MLA Convention New Orleans on January 11, 2025

by Anthony Alessandrini

'On the second day, we held signs with the names of scholars martyred in Gaza and lay down together on the floor outside the hotel ballroom where the MLA’s elected delegates were walking in to hold their assembly. every name every name every name. Many delegates joined us. “MLA is Complicit in Genocide,” read a banner we had painted and brought with us, from occupied Hawaiʻi. A die in is symbolic, a mere fractional representation of the scope and the volume of loss. every name every name every name. We lay in silence as the complicit walked around us.'  – Hannah Manshel, 'What Follows Whereas: Reflections on the MLA Walk Out for Palestine' 

How do you give a form to absence? How do you draw a line around a silence, in order to articulate it? How do you hold on to refusal such that it’s no longer a matter of simply saying “no” to what’s unacceptable but “yes” to what’s necessary?

 

These are familiar question for poets, and for those of us who teach and study and write about language and literature. For organizers doing the hard-headed work of banging our heads against the walls of our ever-more unjust and complicit institutions, they take on a different quality. The group of us who have been organizing around a BDS resolution within the Modern Language Association have found ourselves moving, often surreally, between these two registers. We’re scholars of language and literature up against an organization that claims to represent us, but whose actions reveal not just its complicity with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but also its determination to silence anyone who attempts to contest this complicity.

 

For those who are new to the story, Rebecca Colesworthy’s excellent “Resigning from and to the MLA” and Chris Newfield’s earlier setting out of “The Story So Far” will get you up to speed. More recently, Hannah Manshel’s magnificent essay, from which I’ve taken my epigraph, describes the actions that MLA members took at the recent convention in New Orleans. These were intended to support our resolution and to protest our leadership’s repression, but most of all they were actions in solidarity with Palestinians resisting the hundred-year war waged upon them, with the unstinting support of our governments and institutions.

 

If we succeeded at anything—and I’m still of many minds about that—it was in turning what was meant to be a silence into an event. It was clear for months that MLA’s leadership was determined to make this all go away, with as little noise or attention as possible. They rejected our BDS resolution via a three-sentence email with no explanation and immediately removed it from the MLA website, even though it has passed through all the association’s logistical hurdles. When we tried to use an email list for elected delegates to discuss the situation, our messages were blocked. When the Executive Council finally deigned to put out an explanation, it was only accessible to members via a password, thus blocking it from a fuller public view. It was only due to unprecedented pressure from members, including nine former MLA presidents and 26 former EC members(including two current members who resigned publicly to protest the EC’s decision—something that MLA leadership has never publicly addressed, preferring instead to project a fictional sense of unanimity), that the Council finally put out a public statement—nearly two months after they had killed the resolution.

 

Silences, Secrets, and Lies

 

After two months of silence—and of attempts to silence us—what the MLA leadership finally said is objectionable in so many ways. The refusal to meaningfully acknowledge the context of the ongoing genocide being carried out by Israel and the United States—indeed, the refusal to even use the word “genocide” in a 3000+ word statement—belies the MLA’s rhetorical gestures towards social justice that form part of its mission statement, as well as its publications.

 

The cowardice of the Executive Council’s statement is clear, but it takes a bit more work to read out the deep disingenuousness of its argument. It boils down to this: the Council admits that anti-BDS laws do not prohibit an organization like the MLA from supporting the Palestinian BDS call. Moreover, the phrasing of our resolution—“we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call”—makes it very clear that this is not an official position being taken by the organization. But the EC nevertheless frets that this will not be enough, and that the laws somehow are even more powerful than those who made them claim them to be. As we put it in an earlier response: “the leadership of the world’s most powerful association of writers and teachers has decided that words no longer have any meaning when confronted by unjust laws.” 

 

Instead we are told: “the Executive Council is guided by our lawyers’ assessment, which is that these statutes have been carefully crafted to withstand any challenges that assert that they restrict free speech.” We, the members, have no clue who “our lawyers” might be, but we do have the benefit of the views of other legal experts who have spent years assessing these laws. Here, for example, is the conclusion from a report by Palestine Legal: 

 

“Federal district courts in four states have ruled that these states’ laws, all of which require contractors with the state to sign pledges that they don’t boycott Israel, are likely unconstitutional and that boycotts for Palestinian rights are protected by the First Amendment. However, in each state, the legislatures changed the laws that were challenged so that they no longer applied to the plaintiffs in order to moot the lawsuits.”

 

The actual legal precedent, in other words, runs counter to MLA leadership’s inaccurate and dishonest claims. Rather than being “crafted to withstand any challenges,” when these state laws have come under legal challenge, they have usually been tweaked to allow plaintiffs who challenge them to exercise their First Amendment right to boycott for Palestinian rights. Zoha Khalili, Senior Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal, puts it even more clearly: 

 

“The MLA Executive Council's decision to prevent the Delegate Assembly from voting on the BDS resolution is a cowardly, anti-democratic move. It is also a misguided one: Even if the MLA chooses to prioritize mercenary interests over Palestinian lives, its flawed legal analysis fails to acknowledge that the resolution is simply an endorsement of the Palestinian call for BDS and does not bind the MLA itself to engage in a boycott. A purely expressive resolution like this one is protected speech that is beyond the reach of any anti-BDS law, even under the most repressive interpretation of our constitutional rights.”

 

But even this doesn’t get at what is most damning in the Council’s too-little-too-late statement. There is also a secret revealed there, albeit buried in the faux-legalistic language: the Modern Language Association, without informing or consulting with its members, has already capitulated to these laws by signing anti-BDS clauses in order to obtain contracts. Here are their own words on this:

 

“As of now, the MLA has contracts for the current year that include clauses in which we have affirmed that our association is not supporting BDS. If the membership were to pass a resolution to the contrary, we would be unable to renew these contracts.”

 

We don’t know how many anti-BDS clauses the MLA has signed, nor for how long it has been doing so. What we do know—only because members have pushed relentlessly against the silence and censorship of our leadership—is that the MLA is, officially, an anti-BDS organization. A different way to say that is: the MLA is, officially, a genocide organization.

 

It only remains to be added that the MLA has at no point made the slightest attempt to contest these laws—unlike, for example, the AAUP, which expressed its opposition to them back in 2018. Even as these laws have provided multiple occasions for repressing the rights of MLA members, the organization that claims to represent us has remained silent. In fact, it has failed to issue even the mildest public opposition to the repression of pro-Palestine speech on campus, despite the fact that the Delegate Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed a motion calling upon MLA leadership to do exactly this in January 2024.

 

Taking Our Labor Where It Belongs

 

But to be honest, I’m tired of making these points. I’m tired of the cowardice, complicity, disingenuousness, corporate mentality, censorship, and outright lies of the leadership of the MLA—and, consequently, of the organization itself.

 

I’m saying all this to say this: given its current structure, the Modern Language Association is unreformable. That’s why, in the days leading up to the convention, those of us who organized the resolution issued a call asking supporters to pledge not to renew their MLA membership. Here’s the exact wording of the pledge:

 

“As a direct response to the MLA Executive Director and Executive Council’s refusal to forward members’ resolution calling for an endorsement of BDS, I pledge to not renew my MLA membership and to resign from any MLA governance or leadership position I hold. I refuse to be affiliated with or financially support an organization that both silences its members and is complicit in genocide.”

