant. May I point out that “theory” in Comparative Literature has never been just about itself? Because language, representation, and the human (and, sometimes, the subhuman and inhuman), the substance that “theory” grapples with, are dynamic, and because that dynamism is inherent in the literary “conversations” to which Plan 2009–2014 refers, to dissolve the Centre now would be to signal to all that we do not wish our faculty and students to participate. Could we seriously claim that students and faculty working in a diminished collaborative program would be able to meet the challenges of comparativity in the 21st century? If we must “work across” the languages of literature in order to study phenomena transnationally in their global dimension, then preserving the Centre for Comparative Literature would serve us best.
I understand that to “preserve the quality of education” in the Faculty of Arts and Science, as Dean Meric Gertler rightly argues, we must exercise fiscal prudence. That is why I would not suggest that Comparative Literature should not share the burden of dealing with the Faculty’s $60-million deficit. Rather, what I urge is that the University avoid goring its cows, sacred and profane, in the name of fiscal prudence. If I may speak for Comparative Literature and similar metaphorical bovines, I suspect that given the chance they, like humans, would happily go on a strict diet for a while than die.
Yours sincerely,
Uzoma Esonwanne
Associate Professor
Department of English & Centre for Comparative Literature
Associate Director
MA English Program
cc Professor Cheryl Misak (Provost), Professor Meric Gertler (Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science), and Professor Neil ten Kortenaar (Director, Centre for Comparative Literature)
Professor David Naylor
President
University of Toronto
27 King’s College Circle, Room 206
Toronto ON M5S 1A1
Dear Professor Naylor,
Permit me to add my voice to the flood of voices raised in dismay at the proposed disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. As a specialist in African literature and postcolonial theory, I have been very pleased to be cross–appointed at the Centre. However, when in its Plan 2009–2014 the Centre declared its intention to open our program up to “scholarly and cultural conversations” being conducted in languages around the world, including First Nations languages, I was further delighted. Comparativity at Toronto, I thought, has now chosen to keep a tryst with World Literature.
So you can imagine my consternation at learning that, by successfully proselytizing “theory” to national language literature departments, Comparative Literature has exhausted its intellectual mandate and rendered itself academically redundant. May I point out that “theory” in Comparative Literature has never been just about itself? Because language, representation, and the human (and, sometimes, the subhuman and inhuman), the substance that “theory” grapples with, are dynamic, and because that dynamism is inherent in the literary “conversations” to which Plan 2009–2014 refers, to dissolve the Centre now would be to signal to all that we do not wish our faculty and students to participate. Could we seriously claim that students and faculty working in a diminished collaborative program would be able to meet the challenges of comparativity in the 21st century? If we must “work across” the languages of literature in order to study phenomena transnationally in their global dimension, then preserving the Centre for Comparative Literature would serve us best.
I understand that to “preserve the quality of education” in the Faculty of Arts and Science, as Dean Meric Gertler rightly argues, we must exercise fiscal prudence. That is why I would not suggest that Comparative Literature should not share the burden of dealing with the Faculty’s $60-million deficit. Rather, what I urge is that the University avoid goring its cows, sacred and profane, in the name of fiscal prudence. If I may speak for Comparative Literature and similar metaphorical bovines, I suspect that given the chance they, like humans, would happily go on a strict diet for a while than die.
Yours sincerely,
Uzoma Esonwanne
Associate Professor
Department of English & Centre for Comparative Literature
Associate Director
MA English Program
cc Professor Cheryl Misak (Provost), Professor Meric Gertler (Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science), and Professor Neil ten Kortenaar (Director, Centre for Comparative Literature)
Julia Kristeva, Université Paris 7
A Monsieur le Président de l’Université de Toronto, Le Prof. Naylor
Monsieur le Président, Cher Collègue,
Je viens d'apprendre, à ma grande stupéfaction, que l'université de Toronto envisage la suppression de son Centre de littérature comparée. Je me permets de vous écrire cette lettre ouverte parce que mon association à ce Centre est de longue date. J'y suis venue la première fois en 1992 comme titulaire de la Norhrop Frye Professorship. Mon séminaire avait pour sujet «Proust et le temps sensible» et mes conférences sont à l'origine de mon livre, portant le même titre, qui parut l'année suivante. Par la suite, je suis revenue plusieurs fois en tant que Visiting Professor pour y faire les conférences qui ont abouti à deux autres livres de ma trilogie sur Le génie féminin : Hannah Arendt (1999) et Colette (2002). Enfin, en l'an 2000, j’ai eu l’honneur d’obtenir le titre de Docteur Honoris Causa de votre Université. Je suis convaincue que le rôle que Northrop Frye a joué dans les études littéraires, et plus largement dans la compréhension de la littérature comme mode de pensée spécifique (et non pas simplement comme loisir ou décor), nécessite une approche interdisciplinaire que les universitaires canadiens et la communauté scientifique internationale se doivent de développer et d'approfondir en sa mémoire.
Frye a ouvert une perspective de recherche qui est d'une brûlante actualité : la littérature au voisinage de l'esthétique (le sensible et le beau) et du besoin de croire (spiritualismes et religions). La littérature comparée à donc un rôle inattendu à assumer dans un siècle de heurts de religions.
L'Unesco a voté une convention pour la diversité culturelle que la France et le Canada ont inspirée et soutiennent activement. Cette politique qui se propose un nouveau contrat social pour la globalisation, basée sur l'interaction entre diversité -- contre la banalité comme « mal radical » (Arendt)- a besoin d'être étayée par des connaissances précises sur les langues et leurs expressions culturelles, et que la littérature comparée et les sciences humaines peuvent précisément développer et fournir.
