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

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

Jonathan Allan, on behalf of the conference committees of the Centre

Dear President Naylor,

 

I write to you on behalf of the organising committee—past and present— of the International Graduate Conference of the Centre for Comparative Literature, a committee of which I have been a member for the past three years. As you know, the graduate students of the Centre organise this annual conference every spring, based around questions that are at the heart of the human sciences. In 2009, our central question was: what does it mean to read and how does one read? In 2010, we turned to the experience of time and narration. In 2011, we will explore the question of iconicity, a particularly timely question in light of the front-page image of Northrop Frye in the Globe and Mail this week.

 

The conferences that have been organised over the past three years have received no fewer than one hundred abstracts from scholars from around the world. Last year’s conference alone received close to two hundred fifty abstracts. This number is nearly three times that which the Canadian Association for Comparative Literature generally receives each year for their annual conference. The abstracts we receive come from a range of scholars, from those at the beginnings of the careers to firmly established professors who are members of the highest levels of academia: University Professors, Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, and so on.

 

Over the past few years, the conference has hosted some of the biggest names in literary studies to present keynote lectures. In honour of Linda Hutcheon and Ted Chamberlin, we invited Sander L. Gilman to participate in 2009, an invitation that he quickly and gladly accepted because of the prestige of the Centre and its place in the field of literary studies. Sander Gilman has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto and also held the position of Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory. I will not list all of the scholars who have graced the University by attending this conference, but such a list would include Svetlana Boym, Piero Boitani, and Mario J. Valdés. In 2011, we will welcome Carol Mavor, an art historian, and Michael Taussig, an anthropologist, who will speak to the interdisciplinary and multi-media concerns of icons and their meanings: Why are icons so powerful? What does it mean to break them?

 

And if these two aspects of our conferences were not enough, for the past three years the conferences have either received SSHRC funding or have been established as “fund-worthy but no funds available.” The 2010 conference, “Radiant Past, Explosive Future,” received the full amount of funding requested. The 2011 conference is the recipient of a Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts award, and we anticipate equal success with our SSHRC application. Publications are forthcoming for the proceeding of the 2008, 2009, and 2010 conferences, and the committee of the 2011 conference is currently negotiating publication of the proceedings.

 

Sander L. Gilman has called our conference a “destination” conference for comparative, interdisciplinary, and literary scholars from around the world. Indeed our conferences are noted for challenging the ways we conceive of comparative literature and continue to challenge, in Dean Gertler’s words, “what was revolutionary or radical in the 60s.” If the University and the Dean of Arts and Science decide to continue along this destructive path of closing the Centre for Comparative Literature, there is no way that this conference will be able to continue.

 

Professor Sylvia Söderlind of Queen’s University notes, in her letter (July 13, 2010) to you, “I have attended several of the annual international conferences organized by the students over the years and have been constantly amazed both by the quality of scholarship presented and the caliber of scholars the students manage to attract. Where else do students organize large meetings of scholars of international reputation? More to the point, perhaps, in what other venues organized by students are international scholars eager to participate?” I submit these same questions to you. Where are these same types of conferences being organised by students and where are scholars of international repute so interested in participating? These conferences are another testament to the academic excellence and reputation of the students at the Centre for Comparative Literature and the continuing relevance and strength of our discipline.  

 

On behalf of the organising committees of the 2009, 2010, and 2011 conferences, I urge you and the Dean of Arts and Sciences to consider just what is at stake if the plan to close Northrop Frye’s Centre for Comparative Literature continues. No other program at the University of Toronto, and no other group of students working together at the University, organises a conference that is any way comparable to those run through the Centre for Comparative Literature. This will be a tremendous loss to the intellectual community at the University of Toronto, as well as our neighbouring universities.

 

Finally, let me personally invite you and any of the university administration to attend our annual conference, “Iconoclasm: the Breaking and Making of Images,” that will take place March 17-19, 2011 at Victoria College.

