MLA and BDS 3: Letter from Current and Former Members of the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities to MLA Executive Director and Executive Council on Blocking the Debate

Vancouver MLA Convention on January 9, 2015

--December 24, 2024

Dear Executive Director Paula Krebs and Members of the MLA Executive Council,

 On December 18th,  a letter sent to you from eight past presidents of the MLA was published on LitHub.  The letter raises serious questions about your decision to suppress Resolution 2025-1.  As past presidents, the signers of this letter are well aware of your body’s fiduciary responsibilities, which you have cited as the primary reason for not permitting this resolution to move forward.  Nonetheless, they raise some critical questions about how the supposed economic fallout was calculated, and the generally “conjectural” nature of the legal and financial consequences that you reference as the basis for disallowing a vote. 

As current and past members of the MLA’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities, we seek to uphold the academic freedom of our members, and by extension the core principle of shared governance on which academic freedom rests.  On this basis, we feel called upon to write in support of the organization’s former presidents, and their fundamental point that the extent of the MLA’s legal or financial exposure from the potential passage of this resolution is itself open to scrutiny and debate.  Shared governance is in crisis in our universities precisely because deans and provosts and chancellors are making unaccountable decisions behind closed doors citing financial exigency.  This situation cannot be allowed to replicate itself in the professional organizations that we count on to support us in our struggle for faculty rights on our campuses.  

Equally important, we are deeply concerned that we had to read this response on LitHub, as the link began circulating through our personal networks.  The Executive Council’s messages and report have circulated to the full MLA membership. (Notably, the executive report sent to the MLA membership on December 16, did not mention that two EC members, Rebecca Colesworthy and Esther Allen, have resigned from the committee in protest.) The signers of this Presidents’ letter are no less qualified to comment on the matter of this resolution, and there is simply no warrant for the exercise of communicational control that ensures that only one position is represented to the membership. This would appear to be a clear violation of the most fundamental principles of academic freedom and open debate in the MLA. With all due respect, we therefore write to urge that the letter posted to LitHub be immediately circulated to the full membership of the MLA.

The signers of this letter have been members of MLA and served on multiple MLA committees because of our commitment to the organization and its ideals.  We look forward to ongoing discussions with other MLA members about how to translate our mutual theories about academic freedom and shared governance into practice for our premier organization. 

With thanks and in anticipation of future collaboration,

Signatures updated for circulation 12/27/24 

Amit Baishya, University of Oklahoma

Linda Carroll, Tulane University

Eva Cherniavsky, University of Washington

Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem, CUNY-Kingsborough  

Pedro García-Caro, University of Oregon

Michelle Massé, Louisiana State University

Valerie Traub, University of Michigan

The views expressed here are those of the signers, and do not represent their schools or employers.

Two current or past CAFPRR members who signed the original letter to the Executive Director and Executive Council of the MLA prefer that it not be circulated further and have removed their signatures for this version.