[Mendele] Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements--Cuts, including Judaic Studies, at University of Albany (SUNY)

Victor Bers victor.bers at yale.edu
Fri Nov 5 16:45:45 EDT 2010


Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements

November 5, 2010

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__________________________________________________________
From: Barry Trachtenberg <btrachtenberg at albany.edu>
Subject: Cuts at the University at Albany (SUNY)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:41:15 -0400

Dear Colleagues,
No doubt you have heard about the proposed cuts to the Humanities programs 
at the University at Albany. Below are my comments to the Faculty Senate 
(each speaker was given only three minutes) regarding the changes in 
Judaic Studies at the University over the past few years and how this new 
round of cuts will further diminish our offerings.

Yours,
Barry Trachtenberg

                    -----------------------------------------

Lost in the current discussions about the cuts in the academic programs 
are the recent changes in Judaic Studies. Founded as a Department forty 
years ago this very month, Judaic Studies at UAlbany was a forerunner of 
the burst in Jewish Studies programs that has occurred over the past two 
decades. Now, more than one hundred and twenty-five Universities in North 
America and Canada offer Jewish Studies, and it is a field that is 
continually growing.

I arrived to UAlbany in 2003 as one of the first faculty members whose 
line was to be paid through a public-private partnership, (a failed 
experiment that demonstrated how academic speech can be suppressed through 
such arrangements). I was the fifth member of a vibrant Department that 
offered classes in many realms of Jewish Studies. While we never had more 
than 20 majors at any given time, we often served annually more than one 
thousand students in our classes, many of whom saw Jewish Studies as a 
vital part of their education. Our recent external review from 2009 
credited us as a national competitive program with a staff who is young 
and energetic but which lacks the non- replacement of departing faculty.
Now, I am the sole full-time faculty member in Jewish Studies, and I, 
along with a Hebrew lecturer and a handful of adjunct instructors, have 
had our Department dissolved and we are now housed in History. We are in 
the process of suspending admission to the major.As part of my 
responsibility to oversee Judaic Studies soon to be officially a programI 
am to create an interdisciplinary major out of the faculty located across 
the University, following the model that exists at most other schools. 
Such a task was already going to prove difficult. Since the Judaic Studies 
Department was the site where those faculty with an interest in the topic 
were housed, there are only a few faculty at the University with either 
the training or the interest in mounting classes and making the long-term 
commitment to teaching them on a regular basis. Now, with the plan to cut 
the programs in Theater, Classics, Russian, Italian, and French, I fear 
that my job may be impossible. At least three of the five programs have 
faculty with an interest or clear affinity with Jewish Studies. Take the 
work of French Professor Brett Bowles, for instance, who works on 
antisemitism in French film. One could also point to Professor of Russian 
Henryk Baran, who researches the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As well, 
faculty in the Theater Department are currently preparing a production of 
Dear Harvey, a play on the life and times of the civil rights activist 
Harvey Milk. The absence of these programs will be devastating to my 
efforts to rebuild the Judaic Studies major.

Just as the creation of the Judaic Studies Department in 1970 augured 
future developments in the discipline, the decision to permit its 
attrition over the past few years has likewise presaged the recent news 
about the tragic cuts. I strongly suspect that had we not lost our faculty 
to retirements or to other Universities, we too would have been 
terminated, rather than only downsized.

As the Faculty Senate weighs its decision regarding the termination of 
these five programs, please consider that the cuts impact constituencies 
far beyond those immediately affected. It is devastating and shameful that 
these programs are to be terminated. The effects of these ill-conceived 
decisions will extend far and wide throughout the University and degrade 
us all.

Barry Trachtenberg
Associate Professor of Hist
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