Activist Academics at MLA

Philadelphia, Pa.—We are frequently told that the nine-to-one advantage that registered Democrats frequently enjoy on most college faculties does not matter because the political orientation of professors has no effect on the manner in which they teach. Academics themselves tell a different story, and often do at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

And if the largest conclave of college English professors in the country sometimes sounded like a Democratic Party strategy session at the MLA meeting late last year, it might be because the two groups’ membership rolls have an overlap. “I’ve spent my entire career so far looking at the relationship between language, gender and civic life,” Northwestern’s Sarah Mesle said at the MLA conference.
“Claire McCaskill in the 2004 campaign lost to an objectively inferior candidate,” Mesle opined. It should be noted that supporters of McCaskill’s victorious opponent in that Missouri gubernatorial campaign—Matt Blunt—have made the same “objective” assessment of McCaskill.

“I was frustrated by my inability to put my education to use in her campaign.” To be sure, Mesle was referring to campaign work she undertook on her own time but she herself blurred the line between on-the-clock instruction and after-hours activism.

“I think I would have been more effective as a political speaker if I had approached this as a pedagogue,” she told the appreciative capacity crowd, adding, “It’s not so much that scholars are wrong in their politics.”

Her time on the campaign trail did give her an idea of how popular opinion diverges from the consensus in the Ivory Tower. “It’s dangerous to assume that the public is behind academia,” she told the audience of academics. “I suspect that I am not the only one who found the results of the 2004 election disappointing and realized that the 2006 election victories took place in the absence of articulation by the Democratic Party.”

Mesle’s chosen field, women’s studies, is present on nearly every campus, though usually in the form of interdisciplinary selections from various departments, including English, her springboard. “The transition from women’s studies to gender studies occurred while I was an undergraduate,” Mesle said.

She did not realize how far left she and her realm of study were until she tried convincing voters instead of just students of the wonders of the feminist mystique. “I thought I was a moderate on gender issues because I got married,” she says.

She advocates “constructive pedagogy.” Apparently, it doesn’t always work out the way she plans:

• “Feminism was defined for me by one student as ‘Even though women are physically inferior to men, they should have equal opportunities,” she remembered.

• “As I told someone, ‘It’s so difficult to get across Judith Butler to people who haven’t got through Betty Friedan,’” she noted. That observation really got a rise out of the crowd.

“Use pedagogy,” Michigan State University’s Malea D. Powell advises, on “activist projects.”

“I did a textbook because I didn’t like the way Indians were treated in textbooks,” she says. Dr. Powell herself is of Native American descent.

“I got involved in the mascot battle at Miami University of Ohio in which we were successful,” she recalled. “I got tenure at Michigan State University by publishing new scholarship on Native Americans.”

“I edit The Study of Native Americans and work with Native American communities.” Dr. Powell’s desire to preserve her heritage is understandable and laudable, as long as it does not come at the expense of our common history.

Her personal story is rather an inspirational one. “In 1989, as a 26-year-old single mom, I began my education in the master’s program at Indiana University,” she revealed.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.