Natalie Pendergast. University of Toronto

Dear President Naylor, Dean Meric Gertler and Members of the Strategic Planning Committee:
Professor Meric S. Gertler (Chair) Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science
Professor Parth Bhatt Chair, Department of French
Professor Arthur Hosios Chair, Department of Economics
Professor Janet Paterson Principal, Innis College
Professor Craig Boutilier Chair, Department of Computer Science
Professor John Magee Director, Centre for Medieval Studies
Professor Robert Baker Vice-Dean, Research and Graduate Programs
Professor Stephen Rupp Vice-Dean, Faculty and Academic Life
Professor Suzanne Stevenson Vice-Dean, Teaching and Learning
Ms. Nadina Jamison Assistant Dean and Executive Director, Office of Advancement
Ms. Vera Melnyk Assistant Dean and Director, Office of the Dean
Mr. Isaak Siboni Assistant Dean and Chief Financial Officer

I write this letter with the hope that you will consider why I believe that by closing the Centre for Comparative Literature, the University of Toronto will lose a very vibrant intellectual community of scholars.

I have been dwelling recently on a passage from In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The narrator is confronted with the choice of taking one road or another on his daily walk. Although the passage seems insignificant in this early chapter, the trauma of having to choose one way or the other, whilst knowing that neither suits him perfectly, stays with him over the course of the seven novels in the series. With regard to Proust’s own lifestyle, some critics have wondered whether the two unfitting options symbolized the famous writer’s feelings toward the binary of homosexuality and heterosexuality.

If I consider my situation as a student at the Centre for Comparative Literature through this passage in Proust, I too feel what the narrator feels: that none of the (proposed) choices suit me. If given the option of studying the national languages of French or English, I will be faced with a trauma that will stay with me long after I complete my academic promenade. No, like Proust, like my comparatist colleagues, the only path that suits exists somewhere in the savage pasture between these roads, somewhere in between national literature departments. For, we do not place our feet neatly into the footprints provided by the shoes of our forebears, on a smooth and well-trodden road, already cemented to the earth. No, we would rather wade through the thicker, thornier areas and see what may be hiding in the longer grass. Some of us need to forge our own, new paths.

I am certain that the academic growth of many of my colleagues would be stunted were the Centre transformed into a collaborative program at the School of Languages and Literatures for several reasons.

1. Not only do we have our fingers on the pulse of new criticism, but we respectfully critique new criticism. This is an ongoing process, not a one-time revolution.
2. The Centre for Comparative Literature is our home department. We did not start off at a national literature department, but rather started off with the incentive to compare. We compare languages and literatures, cultures, theories, media and perspectives. If the Centre is closed, we have nowhere to go “home” to.
3. Whether or not other departments “use” the literary theory that comparatists have brought to the fore of humanities scholarship, it is most evident that the way in which they approach literary/critical theory is not as progressive as that of the Centre. As I mentioned above, the loss of the Centre will signify a loss of a community that is built upon an epistemology that I have not experienced in courses at other departments. The way that we learn at the Centre is characterized by a blending of ideas and strategies that we students adopt from our eclectic faculty. We do not only improve our methods of study from reading and writing, we also learn the art of rhetoric, presentation and collective critical thought in various group settings that include different mixes of students and professors. We are encouraged to not only “use” theory critically like in other departments, but also creatively, by reinterpreting theories in parallel with other theories, or by building upon theories from different literary periods, cultural and geographical contexts and with various media, sometimes all at once. 
4. We are an undisciplined discipline. We are united as comparatists not because we all study literatures of different languages but because we share in common an unwillingness to limit our humanities scholarship just because providing administrators with a succinct one-line definition of Comparative Literature will appease them and make for more efficient paper work. We seek to challenge the scope of academic study by including as many different perspectives and approaches as possible—not by excluding and stifling our comparative exchange with one another for the sake of brevity. And I likewise provide you—the people who in many ways hold the fate of future students like me in your palm—with the challenge of trying to fit my own large scope of research into a tightly defined national literature department. My proposed dissertation explores conceptions of subjectivity by way of queer and feminist theory and psychoanalysis, forms such as the novel and the graphic novel, interfaces of images and text, genres such as autobiography and romance, French, English and German literatures and Berliner, Parisian, rural Pennsylvanian and San Franciscan subcultures.

If I shelve for a moment my emotional response to the proposed School of Languages and Literatures, I also have many questions about the logistics of such an edifice. Firstly, what will it look like? Most of my dismay comes from the fact that there is so little information about the school available to those whom it will concern the most. Will this be a standing structure unto itself, or will we be a group of floating academics, using whatever classrooms are available in various basements or libraries across campus? If a new school will indeed be built, where will we be “placed” in the meantime?

The Strategic Planning Committee has from the onset claimed that due to financial constraints it will be necessary to close the Centre of Comparative Literature. I then would like the committee to explain how they are planning to finance the building of a "new" school of Languages and Literatures?

Please understand that by closing the Centre for Comparative Literature you will be closing some of the most open minds in the humanities. Please do not leave us with the undesirable Proustian choice of no right direction. Do you, in good faith and in your heart of hearts, think that closing the Centre for Comparative Literature is what is best for the continuation of comparative scholarship at the University of Toronto? If so, please, convince me how.


Sincerely,



Natalie Pendergast
Ph.D. Student, year 1
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto

Harold Skulsky, Hofstra University, and emeritus, Smith College

Dear President Naylor,

I'm afraid I must agree with many of my colleagues that the dissolution of the Centre for Comparative Literature is a squalid act unworthy of a great university. In particular, it is a blow to humane studies (which are all by nature comparative) at a time when humane studies are already gravely threatened by indifference and hostility from many quarters. Being a survivor of countless planning committees in academia, I am very well aware of the superficially plausible budgetary and pragmatic arguments that inspire proposals of this kind. The arguments are, I submit, as shortsighted and philistine as they are plausible.

