In a presentation Monday about the impact of Duke University’s cost-cutting efforts on their work, Duke Libraries leaders told their employees that they would no longer provide dedicated support to Russian-language collections due to the “elimination of Duke’s Department of Slavic & Eurasian Studies.”
Leaders from Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, which includes the department, were surprised to hear it.
“To be clear: no such decision has been made,” Owen Covington, Trinity’s associate dean for communications and marketing, said in a statement Thursday. “In fact, Trinity has been active in retaining and hiring faculty in this department during the past year.”…