"Buell claimed that the department had not beenable to get the appointment of a seniorprofessor...and that suggests a lack of integrityof the department," Roach says.
But opponents of the change say the departmentis on solid enough ground, and that the move willquite plainly weaken the discipline of linguisticsat Harvard.
"We felt it was in fact an unfortunate move,"says Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguisticsand widely considered the founder of modernlinguistics. "The Harvard department has beenstrong and active...This is...another way ofsaying the program will disappear."
"The strengths of the currently existingdepartment at Harvard--the scholarship andrenown...the vitality of the junior and visitingprofessors...the strength of the undergraduate andgraduate products of the department...are not tobe abandoned lightly," said Yale's linguisticsdepartment chair Lawrence R. Horn in a letter ofcomplaint to Wolff.
Thomas Professor of Linguistics and ClassicsCalvert Watkins, one of the two department seniorprofessors, says, "A field of learning is going tobe marginalized at Harvard, and is going todeprive some of the best students Harvard has."
At Yale, the linguistics department wasseverely jeopardized in January 1992 when arestructuring committee recommended to disband thedepartment and reallocate its resources into otherdepartments.
And according to Horn, the administrativepretext at Harvard is similar to the one presentedat Yale last year. But in Yale's case, saidHorn--who is also on the executive committee ofthe LSA--the administration was moving to cutcosts, dropping several departments.
Despite Yale's budget-cutting maneuvers,however, the linguistics department survived inthe end, as an ad hoc committee told Yale whatnational experts are trying to tell Harvard: It isimpossible to maintain a coherent, systematicprogram of linguistics at a major institution ifthe resources of the department are redistributed.
"The Linguistics Department at Harvard seems tohave been singled out," Horn says. "[Professor ofLinguistics Susumu] Kuno and Watkins are close toretirement and there is no commitment to thejunior professors...They [Harvard administrators]don't see a downside to this decision."
Horn says the Harvard and Yale administrations"feel as if they know best...and they're not goingto be dissuaded by experts."
"If there's not a department," says Horn,"there needs to be a program with its ownbudgetary lines."
The problem with a committee instead of adepartment, said Horn, is that it will not havethe power to make its own administrative decisionsor to appoint its own professors.
The linguistics program at MIT, which is ajoint linguistics and philosophy department, isvery strong, says Horn, because, first of all, ithas excellent professors, and second it is able tomake its own administrative decisions.
"Linguists are in charge of making thedecisions of faculty and staffing," said Horn.
And at Rutgers University, the linguisticsprogram is actually expanding--with several newappointments in the last five years.
"There's been a lot of pressure here to do awaywith linguistics," says Jean Ritzke-Rutherford,professor of linguistics at Rutgers. "I think I'vesuccessfully countered it."
"We are going in the opposite direction [asHarvard]," says Jane B. Grimshaw, chair of theRutgers linguistics department. "It's not the casethat the department is diminishing here."
"I'm surprised that this is happening at auniversity with the reputation of Harvard," saidGrimshaw. "They have some very good people."