Geert Lenout, Unversity of Antwerp

Antwerp, 13 July 2010


Dear President Naylor,


As an alumnus of the Centre for Comparative Literature (Ph.D. 1985), I was greatly disturbed by the news that the University has plans to “disestablish” the Centre. Both as a professor of comparative literature and as someone who is not without experience in university administration, I can appreciate the difficulties involved in such decisions, but I would still ask you to reconsider.
                Admittedly there is a trend in university administration and also, in Europe at least in government agencies, to try to downsize departments in the humanities. In the long run this is a disastrous decision, especially in countries such as yours and mine, where language instruction is and always has been of the utmost importance. My early training in trilingual Belgium and my graduate work at U of T have given me the kind of education that is the necessary basis for a thorough understanding of a multilingual and multicultural reality or our world in the twenty-first century. One of the great challenges of the next hundred years will be to deal with this reality and we will continue to need scholars and intellectuals that are able to study the language and cultures of other peoples in the original language. If great schools such as the University of Toronto, situated in one of the most multicultural cities in the world, are giving up on that task, who else will do it?
                In my own career at the University of Antwerp and in my training of young scholars I have always built on the skills I had acquired at the Centre for Comparative Literature; in part in recognition of the importance of the programme and of the excellence of its teaching staff, my university awarded an honorary doctorate to Linda Hutcheon. I am greatly indebted to U of T and to the Centre in particular for laying the foundations of my scholarly career and I would be greatly disappointed if the Centre would suddenly cease to exist.

Sincerely yours,

Prof. Dr. Geert Lernout
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Member of the Academia Europaea.