In a presentation Monday about the impact of Duke University’s cost-cutting efforts on their work, Duke Libraries leaders told their employees that they would no longer provide dedicated support to Russian-language collections due to the “elimination of Duke’s Department of Slavic & Eurasian Studies.”
Leaders from Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, which includes the department, were surprised to hear it.
“To be clear: no such decision has been made,” Owen Covington, Trinity’s associate dean for communications and marketing, said in a statement Thursday. “In fact, Trinity has been active in retaining and hiring faculty in this department during the past year.”
Covington did note that Slavic & Eurasian Studies (SES) has been in “preliminary discussions” about a merger with the Department of German Studies for over a year, but he said nothing has been decided.
“Those discussions are ongoing and Trinity College will not get ahead of its faculty in considering changes of this kind,” he wrote.
The mix-up is emblematic of the confusion spreading across campus as Duke continues layoffs, which follow a round of buyouts. With policies and timelines differing among Duke’s disparate departments, university leaders are struggling to provide clear information to their anxious faculty and staff.
The Slavic department was already small before the ongoing cuts began, with eight permanent faculty members and two dedicated staff who spent a quarter of their time supporting another department. Then both staff positions were eliminated as part of the cost cutting, as was the librarian specializing in Slavic studies, who supported their work.
Jehanne Gheith spent the last year of her term as chair, which ended in June, sharing duties with the chair of German Studies, who was not previously affiliated with SES, because no other SES faculty could take it on. Now he is the lone SES chair and will lead both departments, Gheith told The Assembly and the INDY.
She added that she is “stunned” the university would make such drastic cuts to Russian studies when the Russia-Ukraine war is upending the geopolitical balance.
“Training experts in Russian and Slavic is going to be really important in the coming years,” Gheith said. “I think the deans get that. I don’t think at higher levels they understand how often the U.S. gets caught short.”
Her frustration has been amplified by the process leading to this point.
Gheith didn’t realize Trinity leaders had already decided which staff members would receive buyout offers until the morning she met with them this spring. She thought it was just a regular check-in meeting with the dean of the humanities.
Gheith said she was told during the meeting that working in a department that may be merged with another was one of the criteria for selecting which staff would receive a buyout offer, though that was retracted in later conversations.
“I never had a sense that I had any control,” Gheith said. She added that she was asked for input, which she provided by email after the meeting, but she never received a response. (Update: After this story published, Gheith said she found an email from April responding to her input.)
Now, she is left confused about why the library would continue supporting German but not Russian if the two departments will merge. And while she is still excited that SES is hosting the acclaimed and exiled Russian journalist Elena Kostiuchenko as a visiting scholar for the year, she wants to ensure the department can provide a robust experience.
Gheith also worries that SES won’t be the only humanities department to suffer stringent cuts, and she’s not alone.
Three other international area studies librarians received buyouts in addition to the Slavic librarian, according to a list of departures sent to library staff and obtained by The Assembly and INDY. That included those specializing in Jewish and Islamic Studies—both sides of the other war embroiling international politics.
Joseph Salem, the head of Duke Libraries, wrote in a public message last week that his team would “scale back support for subject areas where the university is also scaling back.” That prompted concern among other faculty, including departments like Asian & Middle Eastern Studies.
“I already had a long exchange about this sentence with the provost and” Salem, said Shai Ginsburg, the department’s chair. Ginsburg noted that the Arabic program has been growing in recent years, as has Korean, which also lost its librarian.
Though his department has not lost any staff members in the cuts, Ginsburg is frustrated with the lack of transparency.
“There was no strategic plan that was shared with the faculty about where this university is going intellectually,” Ginsburg said. “It’s a small university to begin with. It cannot invest in all areas of knowledge. But there’s never a true discussion—I’m not talking about grand, empty visions about ‘excellence in research’ and what have you—mapping the university, where to invest, how to sustain the humanities. There’s no road map.”
Trinity leaders did not respond to a question about whether other area studies would be scaled back.
Disclosure: Reporter Matt Hartman worked at the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences from 2019 to 2024.
Matt Hartman is a higher education reporter at The Assembly. Comment on this story at [email protected].