Thank you for supporting Slavic Studies at Connecticut College!

[Andrea Lanoux]

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to those of you who  
expressed support for the Slavic Studies Department at Connecticut  
College and who took steps to articulate arguments against a  
departmental merger between the Slavic Studies and German departments  
at a time of two coincidental faculty line vacancies. It has been less  
than a week since Slavic Studies students and faculty launched an  
eighteen-point grass-roots political action plan, and members of the  
administration have heard so much resistance to this idea that  
apparently they are considering striking the proposal from the  
college's annual staffing plan, to be finalized on May 5.

One of the first steps our students took was to start a Facebook page  
devoted to this issue, "Save Slavic Studies and German Studies at  
Connecticut College":

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=103575866352651&ref=ts

I will admit that I at first thought it was a little trite to invite  
you to "join us on Facebook," as many of you have since done--THANK  
YOU! It turns out, however, that of all the pressures exerted, this  
one is the most hated by the administration. Apparently sites such as  
these are extremely effective forms of expressing dissent, especially  
when you write to administrators things like, "Among CC students,  
alumni, and faculty are numerous scholars of Russian and Slavic  
Studies from across the nation, our peers from such institutions as  
Oxford, Grinnell, Harvard, Yale, SUNY Buffalo, Northwestern, UC  
Berkeley, Bucknell, Bard, Texas Tech, Columbia, Yale, Stanford,  
Georgetown, and Ohio Wesleyan, who are standing witness to what we are  
about to do to our academic program and to our faculty." And indeed,  
when you go to the website, there are all your faces, looking out and  
smiling, when in fact everyone has since gone about their business and  
no one is really thinking about this anymore.

So if you haven't yet, please join the movement! We currently have 337  
members, and we'd like to double that number before the May 5 deadline  
for the final version of the staffing plan.

If any of you are ever in a similar situation (I never thought this  
would happen to us), please contact me. I've learned a lot about  
political action on the fly, and I could now articulate an effective  
strategy for responding to a department merger or closure based on  
open faculty lines. It can come on quickly and you need to respond  
quickly before a proposal becomes a decision.

With thanks again to all of you for your help and support,

Andrea Lanoux, Chair
Department of Slavic Studies
Connecticut College





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