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. 

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. (The AHA council will make a decision about how to act on the resolution at its next meeting, in the coming weeks.) 

 

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.

San Francisco Bay on May 30, 2024

by Unspecified Employee

Q: Why does a large university, such as Northeastern, merge with various small colleges, such as Mills College or Marymount Manhattan College or New College of the Humanities? 

A: Because it can.

And because these agreements, while they are announced as mergers, are basically giveaways, and usually come with a big pile of assets that are handed over to Northeastern with few questions asked. 

For instance, when Northeastern merged with Mills College in 2022, they got what their CFO called a fully undergraduate enabled blank slate with $650 million in assets--for more or less nothing more than the agreement to respect tenure for about twenty-five remaining faculty, most of them close to retirement. And for that it got a $250 million or so endowment: a mix of scholarship funds, endowed chairs for faculty, named lecture series, etc. Also included were 135 acres of land in a major metropolitan area, much of it undeveloped. It included a number of dorms that could house around a thousand or so students, a recently updated theater, a recently restored concert hall with frescoes by artist Raymond Boynton depicting an array of mythological scenes, a number of recently built LEED certified buildings, an art museum adorned with the words “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis”  from Hippocrates, a beautifully preserved Mansard building included in the National Register of Historic Places, a street that has been declared as among the nation’s hundred most beautiful, and a Julia Morgan designed campanil. And Northeastern also got a bunch of musical instruments including over twenty grand pianos and a number of historically significant synthesizers, a library with a rare book collection that included a probable leaf from a Gutenberg Bible, all the art in the art museum, a book arts studio, a woodworking studio, a ceramics studio, a number of science labs with their microscopes and their cadavers. A swimming pool was included, a nice one. And a soccer field, a bit run down but still functionable. Also many many computers, desk chairs, coffee makers. A fine presidential house. A number of lovely small houses for faculty built in the Spanish Eclectic style. A very sweet farm. All the things that make a college a college.

It is not like there were no costs when Northeastern was given this $650 million. 

Mills had significant debt, around $30 million was the rumor, that had to be paid off. And some deferred maintenance too. So shortly after the merger Northeastern invested in some brightly colored Adirondack chairs for the meadow, some signage, many gallons of paint, and they turned the fountains back on. They also provided iPads to the faculty with cell service for a year so they finally had working WiFi, then new computers the next year, and eventually a six percent raise. (Mills faculty salaries had been frozen for many years and were unusually low; this raise did not really bring them up to national norms, or compensate in any way for cost of living increases, but it was something.)  

Then the campus was easily monetized. 

Within the year, Northeastern had over a thousand students enrolled to sit in those Adirondack chairs. These students, part of the Global Scholars Program, paid full tuition. So very quickly, the campus was bringing in $81 million in tuition a year. 

The next year, another five hundred students arrived on campus. These were four-year students who were directly admitted to Northeastern, a mixture of graduate and undergraduate students. Assuming a fifty percent discount on tuition and housing, that would be another $20 million. 

Basically, the blank slate was very quickly generating $100 million a year in tuition. 

But really, the CFO’s blank slate comment should probably not be taken too seriously. It is not worth getting all righteous about. It isn’t his job to sugarcoat the merger and he isn’t working for the public relations office. 

But what is interesting about this blank slate comment is that Mills College was, of course, not blank at all. It was occupied by a number of committed faculty, staff, and students. All had different fates. 

The students either left or finished their degrees with Northeastern. Those that stayed got a Northeastern degree at Mills prices.

The staff that decided to remain were protected for a few years. Then many were retained or offered the option to move to Boston. 

But the fate of the faculty was more complicated. Even though Northeastern very quickly figured out how to bring in around a thousand and a half first year students, it has been unable to figure out what to do with the faculty. 

Northeastern, as part of the MOU that was negotiated by the former Mills president and board of trustees, was obligated “to honor and abide by the terms of tenure.” 

But full-time faculty who were not tenured, even though many of them had been an integral part of Mills for many years, had a more mixed fate. The Provost of Northeastern when the merger was announced claimed that the MOU meant that “all full-time non-tenure-track faculty will be teaching with Northeastern following the merger.” But for how long was left unclear. 

Quickly Northeastern moved the Mills full-time-non-tenure-track faculty out of the union with the promise of their “one faculty” model. They then decided that these faculty were actually not part of the “one faculty” and were not guaranteed either the protections in the faculty handbook or multiyear contracts, which allowed them to begin the process of not renewing many of them. There were around thirty of these faculty at the time of the merger; about half of them remain two years in. 

For both tenured and non-tenure track faculty there are conflicting faculty governance issues and no clear path forward to resolving them. The faculty handbook at Northeastern claims that “the University will impose no limitations upon the freedom of faculty members in the exposition of the subjects they teach, either in the classroom or elsewhere.” A fairly standard statement. But this very basic precept has not been one that Northeastern has been willing to meaningfully extend to Mills faculty. 

Right now Mills faculty are tenured under this entity called “Mills College at Northeastern University” (which according to the MOU should exist for the next hundred years). But when the merger happened, Northeastern shut down all of Mills’s classes and degree programs, so the faculty of Mills College now teach courses that the other colleges within Northeastern offer on the Oakland campus. Many to most of the remaining Mills College faculty do not teach in their area of expertise. Just one example: a professor with expertise in African American literature was recently teaching an introduction to criminology course.

Many faculty are likely to be unable to teach in their area of expertise again because that area is “owned” by a Boston college. 

For example, Mills had an internationally renowned music program. It was a well-resourced legacy department with millions in endowment support whose courses were taught by established faculty, a program so prominent that several scholarly books were written about it. Three faculty remain, so there is capacity to offer twelve music classes a year on the Oakland campus. But Northeastern has been unwilling to offer the Music major on the Oakland campus and has decided to allow at most two to three music electives to be offered each semester. (This is happening even though the endowment funds more than cover the salaries of the remaining faculty.)  

These are difficult issues that challenge faculty governance and autonomy in all sorts of ways. To say that Mills music faculty cannot develop courses or programs in music denies the autonomy of Mills faculty.

But even if the Boston Music Department was willing to let Mills faculty develop courses, something they have not been willing to do, the Mills faculty would still be excluded from the decision making processes of those departments. To fix that and foist Mills faculty on pre-existing Boston departments as tenured members risks violating the autonomy of Boston departments to do their own hires. Yet to have say two Music departments in one university with different classes and different requirements is absurd. 

There is no easy way out of these conundrums. And the result has been a sort of stalemate where Mills faculty are in a holding pattern. Because the campus only houses freshmen, everyone is limited to teaching service classes such as first-year writing. Most are barely teaching in their fields. And some have been forced into doing low-level administrative work to fill out their workloads.

Mills College is not Northeastern's only acquisition. It fixed this mess in its in-process merger with Marymount Manhattan College by not respecting tenure and giving all faculty, tenured or not, a one-year contract. This deal, and really here the president and the board of trustees of Marymount Manhattan College should feel deep shame, basically preserves nothing of the mission of Marymount Manhattan College. 

The Marymount Manhattan merger has come with some vague promises that Northeastern will grow Marymount Manhattan’s creative and performing arts programs. But what are Marymount Manhattan’s programs without their faculty? 

Faculty have been promised consideration for any open positions, but without any commitment to there being any open positions. And, as anyone knows, all “consideration” means is the ability to apply for jobs, something that anyone can do at any time. 

This means that there is a good chance that the current Marymount Manhattan faculty are working extra hours for no extra pay, to oversee the teach-out, the very thing that will allow Northeastern will discard them once they’ve done this work. 

Abby Fiorella, chair of the Board of Trustees of Marymount Manhattan College, claims this merger will ensure "the long-term preservation of our mission, our values, and our college." But how can this be true when the merger essentially abandons the college's name, mission, and faculty? 

There is another way to think about this issue. Who “owns” a college? The answer is sort of no one. They aren’t corporations really. And while their assets can be bought and sold, the college itself can not. For many reasons, a college isn't a collection of buildings. If it is anything, it is an organic entity composed of a distinct educational mission, long-standing traditions, and a community of alumni. A board of trustees working with a dedicated faculty and staff are tasked to maintain these traditions and fulfill the mission. 

While a college's mission and traditions naturally evolve over time, these changes typically happen gradually and intentionally, guided by the trustees, faculty, and staff who understand and care about the institution's core values. Simply maintaining the physical campus as classroom space for another university does not preserve Marymount Manhattan College. 

Right now, around a hundred colleges are closing each year and this number is expected to rise. Mergers are way better than closures. They should be encouraged. It does not help anyone, especially students, to just let colleges fail. It also does not help anyone anywhere to just abandon faculty and with them their years of expertise. 

It might be that more oversight and regulatory control is needed as it does not look like big universities are going to do the right thing voluntarily, even things--like protecting tenure, cultivating the exchange of ideas, and utilizing the expertise of a skilled workforce--that would be in their best interest. 

Sadly, the accrediting agencies seem not adequate to this task. The Mills College case illustrates this problem. When accreditors visited post-merger, their response to faculty concerns about governance was that they were lucky even to be employed. 

It was a true statement. They are lucky. But in a fair world, mergers should not be allowed to arbitrarily eliminate faculty and staff positions. At minimum, the assets that the acquiring universities obtain for free in these mergers should be used to offer generous buyout packages to faculty and to meaningfully integrate those that remain before these assets drop to the bottom line of the acquiring university. 

Really though, to be done right, mergers (and not closures called mergers, which is sort of what the Marymount Manhattan College deal seems to be) should involve substantial faculty involvement. Meaningful faculty involvement that is; not the usual meetings that administrators like to hold so they can claim faculty were consulted. 

Northeastern’s tendency so far has been to go in the opposite direction. Trustees are not allowed to discuss the merger with faculty until it is settled. And then right before a merger is announced, they impose gag orders between employees of both institutions (even though it seems likely that this practice contradicts Northeastern Faculty Senate Bylaws regarding faculty authority over issues related to faculty). The gag orders are indicative of the administration’s fear: genuine faculty solidarity across institutions could challenge their ability to structure mergers primarily as asset transfers. And sadly the gag orders seem to be working, with long term consequences. Over two years later, Mills faculty remain embattled, isolated, and paid less than their Boston equivalents. 

The future of higher education mergers does not have to follow this pattern of treating colleges as mere collections of assets to be acquired and faculty as inconvenient obligations to be managed away. A better model would recognize that the true value of any academic institution is not its physical assets, but instead is the expertise, dedication, and institutional knowledge of its faculty and staff. 

When universities like Northeastern acquire smaller colleges without meaningfully integrating their faculty and staff or preserving their academic missions, they gain short-term financial benefits. But ultimately, they diminish the very thing that makes universities meaningful: their role as centers of teaching, learning, and scholarly discourse. 

As more colleges face financial pressures in the coming years, we need a framework for mergers that prioritizes academic integrity and faculty governance. Without such reforms, the losers are not just displaced faculty members, but the entire academic enterprise itself.

MLA New Orleans on January 11, 2025

This is the first section of my talk at the MLA Convention, "Humanities Dies in Darkness," an extension of a theme.  It's paired with the Public Humanities paper.  I go into more detail in another section about why I think anticipatory obedience is the right term for the profession's relation to its funding masters. I'll elaborate in a later post.

**

In spite of its very bad start, the thought of our new year 2025 leaves me somewhat optimistic, or at least determined. 

The first reason for this is that Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza has generated the strongest anti-war movement of the past 50 years. This movement has changed public discourse, so that recently unsayable terms—genocide, apartheid—have become central terms of public discussion of Israeli policy.  The movement has opened up new possibilities for peace, for Palestine, for the Middle East, even as these possibilities face new waves of repression and nasty uphill battles. Many of us in the room have been active in this struggle, including in the struggle to allow debate of a resolution in the MLA’s Delegate Assembly. Please join me in thanking them for their work. I’ll say more about this in the talk.

The second reason for my determination is that our scholarship has never been better. So much work keeps opening our eyes to new things. I can barely keep up with the podcast version of literary books on the New Books Network. I’d also mention Matt Seybold’s American Vandal podcast series, which has become the decade’s more or less best genealogy and critique of the profession’s current institutional conditions. It is another reminder of how our intellectual lives thrive in spite of material conditions that do not.

The third reason for optimism is that the elements are in place to make Trump Part 2 the end of our current long political cycle rather than its revitalization.  This ending won’t be pleasant, and I obviously can’t time it. But I can talk about what our profession needs to do with the elements that are in place—emphasis on the word do.  

This is not the first time that we confront a Western government in the grip of authoritarian populism, as Stuart Hall named it in 1978. This term refers to a socio-political and cultural condition in which leaders build authoritarian state power with the consent of a voting bloc that believes these leaders will uniquely address their genuine needs. Hall saw that the power of Thatcherism lay in its insight that cultural power would decide its fate, not just state power or economic policy.

Now in 2025, the second Trump administration will again try to remake society from above while alleging that this expresses the national will. Trump and Musk seem to be trying to create steampunk 19th century American imperial expansionism for a world to be run by a League of Extraordinary Dictators. At home and abroad, culture war will remain central: smearing the identities of migrants and trans people, exclusionary definitions of normative values—these are not by-products of Trumpism but Trumpism as such. 

One thing that has changed since 1978, or 2008, or 2016 is the destabilizing crisis in the culture industries of which the academic humanities are a part.  Authoritarian populism has always targeted rival cultural producers for destruction. As it continues to do so, it can take advantage of a materially weakened opposition that is also not well organized institutionally. 

I’m talking about us of course--cultural producers whose employment base has been under attack from various directions for 30 to 50 years. Language instructors, journalists, screenwriters, poets, musicians, playwrights—all of our colleagues in culture have been facing steadily increasing levels of precarity, inadequate salaries, unemployment, or replacement, and also few organizational tools to establish basic parity. 

Trump’s return will deepen the well-structured assault on all non-reactionary cultural knowledge production and on their institutions, especially the news media and the university. In addition, Trump’s Big Tech brigades will use so-called artificial intelligence to make this even worse.  We are facing a unique conjuncture within a system that has been under construction for 50 years.

At this point in this system’s cycle, we must confront and reject the humanities fields’ standard response to adversity. Our response has been, in my view, accommodation, coupled with a passive-aggressive reluctance to engage the external demands for positive public knowledge that the university’s social contract involves.   It’s submissive individualism, inherited from Emerson among many others.  

A related term that emerged thirty years ago to describe such a response to authoritarian systems, and now popularized by the historian Timothy Snyder, is anticipatory obedience.  I  want to pose the following question in the context of the MLA Executive Council’s recent decision to block debate of a valid resolution about boycotting Israel: if we cannot debate BDS, how can we demand that others—Congress, university presidents--debate the unacceptable material conditions of our own cultural and academic labor? Without confrontational courage, across the full range of justice issues, how, regarding my topic here, can literary study avoid further budgetary defeat?

Obedience damages the state of others, and also of ourselves.  Overcoming our long-running financial defeat now requires building a countermodel for an alternative culture and society, using elements of both dominant and emergent cultures, in Raymond Williams’ terms. Building a United States not dominated by Trumpism—a minimal but difficult step-- will not happen without the kind of discursive and cultural analysis that defines the work of most of the members of the MLA. I believe that the study of literature, language, writing, and culture will either be central to the next historical cycle or that next positive cycle will occur too late.

I have four points to make about this today. The first is that MLA disciplines cannot be bystanders to building the countermodel.  

The second is that when critics like Hall, Williams, and also Said, Ferguson, Butler, and many others called for the conceptual tools that would build away from authoritarian-democratic and white-nationalist societies in what Williams called the long revolution—literary study successfully answered the call.  Our fields have developed the forms of knowledge that can enable this transition. This development has not slowed down but sped up over the past twenty years.  I only assert this now—perhaps we can discuss a bit later.

Third, we have the intellectual means to attain meaningful public significance as producers of knowledge. But we lack the institutional and financial means.  We are not too slow or too radical to sit at the research table. We are too poor. What this means is that we are unable to fulfill the tacit social contract under which all academic disciplines labor, which is to produce knowledge that ordinary people can use to solve problems in their lives—intellectual problems, not just problems of employment.  I will lay out our financial poverty in the humanities and define it as a social problem and enormous intellectual block.

Fourth, on top the funding scandal is the scandal of our lack of will and failure to confront the funding crisis over a period of decades.  When I say we are intellectually ready but not ready with the required infrastructure, it is partly our own fault. I’ll end by calling for us to transform our relation to funding politics, which must include transforming our structure of feeling about research capital and its institutions. 

We will need a new level of militance if the profession is to survive to fight another day, to say nothing of contributing to the long revolution in democratic affects and practices on which peace and ultimately human survival depend.