LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (12/25/05)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Ukrainian studies and students

Dear Editor:

In a letter to the editor on October 9, Dr. Roman Procyk, executive director of the Ukrainian Studies Chair Fund, made a startling acknowledgment:

"The ranks of qualified Ukrainian studies experts has thinned out dramatically. We face the inevitability with this trend that, sometime in the future, experts in Ukrainian history or literature may come from Russian studies or other disciplines, or have had little formal training in the Ukrainian area."

This is a remarkable statement given that the Ukrainian American community founded the Ukrainian Studies Chair Fund and thus generously funded the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute to educate experts with terminal degrees in Ukrainian history, literature and language.

Are we to believe that there are no graduate students in Ukrainian history, literature, or language in the pipeline at Harvard and Columbia so generously funded by the Ukrainian Studies Chair Fund?

The recent disputatious exchanges in The Ukrainian Weekly and online between Dr. Roman Procyk on one side and Dr. Taras Kuzio and Orest Deychakiwsky have shed little light on the place of Ukraine at American universities. They have offered no plausible solutions.

I would, rather, recommend that all university chairs of Ukrainian studies, whether in the United States or in Canada, which solicit funds from the Ukrainian North American communities, submit comprehensive annual reports of their activities to The Ukrainian Weekly for publication. These reports would inform those who contribute money with detailed objective information about the current amount of the endowments at the various universities, the annual inflow of contributions and of grant monies, a summary of their academic activities and the number of undergraduate majors and graduate students in Ukrainian studies on their campuses.

The current lack of Ukrainian studies graduate students in the United States, if true, would necessitate a fundamental review in strategy on the part of the Ukrainian Studies Fund.

At the very least, the Ukrainian North American community deserves substantially more information about its investment in the Ukrainian Studies Chair Fund in North America.

Bohdan A. Oryshkevich
New York

PS: Please publish my e-mail address so that interested parties can reach me if they so wish. It is [email protected].

Michael Ignatieff: a left-wing liberal?

Dear Editor:

Myron Kuropas refers to embattled political neophyte Michael Ignatieff as a "left-wing intellectual" (December 11), an odd label for one of academia's staunchest supporters of President George W. Bush's war in Iraq and the use of torture by the U.S. government.

Indeed, in Canada Mr. Ignatieff's candidacy has stirred much controversy not only because he got it without the possibility of a challenge and because of his antipathy toward Ukrainians, the reasons given by Dr. Kuropas. On December 2, Ottawa Sun columnist Michael Harris wrote: "Here is a human rights professor who believes what 80 percent of Canadians, his own party, and two-thirds of Americans do not: That the war in Iraq was a good idea. He is also the Wagner-esque creator of the doctrine that lesser evil is allowed in the fight against greater evil, a notion that warms the hearts of people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as their people waterboard the enemy for the homeland."

"Ignatieff, from his illustrious perch at Harvard, not only supported, but vigorously promoted the war, 'whose essential prize is preserving the identity of liberal society itself,'" commented the Toronto Star's Joey Slinger in his December 1 column. "And there is torture, a modest form of which - sleep deprivation, 'disorientation,' hooding - he accepts as a 'lesser evil.' [...] Neither sat well with many of his fellow specialists in the international human rights trade who condemned him for giving the U.S. 'the intellectual tools' to justify the war and creating an atmosphere that left the Americans free to employ what might be called much greater evils."

"There has been no shortage of cranks in Canadian politics, although it could be that Ignatieff has been away too long, and too out of touch, to appreciate that a huge majority in this country is revolted by the directions he urged on the U.S.," the Toronto Star columnist concludes.

Walter R. Iwaskiw
Arlington, Va.

Melnitchenkos respond to letter

Dear Editor:

The accusations by Oksana Pisetska Struk, in her December 11 letter to the editor, of inaccuracies in our article "Personages in Literature: Ivan Bahriany, Tribune of the Republic," are grossly overstated. Ms. Struk uses a single reference (her mother's) about Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, who was mentioned in passing, to cast a shadow on the whole article.

The information on Antonenko-Davydovych came from Bahriany's paper "Ukrainian Literature and Art under Communist Moscow Terror," which he prepared in 1954 for a U.S. congressional committee. In it, he listed 59 writers and intellectuals "destroyed or eliminated" during 1922-1938, including "Number 22, B. Antonenko-Davydovych, writer, exiled, died in Tchytyn isolation."

We are pleased to learn that Antonenko-Davydovych survived the gulag. It is unfortunate that Bahriany believed that his friend had perished.

For our articles on literature, history and philosophy published in The Ukrainian Weekly, we go to original sources, usually in Ukrainian. For our analysis, we read Bahriany's works, as well as various critiques of his works. We spoke to people who knew and worked with him. A few paragraphs in an encyclopedia is not our idea of research.

Eugene Melnitchenko
Helena Lysyj Melnitchenko
Owings, Md.

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