East Village on October 31, 2022   

Looks like it.  

There’s some good stuff in Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic article, “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” but the piece unravels into a tool of the thing people actually hate about the humanities, which is not its implications for social justice but its civil wars. It blames the increasingly desperate struggles of the academic humanities not on right-wing enemies but on liberal humanists—a woke Mellon Foundation and its president Elizabeth Alexander.

I was one of the people that Harper interviewed for this article.  (Here, “Harper” always refers to the author, Tyler Austin Harper). He was fun to talk with, is a serious person, and worked hard on this piece, all of which I respect.  When we spoke, I emphasized our terrible money problems, which I argued tower over our manageable and ordinary methodological debates.  

 

I said that the real issue is our lack of the funding to produce and disseminate our knowledge at the scale that would get the kind of social attention allotted to medicine and computer science. We may think this is intrinsic to their topics and status but it is mainly the result of their vast organizational labor, labor of a kind that the humanities establishment, Mellon included, refuses to try. 

 

Harper cites my Public Humanities piece on funding—“Humanities Decline in Darkness”-- for a statistic in which federal humanities funding rounds to zero. But you have to get to his third-to-last paragraph before he makes his best causal claim about the current situation: 

The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch . . . 

 

I would have finished that last sentence by writing, “and so we don’t build the data and resource infrastructure that would make our needs visible to politicians and the public.”  But that’s not where Harper goes.

 

Harper’s other most effective moment comes from Phillip Brian Harper, the Mellon program director for higher learning: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change. It’s not to serve in perpetuity as the piggy bank for research.” Mellon, he said, was never supposed to be a panacea for the humanities.

 

 

Great, but who will do the shaking of university management? Mellon? Phil Harper says its role is to catalyze. On this topic, it’s not.  

 

He is of course right that the situation is completely appalling. To repeat, even though sociocultural knowledge is essential to solving any of the world’s epic problems, the rich universities listed below spend almost none of their institutional funds for R&D on non-STEM fields.

 

Figure 1. Institutional Expenditues on R&D, Selected Universities

 

SOURCE: NSF Higher Education R&D Survey (HERD) FY2024, Tables 14, 23, 29.

Yes, these figures likely exclude individual faculty research funds via outside grants, named chairs, and other department-managed funds.  But as indicators of institutional investment in humanities infrastructure, they are shocking. Universities’ own refusal to fund humanities research is also one cause of our society’s inability to deal with its core problems.

 

Yet Harper comes not to bury funding failure but to chastise social justice. The fault for him lies not in Trump’s destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities or 40 years of right-wing culture wars, but in Mellon’s interest in a better society.

 

∞∞∞

 

Harper makes two main claims. The first is that “classical” and “social justice” scholarship aren’t complementary approaches but rivals. They compete bitterly for scarce and dwindling funds. 

 

The solution to this is obviously an alliance between rivals to fight for massively better funding for all, at least ten times more funding than socio-cultural scholarship has today.  

 

But Harper diverts attention from funding with his second argument: “social justice” research is a betrayal of humanities scholarship, a kind of negation of it. This increase in “the decidedly sublunary work of furnishing political propaganda” makes Harper wonder whether the academic humanities are worth saving at all.  And Mellon, he writes, has shifted to funding this political propaganda since the arrival of Elizabeth Alexander as president.

 

Let’s try to understand this claim. Harper’s evidence for a policy shift is a Foundation announcement dated June 30, 2020. Mellon declared a new focus on “just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.” Board chair Kathryn A. Hall explained that “our reinvigorated mission and strategic direction . . . not only builds on our historic commitment to the arts and humanities, but rightly emphasizes a desire to make the ‘beauty, transcendence, and freedom’ found there accessible and empowering to all members of society.”  

 

The new direction assumes the complementarity of what we might call “basic” and “applied” humanities research, and not that applied research—addressing social questions—debases basic scholarship.  Complementarity—with awareness of different modes, aims, and questions--is assumed in every STEM field and social science of which I’m aware, so Harper has a special burden to show that the humanities are unlike all other forms of academic research in this way.

 

Alexander confirms complementarity in the announcement by adding, “We are a problem-solving foundation looking to address historical inequities in the fields we fund.” This also expresses reflexivity about Mellon’s own role in knowledge creation, which includes a past of supporting the kind of epistemic biases and limits that need constant correction in every field.

 

The new Mellon direction also seemed to aim at the democratization of humanities knowledge—at taking the results of humanities research outside of a small elite while also learning from communities about their existing knowledges and practices.