Vous comprenez, Monsieur le Président, mon inquiétude devant les mesures administratives envisagées qui me paraissent brutales et à fort relent obscurantiste. J’espère de tout cœur que l’Université de Toronto n’acceptera pas cette recommandation de « dés-établir » son Centre de littérature comparée.
En vous remerciant de l’attention que vous voudriez bien porter à cette lettre,
Recevez, Monsieur le Président et Cher Collègue, l’expression de ma haute considération à de mes meilleures pensées,
Julia Kristeva
le 21 juillet 2010
Monsieur le Président, Cher Collègue,
Je viens d'apprendre, à ma grande stupéfaction, que l'université de Toronto envisage la suppression de son Centre de littérature comparée. Je me permets de vous écrire cette lettre ouverte parce que mon association à ce Centre est de longue date. J'y suis venue la première fois en 1992 comme titulaire de la Norhrop Frye Professorship. Mon séminaire avait pour sujet «Proust et le temps sensible» et mes conférences sont à l'origine de mon livre, portant le même titre, qui parut l'année suivante. Par la suite, je suis revenue plusieurs fois en tant que Visiting Professor pour y faire les conférences qui ont abouti à deux autres livres de ma trilogie sur Le génie féminin : Hannah Arendt (1999) et Colette (2002). Enfin, en l'an 2000, j’ai eu l’honneur d’obtenir le titre de Docteur Honoris Causa de votre Université. Je suis convaincue que le rôle que Northrop Frye a joué dans les études littéraires, et plus largement dans la compréhension de la littérature comme mode de pensée spécifique (et non pas simplement comme loisir ou décor), nécessite une approche interdisciplinaire que les universitaires canadiens et la communauté scientifique internationale se doivent de développer et d'approfondir en sa mémoire.
Frye a ouvert une perspective de recherche qui est d'une brûlante actualité : la littérature au voisinage de l'esthétique (le sensible et le beau) et du besoin de croire (spiritualismes et religions). La littérature comparée à donc un rôle inattendu à assumer dans un siècle de heurts de religions.
L'Unesco a voté une convention pour la diversité culturelle que la France et le Canada ont inspirée et soutiennent activement. Cette politique qui se propose un nouveau contrat social pour la globalisation, basée sur l'interaction entre diversité -- contre la banalité comme « mal radical » (Arendt)- a besoin d'être étayée par des connaissances précises sur les langues et leurs expressions culturelles, et que la littérature comparée et les sciences humaines peuvent précisément développer et fournir.
Vous comprenez, Monsieur le Président, mon inquiétude devant les mesures administratives envisagées qui me paraissent brutales et à fort relent obscurantiste. J’espère de tout cœur que l’Université de Toronto n’acceptera pas cette recommandation de « dés-établir » son Centre de littérature comparée.
En vous remerciant de l’attention que vous voudriez bien porter à cette lettre,
Recevez, Monsieur le Président et Cher Collègue, l’expression de ma haute considération à de mes meilleures pensées,
Julia Kristeva
le 21 juillet 2010
Jeannine Pitas, University of Toronto
July 21, 2010
President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 2006
King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor:
You are currently receiving many letters protesting the Strategic Planning Committee’s proposed “disestablishment” of University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature; meanwhile, our petition has been signed by Margaret Atwood, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and more than 5,000 other concerned citizens from all over the world. There has been much discussion about the Centre’s international reputation, the legacy of its founder Northrop Frye, and its continued excellence in research and teaching. However, I write to you as someone who is personally affected by this proposal. As I begin my second year of the PhD, I am outraged that this excellent centre has been recommended for reduction to a collaborative program – essentially, a graduate minor in literary theory that will no longer permit the interdisciplinary work that makes comparative literature so important for the humanities.
My decision to move from the US to Canada and study at the Centre was the result of many years’ thought and deliberation. As an undergraduate I had the excellent fortune of studying at Sarah Lawrence College, which is known for its commitment to individualized and interdisciplinary study. While I mainly focused on English literature, I also studied Spanish, Polish and philosophy while taking some courses in the social sciences. To me, this multi-disciplinary approach to the humanities was the only one that made sense; rather than studying one narrow field in isolation, I was able to explore the relationships between different areas while focusing on specific topics in depth.
When my professors first urged me to pursue advanced study, I was interested but hesitant. I did not know which discipline to pursue- literature or philosophy? And if I were to choose literature, then should I focus on English or Spanish, or perhaps even Polish? When several of my teachers encouraged me to study comparative literature, I saw it as the ideal opportunity to continue the kind of work that I had begun. The task of writing academic papers (and ultimately a dissertation) would compel me to develop a focused area of specialization; however, I would also have the chance to retain my diverse academic interests and even develop some new ones.
As I began researching programs, U of T’s Centre for Comparative Literature immediately caught my attention as especially strong. And, when I began the MA in 2008, all my impressions were proved true. By this point I had chosen to focus on Latin American and Polish literature, and courses in those departments allowed me to increase my general knowledge of these areas. But, it was the courses offered by the Centre itself that really allowed me to explore the relationships between them while gaining a strong base in diverse philosophical and critical approaches.
