Dear Mario — and Joan,

I’m sorry to be so slow in responding to Joan’s thoughtful email re the future of the program; the first week of class was pretty frantic.  Like Joan, I will be interested to learn what the trends are in grad school applications. She suggested doing research on that question at the last Executive Committee meeting, but I don’t know whether anyone has done that. At that same meeting, I added that building on strengths can become a circular process, and whether that cycle is virtuous or not depends on which circle you belong to. I know I share the concerns of other early modernists that with the departure of so many central lines in premodern — starting with Martin Stevens in my time and many others before him through Joe and David Greetham more recently — that these fields are getting marginalized.

At our meeting with Bill Kelly a year ago fall, he said very clearly that “coverage” was an obsolete objective, and Carrie has added that building on strengths is the mantra with Chase and Louise as well. Certainly under Bill’s leadership and more recently Chase’s, the Graduate Center has done brilliantly at recruiting extraordinary appointments in targeted areas, and Bill made it very clear that he wanted English, his own program, to take advantage of similar opportunities. Eric Lott is one such opportunity and Cathy Davidson was presented as another. I hope that Feisal Mohamed will be our next — because we have a diverse student body even with a smaller but still relatively large class compared to other programs. One of the things I loved about Berkeley, like us part of a large public system, was the huge talent pool of faculty members in all fields. I came prepared to do American literature — in part because of market trends and to work with Fred Crews and Larzer Ziff, but my interests evolved and took me elsewhere. At recruitment day last year one of the most eloquent testimonials came from a matriculated student with a comparable experience who ended up in romantics.

So I would like to see us continue to offer diversity even while building on strengths in place. And of course there are vast strengths in a variety of fields on the campuses where junior hires have increased dramatically.  I think this combination better serves our students while allowing for unanticipated developments in both market and more intellectual trends for institutions and individuals.

Thanks, Joan, for getting me to think about this and Mario for giving me a bit more time to respond.

Best,

Rich