The Annual MLA Disaster
John Sutherland
- The Modern Language Association of America: Program for the 109th Convention, Vol. 108, No. 6
November 1993, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
- The Modern Language Association: Job Information List
At the 1992 MLA convention in New York there were some 12,000 registered and paid-up members in attendance. It is, one is told, the largest function of its kind in North America – and gatherings of professors don’t come bigger elsewhere. Certainly not in Britain, where the MLA’s anaemic cousin, UTE (the University Teachers of English conference), counts itself lucky to get attendance in three figures. The MLA, with a current enrolment of 31,500, was not always as big. Just 40 people came to the first convention in 1883, out of a total membership of 126. Attendance progressively increased, from one thousand in 1930 to five thousand in 1959. Then, with the explosion of higher education, it leapt to 12,300 in 1966, at which level it has stabilised, although there will be a few less this year at Toronto – an oddly colonial choice of location for a national rally.
The growth of the MLA has been a triumph for the association and a disaster for the profession it represents. Not least, the convention is an annual public relations fiasco. Every year American newspapers run their ‘Weird MLA’ article. This year the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the Toronto Globe and Mail will seize on Panel 688, ‘Lesbian and Gay Studies: Conflicting Desires’, which features as its third speaker Gregory W. Bredbeck of the University of California Riverside and his rousing talk ‘Fuck Your Gender’. If gender-fucking is too heavy there are scores of other papers with which to amaze the outside world: ‘Star Power: or, How to (De)Flower the Rectal Brain: the Increments and Excrements of “Influence” in Dorian Gray and Edward II’ (this, incidentally, is what passes for Wildean wit at the MLA); ‘Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson’; or the terser, but sublimely opaque ‘Autophagy and the Logic of the Absolute Fragment’.
These titles will have been solemnly approved by an MLA committee. The same committee has also given its stamp of approval to a quantity of worthy scholarly panels, but most glamour attaches to the politically controversial and theoretically advanced items. Professor Bredbeck’s address will be packed and applauded. There is no more telling statistic in the 1993 Program than the 70 sessions devoted to ‘Literary Criticism and Theory’ (by far the largest category) and the puny six devoted to ‘Research and Bibliography’, of which two take as their subject the chronically depressed status of bibliography in the profession. You won’t get a job, promotion or respect at the MLA by editing works of literature any more. Even more degraded than bibliography is undergraduate teaching of the traditional kind. The three talks sponsored by the National Council of Teachers in a panel called ‘Teaching and the MLA’ depict a profession in headlong flight from the old-fashioned business of the classroom. 1. ‘Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Jazz Modalities and Teaching: “Where Narrative Has Not Been Before” ’; 2. ‘Adventures in Cyberspace: Blurring the Boundaries of Teaching and Research’; 3. ‘Ludic Feminism, Critique-al-Pedagogy, and the Everyday’. God help the students subjected to critique-al-pedagogy, whatever that may be.
Letters
Vol. 16 No. 2 · 27 January 1994
From Maqbool Aziz
I rather think that Professor John Sutherland’s choice of the surgeon for the many chronic and highly infectious ailments of the MLA is not quite the right one (LRB, 16 December 1993). Mr Gorbachev’s hand is far too gentle for the hide in question: what that body needs is the more drastic and daring touch of Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Especially so as the MLA’s annual academic peep-show now has a fast-growing teeny-bopper version as well, which is mounted annually by the academic lesser fry, the ‘graduate student’ community. Indeed, the latter even have their own learned journals, where they publish their own ‘peer-reviewed’ papers and thus ‘keep their bibliographies active’. (It is just a matter of time before the five-to-seven-year-olds will be in the lucrative educational market, with their own professional papers on ‘Deconstructive Perspectives in Runny Noses and Voluble Behinds’.) The numerous advertising lines, such as the ‘Theme School’, the ‘Study Skills Centre’, the ‘Cultural Studies Unit’, the ‘University International Project’, the ‘Centre of Excellence’, the ‘Cross-Disciplines Fertilising-Scheme Unit’, and countless other perversities of this kind that, in the service of marketable innovation, are fast replacing intelligent, humane and meaningful inquiry across campuses in North America: these too are ‘products’ spawned by the relentlessly professional paradigm of the MLA and, needless to add, other organisations of this kind.
