25th July, 2010
Dean Meric Gertler
University of Toronto
100 St. George St., Room 2005
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G3
Dear Professor Gertler,
I have seen the news story in The Globe and Mail that it is your intention to close the Centre for Comparative Literature in the University. As an academic based in the United Kingdom but also one who studied in Canada and is very familiar with the University of Toronto, I write both to express my shock at this intention and also to protest vigorously. As a sometime Dean of Faculty myself, I recognise and sympathise with the need to make savings but there are surely ways of doing this without doing serious damage and long-term to a faculty or to a discipline.
The University of Toronto has an international reputation and the Centre for Comparative Literature is a factor in this. The Centre is well regarded in Great Britain. It has attracted students from all over the world and this valuable addition (and income!) to the University will be lost. In a country such as Canada, and a city such as Toronto, with its huge cultural and intellectual diversity, it essential both for intellectual credibility and also for the realisation of the University’s mission that the Centre continues to provide a space and a framework for the study of literary texts in a comparative context and within an appropriate and demanding intellectual framework. It is not simple piety that has led to the association of the Centre with Northrop Frye but because Frye’s work over his whole career was so crucial in establishing the proper critical discipline for such work.
I am afraid that I am wholly unconvinced by your reported comment that: “The centre has been so successful that it has seeded interest in literary theory and comparative studies across humanities departments . . . our judgment it is no longer necessary.” Not to put too fine a point on it, this strikes me as a convenient rationalisation. If interest has reputedly been sown in other departments, the seed has fallen on stony ground. It simply is not the case that the kind of literary theory which Frye established is generating significant and important work in a genuinely comparative
sense in other departments. I don’t see too many people of the range and intelligence of Professor Hutcheon nor do I see any evidence of the comparative and carefully theorised work in other departments. If you close the Centre for Comparative Literature you will do substantial harm not only the intellectual strength of the University of Toronto but also to its international reputation.
I understand the need to make savings but academic vandalism where you destroy something does not seem the best way to go about it. I am still painfully aware of the enormous and long-lasting damage the Thatcher cuts did to British Universities in the 1980s. I cannot believe that it is not possible to find savings in the way that the Centre for Comparative Literature is run at the moment while securing its future. . I strongly suspect on past experience that you won’t make the savings on administrative costs that you hope for and these will be offset by the loss of student and other income. It is fatally easy to go for the dramatic gesture of closing a unit such as the Centre for Comparative Literature rather than adopt the more painstaking way of looking for alternatives. I know that this is possible because I have done it.
I beg of you, Professor Gertler, to review your decision and look for savings in the way the Centre currently operates but still keep it open. In the long term this will be the better decision for the Faculty and the University and will sustain an important and vibrant Centre.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel R. Lamont
Daniel R. Lamont, MA, MA, MA, PhD
Dean of the Faculty of Cultural, Legal and Social Studies (retired)
The University of Central Lancashire
