A few years ago I wrote that

Now the University of Toronto has decided to abolish its Comparative Literature program, on the grounds that it's no longer needed.

That would be a more intelligible argument if they had not simultaneously disestablished the East Asian Studies department, German, Slavic, etc., lumping them all into a single Department of Languages which will, says the dean, concentrate on language to the exclusion of literature and culture.

This dean is no doubt being praised for his hard-headed realism. Knock off a bunch of small, powerless departments; erode faculty representation (each department contains 1 department chair, who is apt to think of him or herself as an advocate for the discipline and the colleagues who teach it); evacuate subjects of their content; deal with the problem of oversupply of graduates by spaying the departments who so recklessly propagated themselves. This is how managerial culture behaves when nobody is paying any attention to the purpose of a university. Oh, and what is that purpose? Forgive me for rushing in so over-confidently: it is to educate people, some broadly, some profoundly, in a great number of different subjects, these subjects to be discovered according to the needs and the capacities of the time.

The purpose is not to supply graduates tailor-made to the “needs” of Air Canada, Wal-Mart, Médecins sans Frontières or any other external agency, vicious or virtuous. The university gives people the capacities to do what they can with their lives; greater and more diverse capacities than they would have if they spent the four years corresponding to the undergraduate course, or the six or eight years required for the PhD, on the village green, in a bowling alley, in a microchip factory, etc. The capacity-enlarging process is open-ended, because we don't know exactly what the needs of the future will be, and we hope we can count on people to be creative and adaptive in using their capacities.

On the evidence of the dean's decision, Canada does not need individuals skilled in understanding foreign cultures. (Teaching language without literature and culture amounts to adding a voice-over track to the same dreary Saturday morning cartoons and soap operas, a technical job without discovery or newness.) Nor apparently does Canada need the people who, in culture, do the work of historians, anthropologists, theoreticians, inventors of unsuspected points of view. This is ridiculous. Even to stick to the elementary operations of self-interest, Canada must still be dealing with economic partners who do not speak French or English; Canada must still have political and military engagements in places where curling and hockey are not common topics of conversation. Experts, investigators, speculative thinkers in this area are needed more than ever, I would think, in the era of the big world market. And we come cheap, compared to lawyers, economists, and most natural scientists, though we are admittedly most of us sticklers for intellectual freedom and therefore apt to grumble. Oh, of course we all know that there's an economic crisis on, and the university needs to reduce its expenditures. Is killing off half-a-dozen PhD programs going to save so much money that it is worth the sacrifice of the corresponding capacities (not to mention the hole knocked in the reputation of an erstwhile great university)? Self-lobotomizing is not the best way to lose weight.

Torontonians, aren't you proud of your Northrop Frye and your Marshall McLuhan? You're slamming the door in the face of their successors.