What has impressed me most about the Centre, however, is its dedication to quality teaching and mentoring of students. From my first meeting with the Graduate Coordinator, I could see that the Centre’s faculty were truly dedicated to teaching. The guidance, encouragement and constructive criticism that I have received during my first two years here prove to me that our faculty genuinely care about their students’ academic growth and professional futures. Unfortunately, not all of my colleagues at other universities can say the same. And, this dedication on the part of the faculty is reflected in the students’ work. I am constantly impressed by my colleagues’ publications, conference presentations, awards, and let’s not forget, their teaching in various undergraduate programs across the humanities and social sciences. I am not surprised that even in this extremely competitive job market, the Centre’s graduates continue to find work.
I echo other international students when I say that I would not have come to the University of Toronto for any program other than this one. While U of T has many strong departments, the Centre for Comparative Literature offers opportunities for innovative scholarship that simply wouldn’t be possible elsewhere (and which will no longer be possible if it is reduced to a collaborative program). Having read the Strategic Planning Committee’s report, I cannot understand the rationale behind this recommendation. Before I applied to this program, professors various academic institutions assured me that comparative literature was a growing, evolving discipline and that the University of Toronto was an excellent place to pursue it. The signers of our petition –now more than 5,000 - clearly agree. And while we are not ignorant of budgetary concerns, the SPC has stated that they are also committed to maintaining and improving the overall quality of education in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I fail to understand how this quality can be achieved when this distinguished Centre is lost.
Therefore, I ask that you please re-evaluate the SPC’s proposal and recognize that, contrary to what the report suggests, comparative literature is not a discipline that has already achieved its task; rather, our task is only growing. As the world continues to become more culturally diffuse, some nation states have met with much criticism for building up walls between political borders. The “disestablishment” of the Centre for Comparative Literature threatens to follow this pattern within the university. I assure you that the “new synergies” which Dean Gertler expects to come out of the proposed School of Languages and Literatures will be inconsequential when weighed against the loss of our Centre, which currently serves as a meeting place for national languages and literatures as well as cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, political science, visual arts and more. Our tasks may be changing, but these changes make our discipline more relevant than ever. I hope that you will concur.
Sincerely,
Jeannine M. Pitas
PhD Student
Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
CC: President David Naylor, University of Toronto
Provost Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
Dean Meric Gertler, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Vice-Dean Robert Baker, Research and Graduate Programs, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Vice-Dean Stephen Rupp, Faculty and Academic Life, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Graduate Students of the Centre for Comparative Literature
Save Comparative Literature Campaign
President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 2006
King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 1A1
Dear President Naylor:
You are currently receiving many letters protesting the Strategic Planning Committee’s proposed “disestablishment” of University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature; meanwhile, our petition has been signed by Margaret Atwood, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and more than 5,000 other concerned citizens from all over the world. There has been much discussion about the Centre’s international reputation, the legacy of its founder Northrop Frye, and its continued excellence in research and teaching. However, I write to you as someone who is personally affected by this proposal. As I begin my second year of the PhD, I am outraged that this excellent centre has been recommended for reduction to a collaborative program – essentially, a graduate minor in literary theory that will no longer permit the interdisciplinary work that makes comparative literature so important for the humanities.
My decision to move from the US to Canada and study at the Centre was the result of many years’ thought and deliberation. As an undergraduate I had the excellent fortune of studying at Sarah Lawrence College, which is known for its commitment to individualized and interdisciplinary study. While I mainly focused on English literature, I also studied Spanish, Polish and philosophy while taking some courses in the social sciences. To me, this multi-disciplinary approach to the humanities was the only one that made sense; rather than studying one narrow field in isolation, I was able to explore the relationships between different areas while focusing on specific topics in depth.
When my professors first urged me to pursue advanced study, I was interested but hesitant. I did not know which discipline to pursue- literature or philosophy? And if I were to choose literature, then should I focus on English or Spanish, or perhaps even Polish? When several of my teachers encouraged me to study comparative literature, I saw it as the ideal opportunity to continue the kind of work that I had begun. The task of writing academic papers (and ultimately a dissertation) would compel me to develop a focused area of specialization; however, I would also have the chance to retain my diverse academic interests and even develop some new ones.
As I began researching programs, U of T’s Centre for Comparative Literature immediately caught my attention as especially strong. And, when I began the MA in 2008, all my impressions were proved true. By this point I had chosen to focus on Latin American and Polish literature, and courses in those departments allowed me to increase my general knowledge of these areas. But, it was the courses offered by the Centre itself that really allowed me to explore the relationships between them while gaining a strong base in diverse philosophical and critical approaches.
What has impressed me most about the Centre, however, is its dedication to quality teaching and mentoring of students. From my first meeting with the Graduate Coordinator, I could see that the Centre’s faculty were truly dedicated to teaching. The guidance, encouragement and constructive criticism that I have received during my first two years here prove to me that our faculty genuinely care about their students’ academic growth and professional futures. Unfortunately, not all of my colleagues at other universities can say the same. And, this dedication on the part of the faculty is reflected in the students’ work. I am constantly impressed by my colleagues’ publications, conference presentations, awards, and let’s not forget, their teaching in various undergraduate programs across the humanities and social sciences. I am not surprised that even in this extremely competitive job market, the Centre’s graduates continue to find work.
