For the past week I've been telling people that I was going to write about the dissolution of the Folklore Graduate Group at Penn. Mostly this was met with a slightly bewildered, "We have a folklore program?!"
Yes, we do. Well, I mean, we did. It began back in 1963 and gradually expanded into a full-fledged department with full faculty only to then contract back into a graduate program in 1999. In late 2003, the administration decided to freeze all admissions to the program.
It appears that one of the consequences of GET-UP and its partial success is that the University can no longer afford to have as many graduate students. The University's Planning and Priorities Committee conducted a study of the different graduate programs' performance over the past decade to determine where to best make cuts. At the time, the Folklore Program admitted only about two graduate students per year. The committee swiftly recommended that that number be cut down to zero.
The administration and the folklore faculty alike acknowledge that the Folklore Program at Penn has seen better days. In the past, the program was very prestigious and well-known internationally. It was big, not so much in size, but in impact. Its graduates became leaders both within the field and without. The last 10 years have certainly been difficult, with a lot of faculty either leaving or retiring and not being replaced. However, each side claims that the indifference of the other made strengthening the program impossible.
While talking with Jack Nagel, the School of Arts and Sciences' associate dean for graduate studies, I got the impression that the discipline of folklore was dead and that the elimination of the program at Penn was sort of Darwinian. He characterized folklore not as an interdisciplinary study incorporating anthropology, sociology, English and history, but rather a mere "topic" for these disciplines.
Of course Mary Hufford, a graduate of Penn's Ph.D. program in folklore and the current director of the Center for Folklore and Ethnography at Penn, could not disagree more. Created in 1999, the center works to fill the void left by the closure of the Folklore Department and remains a very active hub for student research and work in the discipline.
Standing in the Folklore Program's archives, surrounded by 40 years of research, Hufford said to me, "The difficulty with and the wonderful thing about the discipline of folklore is that it's in that middle ground between the polity and academia." She went on to describe the academic-based community service course offered by Folklore this semester that involves students visiting elderly members of the Liberian community of West Philadelphia to document their memories and traditions.
Other recent projects of the CFE include an ethnography of North Philadelphia's Village of Arts and Humanities, an ethnography of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and also research into the effects of a community's exposure to a carcinogen in collaboration with Penn's Medical School. The CFE's primary affiliation is the Folklore Graduate Group, and although Hufford is hopeful, she is uncertain about the center's future. As the remaining Folklore graduate students complete their dissertations, there will be fewer people to work with and research will become more difficult.
Others worry about the continuation of undergraduate folklore studies at Penn. Tonya Taylor, an outspoken Folklore graduate student, has taken it upon herself to teach her Introduction to Folklore class in a way that will prepare her students for future independent study. It is her hope that the students will continue to study and research within the discipline of folklore even if they must do so independently.
In her inaugural address, President Amy Gutmann outlined her Penn Compact, which placed emphasis on things like furthering interdisciplinary study and improving community interaction. It's ironic and sad that a month later the decision was made to continue the freeze on graduate admissions to the folklore program indefinitely.
At the end of my interview with Associate Dean Nagel, he shook his head and sighed that a folklore department just never became something that a great university has to have. As Penn increases its efforts to compete with both the selectivity and endowment of the Harvard Corporation, we should keep in mind what we risk losing along the way. Penn's aggrandizement could come at the cost of the very things President Gutmann claims to want to embrace.
Amara Rockar is a sophomore political science major from St. Louis. Out of Range appears on Fridays.