Toronto, as the institution we know and love, has little to gain and much to lose in the long run from this penny-wise act of self-mutilation. I will not go on at boring length about the legacy of Northrop Frye, a wise and wonderful comparatist whom I had the pleasure of welcoming to a convention at Smith many years ago, and who is commemorated by two of the Toronto Centre's essential institutions. But it should be clear to you that one of the treasures the University is in danger of losing is its reputation. But bad as that will be, it is far from all. When the Centre is no more, we will all be losers.

Our consolation, such as it is, will be that WE will not have done the deed.

Yours very truly,
Harold Skulsky
Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature
Emeritus, Smith College
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Hofstra University

Mario DiCesare, emeritus, SUNY, Binghampton

Dear President Naylor,

I write as a retired teacher of English and Comparative Literature, having taught for nearly forty years at the State University of New York at Binghamton. During my active career, I wrote or edited some twenty books in several fields, mostly comparative -- e.g., a major study of Vergil's "Aeneid" (Columbia University Press), three books on the important Renaissance Latin poet Marcus Hieronymus Vida, and collections of essays on Renaissance literature. While my major work strictly in English Literature, the edition of the Bodleian Manuscript of George Herbert's "The Temple," is perhaps my best known work, that I think speaks volumes about the narrowness of single disciplinary study.

The suggestion that a department of comparative literature might be disbanded is simply mind-boggling. Such departments seem to me not only immensely valuable in themselves for the contributions made to both teaching and scholarship; they also provide a necessary balance in humanistic study. In the last fifty or sixty years, far too much emphasis in modern literary study has been narrow, sharply focussed on smaller and smaller units of the great world of literature. Personally, were I again a department chair, I would seriously distrust the very narrow specialist, worried that his or her ignorance would dilute teaching. In my pleasant retirement, I subscribe to both the Milton and the Shakespeare lists, among others, and read all the posts, and am regularly astonished at the narrowness of outlook. I think back to the richness offered to us by such titans as Douglas Bush (a Canadian who spent almost his entire academic life at Harvard), who told me once that he read Vergil's "Aeneid" in Latin at least once a year to give body and richness to his study of Milton and other English poets.

I hope that there will be serious reconsideration of any plan to disband the department or to dilute its work.

Thank you for your consideration.

Mario A. DiCesare
Distinguished Professor (emeritus), English & Comparative Literature
State University of New York at Binghamton

Rosa Mucignat, King's College London

Dear President Naylor,

I am writing as a young academic who has greatly benefitted from contact with the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. I have taken part in the 2008 Graduate Conference on 'Recognition' and I was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the work presented, the excellent organization and the resourcefulness of the centre's graduate students and staff. Not only did the organizers secured the participation of some of the bigger names in the CompLit world, but they also managed to find a publisher for the conference proceedings.

Initiatives such as this are crucial to the development of our discipline, and, as testified by the hundreds of letters you are receiving, the Centre itself is a point of reference for scholars of Comparative Literature worldwide.

At a time when many Universities around the world are setting up or expanding Comparative Literature Programmes, your decision to close an established Centre such as yours, with a long tradition and a high international reputation simply defies belief.

I strongly hope you will re-evaluate your decision and avoid measures which will damage not only the institution you are responsible for, but an entire community of students and scholars.

Yours sincerely,


Dr Rosa Mucignat

Lecturer in Comparative Literature
King's College London

Uzoma Esonwanne, University of Toronto

July 15, 2010

Professor David Naylor
President
University of Toronto
27 King’s College Circle, Room 206
Toronto ON M5S 1A1



Dear Professor Naylor,

Permit me to add my voice to the flood of voices raised in dismay at the proposed disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. As a specialist in African literature and postcolonial theory, I have been very pleased to be cross–appointed at the Centre. However, when in its Plan 2009–2014 the Centre declared its intention to open our program up to “scholarly and cultural conversations” being conducted in languages around the world, including First Nations languages, I was further delighted. Comparativity at Toronto, I thought, has now chosen to keep a tryst with World Literature.

So you can imagine my consternation at learning that, by successfully proselytizing “theory” to national language literature departments, Comparative Literature has exhausted its intellectual mandate and rendered itself academically redundant. May I point out that “theory” in Comparative Literature has never been just about itself? Because language, representation, and the human (and, sometimes, the subhuman and inhuman), the substance that “theory” grapples with, are dynamic, and because that dynamism is inherent in the literary “conversations” to which Plan 2009–2014 refers, to dissolve the Centre now would be to signal to all that we do not wish our faculty and students to participate. Could we seriously claim that students and faculty working in a diminished collaborative program would be able to meet the challenges of comparativity in the 21st century? If we must “work across” the languages of literature in order to study phenomena transnationally in their global dimension, then preserving the Centre for Comparative Literature would serve us best.


I understand that to “preserve the quality of education” in the Faculty of Arts and Science, as Dean Meric Gertler rightly argues, we must exercise fiscal prudence. That is why I would not suggest that Comparative Literature should not share the burden of dealing with the Faculty’s $60-million deficit. Rather, what I urge is that the University avoid goring its cows, sacred and profane, in the name of fiscal prudence. If I may speak for Comparative Literature and similar metaphorical bovines, I suspect that given the chance they, like humans, would happily go on a strict diet for a while than die.


