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AS A scholar of literature, I have often taught my students to pay special attention to how, in a successful work of art, a writer's or poet's personal experience transcends the merely autobiographical and acquires a universal tonality. In the case of my department, which went through the agonies of threatened elimination, I actually would have wished that the experience had remained unique, personal, singular. Unfortunately, however, this experience has become increasingly universal, as more and more departments of languages and literatures, and humanities in general, have found themselves facing or anticipating the same threat.
My department has also been one of the rare relative success stories in this growing business of liquidations and eliminations. I write, therefore—on where we were, where we are, and where we want to be in the future—in the hope that something useful to other departments that find themselves in a similar situation can be gleaned from our individual struggle and our survival.
It all happened three years ago. First we were informed that some departments might be eliminated as a cost-saving measure but that more departments than needed for elimination would be put on the list to make the process somehow “fairer.” The rest was done with a speed amazing for a university in which everything takes a long time to get accomplished. We were informed on 29 November 1995 that we were on the chopping block. The next day a public meeting was held at which the dean of arts and sciences officially announced the list of programs considered for elimination—Slavic, applied math, school of communication, speech communications, environmental studies, and two smaller arts programs. It all happened just days before classes and exams were to be over, so that the resulting outcry could be hushed by a long winter vacation.
At the time of the proposed elimination, we were a relatively thriving undergraduate and graduate program, with more than sixty majors and thirty graduate students. While trends around the country were beginning to show drops in Russian enrollments, our enrollments were steady and even on the increase. By now, attempts at eliminating Russian and Slavic departments are becoming almost routine, but back then we were the first major department in the country to experience a threat of elimination, and we were truly stunned and quite unprepared.
As could be expected, the meeting at which proposed cuts were announced was a highly emotional one for faculty members, Staff, and students whose departments were slated for elimination. One after another, people from the seven all-but-doomed programs came to the microphone to ask the dean, the provost, and the president why their programs had been chosen. No reasons were given, however, either then or later. Instead, the dean of arts and sciences assured everyone that before being eliminated, the programs would be reviewed by peer committees on three vaguely defined criteria—the quality of the department, its centrality to the mission of the university, its relationship to other departments. As it turned out later, however, there was no current statement of the mission of the university, so the whole issue of one's centrality or uncentrality was impossible to determine. To me, having come from the former Soviet Union, the whole situation of presumed guilt, no concrete charges, and plenty of doublespeak was uncannily familiar.
We did not know then what we know now—namely, that we may have actually been lucky to be chosen as academe's first major victims in Slavic and Russian. We appealed for letters of support, and they came in huge numbers from all over the country and even from around the world. The still relatively new e-mail made this outpouring of letters even more threatening to our top administrators, because it was clogging their e-mail accounts. The president of the university went on record as saying he was impressed by the show of support for us from other Russian and Slavic departments around the country, former students, businesses, and organizations. He did not, however, take us off the list.
We also appealed to the legislature, pointing out to the lawmakers that we were the only PhD-granting Slavic and Russian program not just in the state of Washington but north of Berkeley and west of Wisconsin. One member of the state assembly, a former student of ours, introduced a bill on our behalf, and several of us, representatives of the faculty, staff, and students, testified for the Higher Education Committee. We kept mentioning the Pacific Rim and the importance, to the state, of trade with Russia in general and Siberia in particular. As the only program of its kind in the state of Washington, we came close to being granted legislative immunity from ever being eliminated. The university obviously fought us tooth and nail, and in the end it prevailed.
We then looked into the possibility of lawsuits. Our graduate students were collecting donations to sue the university and graduate school for committing breach of contract by devaluing their degrees and making it hard for them to compete successfully in the job market. Since all the nontenured positions slated for disappearance in our department were held by women (two lecturers, two assistant professors, and two staff members—women, in general, held 89% of all positions that were to be cut), we kept darkly hinting at a lawsuit on the basis of gender discrimination. The sad truth was, of course, that neither we nor our students could afford lawyers, while the university administrators had theirs on staff.
All this activity generated much-welcomed press coverage. In fact, we shamelessly and somewhat desperately courted the press—a week after the fateful announcement, the Slavic department held a press conference that resulted in spotty TV and print coverage, some of it, as always, so inaccurate that it almost hurt us more than it helped us. As the conflict dragged on, however, the press became more attuned to what was going on and even started, for the most part, to spell our difficult names more or less correctly. We also became more savvy and helped as much as we could by providing reporters with press releases, letters to the editor, and background information. For me, as the official coordinator of all these efforts, it became pretty much another full-time job. It was that year, also, that I got hopelessly addicted to e-mail, while running a listserv forum about the changing fate of the UW Slavic Department for several hundred subscribers. Having the forum, with its daily manifestation of support from all over the country and the world, was highly therapeutic to everyone in the department and probably went a long way in keeping us all relatively, but only relatively, sane. It also kept us away from one another's throats—from the kind of conflict that situations like ours unfortunately often bring about.
