A Mash Note to the MLA
Let me begin by thanking my colleagues Rosemary Feal (Executive Director of the MLA), Professor Erin Templeton, and Chronicle of Higher Education writer Jennifer Howard for correcting my error: the Los Angeles Times did run one feature story on the recent MLA Convention last week, focusing on the role of the humanities, and the job market for humanists, during tough economic times. As you may remember, I’d asked for corrections, since I’d turned up nothing but an LA Times blog post in my search. It turns out the reason my search failed is kind of interesting: I’d used as search terms first “Modern Language Association” and then “MLA” (which is what we all call our professional organization)—but neither term actually appears in the story! The one time we’re named, we’re called “the Modern Language Assn. of America.” I should have just searched for “Feal.”
But I promised to talk about the story the media missed—and no, Rosemary, it wasn’t the Fun Run!
Professional conferences are take place in a very strange, isolated, space—what the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin somewhat awkwardly dubbed a “chronotope,” or “time-space.” One becomes rather cocooned. I remember, for instance, that I was at a conference the weekend of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, and didn’t hear of it until I got to the airport for my flight home. At a conference the outside world ceases to exist for a brief, precious moment, and all that really exists is the work of the profession. That’s one reason so many college teachers hate the MLA Convention, I suspect: it’s pretty unreal, surreal even, and very, very intense. For me, three-and-a-half days spotlighting the work we do, conversing about the conditions under which we do it, strategizing about how to do it better: there’s nowhere I’d rather be.
I figured out a while ago, though—I’ve been teaching full-time since 1990—that it’s only part of why I go. And this year, for me, the MLA Convention was very different than in previous years. The Convention program consisted of 821 different paper sessions; I didn’t attend a single one. In a normal year I’d be presenting on one or two of those panels myself, and attending as many as time would allow; this year, time allowed . . . none. I’m self-conscious about complaining when I know Rosemary’s reading—I don’t want to compare meeting loads!—but I was in a hotel suite for fifteen hours with colleagues, interviewing candidates for a job; had a two-hour meeting, convened by MLA President Sidonie Smith, for department Chairs; a five-hour meeting of the MLA Delegate Assembly (I didn’t make it to the end—Rosemary did!—but I’m not saying more); an organizing meeting for the executive committee for the Division on Twentieth-Century English Literature; and, to wrap things all up, a three-hour meeting, starting at 7:30 Sunday morning, with the ADE (Association of Departments of English) Executive Committee. I came, I saw, I met. (And no, I don’t know how to say that in Latin.)
What was left? Of what did the Convention consist for me, besides interviews and meetings? In a word: Friends. Glorious friends. I use the term advisedly; I do mean “friends,” and not just colleagues. I’ve been doing this long enough to care very deeply about many of those I work with, such that “colleague” doesn’t really capture it. The longest-standing of those friendships go back to graduate school, some twenty-five years or more.
And despite the “bubble” in which one hopes to exist during a scholarly meeting, all we talked about, after hearing the news Saturday afternoon, was the Arizona shootings. Bubble, yes, but conferences take place in hotels; hotels have bars; and bars have . . . CNN. It wasn’t partisan talk, at least among my friends; it was human talk, about how fragile our democracy is, about what power humanistic learning might have, if any, to speak to, or prevent, such a tragedy.
We didn’t come up with any great answers, at least in the conversations I had; but I was very glad to be with friends while trying to digest such incomprehensible news. The news media, when reporting on the gatherings of my professional tribe, likes to highlight the fact that we’re eggheads, and more than a bit left of center: fair enough. We are, and we are. Can I just add that I’m proud to be part of a group that cares so very deeply about people? As Yeats closes his great poem “The Municipal Gallery Revisted”: “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends / And say my glory was, I had such friends.”
I’m reading… with pleasure. While being cloistered in an interview room for that many hours can never be described as “fun,” being able to hire in this economy is a luxury. I am actually thrilled that you had a good MLA and never attended a single formal session. A lot of what you did IS part of the program, though. The MLA meetings to which you were invited. The socializing. Oh, and that Delegate Assembly meeting (which, as Clerk of the Assembly, I will always be at, from start to finish). Thank you for this perspective on what the MLA convention is and isn’t. And I’ll try not to be self-conscious when you read my tweets.
Rosemary Feal
MLA (aka Modern Lang Assn)
Cheers, Rosemary: and thanks for all you do for the Association (or “Assoc.”).
K
Yes, I agree, but while we have come out the other end of the whole professional rite of passage and can feel pretty sanguine about it all, seeing the faces of young job seekers at MLA made the barely repressed anxiety return, and I felt a little like the other end of the Yeats poem:
Around me the images of thirty (OK, twenty) years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side…
Fair point, Nico: My sense of comfort at MLA today was bought with many, many years of anxiety there. I guess what folks like you & I can do is to try out best not to be evil: to work actively to make the profession a more humane work environment. Now, how to do that in a market where there are 250 applications for every good job. . . .
Agreed, Kevin! We need to bring a little So Cal niceness to the profession!
I’m an MLA outsider, so I didn’t think I had anything to say about this. But the last two comments made me remember my hideous experiences as a job seeker at a couple of AHA conventions. (AHA is the equivalent of MLA in the history world.) I won’t go into detail, as I have worked hard to repress the memories. Suffice it to say that I referred to myself and my cohort in shabby tweed coats as “The Legion of the Damned.”