 

Harper presumably approves of problem-solving, and he definitely opposes the perpetuation of historical inequities which he agrees exist.  He sounds fine with humanities for the people, which is the official policy of the state humanities councils and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) whose origin story he affirms. He writes,

[U]nder Alexander, the foundation deserves credit for working to create a more economically just landscape within higher education. Before Alexander’s arrival, Mellon tended to disburse lavish funding to institutions that were already rich. Now, as part of Mellon’s commitment to equity, it is making a conscious effort to provide funding to public and less selective institutions. It has also increased funding for university-led prison education programs

 

All true, good, and important.  So what is so bad about Mellon’s new direction?  

 

Nothing, actually. (Its inaction on overall funding is a separate question to which I’ll return)  But to save what must have been the original idea for the story, Harper spends most of the piece making the false argument that “applied” humanities scholarship (not his term) is political propaganda.

 

How does he show this?  First there’s his prior, the false legacy dualism in criticism and some related humanities fields in which the criticism of texts and historical materials (basic) is denatured and corrupted by engaging in criticism of society (applied). It’s this dualism that turns “social justice” into “political propaganda” that ruins scholarship. 

 

This dualism may encourage him to search his anecdotes for polarity. For example, he spoke with a scholar who “confessed that . . .he had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant. I suspect that this may not be a rare occurrence.”  Harper’s assumed incompatibility between the first and more race-focused version of this scholar’s work makes this a problem rather than progress. 

 

Second is Harper’s assumption that it’s bad to get steered or shaped by a call’s language or a program officers. There seems to be a tacit idealization of “classical” humanities scholarship as pre-social and not in any good way developed by thinking about problems it might solve, or by being asked to change emphases in a proposal by an agency official.  

 

I see this as a humanities provincialism about sponsored research, which always involves calls, program officers, public pressures, institutional forces and so on.  This is not epistemically less valid than idealized autonomous scholarship. Remember actor-network theory and dozens of related ways of discussing the collaborative nature of thinking.  So the scholar who “reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race” likely improved his project. Program officers at NIH, NSF, and other STEM agencies do this advising routinely.  Agency shaping can be good or bad. 

Harper doesn’t have the evidence to rule out good shaping in that more-race-oriented project or the others. (Gabriella Coleman’s valuable commentary on Harper, “The Exposé that Wasn’t,” is really good on this point.)

 

So it’s not that “social justice” aims are inherently anti-intellectual and ruin scholarship. Better knowledge in many areas can come from working like Pasteur rather than like Einstein, to reference a classic study of the (complicated) relation between basic and applied research.  And it’s also not true that agency shaping is bad per se.   

 

So Harper falls back on a third way of making his claim that woke Mellon is ruining the humanities. That is to scorn sample program language as self-evidently non-scholarly.

Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice.

I assume Harper means this program, run by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).  Awarded titles include the following: 

 

·      The Dam, the Road, the Port: The Transformation of the Brazilian Northeast during the Long Twentieth-Century

·      State of Mine(Mind): Affective Geographies of California's Rural North

·      Urban Tropics: Dwelling under South and Southeast Asian Urban Microclimates

·      Uneasy Intimacies: Seeing Irei and Aesthetic Ambiguity Through Fukunosuke Kusumi's Art

·      Black Anti-settler Placemaking: Cooperation Jackson's Eco-villages from Mississippi to Vermont

·      Fiber Optics: Henequén Classification and its Consequences

·      Troubled Waters : Natural Disaster, Space, and the State in Precolonial Panjab (1707-1849)

 

Check these and the others out for yourself.  They all analyze major issues and strike me as likely to make original contributions to knowledge.  I don’t at all see Harper’s justification for assimilating all the projects to “identity” and “justice” studies. To do this, he needs to stereotype everyone on the basis of the appearance of words like “settler,” “queer,” “colonial” etc. I don’t even see how they’re all applied rather than basic research. He offers no evidence (just the legacy assumption) that these are not intensely scholarly, deeply intellectual projects.

 

At breakfast before drafting this post, I read an interesting review of The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture by Susanna Berger (Princeton University Press, 2025).  “Central to The Deformation,” the reviewer writes, “is the question of how religious elites wielded anamorphosis as a means of gatekeeping the divine.”  I love this kind of stuff. But is a book about the relations among perspective in drawing, theology, and institutional power in 17^th century Europe clearly epistemically “classical”—pure, basic research-- and thus intellectually superior to work on “Affective Geographies of California's Rural North”?  The answer is no. Mellon / ACLS funded research simply cannot and should not be delegitimated with superficial separating of the sheep from the goats.

 

The same goes for Harper’s disdain for a grant to Colorado College.

In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.