In the meantime, we were being reviewed, and, after several long months, our continued existence was recommended by “the committee of our peers.” We were judged to be central, solid, and of importance to other departments. In April 1996, however, the dean—choosing to ignore the recommendations of the committee he himself had set up—officially announced our impending doom. Again, he gave no concrete reasons either for his decision or for his rejection of the committee's findings. We then appealed to yet another committee, which was set up to advise the president in reaching the final decision. That committee strongly recommended that the dean's ruling be overturned and that the department, instead, be further strengthened because of its importance to the university and the region and because of the damage that had already been done to it by the elimination process. The faculty senate got into the act—not soon enough, as far as we were concerned—and held a hearing to discuss the reports of the appeals committee for all the programs involved, and almost every committee was highly critical of the dean's actions.
Then, to the surprise of everyone—most of all, probably, the dean—the president did, indeed, overrule the dean's decision, and the department was saved. We joked that it was all somehow reminiscent of Dostoevsky's last-minute reprieve from the tsar after the writer had already been led to the place of his execution. In retrospect, we were probably very lucky once again, this time because the president was retiring that summer and the decision to Save us was one of the last ones he had to make. A remaining president would have probably been less ready to overturn the ruling of the dean, because they would have had to continue working together. We learned of his action in late June, when many of us, faculty members and students alike, were no longer in Seattle, having left for the summer. I personally heard of the outcome when I called the department from Kennedy Airport, on my way to a conference in Europe.
As a result of the president's reprieve, we are still alive and reasonably well two years later. We have paid a steep price, though. Half of the country, even people within our own field, assume we have been killed off. We cannot compete for the best students as well as we could before the threatened elimination, because potential students, understandably, do not believe that a department that was once on the chopping block will not end up there again.
We also still have to deal with the very same dean whose efforts to eliminate us were thwarted by the president and whose love for the department has, probably, not been stimulated by the events. It is still an uphill battle in which we have to be constantly vigilant. The year following the attempted elimination, for example, we had to deal with yet another unpleasant surprise. It was time for our tenth-year review and, as the committee was being set up for us by the dean's office and the graduate school, we learned that one of the outside evaluators would be a dean from Ohio State who professionally had nothing whatsoever to do with Slavic studies. We soon also discovered that he happened to be the very same dean who, just a month before, had recommended that his own Slavic department be eliminated. We protested, the new university president apparently intervened, and the OSU dean was replaced by a Slavist from Harvard.
And yet was ours, despite the trauma, a success story? In many ways it was. We have, after all, retained all our programs and, so far, all our faculty members. We also still have a sizable body of good graduate students, and our undergraduate enrollments are picking up again as students are discovering that we are, in fact, still around and eager to teach them. I would therefore like to share with you what many of us believe was most effective in our struggle to stay alive (and, which, incidentally, appears to have worked fairly well at Ohio State the following year, when, as I mentioned earlier, that department found itself under the same threat).
The go-slow, let's negotiate-diplomatically approach, in my opinion, does not work. If one goes ballistic, one will inevitably be accused of acting hysterically, yet the balance of powers is so uneven that diplomacy is often out of the question. Universities' hatred of bad publicity is one leverage that a threatened program can use if it succeeds in convincing the media that it is worth keeping. Having easily digestible information ready, in the shape of “bullet lists” of the department's accomplishments (including work in the community and placement of students), would be advisable for any department that feels vulnerable right now. Involving businesses in the area that have trade relationships with the countries of a target language is also effective; even though we are academic communities, it is often somehow easier to persuade one's administration of the department's usefulness through the support of business than it is through the support of scholars. Going to the legislature almost worked for us and apparently was quite successful at Ohio State. George Kalbouss, my counterpart at Ohio State, whom I asked for possible pointers from his experience that I could share with you, suggests that the mailing list of the departmental newsletter should definitely include state legislators who are influential in issues related to education.
Letters from concerned academics and students all over the country and the world, the more the merrier, are also very important, even though administrators are probably getting immune to such mail. As I said earlier, we were lucky in this respect to have been the first victims, and the outpouring of letters was strong. Since then, more and more departments have been finding themselves in the same situation and people on the outside are probably getting tired of writing letters and are also disheartened. Class-action lawsuits present a neat threat but are often too expensive and hard to pursue. However, if the department feels wronged on the procedural matters, most universities can accommodate a class-action-style adjudication grievance filed with institutions of faculty governance, like a faculty senate, for example. Local chapters of the AAUP can also—and should, as far as I am concerned—play an active role if faculty members' rights are violated as a result of elimination procedures. Some local chapters, if they are strong, may even have legal funds they can share if they believe in a cause.
