This past year, the Connecticut College website made a small but significant change in labels. A tab reading “Study Away” was replaced with the term “Global Focus.” It leads to a page proclaiming, “The world awaits you. We provide the pathways,” which features pictures of Knowlton dining hall and impressive statistics of our study away programs and student population spanning several countries.
Still, Connecticut College, “a highly selective private liberal arts college,” a school that “promotes an understanding of local, regional, national and international peoples, groups, cultures and issues through its curriculum,” and is a “top Fulbright producer” is making a move to combine the Slavic Studies and German departments into one.
The proposal to create a new program called “European Studies” works to resolve several problems the departments may face: small classes, lack of general student interest, and one of the lowest number of enrolled student majors.
Andrea Lanoux, Chair of the Slavic Studies department, says that the proposal was part of the annual staffing process.
“[The college] goes through this process every year to allocate faculty resources,” said Lanoux. “The proposed merger of Slavic and German was actually designed to maintain faculty resources in those programs, rather than to reduce them.”
In this vein, Dean of Faculty Roger Brooks is working toward an agreement to foster “the greatest impact on students and the breadth and quality of our course offerings and majors.”
Brooks explained that “Slavic Studies and German Studies are both small yet vibrant departments that play an important role in the College’s international initiatives. On the other hand, their enrollments are relatively low and there are many competing requests for faculty resources. I believe we should consider whether a new unit might achieve synergies that the two units alone have not.”
Lanoux supports this decision. “I think it’s positive that the Dean of the Faculty is proposing new ways to use faculty resources to develop new programs that innovate and renew the curriculum,” she said. “Because we have a system of shared governance, proposals such as these start important discussions about how we can work to collectively shape the college’s academic program.
She added, “I am confident that Dean Brooks has the best interests of both programs in mind with this proposal.”
Despite these explanations, the proposed change has not been received well by many community members. “Save Slavic Studies and German Studies at Connecticut College!!!” is a Facebook group boasting over 300 members that unites current students and alumni in their shared disapproval. The group’s wall posts, comments, and messages all protest the possible integration, offering support for the students most affected, and explore ways to help. Most of the posts are dotted with German or Russian phrases.
Alexandra Wolf ’12, one of the administrators of the Facebook group, is passionate about keeping the departments separate.
“While it is important to project a certain image, college should be about academics more than anything else,” she said. “By merging Slavic and German Studies, the college is compromising not only these programs, but also all academics at this school. For a school so focused on being international, especially with programs like CISLA, to not have Slavic and German departments would be a travesty.”
The German and Slavic Studies departments are amongst the smallest at Connecticut College. According to Geoffrey Atheron, Chair of German Studies, however, enrollments in German at Connecticut College have increased, particularly over the past three years.
“While German is one of the smallest departments at the College, it is an excellent program which contributes greatly to the College’s strategic goals of internationalization and globalization,” Atherton said. “Over the last three years, 11 of the College’s 13 Fulbright awards have been to Germany.”
By minimizing these two departments, is Connecticut College, which recently released a statement praising recent Fulbright scholars, cutting itself short?
Alumnus Jessamyn Cox ’09 came to Conn for its German program and left with a Fulbright. A former CISLA scholar, Cox opposes the merge. “These are two very different languages, and very different cultures. They should not be combined. Students apply to Conn knowing we are a top producer of German Fulbright grantees. These students, who may be interested in studying German and hopefully receiving a Fulbright grant of their own, will likely look at the list of majors and be quite confused as to why there is no German major.”
Cox explained a Foreign Language Fellows program that was launched at Conn last fall. The program intended to eventually establish an International Common Room with a Skype lab, ideally in Knowlton, the international dorm. “I think it’s rather hypocritical that Conn hypes up its internationalism,” she said. “I know funding is always an issue, but in the midst of these progressive steps towards further internationalizing the campus, I simply don’t understand how they think it would be prudent to start eliminating language programs,” Cox continued.
“Even without the awards,” said Wolf, “we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage by closing these departments. Russian language study is on the rise nationally. By not having the department at all, we put ourselves at an extreme disadvantage in recruiting intelligent, globally-conscious students.”
Susana Hancock ’07, a Winthrop Scholar and a Rhodes Scholar Finalist—the only Connecticut College Rhodes finalist in the past twenty-five years, emphasizes the importance of German and Slavic Studies in the current times.
In a letter to Dean Brooks, Hancock expressed “[concern] that a joint European Studies department would compromise the strength of each department—areas that the government has identified as specifically needing acute scholarship. I realize both of the departments are small in terms of the total number of students, but they are not small in terms of brain cells shared by its members. The intellectual stimulation I discovered within the Slavic department spanned everything from history and linguistics to politics and philosophy.”
Despite rumors, the merge does not appear to be a response to lack of funding. Many students have expressed concern about the proposal being part of a greater makeover plan that related to the new mascot and construction work on Tempel Green, but according to Lanoux, “My understand is that the non-academic parts of the college’s budget have nothing to do with the faculty staffing plan.”
The merge is still in the planning stages and is unlikely to occur immediately. “Next year, the Educational Planning Committee, which includes two student members, one with voting privileges, faculty, and Dean of the Faculty, will be looking into departmental five year plans and where the college’s curriculum is headed,” said Claire Gould, SGA Chair of Academic Affairs. “This will include looking into both Slavic Studies and German Studies.” She encouraged concerned students and alumni to continue their efforts in keeping the departments separate.
Though the outcome is yet to be determined, changes can still occur, and efforts to find a largely accepted medium will continue to be made. The proponents of the “Save the Slavic Studies and German Studies” group are unlikely to rest; as their Facebook group description reads, in the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky, “to live without hope is to cease to live.”
Their cause lives on.
Though I do encourage concerned students and alumni to “rally together” as I said on the Facebook wall page of “Save Slavic and German Studies!!” I moreso encourage people to hold off contacting Dean Brooks merely because nothing has been decided yet, or looked into closely. The two departments do have low enrollments, which I don’t at all find cause for disbanding, especially because I think both languages are important in today’s world, and also because the departments do bring Conn some of the best and brightest. I do think we need to take a serious look though at what can better attract students to these departments, not only to get enrollments up, but also to better educate students in these languages, cultures, and histories. I have good friends who are majors/minors in these departments, and thus have met many of the professors. As I graduate, I sincerely wish I had considered taking a course or two in German or Russian.