 

The unofficial count of those who have signed on to this pledge is over 350. That includes more than 25 elected delegates, dozens of leaders of MLA forums that organize panels at the convention, and many members of other committees, all of whom have pledged to resign. The list is growing and should continue to grow. That’s why I’m writing this.

 

There are many things I like about this pledge. One of them is its open-endedness. There isn’t an “until…” It’s a refusal. In its actions around this resolution, the MLA has failed its members. Moreover, both by virtue of what it has done and what it has been forced to reveal, it has doubled down on its complicity in genocide—a phrase that I do not use lightly.

 

It’s not up to us to tell the MLA what it needs to do to get us back. We’ve seen what it is, and we’re done with it. We’ve also seen what other organizations have done differently, and we’ll bring our labor to them. 

 

In the days since the convention, I’ve had conversations with earnest supporters of the resolution who have not found this to be such a clear-cut choice. Isn’t there a way to stay and fight? Isn’t it letting the organization off the hook by not using this opportunity to demand that it do something to stand in solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues?

 

I sympathize. One unshakable part of my own political ethos is a loathing of telling other people how they should resist. But the point I’ve been making throughout is that the MLA is not set up to be a democratic institution that serves its members. What has been revealed to us, instead, is an organization that is in essence a publishing company that does some philanthropic work on behalf of “the humanities” on the side. 

 

Matt Seybold makes this clear in two brilliant articles that address MLA leadership’s suppression of the resolution, specifically its claim that the organization’s “financial profile” require it to do so. Seybold writes: 

 

“The Executive Council is claiming it cannot allow its membership to democratically consider the BDS resolution because membership dues are not a sufficiently large revenue stream to make members the primary stakeholders in their member organization, whose other revenue streams must be protected from and for MLA members, in order to deliver to members what they actually need, which is neither democratic authority nor, apparently, reduced membership or registration fees. The more times I read this passage, the more it becomes to me: We need our publishing business to pay for our publishing business.”

 

His conclusion is one that many of us share: “So long as revenue maximization is the top priority of the MLA, it will be doing far more harm to its member scholars, and the rest of us who care about literature and language research and instruction, than any bevy of handbooks, bibliography subscriptions, and teaching collections can arbitrage.”

 

I would add: the MLA has also made it clear that revenue maximization is a greater priority than the lives of our Palestinian colleagues. How could anyone calling themselves a humanist continue to belong to such an organization? 

 

The pledge to not renew membership is a direct refusal of this logic. Like a strike, it’s a call to drop our tools and walk off the job, to stop the infernal machine functioning. And like a picket line, it works via solidarity: no one can force you to join it, but its power comes from our numbers. I have no illusions that MLA leadership will be sorry to see me go; on the contrary, they can’t wait to see the back of me. But a mass exodus accomplishes something else.

 

The argument for staying that I take most seriously comes from MLA members who have been (as I have in the past) part of the leadership of forums dedicated to Arabic literature, or Black studies, or indigenous cultures and politics. These are spaces that those who came before us had to fight for, to carve out room within the general rule of white supremacy that still dominates the MLA, and literary studies in North America more generally. Many leaders of these forums are nevertheless resigning—in some cases, whole forum leaderships are resigning en masse—but they worry, rightly, about simply ceding those spaces. It is not a step to be taken lightly.

 

I can imagine ways that these spaces, and those of us who work in these minoritized fields, can migrate into organizations that have taken a stand against genocide. The most direct parallel organization would be the American Comparative Literature Association—which endorsed BDS in 2024 and has spoken out consistentlyon political issues—but also organizations such as the American Studies Association, Middle East Studies Association, Association for Asian American Studies, African Literature Association, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, to name only a few. Many of these organizations in fact endorsed the boycott a decade ago, and somehow, the sky has not fallen upon them; most of them are in fact thriving. And this is not even to mention whatever spaces we might imagine and create together going forward; after all, many of us are game for giving our free labor to causes and groups that reflect our values and politics. To continue to do so for an organization that does not, like the MLA, is on the other hand simply acceding to our own exploitation.

 

In fact, the other side of the argument for protecting these spaces carved out within the MLA is the extent to which MLA leadership has actively co-opted the labor of scholars and students working in these disciplines, especially scholars and students from minoritized communities, while simultaneously refusing to take part in struggles to defend these fields from the ongoing right-wing public onslaught (or—let’s be honest—taking any meaningful material role in addressing structural issues like the job crisis and the related exploitation of precarious academic labor). In its statement defending the suppression of our BDS resolution, MLA leadership had the gall to celebrate the fact that “two dozen convention sessions are focusing on Palestine”—as though they deserved thanks for the labor put in overwhelmingly by those of us who proposed the resolution in the first place! 

 

In this sense, the suppression of this resolution, a clear act of anticipatory obedience (the decision to kill the resolution was made a little over a week before Trump’s election), sets a very dangerous precedent. The 26 former EC members who called upon the current EC to reverse its decision conclude their open letter with an important question for MLA leadership: 

 

We are asking you to let us, as members of the MLA community, debate on whether we wish, as a collective, to take a position. To disallow us from doing so not only erodes our trust in the MLA with regard to Palestine, but with regard to any other possibly controversial matters. Will you stand strong as the Trump administration attacks things like Critical Race Theory, for example, or queer theory, or trans literature? Surely the new administration will punish scholars in these areas and impose penalties on those who defend them. Can members trust you to stay strong?

 

The words of outgoing MLA President Dana Williams, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed following our protests at the convention in New Orleans, provide an indirect but chilling response. “The association is the membership, we want to reiterate,” Williams insisted, against all available evidence; but she also pointed to “concerns about dividing the membership over endorsing the BDS movement, noting that ‘collegiality was one of many things that we were considering.’” Collegiality, controversy, divisiveness: for decades, these have been the words used to defend the status quo of white supremacy, in literary studies and academic institutions more generally. To think that the MLA will be a meaningful ally in any anti-racist efforts to come is dangerously wishful thinking.

 

Walking Out (For Good)

 

In fact, the question of “collegiality,” in a very different sense, is what leaves me with my own unshakeable conviction that our only choice is to walk out of this complicit organization. MLA leadership has made it very clear, for decades, exactly who counts, and who does not, as part of the MLA’s “we.” In our organizing around this resolution, we returned again and again to scholasticide—not just the complete and absolutely intentional destruction of all educational infrastructure, and the wholesale murder of teachers and students, in Gaza, but the decades-long scholasticide carried out throughout Palestine. As often as possible, we have used the phrase “our Palestinian colleagues.” That is to say: what is unfolding in Palestine, and has been for decades, is happening to scholars and students who should be (and in some cases, literally are) MLA members. 