Yours sincerely,


Uzoma Esonwanne
Associate Professor
Department of English & Centre for Comparative Literature
Associate Director
MA English Program


cc Professor Cheryl Misak (Provost), Professor Meric Gertler (Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science), and Professor Neil ten Kortenaar (Director, Centre for Comparative Literature)

Julia Kristeva, Université Paris 7

A Monsieur le Président de l’Université de Toronto, Le Prof. Naylor

Monsieur le Président, Cher Collègue,

Je viens d'apprendre, à ma grande stupéfaction, que l'université de Toronto envisage la suppression de son Centre de littérature comparée. Je me permets de vous écrire cette lettre ouverte parce que mon association à ce Centre est de longue date. J'y suis venue la première fois en 1992 comme titulaire de la Norhrop Frye Professorship. Mon séminaire avait pour sujet «Proust et le temps sensible» et mes conférences sont à l'origine de mon livre, portant le même titre, qui parut l'année suivante. Par la suite, je suis revenue plusieurs fois en tant que Visiting Professor pour y faire les conférences qui ont abouti à deux autres livres de ma trilogie sur Le génie féminin : Hannah Arendt (1999) et Colette (2002). Enfin, en l'an 2000, j’ai eu l’honneur d’obtenir le titre de Docteur Honoris Causa de votre Université. Je suis convaincue que le rôle que Northrop Frye a joué dans les études littéraires, et plus largement dans la compréhension de la littérature comme mode de pensée spécifique (et non pas simplement comme loisir ou décor), nécessite une approche interdisciplinaire que les universitaires canadiens et la communauté scientifique internationale se doivent de développer et d'approfondir en sa mémoire.

Frye a ouvert une perspective de recherche qui est d'une brûlante actualité : la littérature au voisinage de l'esthétique (le sensible et le beau) et du besoin de croire (spiritualismes et religions). La littérature comparée à donc un rôle inattendu à assumer dans un siècle de heurts de religions.

L'Unesco a voté une convention pour la diversité culturelle que la France et le Canada ont inspirée et soutiennent activement. Cette politique qui se propose un nouveau contrat social pour la globalisation, basée sur l'interaction entre diversité -- contre la banalité comme « mal radical » (Arendt)- a besoin d'être étayée par des connaissances précises sur les langues et leurs expressions culturelles, et que la littérature comparée et les sciences humaines peuvent précisément développer et fournir.

Vous comprenez, Monsieur le Président, mon inquiétude devant les mesures administratives envisagées qui me paraissent brutales et à fort relent obscurantiste. J’espère de tout cœur que l’Université de Toronto n’acceptera pas cette recommandation de « dés-établir » son Centre de littérature comparée.

En vous remerciant de l’attention que vous voudriez bien porter à cette lettre,

Recevez, Monsieur le Président et Cher Collègue, l’expression de ma haute considération à de mes meilleures pensées,


Julia Kristeva

le 21 juillet 2010

Jeannine Pitas, University of Toronto

July 21, 2010


President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 2006
King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 1A1


Dear President Naylor:

You are currently receiving many letters protesting the Strategic Planning Committee’s proposed “disestablishment” of University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature; meanwhile, our petition has been signed by Margaret Atwood, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and more than 5,000 other concerned citizens from all over the world. There has been much discussion about the Centre’s international reputation, the legacy of its founder Northrop Frye, and its continued excellence in research and teaching. However, I write to you as someone who is personally affected by this proposal. As I begin my second year of the PhD, I am outraged that this excellent centre has been recommended for reduction to a collaborative program – essentially, a graduate minor in literary theory that will no longer permit the interdisciplinary work that makes comparative literature so important for the humanities.

My decision to move from the US to Canada and study at the Centre was the result of many years’ thought and deliberation. As an undergraduate I had the excellent fortune of studying at Sarah Lawrence College, which is known for its commitment to individualized and interdisciplinary study. While I mainly focused on English literature, I also studied Spanish, Polish and philosophy while taking some courses in the social sciences. To me, this multi-disciplinary approach to the humanities was the only one that made sense; rather than studying one narrow field in isolation, I was able to explore the relationships between different areas while focusing on specific topics in depth.

When my professors first urged me to pursue advanced study, I was interested but hesitant. I did not know which discipline to pursue- literature or philosophy? And if I were to choose literature, then should I focus on English or Spanish, or perhaps even Polish? When several of my teachers encouraged me to study comparative literature, I saw it as the ideal opportunity to continue the kind of work that I had begun. The task of writing academic papers (and ultimately a dissertation) would compel me to develop a focused area of specialization; however, I would also have the chance to retain my diverse academic interests and even develop some new ones.

As I began researching programs, U of T’s Centre for Comparative Literature immediately caught my attention as especially strong. And, when I began the MA in 2008, all my impressions were proved true. By this point I had chosen to focus on Latin American and Polish literature, and courses in those departments allowed me to increase my general knowledge of these areas. But, it was the courses offered by the Centre itself that really allowed me to explore the relationships between them while gaining a strong base in diverse philosophical and critical approaches.

What has impressed me most about the Centre, however, is its dedication to quality teaching and mentoring of students. From my first meeting with the Graduate Coordinator, I could see that the Centre’s faculty were truly dedicated to teaching. The guidance, encouragement and constructive criticism that I have received during my first two years here prove to me that our faculty genuinely care about their students’ academic growth and professional futures. Unfortunately, not all of my colleagues at other universities can say the same. And, this dedication on the part of the faculty is reflected in the students’ work. I am constantly impressed by my colleagues’ publications, conference presentations, awards, and let’s not forget, their teaching in various undergraduate programs across the humanities and social sciences. I am not surprised that even in this extremely competitive job market, the Centre’s graduates continue to find work.

