Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Comp Lit update: Not going gentle into that good night

In a string of posts (centered around this), I've said a little about the declaration by the dean of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin on how he would deal with the Department of Comparative Literature:
no new money will be invested in it. After current faculty members leave or retire, the department will come to an end.
The dean had offered them the opportunity to close the department voluntarily and they declined and it spiraled from there — with a lot of acrimony where nobody's handled things well, not the department, not the deans, certainly not the chancellor.

As somebody clued me in on earlier today, Comp Lit's website has some very significant updates. They are opting to rage against the dying of the light. Check it out, especially the stinging letter to the chancellor by a UW alum and major donor.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Having just read the letter from Mary Gilbertson (on the Comp Lit website) to the Wile E. Coyote who runs our campus, I just have to say - wow. I'm not one for literary criticism, myself, preferring the SCIENCE (it is *too*) of linguistics, but she makes a powerful case for her position. How did we get to this point... sigh.