 

Speaking only for myself, I have been on two different MLA panels in which colleagues from Palestine had to participate either virtually or by having us read their papers, because Israel’s travel restrictions prevented their right to free movement. In one session, I read a paper from a Palestinian colleague who teaches at Birzeit University in Ramallah—had to read it on her behalf, because she was not allowed to travel to be with us—which was largely about the attempts by faculty to keep the semester going while the campus was being raided daily by the Israeli army. And this was six years ago. Aside from endorsing a 2019 letter to Israeli authorities regarding restrictions on international academics working in Palestinian universities that was issued by the Middle East Studies Association, the MLA has remained studiously silent. How many of our colleagues have died, been imprisoned, or, in the most basic sense, been prevented from being here with us, in conversation with us, working alongside us in this supposedly international organization, during those six years of silence? Could any self-respecting scholar of Palestinian literature or culture ever be expected to set foot in the MLA after this?

 

To put it as plainly as I can: I can’t and won’t be part of an organization that isn’t even willing to speak out against the murder of people who are, or should be, MLA members themselves. It’s more complicated than that, but then again, it really isn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kreuzberg, Berlin on November 9, 2021

THE VISON OF THE BROLIGARCHS 

'For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.

'It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.

'“It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.”

'As Harrington has noted, Trump is the perfect avatar for that worldview. He’s a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted on 34 felony counts and still won reelection, who notoriously said in reference to sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

'So, what is the “anything” that the broligarchs want to do? To understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy goes well beyond simple libertarianism. It’s not just that they want a government that won’t tread on them. They want absolutely zero limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.'

...

'[H]ere’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors.'

***

'Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said.

'And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

'All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.

'The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said.

'For one thing, they valorize aggression, which is coded as male. Zuckerberg, who credits mixed martial arts and hunting wild boars with helping him rediscover his masculinity (and is sporting the makeover to prove it), recently told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is too “culturally neutered” — it should become a culture that has more “masculine energy” and that “celebrates the aggression.”

'Likewise, Andreessen wrote in his manifesto, “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.” Musk, meanwhile, has jumped on the testosterone bandwagon, amplifying the idea that only “high T alpha males” are capable of thinking for themselves; he shared a post on X that said, “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”'

SOURCE: Sigal Samuel, Vox

THE CONFEDERATE RESTORATION

'Like a clogged sewer erupting into the streets, Donald Trump returned to office on Monday, and, as promised, unleashed his filth upon the country. In a flurry of lawless, unconstitutional, racist, bigoted, violent, and, in some cases, plainly stupid executive orders and pardons, Trump set his reign of terror in motion. The future we feared has officially arrived.

'Trump’s activity is, as always, designed to keep people distracted, defensive, and demoralized. He did so much stuff in the opening hours of his junta that the media can’t process it all, and Americans can’t keep up. It will take the courts literal years to process the lawsuits against his administration based on just its first half day, and we already know that the media is a Dr. Moreau monstrosity that has the attention span of mosquitoes, the memory of goldfish, and the courage of chickens.'

---

'“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”—better known as the birthright citizenship executive order—attempts to cancel the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. Getting rid of constitutional amendments via executive order is new, and, for me at least, “the worst.”'

...

'Let’s start with the title:

'“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”

'Make no mistake: This title is a nod to the “Great Replacement” theory. The implication here is that the “meaning” of what it is to be “American” is devalued if that meaning is commingled with certain kinds of immigrant blood. To “protect” the value of being an American (for white people), non-white people who were merely born here must be excluded.'

...

'At the founding, there was no such thing as a “US” citizen; instead, citizenship flowed up from the states. You were a citizen of New York or Virginia or wherever, based on the citizenship laws of that state. That meant that the circumstances of your birth could confer citizenship to you in one state, but not another.

'Obviously, that meant the legal status of enslaved Africans varied by state. In some states, “free” Black people were citizens, while enslaved Black people were not. In some states, enslaved Black people became citizens when they moved to free states. In some states, citizen Black people became slaves when they crossed borders. In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court resolved the issue by declaring Black people everywhere, in every state, “not citizens.” That decision was so bad we fought a war over it.

'After that war, the victors wrote the 14th Amendment, which not only granted citizenship to the formerly enslaved Africans but also created this new concept, a citizen of the United States. That person enjoyed rights and privileges regardless of state lines.

'Now, as Trump and his Republicans try to undo birthright citizenship, you can understand what they’re really trying to do: they’re trying to go back to the pre–Dred Scott days, and make citizenship subject to the prevailing political predilections of the era. And remember that tying citizenships to politics can lead to open war.

'“But the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

'This is a lie. It has, literally, repeatedly been interpreted to confer citizenship universally to people born within the United States.'

...

'“Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

'This is where Trump tries to straight-up change the Constitution without passing a constitutional amendment.'

...

OR '"(2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth."

'This is the Kamala Harris provision. You see, Trump shouldn’t have been allowed to run for president because he violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment when he rose up in rebellion against the government he had previously sworn an oath to defend. But the Supreme Court decided to ignore the 14th Amendment for the purposes of seeing a white man get what he wanted. Here, Trump is saying that Harris shouldn’t have been able to run for president, because the very specific situation this section describes is the situation of Harris’s birth: She was born in the US to two parents who were here legally, but with temporary status.'

'The pettiness toward his former political rival is probably what got Trump on board, but for the broader collection of white Republicans and capitalists who support him, this provision is critical. That’s because even Republicans understand that we need immigrants in this country, not only to perform low-skilled work at exploitative wages, but also to perform highly skilled work should America still want to be a thought and innovation leader. We need immigrants for their labor and their intellectual capacity.'

'But once these people have contributed to America’s wealth, the white people running the joint would still like the option to throw them away. By preventing immigrants on temporary work or student visas from having American-citizen children, the Trump administration is essentially relegating them to permanent second-class status. It’s the “you can come here and enrich us, but you can’t be us” version of white supremacy. Unless, that is, they eventually choose to give the “gift” of citizenship to immigrants.'

'On its face, this order violates the 14th Amendment, the statutes that mirror the 14th Amendment, and the Administrative Procedures Act (which prohibits “arbitrary and capricious” laws and orders such as “don’t give birth while on a student visa or else”). I’d also argue that it could violate the Equal Protection Clause, because it focuses more on the status of the mother than on the father. And it could violate the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution if we’re in a situation where citizenship granted in a blue state is not recognized by red states.

'But I wonder when the courts will get to a discussion of these issues on the merits. Because the government and Trump judges will likely begin by arguing that nobody even has standing to sue the administration over this constitutional violation. They’ll say that an immigrant who is not pregnant has no right to sue, nor does the out-of-status person who is expecting. They’ll say that states don’t have a right to sue, because they’re not “harmed” by the order. They’ll wait until an actual baby is born, and denied documentation, and then force that literal baby to sue.

'In the meantime, the courts could allow a patently unconstitutional order to go into effect and watch as the white-wing media desperately tries to normalize it. They could watch as Trump’s goons attempt to “enforce” the order as he puts families and their American-citizen children on trains and sends them to camps, waiting for just the “right” plaintiff to emerge.

'Even if the courts do get around to “stopping” the order, Trump controls the military. He controls the State Department and the Justice Department. He controls the Social Security Administration. I don’t have a lot of belief that he will follow a court order on this, even if the courts order him to stop.'

...

'This order violates one of the fundamental principles of the United States, and people should react to it like it does.

'Unfortunately, the order upholds another, perhaps even more fundamental principle that has always animated the American experiment: the idea that this country is for white people, and nobody else. The people who believe that, and have always believed that, are the people who hope this order succeeds.