I echo other international students when I say that I would not have come to the University of Toronto for any program other than this one. While U of T has many strong departments, the Centre for Comparative Literature offers opportunities for innovative scholarship that simply wouldn’t be possible elsewhere (and which will no longer be possible if it is reduced to a collaborative program). Having read the Strategic Planning Committee’s report, I cannot understand the rationale behind this recommendation. Before I applied to this program, professors various academic institutions assured me that comparative literature was a growing, evolving discipline and that the University of Toronto was an excellent place to pursue it. The signers of our petition –now more than 5,000 - clearly agree. And while we are not ignorant of budgetary concerns, the SPC has stated that they are also committed to maintaining and improving the overall quality of education in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I fail to understand how this quality can be achieved when this distinguished Centre is lost.

Therefore, I ask that you please re-evaluate the SPC’s proposal and recognize that, contrary to what the report suggests, comparative literature is not a discipline that has already achieved its task; rather, our task is only growing. As the world continues to become more culturally diffuse, some nation states have met with much criticism for building up walls between political borders. The “disestablishment” of the Centre for Comparative Literature threatens to follow this pattern within the university. I assure you that the “new synergies” which Dean Gertler expects to come out of the proposed School of Languages and Literatures will be inconsequential when weighed against the loss of our Centre, which currently serves as a meeting place for national languages and literatures as well as cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, political science, visual arts and more. Our tasks may be changing, but these changes make our discipline more relevant than ever. I hope that you will concur.


Sincerely,



Jeannine M. Pitas
PhD Student
Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto





CC: President David Naylor, University of Toronto
Provost Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
Dean Meric Gertler, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Vice-Dean Robert Baker, Research and Graduate Programs, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Vice-Dean Stephen Rupp, Faculty and Academic Life, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Graduate Students of the Centre for Comparative Literature
Save Comparative Literature Campaign

Myra Bloom, University of Toronto

Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler,

I am writing to you from Madrid, where I am currently spending a month studying Spanish with my friend and colleague from the Centre for Comparative Literature. The sadness and lack of understanding I feel faced with the potential dissolution of our Centre is magnified given my geographical distance from the epicentre of the decision-making process. Having undertaken this trip in the pursuit of knowledge that will aid me in my studies, I am now confronted with the prospect that upon my return, there very well may be no institutional backing for the work that I do.

The merits of our world-renowned graduate conference, international reputation, and acclaimed students and faculty, have been reiterated over the past several weeks. I am heartened by the support that has been shown in the media, by luminaries in the field, as well as by concerned students and members of the larger university community. At the same time, I am dismayed that the accomplishments of the Centre are being thrown into relief against the grim backdrop of its potential dissolution. Nobody will deny that these are difficult times and certain sacrifices need to be made. Nevertheless, at such times it is likewise true that rigorous intellectual work must more than ever be protected from the forces that would attempt to reduce critical thought to a price tag.

It is deeply worrying that the University of Toronto, which prides itself on its commitment to academic excellence, is revealing itself to be so short-sighted as to dismantle the very assets that safeguard it from becoming a bastion of scholarly conservatism. Smaller, less established institutions such as York and Ryerson rightly pride themselves on their forward-thinking interdisciplinary programmes. Up until this point I have been proud to remind my colleagues at these esteemed institutions that the University of Toronto is also adapting itself to the changing face of contemporary scholarship, promoting interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature, ethics, and diasporic identities, to name but a selection. I am disappointed and embarrassed to have to concede that my optimism has been misplaced, that the progressive tendencies that were at long last beginning to manifest themselves are being quashed in an epic purge that will re-establish, once and for all, U of T’s fraternity with the right side of the political spectrum. The chimaeric School of Languages and Literatures, the university’s official rhetoric notwithstanding, is not a viable substitute for real interdisciplinarity. While it is true that amalgamation is sometimes an effective cost-saving measure, it is impossible to argue that the administrative savings the university will enjoy can have any effect whatsoever on the nature or calibre of scholarly output.

Lastly, I would like to express my incredulity that ‘too much success’ is the rhetoric being bandied about as a potential justification for the department’s redundancy. If it is the case that the success of the methodologies of a given discipline enjoin its dissolution, I propose that U of T extend this rhetoric across the board: we can cut computer science based on the success of DIY internet applications such as YouTube and Facebook; we can save several billion dollars by eliminating the medical school, as overpopulation belies the excesses of medical science; the Classics department can likewise shut its doors as the Latin language is being safeguarded by biology, botany, as well as the mysteriously untouchable Centre for Medieval Studies.

The value of a graduate department must not be measured by the same utilitarian calculus that determines how many goldfish the university can afford to shelter in the calm ponds of Massey College. Rather, it must be assessed in terms of the work its students and faculty do to promote critical thinking within the university and in an increasingly-interconnected global scholarly community. I strongly urge you to return to the proverbial drawing board and draft a long-term plan that does justice to the mandate of the University of Toronto.

Yours sincerely,

Myra D Bloom
PhD Candidate, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholar, Doctoral

SSHRC-winning students of the Centre to the President of SSHRC

Dear Dr. Chad Gaffield:

We write to you as recipients of funding from the Social Science Humanities Research Council to ask for your support once again. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Toronto has announced the “disestablishment” of the Centre for Comparative Literature.

