Department name

[Jouko Lindstedt]

On Fri, 20 Oct 1995, George Fowler wrote:

> Jouko Lindstedt writes:
> >The alternative we have been considering is
> >    Department of Slavonic and Baltic Studies
> >    Otdelenie slavistiki i baltistiki
> The new name sounds good enough, but better to my ear in English than in
> Russian. Why is this an "otdelenie" instead of a "kafedra"? Does it
> correspond to the former in a Russian university? Wouldn't that be an
> awfully large department?

Thanks to everybody who answered, mainly by private e-mail. (But I'd still
like to get some answers from Europe, too.) As for George's question, we
are an "Otdelenie" because there have traditionally been _two_ "chairs" or
kafedry, Russian Language and Literature (since 1946, but in some sense
since 1830) and Slavonic Philology (since 1900). That is to say, there is
no full professor that would be scholary responsible for the whole area,
though administratively we of course have a Department Head.

We are not "awfully large", but we have more than 500 students (majors
and minors), and 300 of them are Russian majors.

Jouko Lindstedt
Department of Slavonic Languages, University of Helsinki
e-mail: Jouko.Lindstedt at Helsinki.Fi or jslindst at cc.helsinki.fi
http://www.helsinki.fi/~jslindst/