The Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages (DLCL) will be reorganized into a single department beginning in the fall. Provost John Etchemendy Ph.D. ’82 announced the decision to the Faculty Senate last month, saying the departments represented within the division would remain intact and that the change is “for administrative purposes.”

The DLCL currently consists of five departments: Comparative Literature, French and Italian, German Studies, Iberian and Latin American Cultures and Slavic Languages and Literatures.

The move means the five departments will now share a single budget and form “focal groups” to encourage collaboration across their areas of study.

According to Etchemendy, the new model will “accommodate better the kind of intellectual conditions and interactions demanded of modern literary studies.”

“To a faculty member or a student in any of these departments, nothing will look any different,” said Roland Greene, the head of the DLCL. “Money will end up, more or less, where it ends up now. It’s just a question of whether it starts out at the divisional level or at the departmental level.”

“The most important part of [the reorganization] is the intellectual part,” Greene added. “We spent a lot of time over the last seven years creating what we used to call research groups, and now we’re going to call them focal groups, which are communities with a common interest that cut across the departments that maybe work on things like the novel, or poetics.”

According to Greene, the DLCL “spent a year thinking about this particular iteration,” and received help from Richard Saller, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. The focal groups are modeled after the current Philosophy and Literature research group of the division, which Greene referred to as the “vanguard” of the project.

“The idea is that one would be able to get a B.A. in German Studies with an emphasis in the novel or a B.A. in Russian with an emphasis in poetics,” Greene said. “One can already do that with Philosophy and Literature.”

Greene said within the national context, this kind of program is at the “cutting edge.”

“There is a growing sense around the country that it’s becoming harder to maintain the old-fashioned justification that literature departments in French, Italian, Spanish, etc., should be completely separate from each other, and basically have nothing to do with each other…we’re taking the lead in seeing what the next chapter should be,” he said.

Italian professor Robert Harrison, the chair of French and Italian, said he did not see any advantages to the new system.

“The plan has been approved and the general outline of what the new department would look like and how it would operate; those details have been decided,” he said. “But we don’t know who the chairman is going to be, we don’t know what the administrative staff is going to look like, and until those things are in place it’s very difficult to predict how this new department is going to function.”

“I continue to believe that the antecedent DLCL structure allowed for the productive collaboration possibilities and that we do not need a department to enhance collaboration,” Harrison added.

Greene said the transition to the fall is a concern.

“What everyone wants to avoid is the kind of situation where you simply throw a lot of different former departments into a big catch all department, or you simply consolidate in some heavy-handed fashion without paying attention to that balance between specificity and collaboration,” Greene said.

Harrison also raised concerns about the role the newly organized division would play in hiring new faculty, as Etchemendy said the reorganization “allows very creative kinds of new searches and allocation of the resources.”

“All members of the new department are going to have to participate in decisions that used to be made by nine members of the French and Italian [department],” Harrison said, referring to hiring specific people within his own department.

“I think that what contemporary geopolitics have shown us is that scale is important, that big is not better. After a certain size, big start workings again administration,” he added.

Greene maintained that this is not the case, and that staff would not be cut either.

“For example, we will still hire Germanists at the recommendation of Germanists,” he said.

Greene said the only difference would be that someone from a different area of study but with a common interest would be able to also sit on the hiring committee, as is common practice in other departments. He anticipates that the formation of focal groups will make finding this “outside person” much easier.

He added that the move will, he hopes, benefit students in the end.

“It’s especially exciting for grads and undergrads because it will give them good training, in that literary scholars now need to be very local and very particular in their training, but also wide-ranging,” Greene said. “This provides a nice model on how to do that.”