from Medieval Academy News (Spring 2003)

Medieval Centre vs. Mainline Department?
by David Klausner

In the first of these occasional reports on medieval centers, my friend and colleague Nicholas Howe noted that “centers are unlikely to thrive when higher administrators have to choose between funding them or funding mainline departments.” It was precisely this that most concerned me as I contemplated moving into the hot seat at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies three-and-a-half years ago.

After discussing the question with my predecessor, Roberta Frank, we decided that if the dean and provost agreed, the best solution would be to move the Centre out of its long-time home in the School of Graduate Studies (where each five-year review began by considering the Centre’s continued existence) and into the Faculty of Arts and Science, in effect turning the Centre into a full and permanent department of the University.

The rest, as they say, is history. Although the move has seemed puzzling to those with no interest or experience in administration, for me and my staff it has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. One only partially anticipated advantage—indeed, perhaps the greatest one of all—is that I now have regular contact with the chairs of the seventeen cognate departments with whom the Centre interacts. In retrospect, this has been the major point of the exercise.

Although the Centre is not a small unit—we have about 65 doctoral students and about 20 masters students at any one time—we have a total of only 7.4 full-time-equivalent faculty positions, divided among 13 faculty members. Our masthead, on the other hand, lists a total of 77 faculty, not including emeriti. Since we have no direct budgetary association with most of them, these faculty come to us by good will, their own and that of their home departments. It will be clear, then, that good relations with these departments is at the very top of the list of desiderata facing the Director.

Our move into Arts and Science has facilitated these good relations in major, often unexpected, ways. Simply sitting down with the chairs regularly at the dean’s monthly meetings has meant that there is a casual opportunity to discuss issues of mutual interest without the necessity of formalizing the situation with an appointment. These regular meetings have also fostered a clear sense of where our mutual interests lie within the University’s larger long-term planning. This is particularly important, since when a medievalist retires, the hiring of a replacement medievalist is far from guaranteed and is usually subject to intense discussion within the department concerning departmental priorities. Before our move, there was usually no mechanism by which the director of the Centre could be party to those discussions. Now, it is far more likely to be a matter of course that I will be consulted.

The primary point I’d like to make is that for an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary center, such as all centers of medieval and renaissance studies must be, the nurturing of warm and cordial relations with cognate departments is at least as important as keeping the dean and the central administration on our side. Let me give two examples of the kind of cooperation that can result from good relations.

Last year the University of Toronto advertised a total of eight searches in medieval areas. For only one of these was the Centre the home department; in three others we were the junior partner in a joint search, and in four we were an interested party with no required standing. In those last four searches, through the chair’s good will or through decanal recommendation, the Centre was represented from the beginning on three, and in the fourth a casual conversation with the chair produced an offer to add a representative of the Centre to the search committee.

My second example involves a question that worried me frequently at the outset of my term. We rely on a wide variety of departments to provide us with courses, with faculty for supervisory purposes, and with support in a variety of ways. What can we give them in return? One clear option seemed to me to be interdisciplinary collaborative programs that would interest the departments as much as the Centre.

We have long had a small but very successful collaborative program in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, uniting the Centre with the Departments of Classics and Philosophy, as well as programs in Women’s Studies, and Book History and Print Culture, each of them involving a large number of departments. Last year I put forward a proposal for a new collaborative program in Editing Medieval Texts and invited twelve departments to join us in the venture. Somewhat to my surprise, ten departments signed on immediately, including several whose interest was unexpected but reflected the research interests of individual department members. A fuller description of this new program appears on page 10 of the Winter 2002 issue of the Newsletter. As a footnote, I might add that there has been a groundswell of student support for this program, and we now have about as many in it as we can handle.

In our case, all the necessary courses already existed either in the Centre’s program or that of one of the collaborating departments, and the only new course we needed to fund was a core seminar on editorial resources. In addition to a survey of European libraries, this course is intended to make available the vast microfilm resources of the Toronto academic community, including materials housed in the library of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, the John P. Robarts Research Library, Records of Early English Drama, the Dictionary of Old English, Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana, and the Documents of Early Essex Database, as well as the collections of individual scholars.

There was an interesting side effect to the proposal of this program. At the outset of my term, I discovered during an initial discussion with the dean about merit pay that for those in the physical and life sciences, as well as many in the social sciences, “editing” had an extremely negative connotation. The usual assumption was that a faculty member had asked several friends and colleagues to contribute articles in order to add a book to an otherwise slim curriculum vitae.

There was no conception of the difference between editing a book of essays and editing a primary text. Preparing the proposal for the collaborative program allowed me to write a preamble which was, in effect, a manifesto of the place of text editing in medieval studies.

One further move I would strongly recommend is the formation of a caucus of humanities chairs on whatever level of formality or informality is appropriate. This was suggested to us a couple of years ago by our dean, who pointed out that there had long been a regular meeting of science department chairs and that it wielded a considerable amount of power. Since forming such a group on an informal level within the humanities, we have found not only that it is an extremely useful forum for the discussion of all kinds of subjects of mutual interest, but that it makes it relatively simple for us to communicate as a body with the higher administration, and that such communication is usually highly effective.

There is no question that Nick Howe’s warning is right: forced to choose between an interdisciplinary center and a mainstream department, university administrators will always go for the department. There are, however, ways of convincing them that a center is really no different from a department, as there are ways of convincing departments that the long-term health of a center is important for them as well.