Departments fight merger

Faced with a proposal to combine their departments into one, the deans of six foreign language departments sent a letter to the humanities division opposing the decision.

The proposed consolidation would merge the current departments of French and Francophone studies, Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic languages and literatures, Scandinavian, Italian and Germanic languages into one overarching European languages and cultures department.

The idea stemmed from a report released by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Scott Waugh’s Humanities Task Force last January. The Task Force, which met 10 times throughout the fall of 2009, was created to evaluate the structure of the humanities division and propose changes to increase efficiency.

In past efforts to streamline departments, many of the languages have not been able to replace retired tenured faculty and have decreased in size, said Tim Stowell, dean of the humanities division. The consolidated department would allow the language departments to share resources and merge programs that currently overlap.

Stowell added that while the structure of the departments would change, the major and minor programs in the languages would not.

“From a student’s point of view, (the change) would be nearly invisible,” he said.
However, department chairs feel the change would reduce the quality of UCLA’s language program, said Maarten Van Delden, chair of the Spanish and Portuguese department.

“It’s a matter of prestige and standing in the field,” he said. “If (the proposal) passes through, it will be more difficult for UCLA to recruit and retain top faculty, who want to teach at universities that recognize the importance of a particular department. It will influence graduate students as to where they want to pursue their Ph.D.”

Further, merging departments may allow larger language programs to make decisions for the smaller ones, taking away their autonomy to make decisions for themselves, said Elissa Tognozzi, a senior lecturer of Italian.

After individual meetings with the dean, department chairs gathered to respond, drawing up a letter detailing their shared opposition to the recent proposal. The letter, signed by all the chairs, described plans to create a committee of representatives from the affected departments who will brainstorm other options.

This new committee will begin meeting this quarter to address problems specifically faced by the languages, said Ronald Vroon, chair of the Slavic languages and literatures department.

“It’s the job of the committee to clarify exactly what problems the dean wants to address,” he said. “It’s never been absolutely clear what the relationship is between problems the university faces and what the consolidation hopes to accomplish.”

In response to the letter, the dean said he will consider the arguments and issue a reply later this quarter.

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