The Ongoing Struggle for Comparative Literature
AN UPDATE
December 22, 2006
On the eve of the winter solstice, the coming holidays, and the turn of the western calendar year, we wanted to let you know that the College of Letters & Science seems to be stepping back from its attempt of late last spring to “dissolve” the Department of Comparative Literature. This is good news for now.
But we are still confronted by the stark fact that Dean Sandefur unabashedly refuses to invest any funds in the department. We thank you each and all for your expressions of support and concern. You have had a positive impact on the administration's misguided efforts to dissolve the department. And your support has been a heartening experience for us in this dark time in the College of Letters & Science.
We have made it clear to everyone concerned that we are committed to the discipline of comparative literature as embodied in our department for nearly 100 years. In this globalized historical moment, we are convinced that our discipline is more important than ever as a critical mode of thought, method of analysis, and certainly as a mode of cross-cultural understanding. We urge you to read the compelling letter to the administration from the Department's graduate students.
We wish to stress again that Dean Sandefur persists in his refusal to invest in the Department. After more than six years of cynical neglect by the College, we are dangerously understaffed. We have been told to make things work with what resources we can muster. So we face the new year with a renewed vision of how important the discipline and the department are to the campus and the community and with a tremendous challenge to our success.
Nonetheless, we will attempt to formalize what has been an informal vision and practice of comparative literature in the department, on campus, and in the community. This will include curricular changes to reflect a new and more precise title: the Department of Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies – the latter category which will formalize and deepen our relations with the “human sciences.” We will continue to try to train and award B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in the department. And we will work to develop and sustain the intellectual and pedagogic vision which we have articulated to the campus.
But the risk of “fiduciary asphyxiation” – to borrow a phrase from an assessment of the national condition of the humanities in higher education – is high. We pledge to spend this year and next (that is, through the end of the 2007 - 08 academic year) to make this configuration a workable reality in the hope that we will be able to secure some real and material administrative support. If it proves impossible because of our dangerous lack of faculty, we will have done our best. Though dedicated, we are few. And we cannot continue over the longer term without support from the campus.
U.W. Madison has issued a number of press releases this month proclaiming its support for the humanities. We urge you to urge them to include the Department of Comparative Literature in their support.
Again and always, our thanks to you all; we will continue to rely on your support and hope that together we will prevail in this important endeavor.
Our best wishes for the new year. May it bring better times.
Mary Layoun and Próspero Saíz
The Status of the Struggle for the Department of Comparative Literature - Early fall, 2006
October 4, 2006
Indicative of a disturbing national trend in higher education that has encroached on the humanities in general and on Comparative Literature and similar departments in particular, the effort by the College of Letters & Science to end a nearly century old institutional and intellectual tradition of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin Madison is troubling. Yet it is not intellectual tradition alone that is the issue. For, in a historical moment of proliferation of diverse sorts on a global scale, critical comparative analysis based on poly-lingual literary and cultural fluency is more crucial than ever.
We believe that the administration's effort to close the Department of Comparative Literature is an important campus and community issue. And, as we've already discussed with some of you, we intend to make it the subject of the broadest possible public debate. To further that debate and in the interests of transparency, we post below in chronological order the exchanges between the department and the College of Letters & Science.
We also include a letter of explanation sent to our alumni as well as a letter emailed to our approximately 200 hundred faculty colleagues in small humanities departments in the College. That letter was accompanied by data and graphs compiled from the campus database; those materials are also posted here. A shorter version of the letter to faculty colleagues, without the statistical data, was sent to over 150 national and international departments and programs of Comparative Literature.
We appreciate the many expressions of support and concern about the administration's effort to close the Department of Comparative Literature. We have forwarded those letters to the Dean. If you are learning of this sorry events for the first time and would like to voice your concern, the contact information for our administrators is available here.
View all the emails on this subject, starting from the beginning
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 to over 700 Comparative Literature Alumni
June 19, 2006
Dear friends,
Though you will only just have received our latest departmental flier accompanied by a letter from the Chair a month or two ago, we write now with less felicitous news and with apologies for troubling your mail-box twice in a few months.
But we wanted to let you know of recent disturbing developments concerning the U.W. Madison Department of Comparative Literature.
In late April, after repeated requests to keep former Professor Keith Cohen's FTE line in the department and to search for two new junior faculty with that line, the Dean of the College of Letters & Science, Gary Sandefur unexpectedly asked the Department Chair (Mary Layoun) 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 to maintain and sustain the Department. That proposal is attached here. Dean Sandefur refused our proposal and informed us that he plans to pursue closing down the department and will take that plan up with the L&S Academic Planning Council (APC) next fall.
We are dismayed about 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.
For the past five to six years, the College of Letters & Science has made no investment in Comparative Literature, instead mandating in 2002 - 03 an Ad-Hoc Review of the department. 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). This data, documenting our noteworthy performance on campus with severely limited resources, provides no rationale for the Dean's desire to shut down the Department of Comparative Literature. Nor do the accomplishments on and off campus of our students and faculty and of our alumni. To the contrary.
In the discussions and email exchanges which followed on Dean Sandefur's email, 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.
Comparative Literature today; tomorrow . . . ?
We are in the process of informing individuals, organizations, and institutions about this development and eliciting support locally, nationally, and internationally and we have already begun to receive expressions of concern and support. We write to you as part of that process B 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/
Thank you.
Mary Layoun, Professor and Outgoing Chair
Próspero Saíz, Professor and Chair-Elect