I echo other international students when I say that I would not have come to the University of Toronto for any program other than this one. While U of T has many strong departments, the Centre for Comparative Literature offers opportunities for innovative scholarship that simply wouldn’t be possible elsewhere (and which will no longer be possible if it is reduced to a collaborative program). Having read the Strategic Planning Committee’s report, I cannot understand the rationale behind this recommendation. Before I applied to this program, professors various academic institutions assured me that comparative literature was a growing, evolving discipline and that the University of Toronto was an excellent place to pursue it. The signers of our petition –now more than 5,000 - clearly agree. And while we are not ignorant of budgetary concerns, the SPC has stated that they are also committed to maintaining and improving the overall quality of education in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I fail to understand how this quality can be achieved when this distinguished Centre is lost.
Therefore, I ask that you please re-evaluate the SPC’s proposal and recognize that, contrary to what the report suggests, comparative literature is not a discipline that has already achieved its task; rather, our task is only growing. As the world continues to become more culturally diffuse, some nation states have met with much criticism for building up walls between political borders. The “disestablishment” of the Centre for Comparative Literature threatens to follow this pattern within the university. I assure you that the “new synergies” which Dean Gertler expects to come out of the proposed School of Languages and Literatures will be inconsequential when weighed against the loss of our Centre, which currently serves as a meeting place for national languages and literatures as well as cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, political science, visual arts and more. Our tasks may be changing, but these changes make our discipline more relevant than ever. I hope that you will concur.
Sincerely,
Jeannine M. Pitas
PhD Student
Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
CC: President David Naylor, University of Toronto
Provost Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
Dean Meric Gertler, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Vice-Dean Robert Baker, Research and Graduate Programs, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Vice-Dean Stephen Rupp, Faculty and Academic Life, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Graduate Students of the Centre for Comparative Literature
Save Comparative Literature Campaign
Myra Bloom, University of Toronto
Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler,
I am writing to you from Madrid, where I am currently spending a month studying Spanish with my friend and colleague from the Centre for Comparative Literature. The sadness and lack of understanding I feel faced with the potential dissolution of our Centre is magnified given my geographical distance from the epicentre of the decision-making process. Having undertaken this trip in the pursuit of knowledge that will aid me in my studies, I am now confronted with the prospect that upon my return, there very well may be no institutional backing for the work that I do.
The merits of our world-renowned graduate conference, international reputation, and acclaimed students and faculty, have been reiterated over the past several weeks. I am heartened by the support that has been shown in the media, by luminaries in the field, as well as by concerned students and members of the larger university community. At the same time, I am dismayed that the accomplishments of the Centre are being thrown into relief against the grim backdrop of its potential dissolution. Nobody will deny that these are difficult times and certain sacrifices need to be made. Nevertheless, at such times it is likewise true that rigorous intellectual work must more than ever be protected from the forces that would attempt to reduce critical thought to a price tag.
It is deeply worrying that the University of Toronto, which prides itself on its commitment to academic excellence, is revealing itself to be so short-sighted as to dismantle the very assets that safeguard it from becoming a bastion of scholarly conservatism. Smaller, less established institutions such as York and Ryerson rightly pride themselves on their forward-thinking interdisciplinary programmes. Up until this point I have been proud to remind my colleagues at these esteemed institutions that the University of Toronto is also adapting itself to the changing face of contemporary scholarship, promoting interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature, ethics, and diasporic identities, to name but a selection. I am disappointed and embarrassed to have to concede that my optimism has been misplaced, that the progressive tendencies that were at long last beginning to manifest themselves are being quashed in an epic purge that will re-establish, once and for all, U of T’s fraternity with the right side of the political spectrum. The chimaeric School of Languages and Literatures, the university’s official rhetoric notwithstanding, is not a viable substitute for real interdisciplinarity. While it is true that amalgamation is sometimes an effective cost-saving measure, it is impossible to argue that the administrative savings the university will enjoy can have any effect whatsoever on the nature or calibre of scholarly output.
Lastly, I would like to express my incredulity that ‘too much success’ is the rhetoric being bandied about as a potential justification for the department’s redundancy. If it is the case that the success of the methodologies of a given discipline enjoin its dissolution, I propose that U of T extend this rhetoric across the board: we can cut computer science based on the success of DIY internet applications such as YouTube and Facebook; we can save several billion dollars by eliminating the medical school, as overpopulation belies the excesses of medical science; the Classics department can likewise shut its doors as the Latin language is being safeguarded by biology, botany, as well as the mysteriously untouchable Centre for Medieval Studies.
The value of a graduate department must not be measured by the same utilitarian calculus that determines how many goldfish the university can afford to shelter in the calm ponds of Massey College. Rather, it must be assessed in terms of the work its students and faculty do to promote critical thinking within the university and in an increasingly-interconnected global scholarly community. I strongly urge you to return to the proverbial drawing board and draft a long-term plan that does justice to the mandate of the University of Toronto.
Yours sincerely,
Myra D Bloom
PhD Candidate, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholar, Doctoral
I am writing to you from Madrid, where I am currently spending a month studying Spanish with my friend and colleague from the Centre for Comparative Literature. The sadness and lack of understanding I feel faced with the potential dissolution of our Centre is magnified given my geographical distance from the epicentre of the decision-making process. Having undertaken this trip in the pursuit of knowledge that will aid me in my studies, I am now confronted with the prospect that upon my return, there very well may be no institutional backing for the work that I do.
The merits of our world-renowned graduate conference, international reputation, and acclaimed students and faculty, have been reiterated over the past several weeks. I am heartened by the support that has been shown in the media, by luminaries in the field, as well as by concerned students and members of the larger university community. At the same time, I am dismayed that the accomplishments of the Centre are being thrown into relief against the grim backdrop of its potential dissolution. Nobody will deny that these are difficult times and certain sacrifices need to be made. Nevertheless, at such times it is likewise true that rigorous intellectual work must more than ever be protected from the forces that would attempt to reduce critical thought to a price tag.