'As I keep saying, we’ve tried to do citizenship Trump’s way before. It led to war. It could again, if Trump is allowed to get away with it.'

SOURCE: Elie Mystal, The Nation

IGNORANCE UNBOUND

'No one should be surprised that Trump is pulling out of the Paris climate accord, kicking career civil servants to the curb, threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs against Canada and Mexico (but only 10 percent against China), halting civil-rights litigation, dismantling privacy safeguards, attacking anything that has to do with transgender people or racial diversity, muzzling public health agencies, ripping up environmental protections (“I’d like to see federal lands opened up for data centers”), and generally proceeding through the Project 2025 playbook. He signaled this clearly during the campaign.

'But the brazen lawlessness is another matter: declaring the 14th Amendment to the Constitution null and void by executive fiat; disparaging the Reagan-appointed judge who blocked Trump’s “blatantly unconstitutional” order; proclaiming that another executive order gives him “the right” to ignore the TikTok ban, duly enacted and upheld by the Supreme Court; asserting that his unilateral declaration of a national energy emergency “means you can do whatever you have to do”; authorizing immigration raids in churches and other houses of worship; revealing the nation’s secrets to people who haven’t been vetted; and, of course, the blanket pardoning and commutations of sentences for people who attacked police officers on Jan. 6, 2021, and orchestrated the sacking of the Capitol.'

...

'Returned, as well, is the dark talk (“vicious, violent … radical and corrupt … stumbling … catastrophic … horrible betrayals”) and the gratuitous insults, some now delivered from behind the Resolute Desk. Liz Cheney is a “crying lunatic.” Adam Schiff is “scum.” Jack Smith is “deranged.” Nancy Pelosi is “guilty as hell” for Jan. 6. After the Episcopal bishop of Washington, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, had the temerity at the National Prayer Service to urge Trump to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” Trump lashed out at the “so-called Bishop” who is “a Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” not to mention “nasty” and “boring.”

'Trump’s tired claims, about the “rigged” 2020 election and the FBI’s purported culpability for Jan. 6, have come with him back to Washington, as have his self-enrichment schemes. Asked about the several billion dollars he has amassed in recent days for the cryptocurrency “meme coins” he released, Trump, flanked by moguls Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son, responded: “Several billion? That’s peanuts for these guys.”

'And all of this is being normalized, far faster than during Trump’s first term. Stunned Democrats have yet to find their collective voice. And Republicans are bowing and scraping before Trump. '

..

'The most unwelcome feature of Trump’s return this week, more than any individual action, is his abiding ignorance, even after all these years. This is what allows unscrupulous figures such as Stephen Miller to run amok. It’s also the source of the constant chaos that is Trump’s trademark.

'This week alone, Trump botched — either out of ignorance or mendacity — claims about World Health Organization funding, the trade deficit, opioid deaths, inflation, birthright citizenship, Biden’s pardons, illegal immigration, the Jan. 6 committee and more. In a typical pronouncement, Trump alleged that no president imposed tariffs on China “until I came along.” George Washington would beg to differ.

'With such faulty inputs, it’s no wonder the outputs are defective. “With my actions today,” Trump said on Monday, “we will end the Green New Deal and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate” — neither of which actually exists. The same order promises to “safeguard” Americans’ access to inefficient appliances and plumbing fixtures. He justified his threats to retake the Panama Canal, possibly by force, by saying 38,000 Americans died building it and that “China is operating the Panama Canal.” Fewer than 6,000 Americans were believed to have died, and China does not operate the canal. The White House, justifying its order requiring full-time, in-person work by federal employees, claimed that “only 6 percent of employees currently work in person.” But the Office of Management and Budget found that half of federal workers don’t even qualify to work remotely, and the rest average three days a week in the office.

'And then there was the executive order titled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.”

'Restoring names? The order proposes to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” — even though it has been called the Gulf of Mexico since Spanish explorers mapped it — in 1519.

'Their hostile act was a grave insult to the future United States. And that is why, 506 years later, Trump is finally taking Spain for the mortal enemy it is.'

SOURCE: Dana Milibank, The Washington Post 

HELPING OUT WITH THE LOS ANGELES FIRES

'On Thursday, the L.A.-based Jimmy Kimmel joked that Trump would make the trip “to blame us for the fires in person.”

KIMMEL: “It’s the first time in history that a natural disaster will be visited by an even bigger natural disaster.”  

“I guess to survey the damage, and meet with the governor — mostly to get away from Elon for a couple of days.”  

“He is so, so ridiculous, and we have to sit around with the place on fire, hoping he gives us our own money back. Trump and his minions are planning to leverage any federal aid they might give to force us to help him round up and deport our neighbors as if we’re Eric and he’s cutting off our allowance to teach us some kind of a lesson.”  

“Which, on one hand, you might think, ‘Oh, wow, what a truly — only a despicable human being would use disaster relief money as a bargaining chip,’ but on the other hand — there is no other hand. It’s just that hand.”  

SOURCE: Trish Bendix, New York Times 

Washington, D.C. on any given day in the 21st Century

As Trump kicks off his campaign of nonstop harms, universities and humanities programs will need to look to themselves for the resources to help the people that count on them and advance the ideas, cultures, and practices we need. 

Neither universities nor humanities organizations can do this now and will need to do much better over the next few years.

This post is the final part of my talk at the New Orleans MLA Convention, "The Humanities Die in Darkness." The first part is posted here, and the underlying paper is in the first issue of Public Humanities.

The humanities' first funding scandal is that the country’s main source of basic research funding spends essentially no money on humanities scholarship. Using NSF data, of the $54 billion or so in research that the federal government funds in U.S. higher education, $69 million goes to the humanities. That is, the humanities receive 0.13% of the federal total.  This is a tiny slice of the overall federal research pie, and rounds essentially to zero.  See the figure above.

 

The second funding scandal is what happens when we move from extramural to internal or institutional funds. Of the nearly $100 billion that universities spent on research in FY2022, $25 billion came from the universities themselves. That’s a lot of research, especially outside of STEM.  In a epistemically just or epistemically neutral world, universities would try to even out external shortfalls for the humanities by increasing the humanities’ share of internal funding.  

 

But this is not what happens.  Here are some sample universities.

I’ve simplified the NSF data categories into government, corporate or foundation funding, and internal funds (“institution funds” in the NSF tables).  Watch institutional funds, the grey band. It represents the universities' own money spent on research.  Research universities take a quarter or even a third of research expenditures from their own pockets.

 

So if STEM research is profitable, and makes money, maybe all this internal money is available for the arts, humanities, social sciences, education, law, and so on?

 

In reality, no! Here’s the breakdown of internal expenditures for these universities —the grey bar of total institutional funds is broken out with a separate bar for all non-STEM expenditures next to it.

The short bars are all of non-STEM funding.  The yellow band is all humanities disciplines together.  A few elite university humanities programs do well. Princeton at 10.6% of institutional funds for humanities is the highest I’ve found. Penn, however, is under 2% -- it spends less than 2% of its own research funds on humanities research. The University of Arizona is about 2%. Iowa is about two and a half percent, Kansas back under 2 percent. 