 

Yours truly,

 

Jonathan A. Allan

 

CC: Dean Meric Gertler

Provost Cheryl Misak

Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Centre for Comparative Literature

Dr. Sylvia Söderlind, Department of English, Queen’s University

Dr. Sander L. Gilman, Emory University

Dr. Noreen Golfman, President of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Elizabeth Church, Education Reporter, Globe and Mail

Karen Birchard, Chronicle of Higher Education

Peggy Berkowitz, Editor, University Affairs

Save Comparative Literature Campaign

Marlene Goldman, University of Toronto, Scarborough

Dear Professor Naylor,

 

I am shocked and saddened to find myself writing this letter to you concerning the proposal to close the Centre for Comparative Literature. I read about this plan in The Globe and Mail with dismay and a sense of shame that my university would conceive of this as a cost-saving mechanism.

 A bit of history: I came to the University of Toronto in 1989 to do my PhD in English. At the time, it was commonly understood that the best and the brightest students went into Comparative Literature. Those of us who had not been lucky enough to receive a stellar scholarly education—which would enable us to read literature and literary theory in at least three languages—settled for English. Throughout my graduate career, it became even more apparent that the very best work in the Humanities is often done by comparativists whose training prepares them to transcend the narrower trends of particular disciplines and nation-states, allowing them to develop comprehensive analyses of transnational and global movements. Professor Hutcheon’s internationally celebrated books on postmodernism, irony, parody, adaption, opera, and, most recently, late style and aging constitute some of the best examples of the scholarly contributions made by Comparative Literature’s faculty and students.

 While I understand the need to cut costs, it strikes me as regressive and even dangerous to attack the few institutions, namely, the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnationalism, whose mandate is to promote interdisciplinarity. As it is currently configured, the University of Toronto tends to isolate scholars in discrete silos; faculty and students who work on similar topics have absolutely no knowledge of each other’s scholarship. Though we pursue information and the cultivation of great minds, we are like the proverbial blind men touching the elephant. Indeed, due to the silo-effect, we are both blind and mute if we lack crucial opportunities to converse with each other across disciplines, departments, and faculties.

 Currently, I work in the English Department at UTSC. Thanks to the inspiration and support of professors in Comparative Literature such as Professor Hutcheon and Neil ten Kortenaar, my research has taken me outside the silos. Knowing firsthand the excitement that comes from learning and adopting new ways of approaching intellectual and social problems—I am currently working on representations of memory loss and dementia in literary and biomedical discourses—I urge you to reconsider the closing of the Centre of Comparative Literature. I want to ensure that future students continue to have access to the very best education that the University of Toronto has to offer.  

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Dr. Marlene Goldman,

Associate Professor, English, UTSC

The Centre for Diaspora and Transnationalism

Institute for Women and Gender Studies

 

 

Rachel F. Stapleton, University of Toronto

July 15, 2010

Dear President Naylor,

As I write to you, you have been receiving letters of protest from many concerned individuals, and some 2,600 academics, students, and members of the public have signed a petition asking you to reverse the recommendation of the Faculty of Arts and Science Strategic Planning Committee to disestablish the Centre for Comparative Literature effective July 1, 2011. I write to you to add my voice to theirs, and to ask you to re-evaluate this recommendation and its impact on the University of Toronto, its faculty, scholars, and students—both current and future.

Many of my colleagues have written to you of the international reputation of the Centre; of the ongoing high calibre of the students and faculty; of the innovative and award-winning research and pedagogies that are undertaken and developed at the Centre; of the largest, best recognized, and award-winning student-run conference at the University of Toronto, and possibly in Canada; of the involvement of students and faculty with theory and research groups across the globe; of the long history of the Northrop Frye Professorship in Literary Theory and the many distinguished scholars who have held that post; of the three Centre members who have served as Presidents of the Modern Language Association; of the historical, cultural, and intellectual history and importance of the Centre; and of many other successes of the Centre. I will not repeat facts which they have no doubt covered much better than I ever could.

