MLA Convention, New Orleans on January 11, 2025   

By Liron Mor, Comparative Literature, UC Irvine

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

 

I am writing to inform you that, regretfully, I must decline the 2025 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies offered by the Modern Language Association (MLA). I can no longer consider the MLA my academic home, given its leadership’s refusal, in the midst of an ongoing genocide, to pass to the Delegate Assembly for debate a resolution in support of the 2005 Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). As a scholar of Palestine Studies and Israel Studies, whose research addresses this very region, I oppose this blatant silencing of dissent and, specifically, of Palestinian voices. I am unwilling for my book to serve as a fig leaf for the Association’s leadership, to cover over its failure to address Israeli violence in the region or its attempt to foreclose any discussion of this violence.

 

 

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

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.

MLA Convention New Orleans on January 11, 2025

by Anthony Alessandrini

'On the second day, we held signs with the names of scholars martyred in Gaza and lay down together on the floor outside the hotel ballroom where the MLA’s elected delegates were walking in to hold their assembly. every name every name every name. Many delegates joined us. “MLA is Complicit in Genocide,” read a banner we had painted and brought with us, from occupied Hawaiʻi. A die in is symbolic, a mere fractional representation of the scope and the volume of loss. every name every name every name. We lay in silence as the complicit walked around us.'  – Hannah Manshel, 'What Follows Whereas: Reflections on the MLA Walk Out for Palestine' 

How do you give a form to absence? How do you draw a line around a silence, in order to articulate it? How do you hold on to refusal such that it’s no longer a matter of simply saying “no” to what’s unacceptable but “yes” to what’s necessary?

 

These are familiar question for poets, and for those of us who teach and study and write about language and literature. For organizers doing the hard-headed work of banging our heads against the walls of our ever-more unjust and complicit institutions, they take on a different quality. The group of us who have been organizing around a BDS resolution within the Modern Language Association have found ourselves moving, often surreally, between these two registers. We’re scholars of language and literature up against an organization that claims to represent us, but whose actions reveal not just its complicity with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but also its determination to silence anyone who attempts to contest this complicity.

 

For those who are new to the story, Rebecca Colesworthy’s excellent “Resigning from and to the MLA” and Chris Newfield’s earlier setting out of “The Story So Far” will get you up to speed. More recently, Hannah Manshel’s magnificent essay, from which I’ve taken my epigraph, describes the actions that MLA members took at the recent convention in New Orleans. These were intended to support our resolution and to protest our leadership’s repression, but most of all they were actions in solidarity with Palestinians resisting the hundred-year war waged upon them, with the unstinting support of our governments and institutions.

 

If we succeeded at anything—and I’m still of many minds about that—it was in turning what was meant to be a silence into an event. It was clear for months that MLA’s leadership was determined to make this all go away, with as little noise or attention as possible. They rejected our BDS resolution via a three-sentence email with no explanation and immediately removed it from the MLA website, even though it has passed through all the association’s logistical hurdles. When we tried to use an email list for elected delegates to discuss the situation, our messages were blocked. When the Executive Council finally deigned to put out an explanation, it was only accessible to members via a password, thus blocking it from a fuller public view. It was only due to unprecedented pressure from members, including nine former MLA presidents and 26 former EC members(including two current members who resigned publicly to protest the EC’s decision—something that MLA leadership has never publicly addressed, preferring instead to project a fictional sense of unanimity), that the Council finally put out a public statement—nearly two months after they had killed the resolution.

 

Silences, Secrets, and Lies

 

After two months of silence—and of attempts to silence us—what the MLA leadership finally said is objectionable in so many ways. The refusal to meaningfully acknowledge the context of the ongoing genocide being carried out by Israel and the United States—indeed, the refusal to even use the word “genocide” in a 3000+ word statement—belies the MLA’s rhetorical gestures towards social justice that form part of its mission statement, as well as its publications.

 

The cowardice of the Executive Council’s statement is clear, but it takes a bit more work to read out the deep disingenuousness of its argument. It boils down to this: the Council admits that anti-BDS laws do not prohibit an organization like the MLA from supporting the Palestinian BDS call. Moreover, the phrasing of our resolution—“we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call”—makes it very clear that this is not an official position being taken by the organization. But the EC nevertheless frets that this will not be enough, and that the laws somehow are even more powerful than those who made them claim them to be. As we put it in an earlier response: “the leadership of the world’s most powerful association of writers and teachers has decided that words no longer have any meaning when confronted by unjust laws.” 

 

Instead we are told: “the Executive Council is guided by our lawyers’ assessment, which is that these statutes have been carefully crafted to withstand any challenges that assert that they restrict free speech.” We, the members, have no clue who “our lawyers” might be, but we do have the benefit of the views of other legal experts who have spent years assessing these laws. Here, for example, is the conclusion from a report by Palestine Legal: 

 

“Federal district courts in four states have ruled that these states’ laws, all of which require contractors with the state to sign pledges that they don’t boycott Israel, are likely unconstitutional and that boycotts for Palestinian rights are protected by the First Amendment. However, in each state, the legislatures changed the laws that were challenged so that they no longer applied to the plaintiffs in order to moot the lawsuits.”

 

The actual legal precedent, in other words, runs counter to MLA leadership’s inaccurate and dishonest claims. Rather than being “crafted to withstand any challenges,” when these state laws have come under legal challenge, they have usually been tweaked to allow plaintiffs who challenge them to exercise their First Amendment right to boycott for Palestinian rights. Zoha Khalili, Senior Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal, puts it even more clearly: 

 

“The MLA Executive Council's decision to prevent the Delegate Assembly from voting on the BDS resolution is a cowardly, anti-democratic move. It is also a misguided one: Even if the MLA chooses to prioritize mercenary interests over Palestinian lives, its flawed legal analysis fails to acknowledge that the resolution is simply an endorsement of the Palestinian call for BDS and does not bind the MLA itself to engage in a boycott. A purely expressive resolution like this one is protected speech that is beyond the reach of any anti-BDS law, even under the most repressive interpretation of our constitutional rights.”

 

But even this doesn’t get at what is most damning in the Council’s too-little-too-late statement. There is also a secret revealed there, albeit buried in the faux-legalistic language: the Modern Language Association, without informing or consulting with its members, has already capitulated to these laws by signing anti-BDS clauses in order to obtain contracts. Here are their own words on this:

 

“As of now, the MLA has contracts for the current year that include clauses in which we have affirmed that our association is not supporting BDS. If the membership were to pass a resolution to the contrary, we would be unable to renew these contracts.”

 

We don’t know how many anti-BDS clauses the MLA has signed, nor for how long it has been doing so. What we do know—only because members have pushed relentlessly against the silence and censorship of our leadership—is that the MLA is, officially, an anti-BDS organization. A different way to say that is: the MLA is, officially, a genocide organization.

 

It only remains to be added that the MLA has at no point made the slightest attempt to contest these laws—unlike, for example, the AAUP, which expressed its opposition to them back in 2018. Even as these laws have provided multiple occasions for repressing the rights of MLA members, the organization that claims to represent us has remained silent. In fact, it has failed to issue even the mildest public opposition to the repression of pro-Palestine speech on campus, despite the fact that the Delegate Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed a motion calling upon MLA leadership to do exactly this in January 2024.

 

Taking Our Labor Where It Belongs

 

But to be honest, I’m tired of making these points. I’m tired of the cowardice, complicity, disingenuousness, corporate mentality, censorship, and outright lies of the leadership of the MLA—and, consequently, of the organization itself.

 

I’m saying all this to say this: given its current structure, the Modern Language Association is unreformable. That’s why, in the days leading up to the convention, those of us who organized the resolution issued a call asking supporters to pledge not to renew their MLA membership. Here’s the exact wording of the pledge:

 

“As a direct response to the MLA Executive Director and Executive Council’s refusal to forward members’ resolution calling for an endorsement of BDS, I pledge to not renew my MLA membership and to resign from any MLA governance or leadership position I hold. I refuse to be affiliated with or financially support an organization that both silences its members and is complicit in genocide.”

 

The unofficial count of those who have signed on to this pledge is over 350. That includes more than 25 elected delegates, dozens of leaders of MLA forums that organize panels at the convention, and many members of other committees, all of whom have pledged to resign. The list is growing and should continue to grow. That’s why I’m writing this.

 

There are many things I like about this pledge. One of them is its open-endedness. There isn’t an “until…” It’s a refusal. In its actions around this resolution, the MLA has failed its members. Moreover, both by virtue of what it has done and what it has been forced to reveal, it has doubled down on its complicity in genocide—a phrase that I do not use lightly.

 

It’s not up to us to tell the MLA what it needs to do to get us back. We’ve seen what it is, and we’re done with it. We’ve also seen what other organizations have done differently, and we’ll bring our labor to them. 

 

In the days since the convention, I’ve had conversations with earnest supporters of the resolution who have not found this to be such a clear-cut choice. Isn’t there a way to stay and fight? Isn’t it letting the organization off the hook by not using this opportunity to demand that it do something to stand in solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues?

 

I sympathize. One unshakable part of my own political ethos is a loathing of telling other people how they should resist. But the point I’ve been making throughout is that the MLA is not set up to be a democratic institution that serves its members. What has been revealed to us, instead, is an organization that is in essence a publishing company that does some philanthropic work on behalf of “the humanities” on the side. 

 

Matt Seybold makes this clear in two brilliant articles that address MLA leadership’s suppression of the resolution, specifically its claim that the organization’s “financial profile” require it to do so. Seybold writes: 

 

“The Executive Council is claiming it cannot allow its membership to democratically consider the BDS resolution because membership dues are not a sufficiently large revenue stream to make members the primary stakeholders in their member organization, whose other revenue streams must be protected from and for MLA members, in order to deliver to members what they actually need, which is neither democratic authority nor, apparently, reduced membership or registration fees. The more times I read this passage, the more it becomes to me: We need our publishing business to pay for our publishing business.”

 

His conclusion is one that many of us share: “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.”

 

I would add: the MLA has also made it clear that revenue maximization is a greater priority than the lives of our Palestinian colleagues. How could anyone calling themselves a humanist continue to belong to such an organization? 

 

The pledge to not renew membership is a direct refusal of this logic. Like a strike, it’s a call to drop our tools and walk off the job, to stop the infernal machine functioning. And like a picket line, it works via solidarity: no one can force you to join it, but its power comes from our numbers. I have no illusions that MLA leadership will be sorry to see me go; on the contrary, they can’t wait to see the back of me. But a mass exodus accomplishes something else.

 

The argument for staying that I take most seriously comes from MLA members who have been (as I have in the past) part of the leadership of forums dedicated to Arabic literature, or Black studies, or indigenous cultures and politics. These are spaces that those who came before us had to fight for, to carve out room within the general rule of white supremacy that still dominates the MLA, and literary studies in North America more generally. Many leaders of these forums are nevertheless resigning—in some cases, whole forum leaderships are resigning en masse—but they worry, rightly, about simply ceding those spaces. It is not a step to be taken lightly.

 

I can imagine ways that these spaces, and those of us who work in these minoritized fields, can migrate into organizations that have taken a stand against genocide. The most direct parallel organization would be the American Comparative Literature Association—which endorsed BDS in 2024 and has spoken out consistentlyon political issues—but also organizations such as the American Studies Association, Middle East Studies Association, Association for Asian American Studies, African Literature Association, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, to name only a few. Many of these organizations in fact endorsed the boycott a decade ago, and somehow, the sky has not fallen upon them; most of them are in fact thriving. And this is not even to mention whatever spaces we might imagine and create together going forward; after all, many of us are game for giving our free labor to causes and groups that reflect our values and politics. To continue to do so for an organization that does not, like the MLA, is on the other hand simply acceding to our own exploitation.

 

In fact, the other side of the argument for protecting these spaces carved out within the MLA is the extent to which MLA leadership has actively co-opted the labor of scholars and students working in these disciplines, especially scholars and students from minoritized communities, while simultaneously refusing to take part in struggles to defend these fields from the ongoing right-wing public onslaught (or—let’s be honest—taking any meaningful material role in addressing structural issues like the job crisis and the related exploitation of precarious academic labor). In its statement defending the suppression of our BDS resolution, MLA leadership had the gall to celebrate the fact that “two dozen convention sessions are focusing on Palestine”—as though they deserved thanks for the labor put in overwhelmingly by those of us who proposed the resolution in the first place! 

 

In this sense, the suppression of this resolution, a clear act of anticipatory obedience (the decision to kill the resolution was made a little over a week before Trump’s election), sets a very dangerous precedent. The 26 former EC members who called upon the current EC to reverse its decision conclude their open letter with an important question for MLA leadership: 

 

We are asking you to let us, as members of the MLA community, debate on whether we wish, as a collective, to take a position. To disallow us from doing so 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, or 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?

 

The words of outgoing MLA President Dana Williams, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed following our protests at the convention in New Orleans, provide an indirect but chilling response. “The association is the membership, we want to reiterate,” Williams insisted, against all available evidence; but she also pointed to “concerns about dividing the membership over endorsing the BDS movement, noting that ‘collegiality was one of many things that we were considering.’” Collegiality, controversy, divisiveness: for decades, these have been the words used to defend the status quo of white supremacy, in literary studies and academic institutions more generally. To think that the MLA will be a meaningful ally in any anti-racist efforts to come is dangerously wishful thinking.

 

Walking Out (For Good)

 

In fact, the question of “collegiality,” in a very different sense, is what leaves me with my own unshakeable conviction that our only choice is to walk out of this complicit organization. MLA leadership has made it very clear, for decades, exactly who counts, and who does not, as part of the MLA’s “we.” In our organizing around this resolution, we returned again and again to scholasticide—not just the complete and absolutely intentional destruction of all educational infrastructure, and the wholesale murder of teachers and students, in Gaza, but the decades-long scholasticide carried out throughout Palestine. As often as possible, we have used the phrase “our Palestinian colleagues.” That is to say: what is unfolding in Palestine, and has been for decades, is happening to scholars and students who should be (and in some cases, literally are) MLA members. 

 

Speaking only for myself, I have been on two different MLA panels in which colleagues from Palestine had to participate either virtually or by having us read their papers, because Israel’s travel restrictions prevented their right to free movement. In one session, I read a paper from a Palestinian colleague who teaches at Birzeit University in Ramallah—had to read it on her behalf, because she was not allowed to travel to be with us—which was largely about the attempts by faculty to keep the semester going while the campus was being raided daily by the Israeli army. And this was six years ago. Aside from endorsing a 2019 letter to Israeli authorities regarding restrictions on international academics working in Palestinian universities that was issued by the Middle East Studies Association, the MLA has remained studiously silent. How many of our colleagues have died, been imprisoned, or, in the most basic sense, been prevented from being here with us, in conversation with us, working alongside us in this supposedly international organization, during those six years of silence? Could any self-respecting scholar of Palestinian literature or culture ever be expected to set foot in the MLA after this?

 

To put it as plainly as I can: I can’t and won’t be part of an organization that isn’t even willing to speak out against the murder of people who are, or should be, MLA members themselves. It’s more complicated than that, but then again, it really isn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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: 9 of the 19 current and former members of the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR) who have served since 2020 send a letter to the EC. On Dec 30, the letter is published on this blog with 7 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. 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. 

UPDATE JANUARY 18th: AHA leadership then officially decided as much on January 17. Following the MLA’s lead, the AHA council announced that it had decided to veto the resolution on the grounds that it “lies outside the scope of the Association’s mission and purpose.” 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. 

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.