As you might have seen, this story has found its way into the media and recently appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail (July 13, 2010). Likewise, Noreen Golfman, President of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, has protested the decision (see attached letter). As well, the petition to Save Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto has nearly 5,200 signatures from academics and concerned citizens around the world.

As recipients of SSHRC, we are requesting that the Social Science and Humanities Research Council join us in protesting the recommendation of the Dean of Arts and Sciences. The closure of the Centre for Comparative Literature will be detrimental to research in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Toronto and will also affect scholars across Canada and around the world. All of us write to you as well to inform you that our research could only take place at the Centre for Comparative Literature. The possibility to complete our research – the research funded by SSHRC – is being threatened by the decisions of the Dean of Arts and Sciences.

Yours truly,

Jonathan A. Allan
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada

Myra Bloom
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholar, Doctoral
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada

Natalie Bosco
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholar, Master’s
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada

Ryan Culpepper
Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada

Julie Parisien
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada

Lukasz Wodzynski
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto, Canada

CC: President David Naylor, University of Toronto
Provost Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
Dean Meric Gertler, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Dean Brian Corman, School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto
Vice-Dean Robert Baker, Research and Graduate Programs, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature
Dr. Jill Ross, Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
Noreen Golfman, President of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Save Comparative Literature Campaign

Rachel F. Stapleton, University of Toronto; follow-up letter to Dean Gertler

Dear Dean Gertler,

I am writing to you today to follow up on my letter of July 15th to President Naylor (attached below) in which I expressed both my concern and dismay at the plan proposed by the Strategic Planning Committee that will see the disestablishment of the Centre for Comparative Literature—my academic home at the University of Toronto.

When I chose to leave my career to pursue graduate studies, it was a very difficult decision. While it was always something I had had in mind to do, the practicalities of leaving a steady and comfortable income for a much lower wage was difficult—Toronto has never been a cheap place to live! However, the actual intellectual decision was surprisingly easy: at the Centre for Comparative Literature, I was being offered the opportunity to push my horizons, to engage with my love of languages in ways that neither my career (which had no use for Latin) nor any other department (the Spanish department has little use for English or French, nor does the English department for Spanish) would allow me to do, as well as joining a community of scholars whose diversity of interests and engaging minds continue to astound me to this day.

While I imagine you must be extremely busy working out all the details of these proposals, I nevertheless look forward to your prompt response to both this letter and my earlier letter of concern to President Naylor, which he was kind enough to forward to you on July 16th.

Sincerely,

Rachel F. Stapleton
Ph.D. Student
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto

Brett de Bary, Cornell University

Department of Comparative Literature
247 Goldwin Smith Hall
Phone: 607-255-4155
Fax 607-255-6661
e-mail: complit@cornell.edu


Professor Meric Gertler,
Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
University of Toronto

July 19, 2010

Dear Professor Gertler,

In less than a week, I have received over several different list-serves (one a heavily subscribed international network of Japan scholars) news about the announced dissolution of the University of Toronto’s East Asian Studies Department, Centre for Comparative Literature, and four other departments pending the establishment of a new School of Languages and Literatures. The very rapidity with which word of this development has been circulated among an international community of humanists attests to the high regard in which the programs and departments in question are held. It might also be seen as almost instantaneous confirmation of University of Toronto’s stature as an eminent center of study in the humanities, attained by virtue of its historic association with some of the towering figures of twentieth century humanistic thought. The proposed merger---which, in effect, spells the virtual erasure from visibility of some programs and departments which have currently become synonymous with the university’s prestige in the humanities---will certainly be seen as a significant erosion of these perceived strengths. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that your outstanding faculty in some of the targeted units will not receive offers from elsewhere, as we have recently seen happen in American universities.

As a Cornell faculty with dual affiliations in the departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, I have a keen appreciation of work done by scholars in both these areas at the University of Toronto. The hiring of a new generation of Japan Studies scholars in East Asian Studies was conducted superbly at Toronto. Writings by Thomas Kierstead, Atsuko Sakaki, Eric Cazdyn, and Ken Kawashima are regularly featured in our graduate curriculum, and have inspired our current cohort of graduate students with their imaginativeness and theoretical sophistication. It is difficult to discern the rationale for dismantling a program which has attained such prominence. By the same token, the concomitant phasing-out of your well-subscribed undergraduate East Asian Studies curriculum and major seems equally short-sighted, given that the current dynamism of Asia can hardly be reduced to a purely economic phenomenon.

My colleagues in Comparative Literature have been similarly stunned and saddened by the prospect of the closing-down of your Centre for Comparative Literature. It, too, has been home to renowned scholars, and has been a valuable source of precisely the type of multi-lingual, comparative, theoretically-oriented work so urgently demanded by the complex impacts of globalization on the university.

You may be interested to know that two years ago at Cornell a similar “strategic planning exercise” was undertaken by a group of faculty appointed by our administration here. It resulted in a remarkably similar recommendation to our College of Arts and Sciences to consolidate Asian Studies, together with all of our other literature departments--- with the exception of English--- into a “Foreign Languages and Literatures Department.” Because of the overwhelming opposition of our humanities faculty to this proposal, it was completely tabled after a few months’ discussion. However, since these widely attended discussions offered a forum for articulating at length the detriment that would be done to the humanities as a whole by the proposed changes, the upshot was actually a strengthening of some of the previously threatened units. Today, not only our Asian Studies Department but also our Comparative Literature Department maintain their autonomy, and have been assured that as autonomous departments they will be integral to the future of the humanities at Cornell.

Perhaps a process like this will take place at Toronto. At any rate, I do hope this story of Cornell’s experience may encourage you to consider alternatives to your present plan.