Let me speak, rather, of what I see as the future and the question of the humanities. President Naylor, the disciplines that make up the humanities—the human sciences—are not “pieces of furniture,” as Dean Gertler referred to them in a recent interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that can be shuffled around or tossed out to suit fashionable notions of budgetary feng shui. Nor are they “sacred cows,” as Dean Gertler would also have it, that we are protecting for the sake of tradition. Instead, the humanities are what I called them above: the human sciences. Just as the natural sciences study aspects of our physical world, and the social sciences study aspects of our societies, so do the human sciences study humans, their thoughts, attitudes, creations. While the human sciences do not use the same scientific methods as the natural sciences, we are equally committed to rigorous methodological approaches to our studies; while there is less emphasis on reduplicative research, as in the natural sciences, our research must nevertheless live up to high standards and proofs that are millennia in the making; while our colleagues in the natural and social sciences often times need to look back on only a few decades of research, many of us in the human sciences must understand the centuries of thought behind our materials. We hold ourselves and are held to the same academic and intellectual standards as the other sciences. We are not second class intellectual citizens.

We are not ignorant of budgets, though the Dean’s proposal seems to be very scarce in actual financial details. The Dean has gone on record stating that the proposed disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature along with the formation of the School of Languages and Literatures out of the current Spanish and Portuguese, Italian, German, Slavics, and East Asian Studies departments will save an estimated $900,000–$1.5 million. This begs the question: is the quality and calibre of graduate and undergraduate education offered by the University of Toronto, a quality recognized in the 2010 Maclean’s university rankings, is worth so very little to the University? Is the University really willing to put its reputation on the line for a price tag of $1.5 million dollars? When students of the Centre are bringing in more than $207,500—14% of the proposed savings—in external funding in 2010-2011 alone? Funding that will disappear as students go elsewhere upon the disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature?

It is worrying to me, President Naylor, what this decision, along with many of the others outlined in the recommendations made by the SPC, say about the future of the human sciences at the University of Toronto, and of the University’s attitudes towards these vital studies. While such committees must perforce meet in closed sessions, no member of the Centre for Comparative Literature was asked to answer the concerns raised by the committee, which Professor Neil ten Kortenaar has since done in an open letter to Dean Gertler. As Professor Rebecca Comay (Comparative Literature and Philosophy) notes: “[Comparative literature is] not just about multiplying the number of different disciplines you can juggle—it’s about experimenting with different frames of reference.” I propose that the SPC try to experiment with different frames of reference before cutting funding to the humanities to pay for the poor judgment of the investment brokers. The Centre is home to some of the most creative, innovative, and interdisciplinary thinkers on campus: make use of this “brain trust” to formulate creative and workable solutions, rather than sending it to its dissolution.

Let me ask you again to re-evaluate the recommendation of the SPC, and recognize the ongoing contributions of Comparative Literature to the University of Toronto. To follow through on the recommendation, is not to take a difficult step against the “sacred cows” that Dean Gertler claims it is. On the contrary, the truly courageous position is to champion the humanities.

President Naylor, I hope that you will take on this challenge, and be the champion of the Centre for Comparative Literature and all the other disciplines of the humanities, the human sciences, that are at risk under these proposals.

Sincerely,

Rachel F. Stapleton

PhD Student

Centre for Comparative Literature

University of Toronto

Cc: Meric Gertler; Cheryl Misak; Neil ten Kortenaar; the Save Comp Lit campaign

Michael Dolzani, Baldwin-Wallace College

Dear President Naylor,

I write this on the 98th birthday of Canada’s most famous literary scholar, Northrop Frye.  It turns out, unfortunately, not to be a very happy birthday.  I have just learned, with considerable shock, of the plan to abolish the Centre for Comparative Literature, founded by Frye back in 1969.  I am writing, as an alumnus of the University of Toronto, as Frye’s former research assistant, and as one of the editors of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye project published by the University of Toronto Press, to ask the University to reconsider its decision.

I will always be grateful to the University for taking a chance in 1978 and admitting a student from an unknown small college in Ohio.  Although my experience in English was completely positive, I was sometimes told by other graduate students that Comparative Literature was where the really exciting stuff was going on.  From everything that I have read, that Centre is as vigorous and important now as it was then, yet that has not been a factor in the decision. Yes, it is good that people are not going to lose their jobs, but there will be another kind of loss, for the kind of scholarship enabled by Comparative Literature will become impossible.