 

Not pictured here, the University of California spent a half a percent of its total research expenditures on the arts and humanities together in 2018-19. The University of Oregon and Stanford University spent a fifth of one percent of their internal research funds on humanities research (in 2022). 

 

Clearly, interest in or respect for humanities research is not a function of whether or not you can afford it.  With a few exceptions, universities just don’t use their internal funds to compensate for extramural funding injustice towards the humanities but use these internal funds to perpetuate this injustice.

 

One way to remember this is in round numbers. 

 

Universities spend $100 billion on research (from all sources). 

 

One tenth of that goes to all non-STEM fields as a group, social sciences included.  

 

And then one-tenth of these non-STEM funds goes to humanities disciplines. There’s a tacit One Percent Rule for the humanities—some universitis are above, most are around one percent or below.

 

But where does all that other internal research money go?    

 

It goes to subsidizing STEM research, because STEM research in reality loses money for its universities. I can’t go into this here, except to say yes, you have been gaslighted about this by your own administrators. Universities use the vast majority of their internal funds to make up for the failure of external STEM research sponsors to pay the full costs of STEM research.  Bear in mind, too, that Project 2025 has a plan for the Trump administration to make this problem much, much worse (see page 355).

 

This gets us to the third scandal, which is entirely of the humanities’ own making.  I’ll cast it as a series of questions. Why are you hearing about the research funding scandals from me? Why are you looking at my homemade figures made through my individual readings of NSF survey data? Where are the large scale reports from the humanities disciplines? Where is the humanities equivalent of these very large research funding surveys and analyses that are required of the NSF by law? Where are the NEH, ACLS, MLA, AHA, APA, NHA, and Mellon reports on research underfunding, coupled with policy demands for more funding? Since this would be a large undertaking, where are the collaborations among the leading humanities associations and between them and the NSF? Where is the humanities research infrastructure to study the very damaging lack of humanities research infrastructure? 

 

The answers to these questions are the same: nowhere.  I have found no sustained institutional effort to understand the state of humanities research funding.  A key reason why we have no meaningful research funding on the scale of the profession is that we have no data and no public discourse about such funding.  

 

STEM, in contrast, has been forced to have data and discourse since the 1950s.  They have made a virtue of necessity—and also made a nonstop, militant advocacy program.  Our failure here has inflicted damage on humanities scholarship and on its public reputation. This is damage that we have never tried to define, much less systemically oppose.

  

Our main strategies for survival have been as follows: stressing teaching, expanding public engagement,  and shrinking graduate programs, which make the problem of underpowered research even worse. These false solutions are also driving students away and damaging academic employment. Students and the wider public are attracted to fields that generate visible, useful knowledge about problems in their lives. 2023’s infamous New Yorker article by Nathan Heller, “The End of the English Major?” rested on interview evidence that students follow research investments, not quasi-educational activities.  10 years ago I published a piece in the MLA journal Profession, called “The Humanities as Service Departments.”  That is where ignoring research funding has been taking us.  Students do not major in service courses.

 

The natural and social sciences work under a social contract to generate public knowledge, and so do the humanities. The equation is Research + funding=public benefits=have a future.

 

I am sorry to say that this third scandal of our own making mixes two modes. One is gaslighting—we allow ourselves to be gaslighted about university funding; we then gaslight each other about how this doesn’t really matter.  

 

The other is the practice I mentioned at the start: anticipatory obedience, a reflex on a matter of world crisis like Israel’s destruction of Gaza as well as on matters closer to home, like our own professional survival. 

 

I’ve laid out the alternative elsewhere: surveys, data, analysis, publication, dissemination, advocacy, howling into the void until the void listens. The void does eventually listen.  

 

The void needs to hear us say that extramural funding must by doubled, tripled, quadrupled until the 166,000 college and university humanities instructors have research support in the ballpark of their needs as identified in the surveys we must conduct. 

 

The void needs to hear us say that STEM disciplines must move towards full coverage of their overheads so that much more institutional funding can be used to give humanities scholars appropriate research support.  We need a 10 year plan, and we need it now!

 

My thought about 2025 has been that Trumpism is likely the end of this fifty-year political cycle and not its resurgence.  But we are the ones who have to work to make that true. It is not up to us alone, but it is also up to us.  And we need the money and the infrastructure to have the power so our research can make this difference.

London on January 21, 2017

Tomorrow, we can start rebuilding after this very bad day in U.S. history. Today, I will sit with reality at the bottom of the well.

1. The green transition has been cancelled with immediate effect. The rest of the world will struggle on, led by China, but greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise.  US energy use will increase, and there will be a boom in natural gas power stations, fueled by the tech broligarchy.The US voting majority has chosen climate chaos for itself and the world. The Palisades-Eaton fires in Los Angeles, which has destroyed my hometown of Pacific Palisades, is the harbinger. 
2. The state monopoly on violence goes to the least qualified and most dependent on Trump.  The Secretary of Defense, directors of National Intelligence and FBI, US Attorney General, are all fanatical loyalists and borderline if not actually delusional. They will enforce his attacks on traditional allies and his support for traditional enemies abroad, and do the reverse at home.  His foreign policy point to three-bloc world feudalism structured by continuous diffuse violence. At home, courts, policing, incarceration, and deportation will be further, even wholly, politicized to serve the goals of the executive.
3. Trumpism has now achieved capitalist class consolidation. During his first term and then Joe Biden's, Trump split the billionaire and executive class. Now its leading figures have capitulated completely. "Everyone wants to be my friend," Trump crowed.  Well certainly every member of the 0.1% does. Not just Musk and Thiel but Bezos and Tik Tok CEO Shou Zi Chew will be front-row at the inauguration and are cool with his mass deportations, non-stop threatening and coercion, nullification of diversity, and the rest.
4. The castration complex, which maybe you thought was outdated Freudianism, now rules the planet. The rulers' dominant issue is the(ir) phallus, and all decisions are routed through "the primacy of the phallus and the narcissistic wound" (57). A leading symptom is the ease with which Trump has corralled Washington DC, Big Tech, finance, defense, fossil energy, leaders of every sector, through the sheer assurance of retaliation. 
5. This has transformed Trump's refusal of knowledge and of (democratic) deliberation into a political superpower. Law and knowledge bend the knee to the US culture of force. It's hard to find any prominent figure not responding to Trump's assurance that any non-compliance will be met with retaliation. 
6. Economic policy will be created on the basis of favors in exchange for explicit payment, starting with the tech bros funding Trump's inauguration-based $250 million war chest. The most favors will go to those with the most money, increasing the inequality that allegedly caused Trump's win.
7. National political opposition to Trump no longer exists.  The Harris-Walz campaign proved that Democrats won't use the arguments that work against Trump.  They now need Republicans to block him, but they have no Republicans. Republicans aren't only owned by Trump in the sense of being psychologically unable to oppose him. They also see his political sociopathology as their only real power. As Jonathan Last put it in "Vice is a Moat," they believe that "If a guy [Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hesgeth] is willing to rape a woman, surely he can be counted on to visit destruction on Democrats, or woke generals, or whoever."  
8. Racism is cool again. It can be justified by any "working-class" grievance whatsoever--the high price of milk, slow city government, backed-up expressways, absurd rent increases.  With Trump having destigmatized racism, it is liberated to perform its classic function of deflecting blame from corporate landlords, supermarket monopolies, and other structural problems Trump will worsen.
9. The knowledge class is the constitutive enemy in this Republican-authorititarian psychological formation.  This class has been stripped of standing and authority, and I mean all of us, the-academics, teachers, researchers, creative industry workers, and content makers of all kinds. Trump enforces both knowledge negation and the political negation of its workers.
10. Knowledge class officials will try to neutralize (9) with capitulation.  For example, the executive boards of the two largest humanities associations, the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, started the new year with exercises in anticipatory obedience. The MLA blocked debate of a boycott resolution, while the AHA Council vetoed its own business meeting's resolution against scholasticide in Gaza. Professionals have already been defeated by managers within their own (contradictory) class position known as the professional-managerial class ("Fear Factor"). Now they are imitating managers in refusing to take positions independent of the powers that be, even when these positions are grounded in autonomous (and expert) thought. This strategy will achieve nothing for the professional workers allegedly represented by it, except to confirm their weakness. 
    

