New Directors and Chairs
This article was originally published in the September 1999 issue of CLASnotes.
Ken Wald, Director, Jewish Studies
A quarter of a century ago, a small group of faculty visionaries worked with sympathetic administrators to create UF's Center for Jewish Studies. What began as a modest undergraduate concentration is now a strong and vibrant program housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The Center is best known for its interdisciplinary major and minor, a distinguished visiting lecture series, and the invaluable Price Library of Judaica. 
The undergraduate program exposes students to the full range of the Jewish experience by drawing on faculty from Asian and African Languages and Literatures, Religion, History, Political Science, English and other disciplines. While some students pursue the Jewish Studies curriculum as an avocation or to better understand their own religious traditions, others seek us out to prepare for careers in the rabbinate, Jewish communal service, or academic work in Jewish Studies.
As director, my efforts will be concentrated on two major priorities: (1) enriching academic opportunities in Jewish Studies at UF and, (2) enhancing the outreach of the Center. To enrich the academic program, we have developed a new internship in Jewish communal service and a capstone seminar for undergraduates and graduates. We plan to involve faculty from other departments in the curriculum and redouble efforts to promote study in Israel as an integral part of the undergraduate experience. The Center plans to work closely with departments in developing graduate options to complement the undergraduate program. The goal of the outreach effort is to bring the services of the Center to the entire university. In addition to our usual staple of visiting lecturers, we have plans for joint programs with the Center for Latin American Studies and the Harn Museum, and have begun conversations about the Diaspora Studies program in Anthropology and a genocide studies initiative with the Center for African Studies. By encouraging our faculty to utilize their expertise as visiting lecturers, consultants and scholars in residence throughout Florida, our goal is to make the Center for Jewish Studies a statewide as well as a campus resource.
John Leavey, Chair, English Department
Last month the Department of English was featured in CLASnotes, and Ira Clark as outgoing chair identified an interesting problem for a department as large and diverse as English. When confronted with a seemingly simple set of questions: What is English? What does it do? The response is often a stammer, silence, a partial sketch—all responses you don't expect from those involved with the intricacies of language and communication.
Ira's multifaceted response characterized the many topics, media, and methods that occupy the teaching and research interests of the diverse faculty making up our Department, from writing and literature to computers, creative writing, and film, from children's literature to cultural studies and theory, from nationalist literatures (British and American) to world literatures in English. But I was struck that he ended on the topic of stammering, and I would like to talk about the future of such a response for our profession, especially as a self-justification for what "we" do.
Shouldn't a discipline, and even more so a "profession," particularly one that is involved in perhaps all its endeavors with persuasion, argument, interpretation, shouldn't that discipline have better answers for its university colleagues? What is going on when the discipline supposedly assigned the university responsibility of writing and textual production, of argumentation and rhetoric has trouble formulating an answer? It starts to answer...halts...begins again.... Shouldn't that discipline know what it is doing and how to express it?
The answer, of course, for me, is no. Stammering is a certain rhythm of response, both halting and repetitious; it is the rhetoric of the interrupted sentence, the quos ego of Virgil. Our stammering results from a disciplinary boundary constantly breaking out of bounds and its responsibilities. It isn't so much that literature and writing have given way to film or the digital, it isn't so much that the fragmentation of argument makes the use of a five-paragraph essay questionable, but the very diversity of this one discipline within a vast array of disciplines reminds all of us that the organization of the university is constantly undergoing structural and strategic change. The humanities, of which English is just one small part, constantly reconsider the grounds and the reasons of their work: what do we know, how do we know it, and why continue to know it in the ways we have traditionally known it. English's stammers are just one of the many ways to indicate the continual rethinking of our spasmodic attention to what we do.
Credits
Writers
Ken Wald and John Leavey
