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Sophia Rodriguez-Bell (A.B. ’24) had not planned to major in Slavic and Russian studies. But after taking her first Slavic studies class—drawn in by the professor’s evident passion and its small class size—she was sold.

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, housed in the Division of the Arts & Humanities, is one of several small, highly specialized departments that distinguish the University even among its elite peers. These departments have cultivated close-knit communities dedicated to the language and cultural studies they provide.

In July, the Maroon reported on significant restructuring efforts in the Division of the Arts & Humanities occurring in light of new Trump administration policies and federal budget cuts. The cuts come at a time the University is facing ongoing financial difficulties, though administrators recently expressed cautious optimism after the University’s budget deficit shrank from $288 to $160 million in 2025.

Among the changes was a proposal to consolidate the Division of the Arts & Humanities from 15 departments to just eight. According to multiple sources, departments with fewer than 15 tenure-track faculty members could face consolidation. This includes the Departments of Comparative Literature, Germanic Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and South Asian Languages and Civilizations.

“We won’t build a stronger future for these beloved subjects by treating them as static or frozen in time,” wrote Deborah Nelson, dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities, in a Chicago Tribune op-ed addressing the future of the division and possible results of restructuring.

“The humanities can never be contained within a final, completed form,” she added. “They must be responsive to the constancy of change.”

Restructuring efforts remain ongoing. Although no departments have been officially confirmed for consolidation, some faculty within these smaller departments have expressed concern that the process has already resulted in decreased department stability and fewer languages being offered in the future.

“This feels like a step backwards—having to justify your [department’s] existence,” Nisha Kommattam, associate instructional professor in comparative literature, told the Maroon.

A Closer Look at These Small Departments

Comparative literature, Germanic studies, Slavic languages and literatures, and South Asian languages and civilizations all have relatively few graduate and Ph.D. students, according to the autumn quarter 2025 census reports published by the Office of the University Registrar.

Small departments tend to offer small classes, which many students are drawn to for the opportunity for more individual attention and student-professor interaction that larger, lecture-style classes might not be able to offer.

“Having those small classes were really helpful for me—[it was] really intellectually stimulating,” said Rodriguez-Bell, who majored in linguistics and Russian and Eastern European studies and previously wrote for the Maroon.

Recounting her first year taking classes in the Slavic department, Rodriguez-Bell explained how her professor would joke about turning all of his students into Russian and Eastern European studies majors. “That actually did happen with a good number of us,” she added, including herself.

“I fell in love with the language and the coursebook because of the professors,” Rodriguez-Bell said.

Anne Moss, chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, echoed her statement: “Not only do the small departments preserve the highest quality teaching of language and culture, [but] they also are providing spaces to think about why and how we teach those cultures today.”

Moss, whose research focuses on literature, culture, and gender theory in relation to the Russian-speaking diaspora, joined the Slavic department in 2021. She described a sense of relief at the way UChicago approached and appreciated specialized area studies.

“I didn’t need to explain why studying Russian literature of the 19th century or learning about underappreciated women writers of the 19th-century tradition was important,” Moss said. “It was important because it was a contribution to understanding this field.”

Many of these small departments contribute substantial global research to cultural studies in areas outside of English or American cultures, which some students—including Rodriguez-Bell—have the opportunity to participate in.

“[I] was looking at the current conflicts between Russia and Ukraine,” Rodriguez-Bell said, describing her experience working as a research assistant for one of her professors. “My job essentially would be to look at articles from Russian news media and save them and pass them along if they had anything to do with those sorts of actions.”

On top of research opportunities, these small departments provide extensive language-learning courses for students at their core. The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures has faculty covering eight different Eastern European languages. The Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations teaches Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and more. The Department of Germanic Studies offers Norwegian and Yiddish courses on top of German. The Department of Comparative Literature offers courses engaging with an even wider range of languages, from Japanese to Lakota.

“It’s one of the key assets of the University of Chicago that we teach 50-plus languages, and not one of them is redundant,” Kommattam said. “Regardless of whether 30 people sit in first-year Japanese or whether two people sit in first-year Hittite, that’s wealth. That’s an asset.”

Small Departments, Big History, and Deep Ties to UChicago’s Identity

Some of these small departments have long histories at UChicago. Germanic studies, for example, has existed as a field at UChicago since the University’s founding in 1892 and has since provided intensive studies on German literature, philosophy, and visual arts.

Slavic studies at the University also dates back to as early as 1896. Today, the department researches and teaches a variety of Eastern European cultures, not just Russian. These include Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian.

“Many Slavic departments around the country are just Russian departments,” said Moss. She described UChicago’s Slavic department as unique in its focus on hiring people who specialize in less dominant languages: “We’re decolonizing the Slavic department by hiring [these] faculty.”

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures’ emphasis on multicultural studies is a shared theme among some of these small departments. The Departments of Comparative Literature and South Asian Languages and Civilizations both have similar approaches.

Founded in 1966, the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at UChicago offers extensive linguistic study, textual analysis, and research in many different South Asian languages. According to Andrew Ollett, an associate professor in the department, challenging and reflecting on Western ideologies of knowledge is one of the main goals of the department.

“One of the things that we try to do is have a broader, comparative conversation about literature, religion, [and] state formation,” Ollett said. “We have to understand that these are things that did not only take place in Europe. They have a longer history outside of Europe, and we are constantly reminding people of that.”