It is deeply worrying that the University of Toronto, which prides itself on its commitment to academic excellence, is revealing itself to be so short-sighted as to dismantle the very assets that safeguard it from becoming a bastion of scholarly conservatism. Smaller, less established institutions such as York and Ryerson rightly pride themselves on their forward-thinking interdisciplinary programmes. Up until this point I have been proud to remind my colleagues at these esteemed institutions that the University of Toronto is also adapting itself to the changing face of contemporary scholarship, promoting interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature, ethics, and diasporic identities, to name but a selection. I am disappointed and embarrassed to have to concede that my optimism has been misplaced, that the progressive tendencies that were at long last beginning to manifest themselves are being quashed in an epic purge that will re-establish, once and for all, U of T’s fraternity with the right side of the political spectrum. The chimaeric School of Languages and Literatures, the university’s official rhetoric notwithstanding, is not a viable substitute for real interdisciplinarity. While it is true that amalgamation is sometimes an effective cost-saving measure, it is impossible to argue that the administrative savings the university will enjoy can have any effect whatsoever on the nature or calibre of scholarly output.
Lastly, I would like to express my incredulity that ‘too much success’ is the rhetoric being bandied about as a potential justification for the department’s redundancy. If it is the case that the success of the methodologies of a given discipline enjoin its dissolution, I propose that U of T extend this rhetoric across the board: we can cut computer science based on the success of DIY internet applications such as YouTube and Facebook; we can save several billion dollars by eliminating the medical school, as overpopulation belies the excesses of medical science; the Classics department can likewise shut its doors as the Latin language is being safeguarded by biology, botany, as well as the mysteriously untouchable Centre for Medieval Studies.
The value of a graduate department must not be measured by the same utilitarian calculus that determines how many goldfish the university can afford to shelter in the calm ponds of Massey College. Rather, it must be assessed in terms of the work its students and faculty do to promote critical thinking within the university and in an increasingly-interconnected global scholarly community. I strongly urge you to return to the proverbial drawing board and draft a long-term plan that does justice to the mandate of the University of Toronto.
Yours sincerely,
Myra D Bloom
PhD Candidate, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholar, Doctoral
SSHRC-winning students of the Centre to the President of SSHRC
Dear Dr. Chad Gaffield:
We write to you as recipients of funding from the Social Science Humanities Research Council to ask for your support once again. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Toronto has announced the “disestablishment” of the Centre for Comparative Literature.
As you might have seen, this story has found its way into the media and recently appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail (July 13, 2010). Likewise, Noreen Golfman, President of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, has protested the decision (see attached letter). As well, the petition to Save Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto has nearly 5,200 signatures from academics and concerned citizens around the world.
As recipients of SSHRC, we are requesting that the Social Science and Humanities Research Council join us in protesting the recommendation of the Dean of Arts and Sciences. The closure of the Centre for Comparative Literature will be detrimental to research in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Toronto and will also affect scholars across Canada and around the world. All of us write to you as well to inform you that our research could only take place at the Centre for Comparative Literature. The possibility to complete our research – the research funded by SSHRC – is being threatened by the decisions of the Dean of Arts and Sciences.
Yours truly,
Jonathan A. Allan
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Myra Bloom
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholar, Doctoral
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Natalie Bosco
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholar, Master’s
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Ryan Culpepper
Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Julie Parisien
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Lukasz Wodzynski
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
CC: President David Naylor, University of Toronto
Provost Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
Dean Meric Gertler, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Dean Brian Corman, School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto
Vice-Dean Robert Baker, Research and Graduate Programs, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Noreen Golfman, President of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Save Comparative Literature Campaign
We write to you as recipients of funding from the Social Science Humanities Research Council to ask for your support once again. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Toronto has announced the “disestablishment” of the Centre for Comparative Literature.
As you might have seen, this story has found its way into the media and recently appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail (July 13, 2010). Likewise, Noreen Golfman, President of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, has protested the decision (see attached letter). As well, the petition to Save Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto has nearly 5,200 signatures from academics and concerned citizens around the world.
As recipients of SSHRC, we are requesting that the Social Science and Humanities Research Council join us in protesting the recommendation of the Dean of Arts and Sciences. The closure of the Centre for Comparative Literature will be detrimental to research in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Toronto and will also affect scholars across Canada and around the world. All of us write to you as well to inform you that our research could only take place at the Centre for Comparative Literature. The possibility to complete our research – the research funded by SSHRC – is being threatened by the decisions of the Dean of Arts and Sciences.
Yours truly,
Jonathan A. Allan
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Myra Bloom
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholar, Doctoral
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Natalie Bosco
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholar, Master’s
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Ryan Culpepper
Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Julie Parisien
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
Lukasz Wodzynski
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada
CC: President David Naylor, University of Toronto
Provost Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
Dean Meric Gertler, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Dean Brian Corman, School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto
Vice-Dean Robert Baker, Research and Graduate Programs, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Noreen Golfman, President of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Save Comparative Literature Campaign
Rachel F. Stapleton, University of Toronto; follow-up letter to Dean Gertler
Dear Dean Gertler,
I am writing to you today to follow up on my letter of July 15th to President Naylor (attached below) in which I expressed both my concern and dismay at the plan proposed by the Strategic Planning Committee that will see the disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature—my academic home at the University of Toronto.