With all best wishes,




Brett de Bary
Acting Chair, Comparative Literature
Professor, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature

Françoise Lionnet, UCLA

Dear President Naylor,

I have just heard the distressing news that the University is considering the disestablishment of the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, and I want to add my voice to the chorus of those that have been reacting to this extremely untimely and shocking proposal. Should it be implemented, it would be the death knoll of research excellence in the humanities at the University.

Let me explain why. I am the incoming President of the American Comparative Literature Association (April 2011), and I can assure you that comparative literature is more needed than ever on the North American continent. Any institution that does not take it seriously risks being left out of the debate on crucial issues that have a significant impact on the quality of the democratic public sphere today.

This is because comparative literature is the main humanities discipline capable of opening the door to the views of our world advanced by writers, thinkers, and critics who themselves make it a priority to see the whole world as one rather than focus on a singular national, linguistic or ethnic cultural milieu.

At a time when national perspectives are declining and global ones are on the rise, comparative literature contributes a crucial “world” perspective to the study of today’s literatures and cultures. It alone provides students with the literary tools to understand these not as isolated or self-enclosed entities, but as intrinsically involved in each other’s pasts and futures. Without the approach of comparative literature, we would all be much the poorer, intellectually, culturally, and ethically.

The study of individual languages and their literatures, as well as “area studies,” has of course an ongoing role in education at both graduate and undergraduate levels. But what I would term the “fundamentalist” view, that is, that these studies can suffice without the wider global perspectives brought by the field of comparative literature, does not. The nineteenth-century view of national-language-based disciplines, to which some would seem to want to return at the University of Toronto, was never accurate except—possibly—during the brief period of European national states, which lasted from approximately 1840 until the end of World War II. The desire to reinforce self-contained cultural-linguistic units (even when together they might become part of a larger School for Languages and Literatures) is like all fundamentalisms, an attempt to return to a past that never was. Without the critical perspective of comparative literature, as the means to understand the intellectual history of such geopolitical formations, a very important educational component of an enlightened polity goes sadly missing.

Going through with the proposal to disestablish the Center would be a huge mistake in our increasingly interrelated societies. It would be like studying the economies of France, Germany, and Great Britain without taking note of the European Economic Community and the interrelated perspectives it enables and furthers.

Canada, where I lived for many years is particularly well suited to be in the forefront of these larger comparative approaches. Its multicultural dynamism is in some respects ahead of its only rivals, the United States and Australia. The many different nationalities and ethnic groups which come to Canada do not just start interacting with each other when they get there: they have been doing it, culturally as well as politically and economically all along; and when settled in Canada, they have an invaluable opportunity to learn about each others’ heritages and about the historical connections among such heritages. Interdisciplinary fields of study like comparative literature offer a unique way to teach a history of inter-relatedness that is too valuable to twenty-first century citizenship to ignore, or to jeopardize by sending the message that it is not currently valued by the University. The ACLA has recognized Canada’s pre-eminence in global multiculturalism by scheduling its next annual meeting for Vancouver.

In Spring 2010, I was invited by Prof. Neil Kortenaar to give the Northrop Frye Lecture at the University of Toronto. I was honored by the invitation, and accepting it gave me an opportunity to interact with the Center’s students and faculty. From what I can see, the Center is thriving; its faculty is distinguished, and its students are motivated. As the premiere institution in Canada, and as the leader among Commonwealth universities, Toronto cannot afford to send the message that the Center for Comparative Literature is slated for disestablishment. The disastrous repercussions of such a decision would be felt across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, not to mention Australia, the other Commonwealth powerhouse in education.

I urge you to reconsider the proposal to close this Center, and invite you to visit the website of the ACLA, http://www.acla.org and its upcoming conference that will take place in Vancouver next year: http://www.acla.org/acla2011/

We in the discipline, and many outside it, would be most grateful to the University of Toronto for the support of the interdisciplinary pursuit of excellence in the humanities, and for the Center that should remain its guiding beacon.

Most sincerely yours,




Françoise Lionnet
Professor, French & Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature
Vice-President, American Comparative Literature Association
Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France)
Co-Director, with Prof. Shu-mei Shih, UCLA Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows Program
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/mellon/

Jill Ross, University of Toronto

President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 2006
King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 1A1

Dear President Naylor,

As the only faculty member with a majority appointment in the Centre for Comparative Literature, I must express to you the sense of shock and dismay at the potential loss of my academic and intellectual home here at the University. The Centre has provided myself, and all my colleagues, with the space to teach a broad range of subjects, across languages, disciplines and periods. The classroom experience at the Centre for Comparative Literature is truly a meeting of minds. As a medievalist working in Spanish, Catalan, Latin and Hebrew literatures, my classes at the Centre have been an open forum where Comparative Literature students trained in critical theory, and medievalists grounded in the culture, history and society of the European Middle Ages can come together with those conversant with modern Latin American or medieval Japanese literatures to challenge each other’s epistemological and theoretical frameworks and to profit from the more specialized knowledge each student brings from his or her respective departments. Such a dynamic and engaging classroom experiences are at the core of the Centre’s mission – the dialogic exploration of how languages, cultures, geographies and philosophies cross-fertilize each other.

The closing of the Centre would not only constitute the loss of unique and exciting classroom experiences for students, but would also have a negative impact on fostering the kind of innovative research by faculty nourished by such pedagogical practice. The Centre’s reputation has been built upon and sustained by the synergy between its faculty and students. The many wonderful scholars produced by the Centre, now teaching all over Canada and around the world, are a testament to the Centre’s commitment to teaching and research.