To non-academics, “comparative literature” may seem just one more arcane, narrow specialization.  If people do not even know what comparative literature is, it is understandable if they are not motivated to fund it.  Comp Lit is a centrifugal approach to literary studies that reverses the centripetal approach of a traditional English department.  What I mean is that, if you have a degree in English, your program restricts you to the literature of one language, and usually one country and historical period.  When you go on the job market, you peddle yourself as, say, “eighteenth-century British.”  The centripetal approach originated in the nineteenth century and remains valid; my own degree is in English.  However, it is next to impossible within such a framework to study English centrifugally, in terms of its connections with other languages, literatures, and cultures.  Yet those connections are crucial on three levels, linguistic, literary, and social.  As Frye pointed out in an address to the Canadian Comparative Literature Association in 1974, “In English literature, the major influences have been Latin, French, and Italian:  the influence of Old English on later developments has been minimal, as has that of medieval English apart from Chaucer.  The most familiar schemata of English poetry, rhyme and meter, were taken over from French.  And underlying a great deal of its fiction is a solid basis of popular literature, in folktale and ballad, which has travelled around the world without regard to linguistic barriers.”  To this we may add that when literary theory came of age in the second half of the twentieth century, there was great difficulty accommodating it in traditional English departments, because theory by definition asks general rather than specialized questions.  Frye’s own wide-ranging work was an influential example here.  In a world that is becoming more and more interconnected, and more and more obsessed by its own interconnectedness, it seems incomprehensible that the University would seek to abolish a discipline that studies exactly those connections.

I know that there are financial considerations involved.  Fifty-five million dollars is from one point of view a lot of money.  From another point of view, it is the bonuses of perhaps six CEOs.  The question is what our values are.  The University’s financial crisis has been largely created from outside itself.  We owe the global financial meltdown to people who did not study the humanities, and who consequently made foolish and destructive decisions out of blindness.  No, the study of literature does not necessarily lead to wisdom and sensitivity—but it is one of the few things that can enlarge our being if we are open to it.  That was Frye’s faith.  I truly hope the University may reverse its decision and find other ways to close the budget gap.

Respectfully,

Michael Dolzani

Professor of English

Chair, English Department, Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio

Alvin Lee to the Globe and Mail

Dear Editor,

I have not seen the Gertler report with its recommendation to close the Centre for Comparative Literature at the U of T and to fold it (what would be left of it) into a School that would also include the five departments of Italian, German, East Asian Studies, Slavic languages and Spanish and Portuguese. As a university scholar/teacher and a university administrator, I saw firsthand what precedes and follows such decisions.

Because each individual language and literature department is a linguistic minority in an English-language university, its very existence depends on unusual professional commitment and hard work. It also depends on its ability to convince budget officers that when you fold the cultural milieu of a language and literature department into a broader English-speaking mix, you destroy the identity of the original, and much of its reason for being. The professors no longer use the identifying language in most of their daily work, the staff have to function mainly in English, and the language context in which students are meant to become proficient ceases to exist.

The paramount strength of the graduate programs in the Centre for Comparative Literature has been its ability to attract, for work at an advanced level, able students from around the world who have had deep exposure while undergraduates to more than one language and literature in at least two of the kind of department that would disappear into the proposed new School. There is a close symbiotic relation between the U of T Centre and the separate language and literature departments at the U of T and the other universities from which the students come. As the Northrop Frye Professor of Literary Theory in the Centre in 1991-2, I saw this fact in every class discussion: the accuracy and incisiveness of what a young scholar says about a literary text is convincing only when the text is being read in its original language. It is an important part of Frye’s legacy that he knew this and that he championed the need for just the kind of intellectual and imaginative work that the U of T Centre has been doing for 41 years.

Sincerely

Alvin A. Lee

Professor of English Emeritus and President Emeritus, McMaster University

General Editor, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 30 vols (University of Toronto Press)