UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
DEPARTMENT OF
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
938 Van Hise Hall
1220 Linden Drive
Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1525
Telephone: 608/262-9767
Fax: 608/262-9723
Email: layoun@lss.wisc.edu
Letter emailed to over 200 faculty in small humanities departments in the College of Letters & Science
June 24, 2006
Dear colleagues,
We write to let you know of recent developments concerning the ninety year old U.W. Madison Department of Comparative Literature C developments with troubling potential implications for all small humanities departments.
In late April, after repeated requests to keep Keith Cohen's FTE line in the department and to search for two new junior faculty with that line, Dean Sandefur unexpectedly asked the Department Chair to come in to talk with him about "voluntarily closing it [the Department] down over the next year or two."
We respectfully declined and made a counterproposal to Dean Sandefur for a modest investment in the Department. That proposal is attached here.
Dean Sandefur refused our proposal in an email (5/8/06) as follows:
. . . the College of Letters and Science will not authorize any searches in Comparative Literature in the future. The reason is that the Academic Planning Council during the 2003-2004 period judged your department to be a low priority for the College and we do not have the resources to rebuild your department. My APC advised me to offer you the opportunity to voluntarily close your department. I am doing so. If you choose not to close your department, I will discuss next steps with the APC in the Fall.
We are dismayed by this attempt to close the Department. And we are alarmed that we were not informed or consulted by Dean Sandefur about such an effort at any time prior to his late April email. We are equally alarmed that we were not informed or consulted at any time by the L&S APC of this or any other academic year. So far as we = ve been able to determine, there is no written record of any deliberations on this matter. Faculty Policies and Procedures (FPP) mandates the opportunity for all affected parties to present their position and situation to the APC, as specified in FPP 5.02, "Departmental Restructuring - Guidelines & Criteria." We consider this to be direct threat to the idea of shared governance in the College of Letters & Science.
For the past five to six years, the College has made no investment in the Department of Comparative Literature, instead mandating in 2002 - 03 an Ad-Hoc Review. That review resulted in the Review Committee = s recommendations to support the Department and allow the hire of a senior and a junior faculty member. The Dean at that time (Phil Certain) refused to allow us to search. Subsequently, our requests for permission to search have been similarly refused.
And yet our pedagogic and scholarly performance on campus, even in a time of extremely limited resources, has been more than cost-effective and productive. As a partial indication of that cost-effective productivity, we compiled comparative data and generated graphs from the " Departmental Planning Profiles" database of the last ten years generated by the Office of Academic Planning and Analysis and distributed by the Office of the Provost, UW Madison (4/26/06). We attach this data documenting our noteworthy performance on campus, even with severely limited resources.
In the discussions and email exchanges which followed on Dean Sandefur's emails, Chancellor Wiley wrote the following to Mary Layoun:
My personal feeling is that departments smaller than about 10-15 faculty are administratively subcritical, unnecessarily expensive, and poorly served by the few support staff we can afford to provide for so few faculty. We would all be much better off if we could reorganize into a smaller number of larger departments.
The implications of this administrative sentiment require broad and informed critical reflection and debate.
We believe that the effort to close the Department of Comparative Literature is an important campus and community issue. And we intend to make it the subject of the broadest possible public debate. The move to attempt to close the Department of Comparative Literature represents a direct threat to the faculty and to the disciplines they have chosen to practice C disciplines carefully sanctioned by the university over a long period of time.
Comparative Literature today; tomorrow . . . ?
We are in the process of informing and eliciting the support of people locally, nationally, and internationally about this development. And we have already begun to receive expressions of concern and support from individuals, organizations, and institutions. We write to you as part of that process to let you know what is happening and to ask for your support.
We apologize for this untimely imposition on your summer. But if you share our concern about this turn of events and are willing to support us in our efforts to sustain the Department of Comparative Literature, we would appreciate hearing from you as soon as possible.
Our departmental website is currently being redesigned and by mid to late August will be re-posted to include relevant documents, statements of support, and further information on things as they develop. That web address is: http://complit.lss.wisc.edu/
We look forward to hearing from you.
Mary Layoun, Próspero Saíz,
Professor and Chair Professor and Chair -Elect