Susan Wolfson, Princeton & Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

20 July 2010

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


Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler:

Re: Dismantling of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto

The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers is dismayed to learn from our distinguished professional colleagues at the University of Toronto, Linda Hutcheon and Tilottama Rajan about the imminent dismantling of this internationally distinguished Centre. We write to support an appeal of this unhappy decision. While we appreciate your wish to consolidate several seemingly cognate departments for greater efficiency, both administrative and economic, we think that this particular decision, though it may seem to promise immediate benefits, is a long-term misfortune—not only for the credit and reputation of the University of Toronto, but also for the vital culture of Comparative Literature studies in North America. The founder of the Centre, the incomparable Northrop Frye, embodies its prestige, its long-established excellence. With its generations of remarkable scholars and students, the Centre for Comparative Literature is virtually synonymous with the vibrancy and distinction in Humanities at the University of Toronto.

So we write to express our deep concern over this proposed termination and to urge your reconsideration. How unfortunate to disestablish the degree-granting programs! If anything, the Centre for Comparative Literature might be formally elevated to be what it has become: a capacious and generative global village (to evoke another notable member of the faculty at the University of Toronto, Herbert Marshall McLuhan) for all the modern languages, where students and faculty interact, inspire one another, improve one another’s work, and in sum elevate the profile of the university. Comparative literature has been at the forefront of just about every significant development in literary study, most recently, the advent of global literary studies.

At Princeton University even amid our financial constraints, Comparative Literature is being protected—and more, encouraged, successfully, to develop a few crucial, galvanizing senior appointments. This program, far from being consolidated, is actually the amalgamation of jointly appointed faculty from several departments, including my own (English). In consequence, and by force of its own energy, classes offered by this program typically draw students not only from across the University, but from across the region, from nearby universities. Departments of, Programs in, and Centres for Comparative Literature typically have this kind of appeal, this kind of influence. In our increasingly pragmatic public culture, where economic productivity tends to trump scholarship and critical inquiry, where sports facilities are refreshed while libraries are under stress, where learning and erudition can be ridiculed by a recent former President and recent candidate for vice President, we need the leadership of major universities, such as the University of Toronto, and distinguished entities, such as the Centre for Comparative Literature, to shape and influence the vital force of the humanities and scholarship in the challenges of the modern world. We urge you to reconsider your decision, and to imagine better ways to manage the resources of your distinguished university amid the crises, but also in light of the prospects, of twenty-first century academia.


Yours sincerely,


Susan J. Wolfson


President, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (2010)
Professor of English, Princeton University
22 McCosh Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1016 USA