It could well be argued that academic ideals – if fast manufacture of fake and counterfeit knowledge and its relentless flogging at the so-called ‘scholarly conferences’ can ever be termed ‘ideals’ – espoused, encouraged and propagated by institutions such as the MLA, are very largely responsible for the mess that is university education, in the humanities and the social sciences at any rate, in North America. Despite their endless learned conferences; despite the endless clamour for research and more research; despite those hundreds of learned journals where the ‘results’ of the said research are dished out for all to see – despite so much ‘productivity’ and the dinning noise about it, the actual pedagogical outcome of these frenzied goings-on makes a sad and pitiful tale: 1. Close to 60 per cent of the wards and pupils of the MLA-and-type professoriate cannot think logically for more than two minutes. 2. Close to 70 per cent cannot write a single coherent paragraph. 3. Close to 70 per cent cannot express a mildly complex idea in their mother tongue. 4. Despite four years of ‘taking courses’ in literature, language and literary theory, close to 85 per cent have difficulty making sense of two lines of verse. 5. One particular case: out of a class of 42 students reading English in the Honour School, at a university much in the news for ‘innovative research’, not one student knew the meaning of words such as ‘austere’, ‘etymology’, ‘connotation’, ‘cognate’, ‘impressionism’ etc. 6. Close to 60 per cent of graduate students – the ‘publishing scholars’ of the teeny-bopper variety – have no idea whatsoever of the sequence of literary history – or, for that matter, any history. 7. More than 70 per cent never buy, borrow or read any book other than the texts prescribed for university/college courses – which texts (plays and novels included) they proceed to get rid of within days after the final examinations. 8. Few ever go to see a serious film; ever go to a play without offer of a mark for reward; are ever seen in art galleries.
It is a veritable graveyard the professoriate leaves behind as it embarks on its ‘research projects’, or takes off to confer with the other ‘learned’. Needless to say, the peculiar plight of the young is not at all their fault: their innate intelligence, their passion, their sensitivity, their receptivity, their industry, all are of the highest order. It is the air they breathe on the campus, the unsavoury wind released by the much-researching/much-publishing/much-conferencing/much self-serving professoriate that suffocates them, turns them into degree-wielding semi-literates.
Nor are these conditions confined to the New World. Exchange students from the Old tell the same sorry tale. Thanks to the mystical ‘special relationship’, the monkeying is already in full swing in the green and pleasant land. Walls of departmental offices at North American universities are often plastered with notices inviting customers to a quick fix in Shakespeare in Anne Hathaway’s cottage; ten days of British Heritage in an old castle; a week of deconstruction at this ‘ancient’ seat; a week of feminism at that one. O, ye, listen, if you want Booker Authors we have them all – all products authentic, coming to you from some very reputable firms – Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Bristol, Durham.
One wonders if there’s any other walk of life in which one could get away with so much patent tomfoolery and grotesque negligence in the name of knowledge and research.
Maqbool Aziz
Hamilton, Ontario
Vol. 16 No. 3 · 10 February 1994
From Phyllis Franklin
John Sutherland’s description of the Modern Language Association of America (LRB, 16 December 1993) contains more misleading statements and outright errors than one would expect of someone who has taught at universities in both the United States and the United Kingdom. He treats the MLA’s size as remarkable and somehow in itself a problem. He fails to consider the difference between the number of university teachers in the United States and the number in the United Kingdom. Statistics compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggest that there are 11 full-time equivalent students in the United States for every full-time equivalent student in the United Kingdom. Assuming a similar student-faculty ratio in both countries, one would expect the United States to have 11 times as many faculty members at the university level as the United Kingdom has. Consequently, one might expect professional meetings in the United States to attract considerably larger numbers of participants than equivalent meetings in the United Kingdom. Sutherland’s comparison of attendance at conventions organised by the University Teachers of English with those organised by the MLA is doubly unfair, not only because of this difference in scale but also because of the MLA’s constituency, which goes beyond English and includes the other modern languages, comparative literature, linguistics and folklore.
Similarly off the mark is Sutherland’s claim that the convention is the MLA’s ‘lifeblood’. The convention is only one of a number of services the Association provides. For over a century, MLA members have worked together to develop reference works for scholars (for example, the annual MLA International Bibliography) and publications for teachers (for example, the ‘Approaches to Teaching World Literature’ series and books like Writing, Teaching and Learning in the Disciplines, which last year won an Outstanding Academic Book Award from the American Library Association). Moreover, the MLA collects and analyses statistical information for the field; publishes PMLA, a hundred-year-old journal; houses the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages; sponsors special projects to improve teaching; and works with other learned societies, research libraries, humanities centres and historical societies to encourage public support for teaching and scholarship in the humanities.
Also misinformed is Sutherland’s account of the way the MLA convention programme takes shape. Instead of a single committee, sessions are arranged by over a hundred MLA committees plus another hundred independent organisations that choose to meet with the MLA. Each group referees the convention sessions it plans. All of these sessions and paper titles are listed in the convention programme. With such a decentralised process, complaints about some paper titles are not surprising. MLA members responsible for association governance have weighed these complaints against the consequences of censorship and – thus far – have preferred being criticised to censoring.
