LAST-MINUTE REPRIEVE FOR LINGUISTICS

After a tense six months in which the linguistics department narrowly escaped demotion to a committee, faculty members and students are rejoicing that their department will continue to exist.

But the department's brush with extinction--which galvanized students, faculty, and nationally renowned linguists--spurred a debate that will continue to face Harvard in the future: How does the University assess the validity of an academic field and determine its status in the curriculum?

When Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles sent a letter to Linguistics department members last summer informing them that the department would become a committee, he said the change would improve the way linguistics was studied at Harvard.

Internal battles over tenure had paralyzed the department, an only one senior faculty member remained.

Knowles said in the letter that a departmental review had concluded that since linguistics was an interdisciplinary field it would be better taught in a committee that could draw from the academic and financial resources of several departments.

Considering this a direct attack on their academic pursuits, 20 students in the department formed the Harvard-Radcliffe Undergraduate Linguists' Society in October and began a long and ultimately successful campaign to resurrect their department.

"We're all really upset about the proposed changes," linguistics concentrator Elizabeth L. Kent '94 said at the time. "Essentially what they're doing is killing linguistics."

The students were soon joined by national experts, including MIT professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky, who is considered the founder of modern linguistics.

Stepping up the pressure on the administration, the Linguistics Society of America--the largest linguistics society in the world-also lodged a complaint with University officials.

The society defended linguistics as a legitimate and growing academic field and urged Harvard to keep it as department. A committee cannot recruit or tenure its own professors and can only recommend classes through full-standing departments.

But knowles and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Christoph J. Wolff, the acting linguistics department chair, insisted that linguistic was fundamentally interdisciplinary.

In October, Knowles formed an advisory committee to examine whether to change linguistics into a graduate degree committee, an undergraduate degree committee, or an interdisciplinary degree committee.

Under either option, linguistics would have been taught mainly through other departments.

Although the advisory committee, chaired by Professor of Philosophy Warren D. Goldfarb '69, did not announce its decision to maintain the department until maid-May, students discovered a month earlier that their campaign had been successful.

"The implication of [the committee's] finding is that a well functioning department would better serve our instructional needs than any of the alternatives considered," Knowles eventually told the department.

And only months after the heat of the controversy, the department now has a new chair for next year and two new tenured faculty.

Potebnja professor of Ukranian Philology Michael S. Flier, who will take over as new chair on July 1, said he thought the organized opposition to demoting the department affected the Faculty's decision.

"The possible threat of it dissolving immediately got all of the philologists and linguists in the campus and in the country involved," Flier said.

Flier said the two new senior appointments demonstrate "a very strong commitment and a strong signal that Linguistics is alive and well and moving on."

Some concentrators are disappointed that two junior faculty members who left at the end of this year will be replaced by only one person. But most students are satisfied not only that their department still stands, but also that efforts are being made to improve it.

"I'm definitely happy that they're keeping it a department," said linguistics concentrator Sara K. LaRoche '95. "All the students want the department to stay as a department."