All this means that non-Trumpers of the world will need to fight, and fight like we have never fought before, at least not since the 1930s.  It also means that it will feel like we are rebuilding from scratch.

I'll be ready to rebuild tomorrow.  But today I will stay at the bottom of the well.

 

MLA New Orleans on January 9, 2025

by Rebecca Colesworthy

“A democracy worth its name won’t abandon some people to a principle of non-participation.” — Judith Butler, speaking at the MLA convention on Jan 11, 2025

This is not an exposé. It won’t be a barn burner. It may be a bridge burner despite my efforts to avoid that. I’m not revealing state secrets or breaching confidentiality. I only cite and refer to information and documents that are publicly available or shared with permission. You won’t find accusations or attacks. Some critiques, but I presume good faith on the part of all. 

This is my attempt to pull a lot of threads of recent Modern Language Association (MLA) history together in one place, for colleagues trying to make sense of things and for my own sanity. I don’t claim to be an expert, and I’m certainly not officially authorized, but I have a fair bit of experience and have tried to keep up with the reading, linked throughout here. 

It concludes as most everything I write does—with hope for greater solidarity, including between scholars and publishers, and within and between professional organizations in the humanities, especially as we look toward an increasingly terrifying future.

Here’s the brief version of events:

During the fall of 2024, a group of MLA members submitted a resolution by the September 1 deadline with extensive supporting documentation, including signatures from more than 100 additional members. The resolution responds to expert characterizations of the Israeli war on Gaza as a genocide and scholasticide by saying we, as the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) call. As per the MLA constitution (the relevant section is VII.B.3.), the resolution was reviewed by the executive council (EC) at its October 25 meeting. The EC—of which I was then an elected member—voted not to forward the resolution to the Delegate Assembly (DA) for debate and a vote at its meeting during the annual convention in January. As reported by Inside Higher Ed (IHE), the vote by the EC was “unanimous,” though not all EC members were in attendance at the meeting. Esther Allen, with whom I later resigned from the EC, was not present.

 The resolution proposal and preparation process is, as the MLA notes on its website, “complex.” I won’t reiterate all the steps here. In short, if the resolution had gone to the DA, and if the DA had approved it by a majority vote, then it would have gone to the membership for ratification. Ratification requires that at least 10% of the eligible membership cast a ballot. The MLA website currently estimates over 20,000 members.

 So, what happened after the EC blocked a DA vote? As former MLA president Chris Newfield notes in his own helpful summary of “the Story Thus Far,” the decision “generated some strong responses.” 

Here is a timeline of (some of) those responses and the aftermath of the Oct meeting:

Oct 29: As reported in IHE, the executive director sends the resolution’s proposer, Anthony Alessandrini, a brief email saying “the council has decided it cannot forward your resolution to the Delegate Assembly. As the fiduciary of the association, the council considers the many ways the association could be impacted by any resolution, including the financial and legal effects.” In the subsequent days, Alessandrini writes at length to the EC, asking for further explanation and sharing an email he’d sent in September explicitly offering to discuss any potential legal and fiduciary concerns with the council.

 Nov 5: Alessandrini learns more about the council’s reasoning, not from the council, but from IHE, when a reporter relayed it to him. Later that day, a statement from the EC and an FAQ about its decision are sent to Alessandrini and the DA and posted on the MLA website; I have linked to them here but a member login is required to access them.

Nov 6: The piece in IHE is published.

Nov. 8: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the blocked resolution.

Nov 17: Throughout this period, the EC receives letters from concerned members, including one from 7 former MLA presidents on Nov 17. Though this date wasn’t previously made public, the Dec 16 report from the EC explicitly notes that “a number of members, including a group of former presidents, expressed their puzzlement and distress over [the EC’s] decision.”

 Nov 25: The EC meets for further discussion.

 Dec 6: Esther Allen and I resign from the EC in protest over the EC’s decision.

 Dec 12: 7 of the resolution proposers publish a statement on LitHub. Allen and I share publicly that we have resigned.

Dec 16: The EC publishes its report to the DA about the resolution on the MLA website, responding to various concerns and explaining its decision not to forward the resolution for “legal and fiduciary reasons.” 

·      The legal considerations: “No fewer than twenty-seven states now have laws or regulations forbidding any state entity from purchasing goods or services from any company that engages in or that merely supports boycotts around the world.” There’s the rub: supports boycotts. While the resolution did not commit the organization to participating in BDS and was framed as an expression of members’ endorsement, per the constitution, any resolution is “an official statement from the organization.”

·      The fiduciary considerations: “Fully two-thirds of the operating budget of the MLA comes from sales of resources to universities and libraries, including the MLA International Bibliography. States with anti-BDS laws have already begun requiring their contractors to affirm in writing that they do not participate in or support boycotts, and the MLA has signed such contracts . . . In addition, the MLA does business with states in other ways, including the annual convention, on-site summer seminars, and MLA memberships, which are often funded by institutional resources. Losing the ability to engage with members in those ways or to distribute our resources in those states would also mean that students and teachers in those states would lose access to these resources. If we lose subscription income, our very ability to produce these resources for anyone would be in jeopardy.” 

Significantly, the report omits mention of the fact that Allen and I resigned. Instead, it gives an impression of unanimity at the Nov 25 meeting of the EC, saying “We [i.e. the EC] reluctantly concluded once again that we couldn’t advance this resolution.” But we did not all reach that conclusion.

Dec 17: 13 former EC members send a letter to the EC. The letter was later published on this blog on Dec 29. More former EC members sign on. As of January 7, the letter includes 26 signatories.

Dec 18: The former MLA presidents publish their letter to the EC on LitHub, now with 8 signatories total. In early January, the letter is cross-posted on this blog with a ninth signatory—Michael Bérubé. The addition is significant. As Newfield notes, Bérubé “co-chaired the Ad Hoc Committee [on Advocacy Policies and Procedures] that authored the review policy that the EC used to justify blocking the Delegate Assembly debate of the BDS resolution.” The report of the Ad Hoc Committee is not publicly available on the MLA website; otherwise, I would link to it.

