support SFSU Russian

[Benjamin Rifkin]

Dear Colleagues:

Our colleagues at SFSU are appealing for letters in support of their
program.  I have already written the President of SFSU and the
President of the California State System in my capacity as President of
AATSEEL.  The Executive Director of AATSEEL, Kathleen Dillon, attended
a meeting on the SFSU campus to represent the voice of the field.

I am appending a letter from our colleagues at SFSU in which the
explain the context of their appeal.  If you can write a letter of
support, they (and AATSEEL) will be very appreciative.

Sincerely,

Ben Rifkin
Professor of Slavic Languages, UW-Madison
1432 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706 USA
Voice (608) 262-1623; Fax (608) 265-2814
http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/slavic

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Dear Colleagues:

We are appealing to you for support. At the end of the Spring semester,
in
April 2004 SF State announced its plans to close twelve programs due to
budget cuts, including its Russian major and graduate programs.  This is
the only M. A. in the California State University System and the only
B. A.
program in Northern California (the only other B. A. program is at San
Diego State--more than 500 miles away). This is a great blow to Russian
studies in the San Francisco Bay Area where about 10% of the population
speaks Russian. Despite this, Russian is the only language program (out
of
seven in the Department of Foreign Languages) being slated for closure.
The administration considers Russian an "esoteric" language and
consequently dispensable.

Thanks to the intervention of the local Russian speaking communities,
the
Administration had to admit that Russian language cannot be that easily
dismissed and restored the language classes. We now appeal to the
Academic Community to help explain to the Administration that closing
the
degree programs of one of the major languages in the world is a great
loss
both in academic and practical terms. It is particularly unthinkable in
a
university located in San Francisco, a cosmopolitan city at the very
center
of the Pacific Rim.

Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, ". . .all is like an ocean,
all
flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other
end of
the world."   The community of those who believe in the value of Russian
studies is interconnected within the San Francisco Bay Area and extends
across this country, which is why we are addressing this request to you.
The experience of other similarly endangered programs has taught us that
the opinion of the academic community can influence administrative
decisions.

Please help us to save our program.  Please write a letter to Dr.
Corrigan,
president of San Francisco State University asking him to reconsider
this
decision.  His address is:

Robert A. Corrigan, President
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94132

Every letter of support, of whatever length, can only help us, and your
letter may be the decisive one. E-mails are also an option and can be
sent to
corrigan at sfsu.edu with a cc to russian at sfsu.edu
If you have any suggestions for us, or would like additional
information,
please feel free to contact the program coordinator,Katerina Siskron at
siskron at sfsu.edu


Sincerely,

Ludmila Ershov, Emerita
Katerina Siskron, Program Coordinator, Russian Program, SFSU
Krista Hanson, Ph.D.
Svetlana Kristal, Ph.D.

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