Letter to Stony Brook University about Cutting Humanities Programs
The Executive Council approved the letter to Stony Brook University in May 2017.
15 May 2017
Dear President Stanley, Provost Bernstein, and Dean Kopp:
I am writing to you as president of the Modern Language Association with the support of our organization’s Executive Council to express the MLA’s deep concern about the proposed cutbacks to some of your humanities programs. The potential cuts include not only the dissolution or resizing of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature but also the termination of their excellent PhD programs, as well as the suspension of undergraduate majors in theater arts, cinema studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature. The MLA represents more than twenty-five thousand scholars and teachers of literature, language, and culture in the United States and Canada, many of whom, like me, work in departments such as those designated for drastic reductions at your institution.
The humanities are at the core of a liberal arts education. Faculty members in those areas train our students to think, create, and problem-solve—abilities students will need in life, including in any job they might hold after college. A liberal arts education is not reducible to a specific skill. Rather, it broadens our students’ horizons and teaches the value of understanding our own intellectual and cultural histories as well as those of people who speak other languages and produce literary and other forms of cultural expression different from our own. Our language departments, our departments of cultural and comparative studies, and our theater and cinema programs teach students to communicate beyond geographic, national, and cultural borders. Without strong departments across a range of interconnected fields and disciplines in the humanities, universities risk becoming management or training schools. As Terry Eagleton noted in his Guardian article “The Death of Universities” in December 2010, “[T]here cannot be a university without the humanities. If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.” The world needs thoughtful and informed citizens to deal with the many challenges facing us, so now is not the time to diminish the standing of a fine public university such as Stony Brook.
Stony Brook University is a premier public institution that has boasted first-rate faculty members across the humanities and has prepared talented students for many careers. The Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, for example, where I have been honored to speak, is highly respected. It has received a Chancellor’s Grant for Innovative Study Abroad Programs and is home to leading Hispanists, who, in just the past four years, have received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Hagedorn Foundation, and the Northeast Modern Language Association. The department has successfully placed 90% of its graduate students in jobs. It has the second-highest undergraduate enrollment among humanities departments at the university and is ranked fifth among twenty-six doctoral programs in the College of Arts and Sciences. Moreover, it ranks highest, by far, in diversity. Sixty percent of the graduate students are Hispanic, Latino, or Latina, compared with the university average of 6.3% for minority students overall. The suspension of this department and its PhD program devalues the work of its scholars and students. Further, it eliminates crucial resources for cultural and linguistic study, whose relevance extends far beyond Stony Brook, at a time when Latino, Latina, and Hispanic students are being targeted across the board.
We understand the financial pressures faced by Stony Brook and other public universities. Cuts certainly must be made, but they should not be made to the detriment of the university’s core educational mission. Dean Kopp’s statement—that by making the proposed cuts, “we seek to maintain and enhance excellence in research, scholarship, and artistic creation in as many programs as possible, especially those for which we have a demonstrated record of excellence and/or an opportunity to excel”—is, therefore, shortsighted and runs counter to how the interrelated disciplines of the humanities function. It is simply not possible to protect excellence in a university by dissolving excellent departments.
We close by congratulating Stony Brook University for the high standards it has maintained throughout prolonged periods of budget shortfalls in the past and urge you, its current leaders, to find other ways of addressing the current one.
Sincerely,
Diana Taylor
President, Modern Language Association
University Professor
Professor, Spanish and Performance Studies
New York University
MLA Officers and Members of the Executive Council
Anne Ruggles Gere, First Vice President, MLA
University of Michigan
Simon E. Gikandi, Second Vice President, MLA
Princeton University
Rosemary G. Feal, Executive Director, MLA
Emily Apter, New York University
Angelika Bammer, Emory University
Brian Croxall, Brown University
Gaurav G. Desai, University of Michigan
Lenora Hanson, University of Wisconsin
Eric Hayot, Penn State University
Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Connecticut
David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University
David Tse-chien Pan, University of California, Irvine
Rafael A. Ramirez Mendoza, University of California, Los Angeles
Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt University
Evie Shockley, Rutgers University
Vicky Unruh, University of Kansas
Dana A. Williams, Howard University