When I chose to leave my career to pursue graduate studies, it was a very difficult decision. While it was always something I had had in mind to do, the practicalities of leaving a steady and comfortable income for a much lower wage was difficult—Toronto has never been a cheap place to live! However, the actual intellectual decision was surprisingly easy: at the Centre for Comparative Literature, I was being offered the opportunity to push my horizons, to engage with my love of languages in ways that neither my career (which had no use for Latin) nor any other department (the Spanish department has little use for English or French, nor does the English department for Spanish) would allow me to do, as well as joining a community of scholars whose diversity of interests and engaging minds continue to astound me to this day.
While I imagine you must be extremely busy working out all the details of these proposals, I nevertheless look forward to your prompt response to both this letter and my earlier letter of concern to President Naylor, which he was kind enough to forward to you on July 16th.
Sincerely,
Rachel F. Stapleton
Ph.D. Student
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
I am writing to you today to follow up on my letter of July 15th to President Naylor (attached below) in which I expressed both my concern and dismay at the plan proposed by the Strategic Planning Committee that will see the disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature—my academic home at the University of Toronto.
When I chose to leave my career to pursue graduate studies, it was a very difficult decision. While it was always something I had had in mind to do, the practicalities of leaving a steady and comfortable income for a much lower wage was difficult—Toronto has never been a cheap place to live! However, the actual intellectual decision was surprisingly easy: at the Centre for Comparative Literature, I was being offered the opportunity to push my horizons, to engage with my love of languages in ways that neither my career (which had no use for Latin) nor any other department (the Spanish department has little use for English or French, nor does the English department for Spanish) would allow me to do, as well as joining a community of scholars whose diversity of interests and engaging minds continue to astound me to this day.
While I imagine you must be extremely busy working out all the details of these proposals, I nevertheless look forward to your prompt response to both this letter and my earlier letter of concern to President Naylor, which he was kind enough to forward to you on July 16th.
Sincerely,
Rachel F. Stapleton
Ph.D. Student
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Brett de Bary, Cornell University
Department of Comparative Literature
247 Goldwin Smith Hall
Phone: 607-255-4155
Fax 607-255-6661
e-mail: complit@cornell.edu
Professor Meric Gertler,
Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
University of Toronto
July 19, 2010
Dear Professor Gertler,
In less than a week, I have received over several different list-serves (one a heavily subscribed international network of Japan scholars) news about the announced dissolution of the University of Toronto’s East Asian Studies Department, Centre for Comparative Literature, and four other departments pending the establishment of a new School of Languages and Literatures. The very rapidity with which word of this development has been circulated among an international community of humanists attests to the high regard in which the programs and departments in question are held. It might also be seen as almost instantaneous confirmation of University of Toronto’s stature as an eminent center of study in the humanities, attained by virtue of its historic association with some of the towering figures of twentieth century humanistic thought. The proposed merger---which, in effect, spells the virtual erasure from visibility of some programs and departments which have currently become synonymous with the university’s prestige in the humanities---will certainly be seen as a significant erosion of these perceived strengths. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that your outstanding faculty in some of the targeted units will not receive offers from elsewhere, as we have recently seen happen in American universities.
As a Cornell faculty with dual affiliations in the departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, I have a keen appreciation of work done by scholars in both these areas at the University of Toronto. The hiring of a new generation of Japan Studies scholars in East Asian Studies was conducted superbly at Toronto. Writings by Thomas Kierstead, Atsuko Sakaki, Eric Cazdyn, and Ken Kawashima are regularly featured in our graduate curriculum, and have inspired our current cohort of graduate students with their imaginativeness and theoretical sophistication. It is difficult to discern the rationale for dismantling a program which has attained such prominence. By the same token, the concomitant phasing-out of your well-subscribed undergraduate East Asian Studies curriculum and major seems equally short-sighted, given that the current dynamism of Asia can hardly be reduced to a purely economic phenomenon.
My colleagues in Comparative Literature have been similarly stunned and saddened by the prospect of the closing-down of your Centre for Comparative Literature. It, too, has been home to renowned scholars, and has been a valuable source of precisely the type of multi-lingual, comparative, theoretically-oriented work so urgently demanded by the complex impacts of globalization on the university.
You may be interested to know that two years ago at Cornell a similar “strategic planning exercise” was undertaken by a group of faculty appointed by our administration here. It resulted in a remarkably similar recommendation to our College of Arts and Sciences to consolidate Asian Studies, together with all of our other literature departments--- with the exception of English--- into a “Foreign Languages and Literatures Department.” Because of the overwhelming opposition of our humanities faculty to this proposal, it was completely tabled after a few months’ discussion. However, since these widely attended discussions offered a forum for articulating at length the detriment that would be done to the humanities as a whole by the proposed changes, the upshot was actually a strengthening of some of the previously threatened units. Today, not only our Asian Studies Department but also our Comparative Literature Department maintain their autonomy, and have been assured that as autonomous departments they will be integral to the future of the humanities at Cornell.
Perhaps a process like this will take place at Toronto. At any rate, I do hope this story of Cornell’s experience may encourage you to consider alternatives to your present plan.
