The Justice

Among the recommendations that stands out in the recent Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee report is the elimination of American Studies as a department, and as its chairperson I appreciate this opportunity to warn the University of the consequences of our extinction. For nearly four decades, American Studies has been among the most popular majors on campus because we have blended a commitment to scholarship with an unusual dedication to teaching and advising. Our destruction as a department is therefore bound to produce disaffection and demoralization among our students and faculty at this delicate moment in the history of the University. The overall aim of downsizing that Brandeis must achieve hardly requires the destruction of so healthy and vibrant a part of liberal arts education. Though the Committee assures us that the transformation into an interdisciplinary program should not be understood as a demotion, there is no other way to understand this change except as a devaluation of what we and our students do. The message is that we are no longer entitled to sit with the grown-ups.

The committee urges the dropping of barriers that divide current departments and programs and which result in both duplication of resources and narrowness of vision. Yet nowhere does the CARS report offer the slightest evidence that the Department of American Studies is responsible for those barriers, nor are we in any way accused of having raised them. In fact, the evidence is entirely in the direction of our history of lowering those barriers. For example, because we believe that students can learn about America in divergent and even eclectic ways, our 88 majors can choose to earn departmental credit from almost six dozen courses offered in other departments. In our inclusiveness American Studies is unmatched; no other department could be more open to tapping the knowledge of our colleagues. We have also created the very programs that have helped reduce barriers. Legal Studies, Women's Studies, Environmental Studies, Film Studies and Journalism were all born in American Studies. For the sake of lowering departmental barriers, the very department that has been so fertile a site for curricular innovation is threatened with disappearance.

So punitive a fate is especially galling given our own legacy at Brandeis. Though the United States as a multidisciplinary field of study has its roots in the late 1930s, the formal takeoff of American Studies began in the 1950s. Nowhere was that consolidation more significant than at this campus, where in 1957 Max Lerner published his canonical work, America as a Civilization. In 1990 the key figure in the life of our department, Lawrence H. Fuchs, came out with The American Kaleidoscope. Both of these books have helped to define a field marked by the yearning to treat our nation, for all of its diversity, as a coherent unit. My colleagues and myself are the legatees of the effort to deploy multiple perspectives from a common core; to fling us to other departments in the University, while an American Studies program struggles to survive, will diminish our capacity to do what our own intellectual habits and our teaching experience have honed us to do. Demotion and diffusion are an odd way of upholding the ideal of interdisciplinary learning that President Jehuda Reinharz listed as one of the pillars of the University during this budgetary crisis.

We realize that belts will be tightened in the coming years. But CARS makes no explicit case for the savings that will result from the transformation of a department like ours into a program. Nor does the committee indicate how the scattering of our faculty to other departments will ensure (much less increase) the desired rates of attrition. The committee does not explain why the department of American Studies (along with two others, which are significantly smaller) cannot absorb the same shocks as everyone else. When virtually every other department will remain intact and autonomous, why is American Studies expected to pay so exorbitant a price, to bear so heavy a burden? We will be embarrassed in the wider scholarly world that our American Studies colleagues inhabit. Our former students (now numbering in the thousands) may well feel diminished and perhaps even betrayed. Those among them who have expressed their gratitude for what they learned under the auspices of a harmonious and cohesive department may wonder why it is being asked to make so inequitable and unfair a sacrifice.

Editor's Note: Prof. Whitfield is the chair of the American Studies department.

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