I would urge you to reconsider the recommendation to ‘distestablish’ the Centre. The loss of the Centre would not only be a blow to the standing of the University of Toronto as a hub of great research, but also to the university’s commitment to forward-looking, global, multidisciplinary education in the Humanities.



Yours sincerely



Jill Ross



Associate Professor
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto

Victor Li, University of Toronto

Dear President Naylor,

I am writing to inform you of my disbelief and dismay on hearing that the Faculty of Arts and Science is proposing to dismantle what is acknowledged, nationally and internationally, as one of the crown jewels of the humanities at the University of Toronto--the Centre for Comparative Literature.

I am also completely amazed and dumbfounded by the logic offered in support of this disappointing proposal. It has been suggested that the Centre's very success in promulgating the study of literary theory and comparative studies is also the primary pedagogical reason for its disestablishment. It appears as though success is being rewarded with demotion and marginalization. As any knowledgeable scholar in the field will attest, comparative literature has not become redundant because literary theory and the comparative approach have been absorbed by other disciplines in the humanities. In fact, as the abundance of published books and lively debates in cutting-edge humanities journals clearly indicate, comparative literature remains a highly important and relevant area of academic enquiry in this age of globalization and cultural diversity.

As a recently appointed member of the Centre, I am proud to be associated with the important work carried out by faculty and students and with the new and exciting directions mapped out by the Centre's new director, Professor Neil ten Kortenaar--directions that will position the Centre at the heart of the most significant enterprise in the humanities today, namely, the study of comparativity itself in a world that can no longer afford to be "centric" in any way, "Euro-" or otherwise.

It would indeed be a great pity and an even greater wasted opportunity should the Centre, its illustrious history, and its exciting future be discarded for the short-sighted budgetary savings envisaged by the Strategic Planning Committee. The University may save about a million dollars in the short run, but it stands to lose what is irreplaceable and priceless. I urge you in the name of academic integrity and progress to reconsider this ill-conceived proposal to dismantle the University of Toronto's Centre for Comparative Literature.

Yours sincerely,

Victor Li
Co-editor, The University of Toronto Quarterly
Associate Professor
Department of English and Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto

David Damrosch, Harvard

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

President David Naylor

Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler,

I am writing to express my deep concern and distress over the proposed closure of the University’s distinguished and vibrant Centre for Comparative Literature. Even amid the present financial pressures that the University is no doubt facing, it is an extraordinarily draconian decision to close the discipline's leading program in the country, long established indeed as one of the leading programs in the world in the years following its founding by Northrop Frye four decades ago. I saw the Centre's vitality at first hand this past February as Northrop Frye Visiting Professor; I was strongly impressed by the graduate students for whom I gave a seminar, and found that my public lecture attracted (as is typical for Comparative Literature) a large and lively audience from a wide range of fields, a good indication of the discipline's institutional value even beyond its own walls.

I understand that the plan would be to disestablish Comparative Literature as a degree-granting program, in connection with a consolidation of most literature programs into a single unit. Even if it should prove necessary to effect a consolidation of various national literature programs, this would be all the more reason to preserve as full as possible an identity and institutional role for Comparative Literature. As many universities have found, Comparative Literature serves as a crucial meeting-ground and opportunity for cross-fertilization for students and faculty who work primarily in a national literature. Both intellectually and in terms of institutional health, it is enormously valuable if consolidated literature departments include programs that cut across national and linguistic divisions, countering the danger that the consolidated program will be an uncomfortable yoking together of disconnected specialists, at some savings in costs for support staff but at considerable intellectual and programmatic cost.

At my own university, for instance, even amid our currently severe financial constraints, Comparative Literature has been growing, with faculty from all the national literature departments actively involved in our programs. In my graduate proseminar, I typically have fifteen or sixteen graduate students, even though our own program only admits six per year; the others come from six or seven other departments, not only of literature but in a range of other disciplines. This kind of interconnectivity is particularly true with programs, such as Toronto's, with a strong history of interdisciplinary work.

As with individual departments, so at the national level: the membership of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) has grown steadily throughout the past dozen years, and our annual meeting has seen a tenfold increase in papers delivered, averaging two thousand per year in the past two years. Our participants have come from all around the US and Canada, and from nearly fifty other countries as well, in a reflection of the discipline's expanding role as a central venue for thinking about cultural processes and interactions in a globalizing world. Speaking as a past president of the ACLA, I feel a sharpened sense of concern at the  proposed disestablishment at Toronto when our Association is planning its next annual meeting in Vancouver (our second time in Canada in recent years), where we'll be hosted by the rapidly growing new program in World Literature at Simon Fraser University, founded just a few years ago by a group of faculty led by Paulo Horta, a Toronto graduate.

In Canada as in many countries, our discipline is thriving when programs embrace the possibilities offered in today's intellectual landscape. Altogether, this seems a particularly unfortunate time to consider taking apart Canada's leading program in this vital discipline. This is just the time when Comparative Literature can play an increased and most productive role at Toronto, as it has been doing nationally and internationally. I urge you to reconsider this decision, and to protect and enhance the role of Comparative Literature at the University. Please let me know if I could be of any assistance in thinking freshly about the best ways to move forward with the configuration of literary and cultural studies in this challenging but also promising time.