Harper doesn’t actually know what the conference organizers did and did not consider, but in any case, “how to dismantle systems of oppression” is one of the ‘permanent problems” of human beings. It is also a running theme of literature, history, and philosophy for thousands of years.  One might find the Colorado College formulations a bit plodding and yet not try to discredit the program through a false distinction between intellectual work and its social contributions.

 

I can imagine Harper doing a different kind of research that leads to a different article about the humanities.  He would go to Colorado College, interview the students, staff, and faculty involved in the program, and sit in on its courses for a few weeks while also visiting classes that aren’t part of the program.  He could then compare and contrast and identify the actual cognitive and other effects of the program on the participants. We would all learn something about what actually happens through humanities funding on college campuses to (and by) students and their teachers—for better and worse.  This is the real void in public understanding, and Harper’s dismissal of a program on the basis of its terminology doesn’t help fill it in.

 

So, Mellon’s new direction is less elitist. It puts greater emphasis on “applied” over “basic” research (“Pasteur’s Quadrant”) while insisting on their complementarity (and equal intellectuality). It funds some research on white supremacy and overcoming it--along with funding many other things, and really this funding is a drop in the bucket of overall social need for knowledge about racial nationalism, the authoritarian personality, etc.  Mellon program directors shape applications, as they always have.  They may now fund a higher proportion of outreach and communication programs compared to applied or basic research, but Harper doesn’t get into this important issue.  Finally, Mellon is the last big national funder in research-starved humanities field.  Only the last of these strikes me as a scandal.

 

∞∞∞

 

Daylight does appear when Harper takes the other side of his own argument. 

It is hard to argue that the tens of millions of dollars that Mellon is putting toward internships for working-class kids at public colleges and universities would be better spent financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France. But this calculus also says something about the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods—programs for humanities undergrads, resources for Ph.D. students, traditional humanities research, support for emerging fields and endowment-poor universities—against one another.

Yes, absolutely: we must address with the intent of solving “the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods against one another.”  We must at the same time argue for “financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France.” But it isn’t Elizabeth Alexander or Mellon that set up the zero-sum game. This happens when critics pit different kinds of humanities scholarship against each other.  

 

Mellon et al. didn’t set up the zero-sum funding game.  But what are they doing about fixing it? 

 

I’d trace some of Harper’s completely valid distress about the system to having grown up in this barren funding world where one’s work is always losing out to someone else’s.  The real issue with the humanities’ national leadership isn’t that they politicize scholarship, but that they don’t fight openly and systematically to fund a great deal more of it.  

 

This gets us back to Phil Harper’s statement: 

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change.”

 

But Mellon is not doing that. 

 

I can find reports galore about the crisis in STEM funding—everything from the cuts to indirect cost recovery to the losses of whole areas of research (like racial disparity in public health outcomes that NIH had funded for years) and of scientific personnel. I can find nothing from the humanities associations about their research funding problems.  

 

NEH has been gutted, yet MLA, which did indeed help sue the government over NEH, has joined NHA, AHA, APA et al. in neither collecting data to show the funding problem nor developing a systematic plan for building such funding. 

 

Similarly, the ACLS’s Strategic Framework 2025-2030 doesn’t have a sentence about tracking humanities research funding or expanding it. I see all these great scholars on the board. What are they doing?  What are we actually doing?  Why isn’t something like Figure 1 above on Mellon’s website as part of a large, structural analysis, rather than on the blog of an obscure professor? Universities need to be “taken by the collar.” But who will take the humanities agencies by the collar?

 

None of the solutions are really so abstract anymore.  People here and there have sketched out plans. I outlined one version in a long discussion paper for the MLA Executive Council in 2022, and ended my presidential address in January 2023 with a sketch of the steps we need to take, somewhat expanded in the print version (“Criticism After This Crisis”).  Also in 2022, a sub-committee of the Executive Council developed a reporting structure on cuts (or growth) across the country, planning to use the Association’s large, elected Delegate Assembly to feed information to headquarters for analysis and reporting. The Association never set this up. 

 

Two years went by, and the MLA then set up a panel explicitly about funding at the Convention in January 2025. 

 

Figure 2. MLA Convention Program 2023, Panel 139

 

The panel was an excellent (re)start on the topic, and the panelists had a good planning meeting afterwards.  We outlined NEH, Mellon, MLA, ACLS working together on research data, reporting, development. Then Trump took office and started his attacks. My colleagues bailed on the plan, which as far as I know, is dead.

 

With some discipline, we can replace our historic humanities pastime, discrediting each other’s research, with the project of building a material base for all of it.  If we can’t show basic mutual respect for divergent (and radical) research within the profession, then we are doomed.  But actually we can do this, and many, many of us already are.

 

I again invite both Harpers and everyone else into the effort of building the material base. 

 

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.