Kommattam, who focuses on South Asia from within the comparative literature department, also emphasized the importance of these programs at UChicago: “South Indian languages, Dravidian languages—very few places in the U.S. even teach them and offer them, and one of the main strengths of UChicago is that we do.”

Dravidian languages originate primarily in South India and are spoken by 220 million people globally; Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam are among the most common. According to the South Asian Language Teachers Association, fewer than a dozen North American universities teach any Dravidian languages, with most only offering Tamil. UChicago has historically offered courses in Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam.

But, like many of the programs offered by these small departments, restructuring efforts have already changed the way these studies are approached.

“This is the first year in a number of decades—if ever—that, because of [the] Tamil [faculty] search being frozen and delayed, we are not currently offering first-year Tamil,” Kommattam said. “How is that fair?”

“It’s Not Obvious Where the Savings Come From”

In June, Nelson created five working groups made up of 40 division staff members. Current proposed changes, including the potential consolidation of the 15 humanities departments into eight, were submitted in charge sheets to each of these groups. Within the charge sheets, Nelson described the restructuring as a result of “historical funding pressure” at institutional and national levels.

In addition to current restructuring efforts, the Division of the Arts & Humanities has paused most doctoral program admissions and master’s program admissions for the 2026–27 academic year.

Consolidation of departments and changes to Ph.D. programs are not new to the University of Chicago or the Division of the Arts & Humanities. The Department of Archaeology reorganized in 1903 before eventually becoming the Department of Art History in 1996. In 2024, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations was renamed the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. In the past 30 years alone, the division has added three new departments: visual arts, cinema and media studies, and comparative literature.

For many students and faculty, however, the new changes have raised questions about the University’s ultimate goals.

“It is really detrimental to the community of Ph.D. students as a whole to have admissions paused in this way,” said Chana Toth-Sewell, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Currently, her department has just nine total doctoral students. With admissions now paused, “our community isn’t growing, so the number of interlocutors that we have who are focusing on studying topics, regions, or cultures that resonate with ours is much smaller,” she added, describing how fewer people means fewer chances for researchers to work together and generate new knowledge.

Some faculty have expressed skepticism over the financial reasoning behind restructuring decisions, calling into question the extent Trump administration attacks have influenced policy changes compared to poor financial decisions on the University’s part.

“It’s not obvious where the savings comes from,” said Clifford Ando, Robert O Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History, in an interview with the Maroon. Since late 2023, Ando has published almost a dozen op-eds in the Maroon on University finances.

The University has not released any statements about reducing faculty size or removing programs. According to Ando, merging departments without doing either would not save the University any money. “The only way that this [restructuring] saves money is if you cut [the] things that they claim they’re not going to cut.”

Since the proposal’s announcement in June, the University has released financial statements that show its budget deficit shrank from $288.4 million in 2024 to just $160 million in 2025. Ando has written two op-eds discussing the University’s budget as it relates to restructuring efforts. In them, he called into question the extent to which financial pressures justify divisional changes.

In “Reorg 101: The Past and Future of the Race to the Bottom,” Ando writes: “[F]aculty in humanistic fields and the interpretive social sciences are the only faculty in the arts and sciences who systematically pay for themselves.” He explains that humanities departments do not need expensive buildings or equipment, making instruction in these fields comparatively cheap.

“If money isn’t really the issue at all, why do this? Why attempt to?” Ando told the Maroon. “I think, long-term, the intent is to reduce the number of faculties here.” University administrators have not specified whether the departmental consolidation would lead to reduced faculty.

In an article answering frequently asked questions about the reorganization efforts, Nelson noted that humanities are not as inexpensive as Ando suggests, writing that “the net cost of supporting Arts & Humanities is substantial because faculty research, PhD education, and related activities require resources while generating relatively little external grant support.” She added that the University will continue to invest in the arts and humanities despite the cost.

According to Ollett, however, this concern that his department may be disappearing is already a reality.

“We ended the year teaching two fewer languages than we taught at the beginning of the year,” Ollett said. “We had professors leave, and we don’t know whether those people are going to be replaced, whether those languages are going to be replaced.”

For Ollett, the restructuring would reflect a loss in what he describes as one of the largest South Asian programs available in the United States: “We’ve stood for 60 years, [providing] advanced disciplinary training in South Asian area studies. If we can’t provision that, then there’s no point for us to exist.”

The Future of the Division of the Arts & Humanities

Last August, the Atlantic published an article responding to the restructuring titled “If the University of Chicago Won’t Defend the Humanities, Who Will?” In it, staff writer Tyler Harper recalls the anxiety he felt preparing to interview for a tenure-track position “near Boston,” recounting a faculty mentor from his Ph.D. program who jokingly told him, “Don’t be nervous. It’s just Harvard.… It’s not like it’s Chicago.” Even from the outside, this University has long held a reputation as a nearly unparalleled institution in the world of humanities scholarship.

For years, UChicago has funded the continued research of specialized humanities departments for much of its history. Its small, focused departments have provided academic contributions for cultural, linguistics, and language studies that contribute to the niches of knowledge produced by their fields.

Now, the future of these small departments is unsure.

As Kommattam puts it: “We are a world-renowned institution for liberal arts and humanities. Why would we want to destroy that?”

Editor’s note, January 15, 1:35 p.m: One of Kommattam’s quotes has been updated. The original version contained a transcription error.