With all best wishes,
Brett de Bary
Acting Chair, Comparative Literature
Professor, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature
247 Goldwin Smith Hall
Phone: 607-255-4155
Fax 607-255-6661
e-mail: complit@cornell.edu
Professor Meric Gertler,
Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
University of Toronto
July 19, 2010
Dear Professor Gertler,
In less than a week, I have received over several different list-serves (one a heavily subscribed international network of Japan scholars) news about the announced dissolution of the University of Toronto’s East Asian Studies Department, Centre for Comparative Literature, and four other departments pending the establishment of a new School of Languages and Literatures. The very rapidity with which word of this development has been circulated among an international community of humanists attests to the high regard in which the programs and departments in question are held. It might also be seen as almost instantaneous confirmation of University of Toronto’s stature as an eminent center of study in the humanities, attained by virtue of its historic association with some of the towering figures of twentieth century humanistic thought. The proposed merger---which, in effect, spells the virtual erasure from visibility of some programs and departments which have currently become synonymous with the university’s prestige in the humanities---will certainly be seen as a significant erosion of these perceived strengths. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that your outstanding faculty in some of the targeted units will not receive offers from elsewhere, as we have recently seen happen in American universities.
As a Cornell faculty with dual affiliations in the departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, I have a keen appreciation of work done by scholars in both these areas at the University of Toronto. The hiring of a new generation of Japan Studies scholars in East Asian Studies was conducted superbly at Toronto. Writings by Thomas Kierstead, Atsuko Sakaki, Eric Cazdyn, and Ken Kawashima are regularly featured in our graduate curriculum, and have inspired our current cohort of graduate students with their imaginativeness and theoretical sophistication. It is difficult to discern the rationale for dismantling a program which has attained such prominence. By the same token, the concomitant phasing-out of your well-subscribed undergraduate East Asian Studies curriculum and major seems equally short-sighted, given that the current dynamism of Asia can hardly be reduced to a purely economic phenomenon.
My colleagues in Comparative Literature have been similarly stunned and saddened by the prospect of the closing-down of your Centre for Comparative Literature. It, too, has been home to renowned scholars, and has been a valuable source of precisely the type of multi-lingual, comparative, theoretically-oriented work so urgently demanded by the complex impacts of globalization on the university.
You may be interested to know that two years ago at Cornell a similar “strategic planning exercise” was undertaken by a group of faculty appointed by our administration here. It resulted in a remarkably similar recommendation to our College of Arts and Sciences to consolidate Asian Studies, together with all of our other literature departments--- with the exception of English--- into a “Foreign Languages and Literatures Department.” Because of the overwhelming opposition of our humanities faculty to this proposal, it was completely tabled after a few months’ discussion. However, since these widely attended discussions offered a forum for articulating at length the detriment that would be done to the humanities as a whole by the proposed changes, the upshot was actually a strengthening of some of the previously threatened units. Today, not only our Asian Studies Department but also our Comparative Literature Department maintain their autonomy, and have been assured that as autonomous departments they will be integral to the future of the humanities at Cornell.
Perhaps a process like this will take place at Toronto. At any rate, I do hope this story of Cornell’s experience may encourage you to consider alternatives to your present plan.
With all best wishes,
Brett de Bary
Acting Chair, Comparative Literature
Professor, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature
Françoise Lionnet, UCLA
Dear President Naylor,
I have just heard the distressing news that the University is considering the disestablishment of the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, and I want to add my voice to the chorus of those that have been reacting to this extremely untimely and shocking proposal. Should it be implemented, it would be the death knoll of research excellence in the humanities at the University.
Let me explain why. I am the incoming President of the American Comparative Literature Association (April 2011), and I can assure you that comparative literature is more needed than ever on the North American continent. Any institution that does not take it seriously risks being left out of the debate on crucial issues that have a significant impact on the quality of the democratic public sphere today.
This is because comparative literature is the main humanities discipline capable of opening the door to the views of our world advanced by writers, thinkers, and critics who themselves make it a priority to see the whole world as one rather than focus on a singular national, linguistic or ethnic cultural milieu.
At a time when national perspectives are declining and global ones are on the rise, comparative literature contributes a crucial “world” perspective to the study of today’s literatures and cultures. It alone provides students with the literary tools to understand these not as isolated or self-enclosed entities, but as intrinsically involved in each other’s pasts and futures. Without the approach of comparative literature, we would all be much the poorer, intellectually, culturally, and ethically.
The study of individual languages and their literatures, as well as “area studies,” has of course an ongoing role in education at both graduate and undergraduate levels. But what I would term the “fundamentalist” view, that is, that these studies can suffice without the wider global perspectives brought by the field of comparative literature, does not. The nineteenth-century view of national-language-based disciplines, to which some would seem to want to return at the University of Toronto, was never accurate except—possibly—during the brief period of European national states, which lasted from approximately 1840 until the end of World War II. The desire to reinforce self-contained cultural-linguistic units (even when together they might become part of a larger School for Languages and Literatures) is like all fundamentalisms, an attempt to return to a past that never was. Without the critical perspective of comparative literature, as the means to understand the intellectual history of such geopolitical formations, a very important educational component of an enlightened polity goes sadly missing.
Going through with the proposal to disestablish the Center would be a huge mistake in our increasingly interrelated societies. It would be like studying the economies of France, Germany, and Great Britain without taking note of the European Economic Community and the interrelated perspectives it enables and furthers.
Canada, where I lived for many years is particularly well suited to be in the forefront of these larger comparative approaches. Its multicultural dynamism is in some respects ahead of its only rivals, the United States and Australia. The many different nationalities and ethnic groups which come to Canada do not just start interacting with each other when they get there: they have been doing it, culturally as well as politically and economically all along; and when settled in Canada, they have an invaluable opportunity to learn about each others’ heritages and about the historical connections among such heritages. Interdisciplinary fields of study like comparative literature offer a unique way to teach a history of inter-relatedness that is too valuable to twenty-first century citizenship to ignore, or to jeopardize by sending the message that it is not currently valued by the University. The ACLA has recognized Canada’s pre-eminence in global multiculturalism by scheduling its next annual meeting for Vancouver.
