What The MLA Is... (Guest Post)

MLA Convention Hallway Meeting on January 10, 2025

The organization has chosen an interpretation of fiduciary responsibility beyond the wildest hopes of Chicago School economists.

by  MATT SEYBOLD  

(This is cross-posted from his blog American Vandal, where you can find his important podcast.)

JAN 08, 2025

In March, I was nominated to for the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA). In December, I learned that I had lost that election.

Don’t cry for me. I was never fully convinced I was a good fit for the position and, as such, could not campaign for it with much vigor.1

I wasn’t even an active MLA member at the time of my nomination, an irregularity which clearly bothered the Executive Director, Paula Krebs, when she reached out to discuss (and possibly dissuade me from) accepting the nomination.

I still have no idea how I came to be nominated, but I decided to stand for the election in spite of my reservations.

And I’m glad I did. Because what did happen in the intervening nine months was that I had to think about the oldest, largest, and nominally most influential organization in my profession as I never had before. And I had far greater capacity to do so thanks to the dozens of MLA members who reached out to me after the nominations were made public in June to discuss their experiences and their concerns.

Those who spoke with me are disproportionately worried about two things.

They perceive the leadership of MLA to be overrepresented by tenured professors at flagships or elite private universities, whose experiences of the contemporary profession might be radically different from that of MLA members who work at small colleges, community colleges, branch campuses, HBCUs, etc.2

They believe MLA leadership is ignorant of, or perhaps even an impediment to, the academic labor movement. What little care the organization expresses for the well-documented job insecurity of most academic workers in language and literature departments is widely regarded as pretense and lip service.3

During that phone call in March, I was told multiple times that “the MLA is not a labor organization.” I’m not the only one who has heard this refrain. But the fact that the MLA is not empowered to collectively bargain does not, I believe, justify abdicating from all labor advocacy on behalf of its members.

On the very same day Director Krebs informed me that I had not been elected to the Executive Council, a collective of MLA members who had proposed a resolution of support for the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which the MLA Executive Council refused to pass on to the MLA Delegate Assembly, published an open letter in LitHub alleging “the handling of our resolution fundamentally unconstitutional from the beginning” and the decision “unprecedented in the history of the organization.” They called on the MLA leadership to “let members decide.” That call has since been publicly endorsed by eight past presidents of the MLA. And two members of the Executive Council, Esther Allen and Rebecca Colesworthy, have resigned in solidarity.4

I heard much about the BDS resolution in the months leading up to the election. And what I heard made me uneasy. But I want to be perfectly clear, I had plenty of time and opportunity to remove my name from the ballot, and I did not, because I desperately want to believe the MLA can be an ally to and advocate for humanities scholars and teachers, even if I presently believe it is failing spectacularly at that task.

There are many disgruntled members who remain committed to reforming the MLA from within. I still think they might be able to, and I certainly hope they succeed.

I, however, withdrew from the 2025 MLA Convention in New Orleans and signed the pledge not to renew my membership or otherwise financially support the MLA under its existing leadership.

I disagree with the Executive Council’s decision regarding the BDS resolution, but the BDS resolution is not something about which I would claim to speak as an expert. What provoked my withdrawal from the convention is my career-long commitment to the study of political economy from a humanities perspective.

As such a scholar, I regard the report the MLA Executive Council published on December 16 to explain their suppression of the BDS resolution as a contradiction of the work done by myself and my peers, as well as a betrayal of the professional class whom the MLA claims to serve and represent. And if the logics and rationales of that report are broadly legitimized by scholars of language and literature, they will be assisting in the programmatic defunding, deskilling, and delegitimization of their own disciplines.

To fully comprehend this, we have to start with the MLA Executive Council’s extensive use and expansive definition of terms of art like “fiduciary responsibility,” “fiduciary duty,” “fiduciary standards,” and “fiduciary review.”5

These terms were a minor, relatively inconsequential, part of the U.S. economic and legal lexicon until the 1960s. They proliferated in the decades which followed because they were associated with Chicago School Economics, and specifically the theory of Corporate Social Responsibility, introduced to the public by Milton Friedman in his 1962 manifesto, Capitalism & Freedom, then further popularized through a New York Times editorial published on September 13, 1970.

