The Mark 2010

Cuts to U of T humanities departments suggest these areas of study are most disposable, but they're more important now than ever.

When the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto announced its plans to “disestablish” the Centre for Comparative Literature – founded in 1969 by Northrop Frye – the international humanities community, as well as the local, went into a state of shock.

With good reason. The centre was in sad, if good, company: also closed were the interdisciplinary Department of East Asian Studies, the Centre for Ethics, the Centre for International Studies, and the Centre for Diasporic and Translational Studies. Faculty members, almost all cross-appointed to traditional departments, were to be sent “home.”

In the case of Comparative Literature – the program in which I have taught for 20 years – students would no longer be admitted, offered courses, or granted degrees. In other words, the program would have no budget or faculty, but along with the few faculty members in East Asian Studies who teach language and literature, it would be somehow folded into a new School of Languages and Literatures, along with the (former) departments of Slavic Studies, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The larger departments of English, French, and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations would expressly not be part of the school.

The dean has candidly admitted that the review done of the entire faculty (which, remember, is one of both arts and science) was undertaken for financial reasons and that cuts had to be made somewhere. This is, sadly, a familiar dilemma in universities today. However, what has disturbed the humanists here – and elsewhere, if the many letters of protest and the many signatures on the online petition can be believed – is the perception that we are the ones who are deemed most disposable.

The reason given for one of these cuts – that Comparative Literature has been so successful that every department now does that same theoretical and comparative work, and thus the centre is no longer needed – echoes, or perhaps parodies, Yale comparatist Haun Saussy’s famous lament about the institutional weakness and yet the great intellectual strength of comparative studies in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, the 2004 report of the American Comparative Literature Association. But the negative implications of one of Saussy’s sobering conclusions are worth considering: “We may all be comparatists now – and for good reason – but only with a low common denominator.” In intellectual terms, this is hardly something to be proud of supporting.

These are financially difficult times, to be sure, but if ever there was a time to support, not stifle, serious comparative work in intercultural and interdisciplinary areas, it is today: our globalized, multicultural, electronic world needs the kind of serious critical scrutiny and historical contextualizing made possible by the humanities in general and interdisciplinary thinking in particular. The University of Toronto is situated in one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world and within an officially multicultural nation: in cross-cultural areas of study, it should be a leader, not an executioner.