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Once near failure, Slavic Dept. revitalized

By Alex Dubilet
February 02, 2005

When Kevin Platt became the chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages
and Literatures three years ago, the program was in disarray.

The low enrollment in Penn's advanced Russian language classes said it
all -- in the spring of Platt's first year, the number of students taking
third-year Russian had shrunk to one.

This year that number is up to 10, a reflection, he says, of the overall
revival of the Slavic department that has taken place since 2002.
Although the department is still modest in size -- four active tenured or
tenure-track professors and three lecturers -- it is in considerably better
shape than it was three years ago. The standardization of the Russian
language program, the expanded offering of content courses and the creation
of a Russian heritage program are some of the most apparent improvements
that are generating a broader excitement toward Slavic studies at Penn.

"The overall resurgence of Slavic studies is a reflection of a conscious
decision by the deans [and] by the administration that a serious university
could not exist without a serious Slavic department," Platt says.
During the 1980s, Penn was a major research center in Slavic studies, with a
number of scholars across a variety of disciplines ranging from history and
literature to economy and political science. But by the 1990s the situation
worsened, especially within the Slavic Department itself.

"For a variety of reasons the department was falling apart in the '90s, and
it was really a confluence of events," Platt explains. "What happened was
the Soviet Union fell apart and there were a number of retirements and
losses of professors to other departments all at the same time, and the
department shrank down to two ... tenure-track positions."
The department's future wavered in uncertainty until the decision to
reinvest was made under the guidance of former School of Arts and Sciences
Dean Samuel Preston.

"The department had gotten pretty small. The decision we had to make was
whether or not we should rebuild the faculty in a modest way," recalls
School of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell, who worked under Preston.
"We were looking to bring in a chair from the outside who could bring a
fresh perspective on the department."

They hired Platt and promised him two additional tenure-track hires. And
that was the turning point.
The challenges of rebuilding the department were numerous, ranging from
redesigning the curriculum to appealing more broadly to the student body.

In the remodeled version, Platt has embraced the current academic trend
aimed at breaking down traditional disciplinary borders -- something that
Penn has come to advocate strongly.

"I am trying to be forward-thinking in terms of the way I construct the
discipline here," Platt says, "so that we are consciously attempting to
create a department which has a lot of interdisciplinary bridges built
around it and staffed by people who are interested in interdisciplinary
content." That perspective is guiding the department's current faculty
search.

In remaking its image, the department has been actively trying to reach out
to students, and some say that the atmosphere of the department has become
both more serious and more inviting.

"You don't see other departments having this kind of aggressive marketing
campaign," College senior Daniel Watson says, referring to the multitude of
flyers in Williams Hall advertising Russian culture, events and the
department. "The Slavic Department was really trying to reach out to the
student body."

On a personal level, Watson added that as a major, he has had a unique
experience with the department.
"The department allows me to get both perspectives -- to engage personally
with some professors and engage really intensely on an academic level with
others."

Two years ago the department added another experimental component to its
curriculum -- the much-praised Russian heritage program.
In light of the fact that Penn has a large number of students from the
Russian community, the department decided to create a program that
specifically targets students who might speak the Russian language yet lack
the grammar and reading skills to be fully fluent.
"The reason why we decided to come up with the new program was [because] we
had trouble accommodating heritage students," says Julia Verkholantsev,
coordinator of the heritage program.