James Phelan, Ohio State University

 July 15, 2010

President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1

Dear President Naylor:

    I am writing as a former Northrop Frye Visiting Professor at UT’s Centre for Comparative Literature to urge you to reconsider the plan to close the Centre in 2011. As former department chair, I realize that difficult economic times mean that universities must make hard and often unpopular decisions.  But this plan strikes me as one that will do long-term damage to the University’s stature as well as to its key role in the promotion of interdisciplinary study in the humanities.  In short, looked at from an administrative perspective, the plan seems to me to be a very bad bargain.

The Centre for Comparative Literature has long been a jewel in the lustrous crown of UT, because of the quality and diversity of both its faculty and its students. The reputation of the Centre—and its connection to Northrop Frye, a giant in the field of literary studies—made me feel deeply honored by the invitation to serve as a Visiting Professor.  In the seminar I taught in 2002, I had students from Estonia, Namibia, Poland, and England as well as from Canada and the U.S., and their perspectives on our common reading made for one of the richest teaching experiences of my career.  Folding the Centre into the new School of Languages and Literatures will mean that it disappears from the consciousness of literary scholars not just in Canada but also in the United States and Europe, with the result that UT will no longer attract the best faculty and students doing work on literature across national borders.  And the loss of the Centre at UT also strikes a heavy symbolic blow against the continued vitality of such work in North America.  That outcome is especially undesirable at a time in history when we need more people with a global consciousness, an ability to speak across the linguistic and cultural barriers that nationalism is always erecting.  Furthermore, closing the Centre for Comparative Literature will contribute to a view of UT as an institution that used to value but no longer cares much about the humanities.  In that respect, the decision will contribute to a narrative about the diminishment of UT: this once great North American university was not able to find creative ways to respond to economic hard times but instead sacrificed valuable parts of its identity in the search for greater efficiency. 


For these reasons, I urge you and your colleagues to find a way to keep the Centre alive as a distinct academic unit.  If you are able to do so, you will earn the deep respect and gratitude not only of the UT faculty and students involved with the unit but also of literary scholars across the globe. 

Thank you for listening.

Sincerely,

James Phelan, Distinguished University Professor
Director, Project Narrative


 
Cc: Cheryl Misak, Provost
       Meric Gertler, Dean
       Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature