MLA and BDS 9: Open Letter From MLA Delegates Resigning To Protest Suppression Of Resolution 2025-1

 

MLA Convention, New Orleans on January 11, 2025

To the Officers and Members of MLA Executive Council: 

We, the undersigned, resign from our positions as members of the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association, effective immediately. Likewise, we resign from the MLA. We refuse to serve in this capacity because of the MLA leadership’s suppression of the Delegate Assembly’s right to vote on proposed Resolution 2025-1 endorsing the 2005 call of Palestinian civil society organizations to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel. The quashing of this vote diverges from the due process that was followed to bring it to the Delegate Assembly.

 

In early October 2024, Resolution 2025-1 was proposed by a group of general members of the MLA. Despite gathering numerous member signatures in support of the resolution, going through a lengthy vetting process with MLA leadership, and receiving overwhelmingly favorable comments in an online open forum, MLA’s Executive Council stopped the proposed resolution from being considered at the 2025 MLA Delegate Assembly. Executive Director Paula Krebs did not meet with the makers of the resolution to discuss their concerns, nor did she respond to letters from the membership who raised their concerns. Throughout the months of November and December, several former MLA presidents published their letters of dissent and two EC members publicly resigned in protest, citing the “lack of communication and transparency” around the procedural vote. Even though the writers of the resolution followed all protocols to gather the correct number of signatures, they were met with silence by the Executive Council. This came as a surprise to many in the general membership as well as delegates.

 

As delegates from a range of humanities fields, we have invested significant intellectual and administrative labor in the MLA, some of us for decades. We have demonstrated a commitment to its mission to support “justice throughout the humanities ecosystem.” Simply put, when the Executive Council blocked the vote on the BDS resolution, they betrayed us as delegates and members. In doing so, they improperly prevented us from fulfilling our duties as delegates and from representing our diverse constituencies. Therefore, against this institutional and calculated violation of trust and protocol, we refuse to continue with the MLA and its illiberal and capricious leadership. Our walkout of the 2025 Delegate Assembly reflected our frustration with a governance structure that we have engaged in continued good faith despite a record of obfuscation around the issues of higher education and human rights in Palestine. This year’s suppression of the vote follows last year’s failure to act upon the emergency motion defending pro-Palestinian speech passed overwhelmingly by the Delegate Assembly. The MLA has consistently shown willful obstruction and obfuscation around Israeli war crimes and human rights violations in Palestine, which compels us ethically to resign collectively and not be complicit in MLA’s cowardly, preemptive capitulation to outside political pressures and, therefore, complicity with genocide. The recent decision of AHA’s Council to veto a resolution on scholasticide in Gaza, though it was overwhelmingly supported by members, affirms our sense that any statement in support of Palestinian life and liberation would ultimately be silenced by academic institutions.

 

We are unwilling to remain part of an organization that is complicit in genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, where all major institutions of higher learning have been destroyed by U.S.-backed Israeli attacks. Israel has killed at least 12,794 students and 759 educators in the West Bank and Gaza and has prevented at least 785,000 Palestinian students from attending their schools and universities since October 2023. By resigning from the Delegate Assembly (and as members of the MLA), we stand with our Palestinian colleagues who have called for international academics to “fulfill their intellectual and academic duty of seeking truth, maintaining a critical distance from state-sponsored propaganda, and to hold the perpetrators of genocide and those complicit with them accountable.” If our disciplines are to retain their integrity, we must actively work to undo ties to setter colonial regimes that engage in acts of genocide and scholasticide—a reality that existed in Palestine when the 2005 BDS call was issued and that will persist after the ceasefire goes into effect.

 

In resigning from the Delegate Assembly, we refuse to support an unethical organization that values its fiduciary concerns and political expediency over human life. Our resignation is an ethical and professional duty that reflects our concerns about the organization’s future viability and its apparent disregard for academic freedom and membership governance. If the MLA abrogates democratic governance, assembly procedures and accepted protocol to succumb to pressure from politicians and outside interest groups and/or align itself willfully with corporate and state interests, the Delegate Assembly effectively becomes an irrelevant body with no ability or purview to argue for academic freedom and just working conditions or to advocate for the humanities in times of crisis. And would such an enervated vision of the humanities be worth saving? What good, after all, are the humanities if we cannot apply our knowledge in the world? If we cannot materially oppose genocide—the gravest of crimes against humans? 

 

Sincerely,

 

Hosam Aboul-Ela, Rocky Mountain Delegate, University of Houston

 

Hatem N. Akil, Language Programs Delegate, Valencia College

 

Amit Baishya, Academic Freedom Committee Delegate, University of Oklahoma

 

Karyn Ball, Politics and the Profession Delegate, University of Alberta

 

Purnima Bose, TC Marxism, Literature & Society Forum Delegate, Indiana University

 

Sarah Dowling, Region 1 Delegate, University of Toronto

 

Katherine Gillen, Adaptation Forum Delegate, Texas A&M University--San Antonio

 

Rebecca Johnson, Romantic and 19th Century Delegate, Northwestern University

 

Boyda Johnstone, Community Colleges Delegate, Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY)

 

Robin Kello, Graduate Students Delegate

 

Karim Mattar, Global Arab and Arab American Forum Delegate, University of Colorado at Boulder

 

Nasser Mufti, 20th/21st Century English and Anglophone Forum Delegate, University of Illinois at Chicago

 

Kalyan Nadiminti, English and Anglophone Forum Delegate, Northwestern University

 

Angela Naimou, Politics and the Profession Delegate, Clemson University

 

Janet Neigh, LLC Canadian Forum Delegate, Penn State Erie

 

Kaneesha Parsard, CLCS Global Anglophone Delegate, University of Chicago

 

Trisha Remetir, Asian American LLC Delegate, UC Riverside

 

Juno Richards, LGBTQ in the Profession Delegate, Yale University

 

Stephen Sheehi, Mid-Atlantic States Delegate, William & Mary

 

Elizabeth Sheehan, Women and Gender in the Profession Delegate, Ohio State University

 

Levi Thompson, LLC West Asian Delegate, University of Texas at Austin

 

Katie Walkiewicz, Indigenous Literatures of the United States and Canada Delegate, UCSD

 

Jini Watson, Postcolonial Forum Delegate, University of Melbourne

DATED March 10, 2025