Dec 19: Allen and I publish our resignation letters on this blog.

Dec 24: 12 current and former members of the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR) send a letter to the EC. On Dec 30, the letter is published on this blog with 10 of those signatories.

Jan 9 –12: MLA Members for Justice in Palestine stage a number of successful protests at the MLA annual convention, including a die-in and walkout at the Saturday DA meeting, as covered in IHE, Common Dreams, and LitHub. I cannot do justice to the scale and impact of the protests here, but will share the words of Karim Mattar, a Palestinian American professor of English, who told Common Dreams that “Saturday's protest brought tears to his eyes. ‘To see this protest, this movement emerging at the MLA, to see this national and international movement of solidarity with Palestine to emerge in the last year, has been incredibly moving for me.’” In that, Mattar is not alone.

In advance of the convention, organizers issue a press release announcing, among other things, that over 100 members signed a pledge to quit the association. Now, less than one week since the convention, they tell me that more than 300 members have taken the pledge. Among them is Matt Seybold, who was recently nominated to run for the MLA EC and has written two incisive, must-read assessments of the situation, posted on Jan 8 and Jan 12 on his American Vandal blog. 

Missing from this timeline are the many months proposers spent carefully preparing the resolution, gathering evidence and signatures, and trying to work with the MLA to address any potential concerns—including legal and financial concerns—well in advance of the EC’s October meeting. The protests were spectacular and effective, but we should remember that they were not the goal. The goal was to mobilize MLA members to pass a resolution answering a longstanding but never more urgent call for solidarity with Palestinians. That call still stands.

The MLA Members Behinds the Numbers

300+ members who have pledged to leave is about 10% of annual convention attendees. That’s major. Still, the numbers here may seem relatively small compared to the total of 20,000+ members. I can say with confidence that those who are leaving the organization are for sure part of a larger whole of concerned members. How large exactly I don’t know. Data is a moving target and scale is hard to gauge. Communication channels are informal.

The significance of the names behind the numbers cannot be overstated. I’m not talking about the prestige they carry, though there’s plenty of it there. I’m talking about the decades upon decades of service to the organization they represent. There’s occasional repetition among the signatories—former members of CAFPRR are also former EC members and signed both letters. That means there’s some double counting above, but for me that’s just a reminder of how much some members have given to the organization over years and years. Concerns are being raised across age and rank.

Then there are the dates of these actions—many in December, perhaps not the cruelest month but close to it in academia. I read through this collection of documents and see care and commitment. I think of the labor, coordination, and outreach it took to produce them. I see MLA members finding time no one has—on top of jobs, service work, the holidays, and family obligations—to fight not against the MLA so much as for it. And yes, I include the executive council in that group but I’m above all talking about the rank and file whose dissent doesn’t translate into a line on their CVs. 

What you’ll also find, if you read through these materials, is a wide range of concerns—about Palestine but also, and even more so, about the organization.

The letter from current and former CAFPRR members, for example, doesn’t mention Palestine, above all expressing concern about the MLA potentially replicating the very usurpation of shared governance members are facing on their campuses and what they characterize as an “exercise of communicational control.” 

In this vein, the former presidents write to the officials, “You are not procedurally obligated to withhold the financial data that might make your argument more convincing.” It’s a common refrain: worry and frustration over a degree of opacity in excess of procedural mandates. My own resignation letter said I felt troubled by the EC’s “lack of communication and transparency with the [resolution] proposers and [MLA] members.” That concern has not been allayed in the month or so since I sent it. 

 Some of the members now leaving the organization joined relatively recently. Others have been members for decades. Many who wrote and signed letters are staying but the fact of their staying should not be taken as a sign of satisfaction. 

Across these groups what I see is people who have been calling on their professional organization to be the model that so many academic institutions are failing to be right now, to live up to its self-proclaimed status as a “leading advocate for the humanities.” Perhaps, beyond a certain point, it’s an impossible demand, but it’s not an untoward one in our era of rampant de-professionalization and attacks on higher education from all corners. Members aren’t wrong to demand more. They—we—deserve more.

Some Not So Ancient Organizational History

MLA has a history with BDS. At the 2017 convention, the Delegate Assembly voted down a pro-boycott resolution and voted up an anti-boycott resolution. The latter was then ratified by the membership and can be found, along with all ratified resolutions, on the MLA website. It’s one of two resolutions ratified in 2017 and one of the last two resolutions ever ratified.

The 2017 resolutions were only peripherally on my radar, and I am not going to revisit them at length here. This year’s lead proposer, Anthony Alessandrini, told IHE that the new resolution was “essentially a fresh start” and I’ll follow his lead, except to note that there were two EC resignations following the 2017 resolutions, too. You can read the two members’ joint statement of resignation on the Critical Inquiry blog, In the Moment, along with a series of letters, a response, and a rejoinder. Unsurprisingly, we MLA members are extremely good at writing letters. 

There’s also a more immediate predecessor to this year’s resolution—an emergency motion calling on the EC to defend pro-Palestine speech that was passed at the 2024 DA meeting. On March 4, the EC sent a letter to members about the motion, affirming its support of academic freedom and announcing a newly planned webinar and special issue of Profession.

This year’s resolution, Alessandrini further said, stemmed from “a lot of concern to make sure that Palestine continued to be discussed within the MLA.” Some may wonder whether a resolution endorsing BDS was the best way to do that. As the proposers explain on LitHub, a number of other scholarly and professional organizations have endorsed BDS. This resolution, it bears reiterating, was framed as an endorsement by members. Again, the challenge, per the EC report, was 1) that the MLA constitution says that any resolution, whatever its wording, is “an official statement of the organization,” and 2) laws and executive orders that target not just boycotts but also support of boycotts.

 I am not personally interested in debating whether this year’s resolution was the “right” way to address concern for Palestine. The resolution is what it is, i.e., what the members who wrote and supported it wanted it to be and what they thought would pass muster based on their communication with the MLA during the proposal process. 

The leadership’s handling of the resolution also is what it is. That for many is the core issue: How the resolution was handled and—fittingly for language and literature experts—the terms in which it was handled. 

Fiduciary Review and Trust

As the Dec 16, 2024 report reminds us, in 2019 members voted to move the EC’s review of resolutions before a potential debate and vote by the DA—and with good reason. That change was initially suggested by the aforementioned Ad Hoc Committee on Advocacy Policies and Procedures. Again, the committee’s report is not publicly available on the MLA website, or I would link to it here. (I read it while a member of the EC.) 

You can, however, read the minutes from the 2019 DA meeting where the report’s recommendations were debated and voted on and see all the changes that were made to the previous resolution procedure: Resolution word maximums were changed from 100 to 200; the deadline for resolutions was moved to Sept 1; proposers would now have to collect 100 instead of 10 supporting signatures to further engage members; and the EC would review resolutions at its October meeting to decide whether or not to forward them to the DA. Not forwarding resolutions is well within the EC’s power—but it’s not a foregone conclusion, even if there are legal and fiduciary concerns.

Passage is also not a foregone conclusion. In 2023, a motion calling on the association to annually contribute $250,000 to union organizing efforts was defeated in the DA by a vote of 81 to 3 on legal and fiduciary grounds. 

