Dear President Phillip, Vice-President Herman, and Dean Wulfert:

I write to protest the planned łdeactivation,˛ a.k.a. destruction, of SUNY-Albanyąs programs in French, Italian, Russian, Classics, and Theater.

I trust that you have received, by now, hundreds if not thousands of messages like this one; and I want to hope that these pleas have begun to make an impression, assuming for a moment that your concerns include the reputation of your University as well as its actual quality.

Why would a University, even one with serious budget problems (a condition plaguing all public institutions at the moment), advertise to the world its utter contempt for academic values? Why would a University want to be known as a place where entire Departments can be closed, and tenured professors fired, without the slightest regard for process and fairness?

The answer might be that you do not want to run a University after all, but a kind of corporation where teaching and research are being conducted at the discretion of management.  But I cannot believe that this could be your intent, in spite of everything I have read on President Phillip's qualifications. Surely you understand that the quality of teaching and research, in an institution of higher learning, requires a measure of intellectual and practical independence that is simply not compatible with the sort of decision you just made.

Surely you understand that the brutal sacrifice of łsmall˛ programs, assuming even that your entire institution will not find itself discredited for good, will fatally compromise other, larger ones, in the Humanities at least, and probably beyond.  Itąs hard to see how your Spanish section, how your Departments of English, History, and the like could not be affected by this, and will keep attracting top-quality scholars and teachers to a place where professors are treated like cattle. Itąs hard to see how a University that claims to bring "The World Within Reach" to nearly 18,000 students can sustain this ambition by failing to nurture, and then proceeding to dismantle, a good chunk of said Worldąs languages, literatures and cultures. It makes you look small, provincial, and clueless. (I would respectfully suggest that you retire this slogan  which has now become obscene  in addition to retiring faculty. That at least shouldn't be hard to do.)

So you felt compelled, by desperate times, to adopt desperate measures, and the only real question before you was where to let the axe fall. As I just suggested, the Humanities as a whole became the (soft, easy) target; for the decision to destroy French, or Italian, or Russian, or Classics, or Theater, let alone all of the above, is not thinkable by anyone with the slightest understanding of, and respect for, the integrity of Humanities as such. Contempt for due process and contempt for Humanist learning seem to go hand in hand in this matter. You cannot realistically hope to recover from having exhibited this double dose of scorn, unless the plan is for SUNY-Albany to become a pure tech and science institution, where practitioners of other fields are considered second-class citizens. There would be at least some logic to that, although it seems to me that scientists are not less concerned than others by basic rules of human decency and institutional fairness; scientists are no less concerned than others by abuses of power; scientists are no more likely than others to want to stay in a place where academic freedom has become a joke.

What is in fact at stake is the integrity, the reality of what a University is  at least a comprehensive one, as opposed to a łtrade school˛ ; the reality of what SUNY, at Albany and elsewhere, as a flagship public institution, claims it wants to be. That reality cannot be sliced and diced. What makes a University great is the generous co-existence of different fields, large and small. If łsmall˛ becomes a pretext for elimination, everyone suffers, because a basic principle of intellectual solidarity, the interconnectedness of what a University worthy of the name brings to its students, has been lost.

It may not feel like it, it may take years for you to begin to feel it, but you have essentially decided to kill SUNY's soul in exchange for a few dollars in a couple years' budget, as though such a soul could be removed and exchanged for a replica with missing parts. It cannot. Soon you will have to destroy something else, and then something else, and so on, all the while helping to persuade angry taxpayers and voters that Universities can be shrunk and cut at will, that entire disciplines are just a waste of money, that all fields ought to bring in their own money, that no public service, no public interest,  are involved, in any way, in the preservation and transmission of culture, and no public resources should be dedicated to such a task. But SUNY as a whole will not survive for long in a world ruled by such ideas; you will not be able to satisfy, with the few crumbs you just threw, the beast that you are trying to feed.

Sincerely,

François Cornilliat
Professor of French
Rutgers University