As Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society continues to refine its place on campus as a hub for dynamic intellectual discourse, it continues to grapple with translating academic success into resources.
Bringing together faculty from the language, literature, and social sciences departments, the 10-year-old institute intertwines historically distinct fields in efforts to study trends of globalization and encourage the importance of language mastery. But despite its recent expansion and the growth of its undergraduate major, the institute has struggled to secure funding and faculty time, raising questions about how such an interdisciplinary project can maintain a coherent focus while encompassing so many departments.
Faculty in the institute, though it houses undergraduate and graduate programs, are quick to underline that it is not its own department but rather one of a new breed of amorphous interdisciplinary bodies and an embodiment of the challenges facing contemporary academia.
“You have a group of faculty who do not see the world in the same way but are capable of speaking with each other,” said professor Reinhold Martin of the hodgepodge of faculties and academic backgrounds that can be found in ICLS. Martin’s own situation—teaching in the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning, as well as leading courses in ICLS—represents the academic border-crossing common of ICLS’s faculty, who hail from diverse schools and departments like law, anthropology, classics, Slavic languages, and religion.
Language study has always been at the core of comparative literature. The field formally developed in the late 19th century when foreign languages began to play a more nationalistic role in Europe.
Multi-lingual scholars would trace themes across periods and countries, while looking at the ways the literatures of different tongues influenced each other.
But the field faced its largest transition after the fall of Soviet communism, which created an existential dilemma for area studies, which had stemmed from the U.S. government’s effort to examine the cultures and practices of Eastern European and Central Asian societies. That political shift came with the realization that a strict focus on European languages was insufficient in a globalizing world, said Andreas Huyssen, the chair of Germanic languages and the institute’s founder.
At Columbia, faculty decided to integrate area studies, a field of charts and data reports, with comparative literature, which is driven by text-intensive literary theory and foreign literatures. The result of that interdisciplinary mixing was the program which would become the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
“The basic axiom is that those who understand particular social science endeavor are committed to the place of language in the social science world,” said Rosalind Morris, associate director of the ICLS and a professor in the anthropology department.
“We wanted comp. lit. to engage with rather than evoke globalization,” she said.
The program’s committee pushed administrators to name it an institute, a designation which comes with more resources, in hopes of appointing more faculty.
Over the past decade, the marriage between the social sciences and the humanities has strengthened, and the application-only comparative literature major is more popular than ever. Unlike many majors, the comparative literature major is housed not in a department but in the institute.
Yet despite that success, ICLS has struggled to secure funding and professors.
“We are massively under-funded,” Morris said, mentioning the “extremely minimal administrative funds” for its graduate program. In the future, Morris and the executive committee wish to enlarge this program if resources are made available.
“In general,” she said, “interdisciplinary institutes that boost degree programs should be more well-funded.”
And while it seems that scholars passionate about comparative literature would naturally gravitate toward ICLS, the task of solidifying a list of faculty who identify with the institute often boils down not to interest, but to a fiscal bottom line.
According to Morris, the administration vowed to aid with hiring, but professors affiliated with the institute say that administrators have not followed through with money.
“My heart and work is in the institute,” said professor Stathis Gourgouris, the only professor who teaches two courses in ICLS, one course in English and one course in classics. He explained what some might deem a challenge of holding multiple affiliations. “I am equally interested in the welfare of each department [I teach in], but [for some faculty] they could be conflict in departmental policy.”
Gourgouris said that straddling several departments or institutes is a logistical and philosophical challenge for professors.
“Nowadays, we are all incredible specialists. Interdisciplinary teaching is asking people to combine modes of specialization,” he said. “People have to be interested in branching out.”
Such demand has manifested itself in team-taught courses, which have united professors from graduate schools with professors from the arts and sciences. These courses can be difficult to manage all the same. For instance, whereas a professor from the law school—which boasts a sizable faculty and budget—would likely face little resistance when allotting time to a non-law course, the smaller Italian department might be forced to reconfigure its course offerings if even one professor opted to teach in ICLS.
Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks said that the recent restructuring of the Spanish and Portuguese and French departments have freed up faculty for team-teaching and cross-appointments. “They have stable faculty who can teach curses without threatening the curricular integrity of their own departments,” Dirks said.
But in some ways, being an institute rather than a department is an advantage to ICLS. If ICLS were to become a department, professors would need to, as Gourgouris put it, “secede from their home departments.”
Huyssen stressed that the interdisciplinary project is essential to the larger intellectual mission of a university, but is threatened in a time of recession and budget cuts. “The humanities are under the gun,” he said. “But they are still as necessary as ever in the educational project.”
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