Resolutions and motions are different and have different procedures. The 2023 situation is not the same as this year’s. But it does provide an example of the MLA leadership making a case to the DA and engaging in open deliberation about legal and fiduciary concerns. I am not convinced that, as the executive director told IHE, the resolution “couldn’t possibly go forward,” that we couldn’t have entrusted members to weigh different factors and worked more with members to surface and address concerns.

The executive council is the fiduciary of the organization. “Fiduciary” is not a synonym for “financial.”  As my friend and former colleague on the EC, Samer Ali, reminded me, the root of “fiduciary” is the Latin term for “trust.” (Ali was also a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Advocacy Policies and Procedures that recommended putting the fiduciary review before the DA deliberation.) This valence, however, continually seems to be missing from the EC’s calculus. 

Matt Seybold, in his recent writing about the MLA, draws on his expertise in political economy from a humanities perspective to draw out the anti-labor roots of the MLA’s understanding of “fiduciary responsibility,” aligning the latter with the same corporate logics and rationales being used to gut members’ colleges and universities.

Where then is the trust? How much trust has been lost? How is it to be measured against the organization’s other resources?

To have disallowed members from voting on the resolution, the former EC members write, “not only erodes our trust in the MLA with regard to Palestine, but with regard to any other possibly controversial matters. Will you stand strong as the Trump administration attacks things like Critical Race Theory, for example, or queer theory, trans literature? Surely the new administration will punish scholars in these areas and impose penalties on those who defend them. Can members trust you to stay strong?”

Trump takes office on Monday and, whatever happens with the ceasefire currently—finally—being negotiated, these questions very much stand.

Members and/versus Publishers: Solidarity not Exceptionality

The 2017 resolutions were before my time—not as a member but as an engaged member. At the time, membership bought me access to the convention where I may or may not have had interviews in any given year. 

2016–17 was the last year I applied to tenure-track jobs. I had one interview at the convention that year, for a job at a school 20 minutes from my home. The job went to an inside hire and should have from the start, without the rigamarole of a search. 

I started a job in publishing nine months later and stayed on as a self-subsidized MLA member because I believe in the organization’s mission and work and have been lucky to have the “disposable” income to support it. Indeed, it’s only after I stopped trying to be a professional teacher and scholar that I became more involved in “my” professional organization.

I am, to my knowledge, the second-ever publisher to serve on the EC—which is surprising given how central the business of publishing is to the MLA and, hence, to the EC. It’s primarily as the fiduciary of the MLA as a publisher that the EC suppressed the resolution, writing in their Dec 16 report:

“The MLA has a very different financial profile than most of the other humanities member organizations. While we, like they, collect dues and conference registrations, these funds are only a small portion of the revenues on which the MLA relies to pursue its mission in publishing, convening, professional development, and advocacy for humanities teaching and research. Fully two-thirds of the operating budget of the MLA comes from sales of resources to universities and libraries, including the MLA International Bibliography.”

 Much could be said about the tone of this passage. In his own reading of its substance, Seybold calls out the tautology. It seems to be saying, as he puts it, “We need our publishing business to pay for our publishing business.” 

I am, as I know Seybold is, a fierce supporter of nonprofit publishing businesses. And the idea here is that the MLA’s publishing business helps subsidize all kinds of other activities and resources that benefit members, which is all fine and good until members pose a risk to the business by, say, proposing a resolution that might jeopardize contracts with anti-boycott clauses. 

As a publisher and independent scholar, I don’t have institutional access to the MLA Bibliography, which is held up as the resource that must be protected at all costs. Believe me, I wish I did. 

But I also understand how institutional subscriptions work—although, in one of my darker moments this past fall, it occurred to me that I basically voted in October to protect a resource I can’t use. Worse, I voted to protect the finances of an organization that, because of that same vote, I don’t especially feel represents me as a member. Nevertheless, I have not yet signed the pledge to let my membership lapse—though it’s highly possible that the leadership would like me to at this point.

Perhaps because I don’t identify with any single scholarly profession, but work within several, what most troubles me about the above passage is the blitheness with which it claims the MLA is different from other humanities member organizations. 

While it may technically be true that the MLA has a different financial profile, the MLA is not so different from its peers in leaning on its status as more than a member organization when pushed to take a stand on Palestine. In January, at their annual meeting, members of the American Historical Association voted to approve a resolution opposing scholasticide in Gaza. The AHA resolution does not mention BDS—but that didn’t stop it from raising concerns among leadership. According to the New York Times, the organization’s executive director read a report stressing that “We are not a political organization, which is essential if we are to have any standing to provide Congress with briefings on such issues as the histories of deportation, taxation, civil service, and other pressing issues.” The resolution, the ED implied, could conflict with other advocacy activities. 

UPDATE JANUARY 18th: AHA leadership then officially decided as much on January 17. Following the MLA’s lead, the AHA council announced that it had decided to veto the resolution on the grounds that it “lies outside the scope of the Association’s mission and purpose.” Like the MLA, the AHA appears to be a member organization until members threaten to get in the way of the “real work” of the organization. 

I don’t doubt the commitment of these organizations’ leaders to members. But I do think I’m aptly summarizing the message some members are getting. The outgoing MLA president told IHE “’the primary reason’ for the council’s decision ‘was fiduciary.’" But she also mentioned concerns about dividing the membership over endorsing the BDS movement, noting that "collegiality was one of many things that we were considering.” 

This quote should stop you in your tracks. “Collegiality” and potential divisiveness have not been part of the official narrative of the EC’s decision making before now.

 What worries me is the pretense that the membership hasn’t already been divided—not by any activism or even dissent and protests, but rather by decisions on the part of leadership and by how those decisions are being spun for public consumption. Of course, I want members in both red and blue states with anti-boycott legislation to have access to the full panoply of MLA resources. Of course, I don’t want a resolution to conflict with that. But I personally am desperate for some more open reckoning with lines that are implicitly being drawn all the time between different parts of the membership and different parts of the mission—between who counts and who does not, between which activities are mission-critical and which are not. 

My partner in resignation, Esther Allen, told IHE, “They [MLA leadership] really don’t feel comfortable with any kind of member activism; they really don’t want it at all on any subject.” Whether or not that’s entirely true, it is for sure a, if not the, message being sent to members.

There may be specific things the MLA can do to address that—such as proposing changes to the constitution that would enable members to take activist stances without threatening its subscriptions. But I would also love to see the organization itself be more activist. There is strength in numbers. 

Rather than declaring the MLA’s difference, why not make an effort to partner with other organizations? Why not leap at the chance to learn more about how they are navigating anti-boycott laws and the barrage of contemporary threats we all are facing? That would be a mark of bold leadership.

If the MLA is not ultimately so different from other member organizations, I wonder: is it “very different” from other publishers? Have other university presses (the MLA is a member of the Association of University Presses) signed contracts requiring them to confirm in writing that they don’t participate in or support boycotts? Do authors ever have to make such pledges to collect royalties? 

I ask these questions not to cast judgment but to try to identify sources of collective power. Now is the time for greater solidarity and collective strategizing within and between humanities member organizations—and, yes, publishing businesses. Because truth be told, I’m not sure any of us who care about the humanities can afford to insist that we’re exceptional right now.