Russian departments in trouble

[David J Birnbaum]

Dear SEELANGers,

A few comments from a member of a Slavic department that emerged more or
less intact (for the moment) after being faced with the threat of serious
administrative restructuring last year:

1) The AATSEEL Vision 20/20 session this year will be devoted to ways of
dealing with administrative restructuring initiatives. This plenary
session meets from 10:45 to noon on December 29th, and will include
representatives from the University of Washington, the Ohio State
University, the University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, and the
University of Massachusetts. Please come.

Meanwhile, if your department or program is threatened:

2) Have a strategy. Decide what sort of support you would like and what
form it should take. Do you want to go public at all? High volume of
letters? Low volume from selected prestigious addresses? Addressed to you?
Or addressed to your administrators? Commending your department for its
quality? Or protesting administrative attempts to close it? Do you want to
go to the press? If so, can you present a case that won't sound like
ivory-tower whining to the general public? If so, which press? What you
say to your student paper, your university's non-student paper, your local
paper, and the Chronicle of Higher Education should differ.

3) Internal support from other sources in your college or university may
be more important than outside support. Will your area-studies graduate
programs collapse without certain Slavic department offerings? If so, ask
your social science colleagues to put that in writing. Is your department
active in inter-departmental programs in Comparative Literature, Cultural
Studies, Film Studies, Women's Studies, or anything else? If so, ask your
colleagues to speak about the importance of your department to the broader
operations of your college or university. Will the chairs of your natural
science departments defend the importance of the humanities to a quality
university? One reason Slavic departments are easy targets is that they
look small and isolated, and administrators might think (not entirely
unreasonably, given what they know) that if something has to go,
eliminating a small and isolated department or program does the least
college-wide or university-wide damage. Show them that this isn't true
because your department or program is really much bigger than it looks,
and that its elimination threatens more than just a few faculty and a
couple of degree programs.

4) If you have an ethnic Slavic population in your area, enlist their
help. The younger generation might not flock to your classes, but the
older generation may care very much about preservation of its ethnic
heritage. This is particularly important for state schools, where the
administrators are accountable in certain respects to the local
government, which can't afford not to listen to voters.

5) If you need letters from outside, supply enough information so that
your letter writers can do some good. The two recent appeals from British
universities told us _nothing_ about their programs, their faculty, what
their graduates have gone on to do, the roles of those departments in
their universities, or anything else that would let me write a letter that
I would take seriously, let alone one that might persuade an administrator
that the threatened departments are viewed from outside as worth saving
_for specific reasons_. Administrators have told me that they discredit
outside evaluations by people in the field because we tend to circle the
wagons automatically whenever one of us is threatened. A generic letter
with no specific details about the department or program under threat will
reinforce this (not entirely unfair) administrative assumption. Don't ask
people to write ignorant letters; if you want their help, help them write
effectively.

6) If you reject specific administrative proposals, rebut them explicitly.
Don't say "we're small but of high quality" without having specific
arguments to support your assertions of quality. A dean once told me that
the university is the only place where 100% of the people think they're
above average. You have the facts and they don't; use them.

7) I'd be surprised if there were a department or program that couldn't
genuinely benefit from some restructuring. A lot of administrators push a
reallocation model, where the goal is not so much to cut costs as to take
support away from weak areas and reassign it to build on strong ones.
Their attempts to cut entire Slavic departments and programs may be
motivated by a perception that these entire departments and programs are
weak. Change the granularity by identifying the parts of your department
or program that _are_ weak, that you don't do well, or that you don't
consider very important in comparison to others. Brag about the quality of
what you genuinely do well, instead of arguing that _all_ of your
activities are first-rate (unless you can document that they are). Propose
an internal reallocation; even if you don't get to keep the reallocation,
you'll have provided the administration with a way to save some money
without taking down your entire department or program. Expect to lose
something; your goal is to save what's most important.

8) Decide whether your administration is evil, whether they are
well-intentioned but ignorant of what a healthy Slavic program should look
like, or whether they are right and your department or program really
isn't very good.  Tailor your responses accordingly. Administrators who
are trying to do the right thing but don't know how may be willing to work
toward compromises with departments that are willing to compromise.

9) Defending a department or program takes a trememdous amount of time.
Mobilize everyone, especially faculty and graduate students. If you are
deeply involved, don't expect to prepare more than perfunctorily for your
classes and don't expect to get any research done. At some point the
crisis will pass and life will go back to normal, at least for a while. If
it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

10) The preceding guidelines are general and every case is different.
Don't mechanically apply what seems to have worked at one institution to
another. There are, alas, no guarantees; a lot of cases do end in
compromise, but you could do everything right and still lose it all.

More details at Vision 20/20 in Toronto.

--David (Chair, Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of
Pittsburgh)
________________________________________________________________________

Professor David J. Birnbaum     email: djbpitt+ at pitt.edu
Department of Slavic Languages  url:   http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/
1417 Cathedral of Learning      voice: 1-412-624-5712
University of Pittsburgh        fax:   1-412-624-9714
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA