MLA and BDS 8: Open Letter To MLA Leadership From MLA Forum Executive Committees

Mississippi River, New Orleans on January 9, 2025

To Executive Director Paula Krebs, Coordinator of Governance Leigh A. Neithardt, and Members of the Executive Council:

In response to your undemocratic suppression of Resolution 2025-1, we write to inform you that we are collectively resigning from the Modern Language Association. We no longer see the MLA as a place where we can continue to invest our intellectual labor.

 

About four hundred MLA members (including delegates, executive forum members, and longtime participants) have signed a pledge not to renew our membership. In addition, because the executive forum structure is the beating heart of the convention, a sizable group of members have resigned, are withholding labor, or protesting MLA’s actions by proposing a session on academic freedom and the Palestine exception for the next convention.

 

Resignations of Executive Forums en masse include 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, West Asia Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 20th- and 21st-Century American Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Marxism, Literature, and Society Transdisciplinary Connections, and Postcolonial Studies Transdisciplinary Connections. Individual members of twenty-five other executive forums have also resigned and signed the pledge, including Memory Studies Transdisciplinary Connections, Medical Humanities, Sexuality Studies, Prose Fiction, Hemispheric American, Global Anglophone Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Poetry and Poetics Genre Studies. Twenty-twoother forums such as Sound Media Studies, Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia Diasporic Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Shakespeare, Creative Writing Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies, Translation Studies Transdisciplinary Connections, Latina and Latino Studies Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and numerous others who did not wish to be named for fear of repercussion, are withholding labor and/or proposing panels on academic freedom for Toronto. 

 

We list these names and numbers only to give you a sense of the widespread disaffection your arbitrary decisions in the name of fiduciary responsibility have caused among your members. Your actions will have consequences far beyond these numbers. The eloquent and principled statements of resignation, some of which we attach at the end of this letter, urge you to affirm solidarity with Palestinian people in this moment.

 

Indeed, we are heartened that you have recently conceded that our protests have had an impact, announcing processes to change the constitution in an effort to create a mechanism for the membership to make its views known, separate from the MLA association’s business interests. We believe that these proposed changes, as well as a perfunctory nod to scholasticide, are a direct reaction to the executive forum members’ and delegates’ protests. We are proud of the efficacy of our efforts and of the solidarity shown by all of the forum executive committee members and delegates who took up this question for serious debate.

 

These changes, should they take place, will perhaps enable MLA members to use the platform of the MLA to respond to threats facing higher education starting in 2027. In sympathy with colleagues who aim to move the MLA to action, we hope that these changes, while belated, will strengthen their academic freedom. We can only note with outrage and profound sadness that these changes have come through the abandonment of any meaningful solidarity with the Palestinian people. 

 

We are further dismayed that you continue to refuse to address the moral urgency of the moment. Neither vague promises about bureaucratic changes nor the obfuscation of their actual impact or the exact time of their execution is enough. Instead of investing more of our time and labor in the MLA, we plan to continue to protest in solidarity with Palestinian scholars and to find other associations and venues that are able to create the conditions for more meaningful engagement with all the challenges of our era, and are not invested in protecting the right to conduct business as usual amid a genocide.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

MLA Members for Justice in Palestine

 

[Below are statements from several forum Executive Committees whose members have resigned, are withholding labor, or are protesting MLA’s actions by proposing a session on academic freedom and the Palestine exception for the next convention.]

 

CLCS Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia Diasporic Forum

The CLCS Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia Diasporic Forum has dedicated our guaranteed session for Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Toronto in January 2026 to the topic of “Colonialism and Academic Imperialism: The MLA and Southeast Asia.” Our session responds to the MLA executive committee’s refusal, during the 2025 Convention, to allow the Delegate Assembly to vote on resolution 2025-1 endorsing the international Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and continued lack of clarity on future actions to resolve this situation. Scholars of and from Southeast Asia have long wrestled with overlapping histories of scholasticide, academic imperialism, and infringements on academic freedom guised in the name of liberal democracy. Our session foregrounds the expertise of our membership in responding to such conditions and explicitly addresses the role of institutions such as the MLA in perpetuating epistemological imperialism and suppressing academic freedom.

 

RCWS Creative Writing Forum

The members of the RCWS Creative Writing Forum Executive Committee denounce the Executive Council’s decision not to allow discussion on Resolution 2025-1. While we have decided not to resign in order to preserve the creative and intellectual community this forum has provided us, we support our colleagues who have resigned in protest. 

 

After serious discussion, we have agreed to voice our protest by tactically withholding our labor in the following ways: 

 

1) We will not put forward a CFP panel.

2) We will use our guaranteed panel to allow discussion on the role of CW in political crises.

3) We will not recruit to fill the two open positions on our forum.

 

We would like to underline that the Executive Council’s actions have made scholars reluctant to join our forum. The last person we had invited to join our committee declined in the following manner: “In the end, unfortunately, it's not the right time for me to jump into MLA service. Some of the reasons are personal, and some have to do with the current BDS discussions.” 

 

We regret that the EC has jeopardized our sense of community in this inflexible way.

 

LLC 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone

As a direct response to the MLA Executive Director and Executive Council's refusal to forward members’ resolution calling for an endorsement of BDS, we, the undersigned, pledge not to renew our MLA memberships, following the 2025 convention, and to resign from our roles as members of the 20th/21st Century Anglophone Forum. Given that every single member of this Forum has signed this pledge, we see no future for the 20th/21st Century Anglophone Forum at the MLA. 

 

It is not lost on us that the ongoing genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, and colonization of Palestine more generally, are the occasions for the dissolution of MLA’s 20th/21st Century Anglophone Forum—a field that has arguably depoliticized the interventions of postcolonial studies. We hope the MLA takes note of this irony, and reconsiders its decision to disallow even the smallest stand against empire. 

 

TC Postcolonial Studies

We, the undersigned forum on Postcolonial Studies, do hereby resign from our positions in entirety. We cannot stand by the MLA Executive Director and Executive Council’s refusal to forward the resolution calling for an endorsement of BDS. All current as well as recently outgoing members of the forum have pledged not to renew our MLA membership after the 2025 convention and do not plan to attend future MLA conferences or teach MLA handbooks and volumes in our classrooms.

 

Postcolonial studies has been indebted to Palestinian scholars and activists since its inception and it is clear that the field’s commitments to anticolonial justice and assertions of humanity are out of place at the MLA. While postcolonial studies itself has much to reckon with, it is also a field that has wrestled fiercely with settler colonial critique. The ongoing genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, along with the violent history of Palestine’s colonization, must be a topic of serious academic engagement for the MLA to have any moral standing as an international convenor of the humanities, and the recent responses of the MLA leadership haves shown us the need to look elsewhere for the ethical pursuit of knowledge.

 

TC Marxism, Literature, and Society 

In response to your decision against advancing Resolution 2025-1 for debate and a vote in the Delegate Assembly, we write in our capacity as present, incoming, and outgoing Executive Committee officers of the TC Marxist Literature and Society Forum to resign from our positions. In your justification for this decision, you cited your responsibilities to serve as fiduciaries of the organization in a legal landscape in which numerous states have prohibited entering into contracts with entities who support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [BDS] Movement. We do not find your reasoning compelling. Rather than repeat the convincing arguments that eight former MLA presidents made in their December 18, 2024 letter to you protesting your decision—which inexplicably was not forwarded to the full membership—we will make three other points.

 

First, in the United States and beyond, lawfare has become a means to curb previously-protected forms of dissent; current and pending legislation in states seeks to restrict civil liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, including speech and assembly rights. As you note in your Report to the MLA Delegate Assembly on Resolution 2025-1, the ACLU and other organizations are challenging such instances of lawfare. In a political climate in which gerrymandered state legislatures and the Trump administration view silence as a green light to enact laws that further restrict freedom of speech and academic freedom, we abjure the MLA’s preemptive ceding of our rights to freedom of thought and protest. We do not agree that the best means of guaranteeing our rights is capitulation to restrictive legislative measures. Such measures should be vigorously fought.

