This just makes me want to weep. It gives some account of the fate of the department where I studied for my B.A. Are we always to be governed by fools? Little-souled and short-sighted and bumbling fools?
It makes me think of the way that publishers are currently slitting their own throats by whoring themselves out to the market only and stabbing the collective back of literature and all who care about literature.
Fools.
Peter A Leonard writes:
It is all very sad, very depressing.:jester:
At the time the decision was made, I wrote a letter to my MP (I was advised by a lecturer that this might be of some help).However, it seems that someone must have thought that the idea made sense on paper (God knows it made no sense anywhere else), and simply made the decision unwaveringly and unilaterally, in the manner, it seems, that such executive decisions are now made, and was simply not disposed to listen to the views of any of the people actually affected, all of whom, to my knowledge, were entirely opposed to the decision. At the time I applied to Durham University, I also made applications, for the same course, to a number of others. I was tempted by Sheffield University. The course did not look bad, and Sheffield, the city, seemed very lively. Durham was not a lively or an especially cosmopolitan city (it must be even less so now the department has been axed), but, having received offers from Sheffield and Durham, I chose Durham on the strength of the East Asian Studies department, which was, indeed, a strength. Most of the students on the course I entered were learning Japanese from scratch, and were to be spending the second year in Japan. The task the teachers had in that first year was to make sure we were actually able to speak Japanese – not fluently, perhaps, but usefully – in a single year before we went out. This they did in every single case of which I am aware. This is one example of the many merits of that department. To have axed it is nothing short of a work of vandalism and philistinism, and I, along with the Japanese people, as vouchsafed, it seems, by the unnamed representative of the Japanese Embassy, will never forgive those responsible for the decision. They are pigs, and I hope for the opportunity one day to tell them so in person.