Psychoanalysis and my senior thesis

[Deborah Hoffman]

Uvazhaemye SEELANGovtsy,

While I understand the humor frequently associated
with Freud and Freudianism, nonetheless I'd like to
proffer a few thoughts for consideration by those in
academia: 

--What has undergraduate enrollment (where grad
students come from) in Slavics/Russian been like of
late?  What effect might that have on the future of
your departments? 
--How many of your undergraduates are actually writing
a senior thesis in order to graduate?  
--How many of them are doing it in Slavics or Russian
literature?
--How many of your undergraduates could even name 12
heroes in Russian literature?  How many of them could
tell you the plot of Slovo o polku Igoreve with enough
familiarity to attempt an interpretation?  When I
graduated from Indiana (with honors, though sans
senior thesis which was not offered) we'd spent
exactly 55 minutes on anything that came before
Pushkin.
--How many of your undergraduates read SEELANGS?
--How many of your undergraduates would take the time
to solicit scholarly input from a wide body of people
before deciding to proceed with a topic?
--Is making light of a serious inquiry by an obviously
engaged and motivated undergraduate, rather than
redirecting or shaping if you believe the topic
ill-chosen, really the best approach under the
circumstances?  Friendly ribbing among colleagues of
roughly equal station being another matter entirely,
of course. 

Of course, if the felicitously named John Reed turns
out to be a sockpuppet, I will be quite abashed :-)

Deborah Hoffman
Finance Chair, Graduate Student Senate
Modern and Classical Language Studies
Kent State University
http://users.ameritech.net/lino59/index.htm

Stop the Genocide in Darfur: 
http://www.savedarfur.org/

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