 

Second, the BDS Movement emerged in 2005 as an initiative from Palestinian civil society to protest Israel’s decades-long human rights violations and brutal occupation of their land. BDS is a non-violent form of disobedience and a departure from earlier forms of struggle which involved armed confrontation. Those of us who advocate for non-violent resistance should support and applaud such initiatives from civil society. Indeed, the MLA’s mission is explicitly oriented toward justice: “The MLA supports and encourages impartiality, fairness, and justice throughout the humanities ecosystem.” In the face of scholasticide in Gaza, the encouragement of non-violent resistance in all its creative forms falls under this mission and we should be able to freely discuss these issues.

 

Third, our forum executive committee has been frustrated by the MLA’s impediments to facilitating basic communication with the over 500 members we are told constitute our forum. On several occasions, we have complained about your unwillingness to share a forum membership list with the executive committee and the “rule” mandating that all EC communications must be approved before you will forward them to our membership based on an arbitrary time schedule. As we have noted in past communications with you, these “rules” indicate a basic mistrust of our executive committee’s judgement, implicitly suggesting that we are not disciplined enough to send messages that are only related directly to MLA business. They have also impeded our ability to publicize our CFPs and solicit nominations for our committee officers. This mistrust is emblematic of the MLA Executive Council’s suspicion of the Delegate Assembly’s ability to debate Resolution 2025-1 and its opaque decision-making procedures.

 

Over the last few decades, many in the humanities have decried the dismissal of our relevance to public policy and, more generally, the public sphere. Your unwillingness to bring Resolution 2025-1 for debate in the Delegate Assembly is compelling evidence that MLA itself has substantially contributed to our irrelevance through a retreat from debating the most pressing issues of our day. We regret that the organization has abdicated its responsibility to advocate on this issue and others and, thus, demonstrate not only the relevance of the humanities but our indispensability to functioning democracies.

 

LLC 20th- and 21st-Century American

The MLA LLC Forum Executive Committee for 20/21C American Literature has collectively chosen to resign following the MLA Executive Council’s vote to withhold the resolution stating that members of the MLA endorse the 2005 call from Palestinian civil society to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in opposition to the war on Gaza. The members of this committee agree that our professional societies should remain forums for open debate and that the MLA’s fiduciary responsibility is encased within–not poised above–its larger responsibility to serve as “a leading advocate for the humanities” when our work is under extreme threat.

 

TC Memory Studies

We write to you as executive committee members of the TC Memory Studies forum (G108) to condemn the organization’s undemocratic decision to refuse to forward to a DA vote the resolution to endorse the Palestinian-led BDS movement (Resolution 2025-1). As has been widely discussed, including in an essay by a number of the MLA’s own past presidents, the MLA’s legal and fiduciary justifications for this decision are both unpersuasive on their own merits and inappropriate as a response to genocide, scholasticide, and apartheid.

 

As scholars of memory studies, we cannot silently stand by while the MLA willingly participates in a culture of denial and evasion that has characterized the establishment political response to the genocide in Palestine. Our field was largely founded by scholarship about the Holocaust, and several of us on the forum executive committee study Holocaust memory, among other topics. Decades of powerful work in this field has taught us that it is not enough to oppose genocide and other atrocities long after they are over, as matters for pious commemoration. The animating principle of memory studies is that we must draw the connections between past and present in order for the lessons of the past to be meaningful.

 

The MLA is not its products or its database but the members who devote their time and intellectual labor to the organization. In light of the MLA leadership’s failure to forward

Resolution 25-1 for a vote, we hereby withhold our time and intellectual labor from the

organization by resigning as members of the forum executive committee and pledging not to renew our MLA memberships.