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