From galya@u.washington.edu Sun Apr 9 07:06:32 PDT 1995 >From galya@u.washington.edu Sun Apr 9 07:06:31 1995 Return-Path: Received: from carson-oms1.u.washington.edu by lists.u.washington.edu (5.65+UW95.02/UW-NDC Revision: 2.32 ) id AA15832; Sun, 9 Apr 95 07:06:31 -0700 Received: from carson.u.washington.edu by carson-oms1.u.washington.edu (5.65+UW95.02/UW-NDC Revision: 2.32 ) id AA17247; Sun, 9 Apr 95 07:06:19 -0700 Date: Sun, 9 Apr 1995 07:06:18 -0700 (PDT) From: Galya Diment To: John Simpson , dickd@u.washington.edu, The UW Daily , slavic-uw@u.washington.edu, GRADUATE STUDENTS -- Andrew Inniss , Eric Voss , Carol Price , chekhov@u.washington.edu, cicely@u.washington.edu, Charles H Mills , cnvotaw@u.washington.edu, Linda Tapp , Donald Livingston , dlsherry@u.washington.edu, Lisa Frumkes , Samoukova , David Graber , hoogen@u.washington.edu, Hyung-Goo Lee , jkautz@glas.apc.org, Laura Bratoff , Mica Hall , Sergei Mihailov , rickmcp@u.washington.edu, Sunny Otake , Timothy Riley , Anthony Qualin , warrenlloyd@eworld.com, Geoffrey Schwartz , Jeanne Farrow , Lin Zhong , reecas@u.washington.edu Cc: Fred Moody , wpg@u.washington.edu, thorud@u.washington.edu Subject: Slavic Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII As a graduate advisor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, I am at a loss to explain to myself or the students what has been done to them and why. Your decision to eliminate the department and, in particular, the graduate program -- one of the absolutely finest and most successful in the country, as you should know very well by now -- devastated their prospects of getting meaningful and marketable degrees. These are the students (33 in number) who take out loans to pay for their education, often work two or three jobs, sometimes relocate their whole families in order to come to this particular program because of its reputation -- what are they supposed to do now? Who will pay their loans? Their expenses for moving if they are going elsewhere? Who will compensate for the markedly decreased value of their degrees -- if they can even somehow manage to get these? What have they done to deserve this -- what have we all done to deserve this? You are also in the process of restructuring Romance, which, unlike us, has been grossly mismanaged for years and whose graduate program is in no way comparable to ours in the national rankings (we are presently ranked by most of our peers as one of the top five programs in the country which the review committee report should have made clear to you). As far as I know, their graduate program remains intact, and, if anything, you are going to spend MUCH MORE money on them, not less, since running two departments, which is your plan, is obviously more expensive than running one. Are you, then, rewarding that department for their failures and punishing us for our successes? We are in the best shape we have been in years, more recognized and successful than ever -- and you are eliminating us. They are in the worst shape they have been in years -- and you are pouring more money into the department instead of less. THEIR linguists were introduced to the Department of Linguistics and held negotiations with them -- our linguists, like criminal third-rate citizens of this university, are told the day of the announcement that they will be transferred to that department. No one ever asked them whether they objected to the move. Two of the four literature professors will be in a similar fashion shipped to Comp. Lit. No prior consultations, no negotiations, no feedback from Comp. Lit., nothing! Why? Because our chair, unlike the former chair of Romance, also an Associate Professor, was not making $90,000 but much, much less? Because Romance is "civilized" and Russians and other Slavic nations are barbarians? Because corruption should be rewarded? What IS going on? Coming back to our students -- we will leave the discussion of the faculty situation for later -- it is obvious that nothing in the world can restore their idealism and their belief in the so-called ideal of higher education and its basic decency and high ethical and professional standards. You can, at the very least, restore the department for them and allow them to get themselves back in the position where they can reasonably expect to get jobs and thus repay their numerous loans and other money obligations which their graduate studies have incurred. This is really the bare minimum that can -- and should -- be done for them now. Galya Diment Associate Professor Graduate Program Coordinator Slavic L & L .