Ryan Culpepper, University of Toronto

Dear President Naylor,

You have by now received many letters protesting, on various grounds, the proposal to close the Centre for
Comparative Literature. I concur with the worthy sentiments expressed in those letters whose contents have been made public. Indeed, the closure of the Centre will entail deep and historic setbacks for the University of Toronto in the eyes of its own members and scholars at its peer institutions, as the univocal global response already indicates. It seems we are all at a loss to understand how the modest budgetary benefits of closing the Centre even begin to approach the significant intellectual detriments involved. Many have listed those detriments, and I see no need to rehearse them here.

But I write you as a student. I am not Canadian myself, and in fact I had only been to Canada once in my life before moving here to attend U of T, though I grew up in the USA, just a few hours from the border. I came to Canada for one reason only: the Centre for Comparative Literature. Its international reputation made it the only non-U.S. graduate program I applied to. I was flattered to be admitted, and I turned down four offers from prestigious universities to come here, because the Centre represented the best. Perhaps this is an embarrassing admission and makes Americans look ignorant, but the Centre is one of very few widely recognized and respected institutions among U.S. academics. Everyone in the field of literary studies knows how fine the work in the Centre has been for decades. It was recommended to me by several of my advisors, and no other place in Canada was recommended.

In my time at U of T I’ve learned a great deal about the exciting intellectual work happening in other departments here and at universities across Canada. I collaborate with Canadian colleagues and recommend their work to my peers at U.S. universities. I have recommended U of T to several of my friends applying to graduate school (one to the Philosophy department and one to Slavic Languages and Literatures). Overall, my experience here has been positive, and the Centre has provided me ample opportunity to grow intellectually, engage in innovative research, interact with major intellectual figures, and develop a sense of my scholarly priorities. The culmination (so far) of this experience has been the reception of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship this April.

Had the Centre for Comparative Literature not existed at the time I applied to graduate school, I never would
have considered U of T, or turned my attention north for any other program. I’m so glad I did. The suggestion of a collaborative program in comparative literature to replace the Centre is frankly laughable. Not only can we not imagine how such a collaborative program would function (and it seems the Strategic Planning Committee has done no work to imagine it, either), but more importantly no serious student would attend U of T for such a program. Why should they? Rigorous and cutting-edge programs, all degree-granting, exist at the major research universities in the U.S.A. For an American university to say, “We don’t have comparative literature” is for it to say, “We areweak in humanities research.” The same will be said of U of T as it removes itself from the company of all the Ivy League universities, the UC universities, Stanford, Duke, Rutgers, Chicago, Michigan, Boston, NYU, Johns Hopkins, Texas, Emory, and many others.

There should be no doubt how the closure of the Centre will be perceived and what it will say about Canadian
humanities research to academics outside Canada. That much is obvious. The question is: Does U of T really have no concern for this? Is U of T prepared to step down as a leader in humanities research? Convinced that your answer to these questions is “no,” I urge you to immediately respond to the proposal of the Strategic Planning Committee by insisting on the preservation of the Centre for Comparative Literature.

I would be very happy to talk with you about these matters in person, or by e-mail.


Sincerely,
--Ryan Culpepper
Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar
PhD Student
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto