Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000637, Sat, 8 Jul 1995 08:33:16 -0700

Subject
Slavic Dept. at UW (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITORIAL NOTE: NABOKV-L is running the announcement below since a number
of subscribers wrote letters in support of the University of Washington
Slavic Department. A number of students there are doing Nabokov
dissertations.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 1995 13:32:00 -0700 (PDT)
From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>
To: Nabokov <Nabokv-L@UCSBVM.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Slavic/UW

Don, if you find this appropriate, would you please run the following:


Over the period of the last seven months, as the department of Slavic L &
L at the University of Washington remained on the brink of elimination,
mostly because of the ill-informed and misguided actions of local
administrators, many of you wrote letters in our support or expressed
your interest and concern in other ways. My return from the Nabokov
conference in Nice, at the end of June, happily coincided with our
President's announcement that he was overturning the decision of the
Dean of Arts and Sciences to eliminate the department and is restoring it
virtually intact (graduate program and all, even a vacancy that we were
not allowed to fill last year) with some possible cuts down the line as
people retire. This is, overall, a victory since even cuts now can be
negotiated, and there will be a new administration in place with whom we
can hopefully deal better than with the previous one (or so my colleagues
from North Carolina, whose Provost will be our next President, are
telling me...)

Both personally and on behalf of my department, faculty and students, I
would like to deeply thank everyone who supported and helped us in this
battle. We are alive and, hopefully in time, will be well once again!

Galya Diment