In Spring 2010, I was invited by Prof. Neil Kortenaar to give the Northrop Frye Lecture at the University of Toronto. I was honored by the invitation, and accepting it gave me an opportunity to interact with the Center’s students and faculty. From what I can see, the Center is thriving; its faculty is distinguished, and its students are motivated. As the premiere institution in Canada, and as the leader among Commonwealth universities, Toronto cannot afford to send the message that the Center for Comparative Literature is slated for disestablishment. The disastrous repercussions of such a decision would be felt across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, not to mention Australia, the other Commonwealth powerhouse in education.
I urge you to reconsider the proposal to close this Center, and invite you to visit the website of the ACLA, http://www.acla.org and its upcoming conference that will take place in Vancouver next year: http://www.acla.org/acla2011/
We in the discipline, and many outside it, would be most grateful to the University of Toronto for the support of the interdisciplinary pursuit of excellence in the humanities, and for the Center that should remain its guiding beacon.
Most sincerely yours,
Françoise Lionnet
Professor, French & Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature
Vice-President, American Comparative Literature Association
Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France)
Co-Director, with Prof. Shu-mei Shih, UCLA Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows Program
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/mellon/
I have just heard the distressing news that the University is considering the disestablishment of the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, and I want to add my voice to the chorus of those that have been reacting to this extremely untimely and shocking proposal. Should it be implemented, it would be the death knoll of research excellence in the humanities at the University.
Let me explain why. I am the incoming President of the American Comparative Literature Association (April 2011), and I can assure you that comparative literature is more needed than ever on the North American continent. Any institution that does not take it seriously risks being left out of the debate on crucial issues that have a significant impact on the quality of the democratic public sphere today.
This is because comparative literature is the main humanities discipline capable of opening the door to the views of our world advanced by writers, thinkers, and critics who themselves make it a priority to see the whole world as one rather than focus on a singular national, linguistic or ethnic cultural milieu.
At a time when national perspectives are declining and global ones are on the rise, comparative literature contributes a crucial “world” perspective to the study of today’s literatures and cultures. It alone provides students with the literary tools to understand these not as isolated or self-enclosed entities, but as intrinsically involved in each other’s pasts and futures. Without the approach of comparative literature, we would all be much the poorer, intellectually, culturally, and ethically.
The study of individual languages and their literatures, as well as “area studies,” has of course an ongoing role in education at both graduate and undergraduate levels. But what I would term the “fundamentalist” view, that is, that these studies can suffice without the wider global perspectives brought by the field of comparative literature, does not. The nineteenth-century view of national-language-based disciplines, to which some would seem to want to return at the University of Toronto, was never accurate except—possibly—during the brief period of European national states, which lasted from approximately 1840 until the end of World War II. The desire to reinforce self-contained cultural-linguistic units (even when together they might become part of a larger School for Languages and Literatures) is like all fundamentalisms, an attempt to return to a past that never was. Without the critical perspective of comparative literature, as the means to understand the intellectual history of such geopolitical formations, a very important educational component of an enlightened polity goes sadly missing.
Going through with the proposal to disestablish the Center would be a huge mistake in our increasingly interrelated societies. It would be like studying the economies of France, Germany, and Great Britain without taking note of the European Economic Community and the interrelated perspectives it enables and furthers.
Canada, where I lived for many years is particularly well suited to be in the forefront of these larger comparative approaches. Its multicultural dynamism is in some respects ahead of its only rivals, the United States and Australia. The many different nationalities and ethnic groups which come to Canada do not just start interacting with each other when they get there: they have been doing it, culturally as well as politically and economically all along; and when settled in Canada, they have an invaluable opportunity to learn about each others’ heritages and about the historical connections among such heritages. Interdisciplinary fields of study like comparative literature offer a unique way to teach a history of inter-relatedness that is too valuable to twenty-first century citizenship to ignore, or to jeopardize by sending the message that it is not currently valued by the University. The ACLA has recognized Canada’s pre-eminence in global multiculturalism by scheduling its next annual meeting for Vancouver.
In Spring 2010, I was invited by Prof. Neil Kortenaar to give the Northrop Frye Lecture at the University of Toronto. I was honored by the invitation, and accepting it gave me an opportunity to interact with the Center’s students and faculty. From what I can see, the Center is thriving; its faculty is distinguished, and its students are motivated. As the premiere institution in Canada, and as the leader among Commonwealth universities, Toronto cannot afford to send the message that the Center for Comparative Literature is slated for disestablishment. The disastrous repercussions of such a decision would be felt across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, not to mention Australia, the other Commonwealth powerhouse in education.
I urge you to reconsider the proposal to close this Center, and invite you to visit the website of the ACLA, http://www.acla.org and its upcoming conference that will take place in Vancouver next year: http://www.acla.org/acla2011/
We in the discipline, and many outside it, would be most grateful to the University of Toronto for the support of the interdisciplinary pursuit of excellence in the humanities, and for the Center that should remain its guiding beacon.
Most sincerely yours,
Françoise Lionnet
Professor, French & Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature
Vice-President, American Comparative Literature Association
Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France)
Co-Director, with Prof. Shu-mei Shih, UCLA Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows Program
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/mellon/
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