Befitting a “doctrine,” Friedman’s editorial does not exhaustively respond to any specific event or application of contrasting “social responsibility,” but through paratexts - the above abstract, a series of eight portraits of social responsibility activists, and a photo of protestors dressed in cloaks and gas masks - the Times frames Friedman’s position as a response to Ralph Nader, Campaign G.M., and the combined labor, consumer protection, and environmental movements which over the course of the late sixties converged on General Motors and eventually forced from it some concessions on working conditions, product testing, and pollution.

At its origins, the Chicago School doctrine of Corporate Social Responsibility is simply a rhetorical justification for private corporations to do what they prefer to do anyway: act contrary to the interests of rank-and-file employees, harmed communities, and social activists. This is what the MLA is endorsing when it treats revenue maximization as the sole measure of fiduciary responsibility. It is a resoundingly anti-labor doctrine. There is simply no other way to interpret it.

But even beyond revealing the MLA Executive Council to be, as many of its members and ex-members have long alleged, hostile to labor generally, the zealous adoption of Chicago School Economics further confirms a hostility to humanities labor specifically.

If you want to understand this in granular and historicist terms, I would point you towards “The Chicago Fight” episodes of The American Vandal, as well as towards the scholarship of Andy Hines, Edward Nik-Khah, and Anna-Dorothea Schneider upon which those episodes are based. What they show is that Chicago School Economics is designed to denigrate the knowledge claims of other disciplines, to colonize their institutional spaces, and, quite literally, to steal their resources. When Milton Friedman and his band of self-described pirates toasted the founding of Chicago School Economics, they had not yet constructed anything of note, what they have done is conquer and destroy a series of humanities and soft social science programs and departments which had thrived in their university through most of the first half of the 20th century.

This was accomplished at University of Chicago, and extensively imitated at other institutions, scholastic and governmental, around the world, exactly by insisting that fiduciary review be given priority over all other considerations of mission or obligation. Chicago School Economists would argue that the preservation and expansion of an institutions capital base be placed at the foundation of an organization’s hierarchy of needs because upon that capital base all other organizational missions and obligations depend.

But this prudent-sounding rational masks the more insidious reality: fiduciary review is an economic forecast. Economic forecasts are famously unreliable. But the standard of Corporate Social Responsibility expects executives to treat those forecasts as contractual stipulations. So what has really being placed at the foundation of the institutional hierarchy of needs is the beliefs and desires of economists (or, economic prognosticators). As one lawyer who found himself litigating against the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility put it, “The Chicago response was, well, those objections weren’t economics, and if it wasn’t economics, it didn’t count.”

The recent statements made by the authors of the BDS resolution and the coalition of past MLA presidents both question the legitimacy of the fiduciary review carried out on behalf of Executive Council and complain of the unnecessary lack of transparency regarding the method and accounting of that review. Even were we privy to all the budgetary details, the MLA Executive Council’s Report would be dependent upon an economic prognostication which claims to be able to forecast the actions of dozens of educational institutions, state governments, and courts. And also offers no accounting of the counter-effects of the EC’s decision (including, for example, the loss of membership dues and registration fees).

Economic forecasting is the mask for ideological prescription which has characterized neoliberal governance since the 1970s. And, across that span, has consistently rationalized the defunding and dismissal of alternative methods of knowledge-creation, most especially those practiced by literature and language scholars.

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.

NOTES

1. As one friend put it recently, by losing the election I “saved myself the trouble of resigning in solidarity.”

2. I want to acknowledge that I was not the only candidate for the Executive Council this year who would represent greater diversity in this respect, and two candidates who were elected hail from a small, private HBCU and a small, regional public. I regard this as an unalloyed good.

3. The 2023 presidential theme of “Working Conditions” came up in several conversations as a kind of bait and switch. One member called it “a marketing push to suck a few more years of dues out of people who would be better off if they’d given to mutual aid.”

4. Colesworthy made her letter of resignation public earlier this week.

5. The word fiduciary appears fifteen times is the 3,000-word December 16 Report, more times than iterations of Palestine (13), Gaza (10), Israel (9), academic (8), protest (7), violence (2), labor (0), worker (0), or genocide (0).