Sincerely yours,

David Damrosch
Professor and Chair,
Department of Comparative Literature
Harvard University
Dana Palmer House 201
16 Quincy St.
Cambridge MA 02138

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

John Bell, University of Western Ontario

Dear Professor Naylor:
It was with the greatest dismay that I learned recently of the University of Toronto’s proposal to close its Centre for Comparative Literature. Comparative Literature has a particularly important role to play in today’s multicultural world, and the Toronto Centre, with its innovative curriculum, dedicated faculty, and corps of highly motivated students, is a world-renowned institution in the field. The closure of the Centre —the very suggestion of which furnishes yet another instance of the present unfortunate tendency of university administrators to devalue the study of Arts and Humanities —would, if carried out, have a devastating impact on literary and multicultural studies in Canada. I urge that this disastrous proposal be rejected.
Yours sincerely,
John L. Bell, FRSC
Professor of Philosophy


Professor John L. Bell, FRSC
Department of Philosophy
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6A 3K7
Canada

David Goldfarb, Polish Cultural Institute

Dear President Naylor, Provost Misak, and Dean Gertler,

I am very disappointed to learn of plans to disestablish the Centre for Comparative Literature and to consolidate the smaller language and literature departments into a single school.

When I was getting my M.A. in Slavic at Toronto in 1990-91, Comparative Literature was a refuge for those of us who were interested in theory and serious interdisciplinary and comparative work that didn't quite fit under the rubric of Slavic Studies. I completed my doctorate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, because that was a particularly vibrant department at that time and as a U.S. citizen it was more difficult for me to fund a Ph.D. in the humanities in Canada (I funded my M.A. with a scholarship from the Harry S. Truman Foundation), but had I stayed at Toronto, it would have been in Comparative Literature, and I would not have regarded a doctoral program in Comparative Studies in Slavic Literature as a serious alternative.

In merging departments as proposed, universities imagine administrative efficiencies that make no disciplinary sense, even as administration seems to be ever expanding at higher levels.

The Slavic Department is already an amalgam of languages with a range of historical and cultural traditions, some of which are not even Slavic, and as a specialist in Polish literature, I am concerned that Slavic, Baltic, and non-Slavic East European languages that are already overshadowed by Russian in virtually all North American Slavic departments will be further marginalized and lost in a larger program, just as these countries are becoming more integrated into Europe and are gaining in prominence on the international stage as political, economic, and cultural forces.

Comparative Literature needs strong independent national language departments as a resource for students who require total competency in more than one literature, and they need Comparative Literature to be strong and independent as a department to insure the integrity of the core of the discipline of Comparative Literature, which is comprised of theory, criticism, and the history thereof without bias toward the theoretical traditions of any particular national literature. I have been in the field of Comparative Literature now for nearly twenty years, first as a graduate student, then as a lecturer at Queens College (CUNY), Hunter College (CUNY), an Instructor at New York University, and as an Assistant Professor in the Slavic and Comparative Literature Departments at Barnard College, Columbia University and I directed the Doctoral Program in Polish Literature at Columbia University, and it has been my experience that Comparative Literature attracts the brightest and most ambitious students in the Humanities, because it has been an incubator for the most important currents in humanistic discourse that could not at their beginnings fit easily in existing departments. Without Comparative Literature, we would not have seen the rise of Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies (including many fields such as Francophone Studies devoted to French literature outside of France), Film Studies, and presently the emergence of Translation Studies as a serious academic discipline.

Disestablishing the Centre for Comparative Literature and creating an amalgamated School of Languages and Literatures would represent a step backward in every respect. The consolidation of smaller departments creates a "Department of Others," and is a movement toward their eventual liquidation in an increasingly globalized world where it is ever more important to develop greater and deeper competency in languages and cultures other than our own. The elimination of Comparative Literature as an established independent Centre would close off the most active unit of intellectual innovation in the Humanities at Toronto at a time when it is most needed in the curriculum and as a center of research.

Sincerely,


David A. Goldfarb
Literary Curator
Polish Cultural Institute
350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 4621
New York, NY 10118
--
http://www.polishculture-nyc.org/
--
http://www.davidagoldfarb.com

Neil ten Kortenaar, Letter to the Editors, Globe and Mail

Where ideas come to life
Northrop Frye lives on. His books continue to inspire readers, scholars of literature and editorial writers. To remember Mr. Frye’s legacy, as the editorial Fearful Anatomy (July 17) does, is one way to honour it.

Another way is to maintain a space where ideas that measure themselves against the world and that seek to be as large as literature, culture and the imagination itself can flourish. Frye himself established such a space at the University of Toronto, and the work of the many graduates from the Centre for Comparative Literature testifies to the value of a space between languages and disciplines, where one can see what they share and appreciate their diversity.

U of T is the premier place for studying comparative literature in Canada, and its degree programs in comparative literature are now at risk. That is the important news item here.

Neil ten Kortenaar, director, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Letters to the Editor

Barbara Foley, Rutgers University

Dear President Naylor:

It has come to my attention that the University of Toronto is seriously considering eliminating its Centre for Comparative Literature. I am in an English department; but I have been aware for many years that Comparative Literature is crucial to the life of the humanities. Not only has Comparative Literature, as its name indicates, enabled scholars to transcend the provincialism inevitably associated with single-language literary study. In addition, CL has been the home of critical theory for some three decades now: and critical theory is at the heart of most of the major advances, over the past three decades, in both literary and more broadly cultural study.

In June 2010, at the annual meeting of the Marxist Literary Group, I recently met--or reencountered--a number of the members of the U of T's Comparative Literature program: Eric Cazdyn, Ryan Culpepper, Rebecca Cornay. At different stages in their careers, all are outstanding scholars. Your university is well served by having them on its campus. I urge you to take whatever steps you can to preserve--indeed, build--the department to which they give honor.

Very truly yours,


Barbara Foley
Professor II
English and American Studies
Rutgers University-Newark Campus