Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler,
I am very disappointed to learn of plans to disestablish the Centre for Comparative Literature and to consolidate the smaller language and literature departments into a single school.
When I was getting my M.A. in Slavic at Toronto in 1990-91, Comparative Literature was a refuge for those of us who were interested in theory and serious interdisciplinary and comparative work that didn't quite fit under the rubric of Slavic Studies. I completed my doctorate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, because that was a particularly vibrant department at that time and as a U.S. citizen it was more difficult for me to fund a Ph.D. in the humanities in Canada (I funded my M.A. with a scholarship from the Harry S. Truman Foundation), but had I stayed at Toronto, it would have been in Comparative Literature, and I would not have regarded a doctoral program in Comparative Studies in Slavic Literature as a serious alternative.
In merging departments as proposed, universities imagine administrative efficiencies that make no disciplinary sense, even as administration seems to be ever expanding at higher levels.
The Slavic Department is already an amalgam of languages with a range of historical and cultural traditions, some of which are not even Slavic, and as a specialist in Polish literature, I am concerned that Slavic, Baltic, and non-Slavic East European languages that are already overshadowed by Russian in virtually all North American Slavic departments will be further marginalized and lost in a larger program, just as these countries are becoming more integrated into Europe and are gaining in prominence on the international stage as political, economic, and cultural forces.
Comparative Literature needs strong independent national language departments as a resource for students who require total competency in more than one literature, and they need Comparative Literature to be strong and independent as a department to insure the integrity of the core of the discipline of Comparative Literature, which is comprised of theory, criticism, and the history thereof without bias toward the theoretical traditions of any particular national literature. I have been in the field of Comparative Literature now for nearly twenty years, first as a graduate student, then as a lecturer at Queens College (CUNY), Hunter College (CUNY), an Instructor at New York University, and as an Assistant Professor in the Slavic and Comparative Literature Departments at Barnard College, Columbia University and I directed the Doctoral Program in Polish Literature at Columbia University, and it has been my experience that Comparative Literature attracts the brightest and most ambitious students in the Humanities, because it has been an incubator for the most important currents in humanistic discourse that could not at their beginnings fit easily in existing departments. Without Comparative Literature, we would not have seen the rise of Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies (including many fields such as Francophone Studies devoted to French literature outside of France), Film Studies, and presently the emergence of Translation Studies as a serious academic discipline.
Disestablishing the Centre for Comparative Literature and creating an amalgamated School of Languages and Literatures would represent a step backward in every respect. The consolidation of smaller departments creates a "Department of Others," and is a movement toward their eventual liquidation in an increasingly globalized world where it is ever more important to develop greater and deeper competency in languages and cultures other than our own. The elimination of Comparative Literature as an established independent Centre would close off the most active unit of intellectual innovation in the Humanities at Toronto at a time when it is most needed in the curriculum and as a center of research.
Sincerely,
David A. Goldfarb
Literary Curator
Polish Cultural Institute
350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 4621
New York, NY 10118
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http://www.polishculture-nyc.org/
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http://www.davidagoldfarb.com
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