Proposition: Human flourishing will not be advanced at the upcoming meeting of the Modern Language Association, which begins next Thursday in New Orleans. Evidence: The conference program includes among its listed sessions the following gibberish, gossip, and complaint:
- “Contemporary Astrological Media of Minoritarian Self-Making”;
- “The Queer Conspiracy of Illegibility”;
- “Against Resilience: Laziness as Refusal”;
- “How to Be a Woman Though Male: On Uncertainty and Trans Pedagogy”;
- “Embracing the Low Road? Hating ‘Men’ in Manifestos”;
- “The (In)Visibility of Claudia Rankine’s and Donald Glovers’s Public Responses to the 2015 Charleston Shooting”;
- “‘Just a Young Boy in the Hood’: Imaginative Cartographies of the Ends in UK Rap’s Live Performances”;
- “Third Space: Queering America in Early American Literature.”
Lest the reader assume I am merely cherry-picking embarrassing session titles, he or she is invited to consider the following:
- Among the conference’s events are one session and one presentation dedicated to the American master and Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway, while three sessions and four presentations are concerned with “whiteness.”
- Of the nine sessions or presentations that take Shakespeare as their topic, at least five pair the Bard with an obnoxious progressive preoccupation (e.g., “Disability and Homonationalism in Shakespeare’s Pericles”).
- Though the Fireside Poets dominated American letters for a century, program searches for Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell turn up exactly nothing.
- So, as far as I can tell, does a search for Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson’s only rival for the title of Greatest American Poet.
“But so what?” you say. “The academic humanities have for years been a hive of deconstruction, obscurantism, and self-reference. Of course the MLA conference is 99 percent inside baseball! Of course it has a “land acknowledgement”! Of course its 2025 theme—“Visibility”—tracks perfectly with leftist concerns that we might forget the plight of indigenous transgender atheists for five minutes!”
To imagine that MLA’s ideology has no impact on the classroom is naiveté of the highest order.True, true, and true. And yet, it is not quite right to say that the Modern Language Association’s radicalism lacks real-world consequences. These are, after all, our professors, the men and women (and other!) who fill literature and language departments from sea to shining sea. To imagine that the ideology fueling “Storying Youth Climate Activism in the Face of Political Repression” has no impact on the classroom is naiveté of the highest order. Furthermore, there are, against all odds, still useful English departments and courses in this country. When the many misbehave, the few are swept up in their reputational tsunami.
Take, for example, the greatest MLA story of them all, a 2014 scandal that managed to tie up power dynamics, wokeness, and the shrinking humanities job market in a single soapy bundle. Readying himself for that year’s conference, an anonymous 37-year-old assistant professor placed a Craigslist ad in search of an “MLA mock-interview make-out session”:
I will arrive at your MLA hotel room, in my interview suit, ready to discuss my research, my place in my field, my theoretical approaches, my teaching methods, etc.
You ask me the appropriate questions and listen, interrupt, challenge, acting as a typical faculty member of a hiring committee. (You explain that your colleagues are respectively ill in bed and unable to attend because of personal obligations but, yes, you are authorized to advance my candidacy.)
Over the course of the interview we begin to cast flirtatious sidelong glances, adopt inviting body language and inch toward one another. At the right moment one of us makes the bold move of an innocent touch on the shoulder, followed by leaning in for a kiss. We both know it’s wrong, but we’re too titillated to stop.
Hilarious? Anthropologically fascinating? Mildly insane? Absolutely. Yet, true to form, the randy instructor’s colleagues were having none of it and swiftly denounced the ad on social media. Within days, the original poster had apologized for his role in upholding academic “power structures and abuses.” But too late. The viral story would go on to be covered by Jezebel, Slate, the Daily Dot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Of course, not every MLA conference-goer is a highbrow deviant who lacks even the courage of his strange convictions. Nor is every attendee a joyless thought-policer tripping on Marxist theory. The fact remains, though, that ham-and-eggers like me paid for these guys’ hotel rooms. Whether through taxes or tuition, we sponsored the whole outlandish show. While few would draw a direct line between MLA malfeasance and declining trust in colleges, it is no great leap to blame the MLA mindset for English departments’ sorry straits. Once the public decides that literature profs are frivolous weirdos who hate the books we’ve actually heard of, well, it’s hard to un-ring that bell.
The fact remains that ham-and-eggers like me paid for these guys’ hotel rooms.The same goes for the Modern Language Association’s politics, which tend—how to put this?—not to greet Israel as a friend among the nations. Among MLA’s most recent forays into the news was its “emergency motion,” last January, to defend professors who face blowback for criticizing the Jewish state. Another concerned the organization’s internal debate, this October, of an anti-Israel “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” resolution. Intriguingly, the resolution in question was rejected by MLA’s executive council despite widespread support and will not go before the full conference for a vote next week. Did sanity prevail? Maybe. The council’s explanation, however, was financial rather than moral. As executive director Paula Krebs told Inside Higher Ed, “The MLA’s contracts, which the resolution could jeopardize by cutting off customers, provide a significant share of its revenue.”
What is the man on the street to make of such behavior? Indeed, what must liberal but sane Democrats such as Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman think of it in the privacy of their offices and homes? My guess is that their attitude mirrors my own feelings for Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), the populist firebrand of “Jewish space lasers” fame. “There go our allies,” one can almost hear them saying. “God bless ’em, but keep ’em the hell away from any real power.”
Just so. Next week, 5,000 highly credentialed pedants will gather in the Crescent City for four days of backscratching and accusation. Let’s get busy reforming higher ed without them.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.