But the strongest weapon—as in medicine—is probably not aggressive therapies after the invasion of the disease but early prevention. What we are doing now—revamping all our courses to attract more students—we should have done years earlier. The trends and signs of the impending danger to the field in general had all been there, and we should have anticipated the threat by staying ahead of the curve rather than behind it. Changing the curriculum every ten years or so is probably a good idea, to keep it updated and in tune with the changing times, and it is obviously much more relaxing and rewarding to do so at the department's own initiative than under the gun.
As a graduate adviser, I have spent the last year chairing both the graduate affairs and the curriculum committees, which were charged with revising our degree programs and our curricula. By now we have presented our blueprints for changes both to college councils and to graduate councils, and they appeared to like them. I know that other universities, like Ohio State, for example, have been undergoing a similar transformation. In this last part of my article, I would like to describe the kinds of changes we are putting into place, since some of our steps may be helpful to departments of language and literature outside Slavic as well.
What we are doing now—and, in my opinion, should have done a long time ago—is to simplify our degree programs and to develop more attractive courses for undergraduates, in an effort to capitalize on the boom in the undergraduate population that all universities are experiencing at the moment. There exists a healthy compromise, I believe, between one's scholarly integrity and popular demand. The year after the Slavic department was threatened with elimination, Ohio State introduced a course on vampires in Slavic culture, and enrollment for the course topped two hundred. As we all know, topics in courses on literature and culture are not ends in themselves but vehicles for a meaningful discussion of a given literary tradition or a given culture, and the level of this discussion does not have to go down if the topics have a broader appeal. We noticed in our experience of the past two years—and I hear it from colleagues on other campuses as well—that folklore in general is becoming a big draw, at least in Slavic departments; and this is a somewhat unexpected and much-welcomed boon for medievalists, who often found themselves underappreciated in years past.
It is true that interest in Russian seems to be waning at the moment, yet interest in other languages and cultures of eastern Europe is noticeably on the rise. Slavic departments can easily take advantage of this situation, since we already teach several Slavic languages, but even “pure” Russian departments can probably find some ways to capitalize on this trend.
As I am sure has been the case in many departments, our catalog offerings used to be like a menu in restaurants of the former Soviet Union—many items listed but very few available. We went through and discarded two-thirds of the old courses. We also produced ten or so new permanent umbrella-like courses, both for graduates and for undergraduates, where different topics can be taught each year. The courses planned for next year include Russia, Eastern Europe, and the West: Comparative Pragmatics and Discourse; The Other Europe: Contemporary East European Fiction; and Literary, Cultural, and Film Studies of the Post-Soviet Era.
We also did a major overhaul of our graduate program, which no longer offers two tracks, for the MA and the PhD, as has been the tradition. Instead, we now offer one MA and one PhD, both in Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures. The requirements for the MA include two linguistics courses, two Russian literature and culture course, one course on Eastern European literature and culture, a Slavic language pedagogy course, fifth-year Russian, at least one year of a second Slavic language, and a general proseminar on how to use Slavic resources.
Given the reality of the market these days, we intend to cut down on our PhD program and accept, or encourage to continue, only very strong candidates. Since we cannot be sure these days whether all our vacancies will be filled in the future or what kinds of specialists we may want to attract for our changing curricular needs, admission to the PhD program will depend on the faculty's judgment that teaching and library resources are sufficient for the proposed course of study. Our PhD program is now fashioned as a flexible system of students working closely with their committees in designing their course work in accordance with their particular research interests, fields, and needs. It is still too early to see what effect this new system will have on our enrollments, but we feel that by giving most of our attention to the undergraduate program and streamlining our graduate programs, we can better control both our enrollments and our resources.
One other point may prove helpful. During our battles with the university administration, we were supported by many alumni and their spouses or friends. This Support has since been translated into a strong group within the UW Alumni Association, which calls itself Alumni and Friends of the UW Slavic Department. Its members raise money for our outreach functions, aid us with activities in the department, and help keep vital links between us and the communities outside the university. Fund-raising in general has become a much more visible part of our existence than it was before the threatened elimination. We have established several outreach funds for doing community service, like retreats for high school students in the state of Washington who are taking Russian, and the Russian Olympiads.
To finish this article on an upbeat note, I think most of the changes we have instituted and the new activities we have engaged in since our near-death experience three years ago are useful and, in some ways, even essential, given the situation we find ourselves in. The universities are changing, whether we like it or not (most of us, for good reasons, do not). The trick, I believe, is to anticipate these changes and to deal with them in a way that the departments, rather than the university administrations, see fit. We were lucky to have survived and then to be able to implement the changes still mostly on our terms. Other programs may not have that luxury once they are put on the chopping block. Therefore, as I mentioned earlier, the best medicine against what one of my favorite writers, Vladimir Nabokov, would call “invitation to a beheading” may be to stay ahead of the curve or, to use the same author's formulation, ahead of the “bend sinister,” rather than to find ourselves irrevocably behind it.
The author is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington. This essay is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 26–28 June 1997, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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