Sutherland is wrong as well about the way ideas circulate among scholars. He argues that discussions at MLA conventions of ‘theory’ and of other topics he regards as ‘politicised’ have damaged the profession. Although drawing such a conclusion seems premature, this is not the place to argue the point. Rather, I question Sutherland’s assumption that discussions at MLA conventions caused the alleged damage. Does Sutherland really believe that if the MLA had prevented such conversations from occurring at its meetings, the ideas he dislikes – ideas that have been widely debated for more than twenty years in a number of countries among teachers and scholars in anthropology, history, law, linguistics, philosophy, sociology and literary study – would have disappeared? The MLA certainly does play a role in the circulation of ideas, but its conventions cannot be as decisive as Sutherland asserts because scholars have many means of communication available to them, including regular meetings of other organisations in the modern languages and literatures.
Sutherland’s most misguided criticism of the MLA concerns academic employment. Although Sutherland acknowledges the ‘economic grounds’ for current trends in the academic job market in the United States, he nevertheless asserts that the ‘MLA bears primary responsibility’ for what he describes as a ‘mess’: university decisions to hire more part-time teachers and fewer full-time teachers than in previous years. Blaming the MLA makes no sense. Changes in university hiring practices that began in the Seventies in the United States have affected all fields. The distribution of full and part-time faculty members in fall 1987 by areas of study shows that part-time teachers account for similar proportions of all faculty members in the natural sciences (14.3 per cent), social sciences (12.4 per cent), and humanities (15.3 per cent). Also informative are the proportions of part-time teachers among all faculty members in the fields of business (17.7 per cent), education (14.8 per cent), fine arts (25.5 per cent) and health sciences (17.9 per cent).
Phyllis Franklin
Executive Director, MLA,
From Catharine Stimpson
What a holiday bonus the London Review of Books gave to the snide and the ignorant by publishing ‘The Annual MLA Disaster’ by John Sutherland. ‘The Annual MLA Disaster’ belongs to two spent genres – MLA-bashing and USA-bashing. The mockery of titles printed in the MLA convention programme wrongly assumes that anyone can judge a paper from its title. The crack that the MLA’s governing structure is ‘dubiously democratic’ is cheap and silly. The assertion that causes such as ‘gay rights’ have ‘no natural connection with literary study’ betrays a rigidly narrow view of literary studies. Etc, etc, etc.
Unfortunately, Sutherland is largely correct when he describes the current job market for scholars in the humanities. One reason why his article is so dismaying is that it corrodes the efforts of supporters of the humanities across a wide ideological spectrum to improve this social and economic condition. In 1990, I served as president of the MLA. I know that such efforts are possible. I also learned that MLA-bashers often have their own political agenda. I trust that Sutherland got carried away by his own polemic, not that he is carrying the banner of one faction or another.
Catharine Stimpson
State University of New Jersey,
Vol. 16 No. 4 · 24 February 1994
From John Sutherland
I found the last sentence of Catharine Stimpson’s letter (Letters, 10 February) mystifying. ‘I trust that Sutherland got carried away by his own polemic, not that he is carrying the banner of one faction or another,’ she writes. It may be that she suspects that I am a member of the MLA’s bête noire, the National Association of Scholars. I am not. Stimpson implies in her letter that to criticise the MLA is to criticise the United States and all it stands for. It is in fact quite possible to admire America (as I do), to admire and envy the American university system (as I do) and not to admire the MLA in its present form (as I do not). It is of course for the members to decide if they want changes. If the Association is doing as splendid a job as Phyllis Franklin reports (Letters, 10 February) clearly its officers have nothing to fear.
John Sutherland
University College London
From Susan Fellows
Professor John Sutherland’s explication of the meat market known here and about as the MLA (LRB, 16 December 1993) provides a most illuminating view which certainly reveals much of the current state of affairs in that area, at least, of academia. Maqbool Aziz’s answer (Letters, 27 January) should certainly eliminate most if not all queries the poor soul might have who would choose to question the Sutherland piece. I have distributed the odd copy of both the article and the letter about my department. Such subversive behaviour has not gone unnoticed. I am a PhD candidate at the University of California at Riverside where the (in)famous Dr Gregory Bredbeck and his theoretical minions fuck their and our gender on a regular (if not daily) basis. I sign my name on the assumption that no one else at UCR would have the good sense to read your paper.
Susan Fellows
Solana Beach, California
