In Defense of the Russian Department

They say the first casualty of war is truth. When the conflagration in Eastern Europe started earlier this year, I didn’t expect the old adage to be proven true on my own campus. And yet, I have been disappointed.

An article in The Dartmouth from July 1 reports on a petition circulated among students that calls for the restructuring of the Russian Department into the “Eastern European Studies Department.” As a Russian major, I have long sought to study the history, culture, and languages of the greater Slavic peoples. After close examination, I can only conclude that the proposal would do nothing but a disservice to the College and its students.

Issues arise even from the very first paragraph of the petition, when it submits as underlying logic that restructuring and renaming the Russian Department “would follow the precedent of peer institutions such as Brown, Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania.” Just because these institutions are our fellow Ivies does not mean we should follow their lead. The schools listed are research universities, while Dartmouth is a liberal arts college. I question the petition’s suggestion that Dartmouth make itself more like schools that substantially diverge from our educational practices. This is, however, the least troubling assumption that the petition makes.

The petition’s sponsors admirably advocate that students in the Department have the “opportunity to study the literature, history, culture, politics, and languages of the region,” specifically mentioning other Slavic languages, such as Ukrainian and Bosnian. And yet, the students behind the petition go a step further and justify this call for an expansion with a criticism of “Russian imperialism.” 

They continue: “[T]o have a ‘Russian’ Department tasked with teaching about Slavic and Central Asian cultures applies an insoluble lens which prevents the proper interpretation and contextualization of … Eastern Europe and Central Asia.”

The question of whether Russia is even a part of Europe has been and remains open. It is the foundational debate of Russian identity and the battlefield upon which the two major Russian intellectual traditions, the Westernizers and Slavophiles, have bitterly fought. The debate is so central to understanding Russia that one of my professors found it necessary to preface a course entitled “Introduction to Russian Civilization” with a simple question: “Is Russia a European or an Asian nation—or neither?” 

To criticize the Department’s name for being imperialistic while seeking to rename it the “Eastern European Studies Department” is itself an act of imperialism. Doing so hazards an answer to a question that Russians themselves have not even answered. It clouds the intended “interpretation and contextualization” of Russia and its broader environs with bias. It poisons the intellectual well before we’ve even begun to draw from it.

The petition continues by arguing that the “current faculty already possesses a wealth of knowledge which would streamline a transition to a broader department.” Its sponsors cite a cavalcade of professors in the Department with experience in non-Russian Slavic languages, including Serbo-Croatian and Polish. 

However, to suggest that the Department is ready, in its current state, to suddenly offer a whole language family’s worth of courses is fundamentally dishonest. As one professor among the aforementioned cavalcade told me: there is no one in the Department expressly qualified to teach any language other than Russian. This is not even to mention the lack of teaching assistants and graduate students available to support such an endeavor. The petition only somewhat addresses the discrepancy between its grand vision and reality—calling for, in a throwaway, “the recruitment of additional knowledgeable faculty and staff.” To this, I respond that the proposed changes would not just require recruitment. They would need a draft.

While I do not doubt that the authors advocate a restructuring of the Department from a place of true intellectual vitality, the petition resorts to weak self-justification and thus illustrates precisely why the name should not change:

 “Students … would rather graduate with the credentials to understand and interpret a broader region of the world,” the sponsors write. “By making the shift to an Eastern European Studies Department, graduates will have more tools to improve the world.” 

As it stands, whatever new credentials an “Eastern European Studies Department” might presumably confer on students would be false, and whatever new tools it might offer would be useless. In terms of course offerings, the Department would still effectively be a Russian one. The proposed new name, then, would be misleading in practice, nominally suggesting that the Russian Department offers courses of study it does not and cannot.

While I do not doubt that the authors advocate a restructuring of the Department from a place of true intellectual vitality, the petition resorts to weak self-justification and thus illustrates precisely why the name should not change[.]

The petition ends by noting that “[t]he Russian Department and German Department are currently the only departments at Dartmouth which center around [sic.] one country instead of covering the broader regional context.” The authors cite the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages (ASCL) Program and the Middle Eastern Studies (MES) Program as examples of “departments [sic.] which offer greater context.” In the first place, these are not departments but programs. In the second place, even if they were departments, they are not good models to follow.

Pigeonholing drastically different cultures and languages into a region-focused department can and will spark uncomfortable questions. For example, pegging Japanese and Chinese language courses into one “ASCL Program” forces us to ask if there is any relationship between the Japanese and Chinese culturo-linguistic worlds beyond that of mere geographical proximity. 

Similar questions arise with this petition’s proposal of an “Eastern European Studies Department.” As mentioned earlier, is Russia even “European”? If the Department were to offer Ukrainian language courses, is Ukraine European? Or is it Slavic? Or is Russia Slavic and Ukraine European? How about Poland? I don’t know enough to have an answer, but I am sure nationalists, anthropologists, thinkers, and statesmen of many different stripes think they do. And these questions are far too complex to be answered by this petition or by a perfunctory departmental name change.

Fundamentally, I am not opposed to the expansion of the Russian Department that this petition champions. There are few things that I would like to do more than study a bevy of Slavic languages and explore even further my passion for Slavic culture. I hope that the Administration understands the incredible quality of the teaching and scholarship that comes out of the Russian Department and honors its potential by giving it more resources. 

It is perhaps too late to save the truth from this war and all wars, but I exhort the Administration to do everything in its power to stop the Russian Department—which has existed since 1918 and served as a home for the College’s first female professor—from becoming the next casualty of the War in Ukraine.