When the media deigns to cover a landmark Supreme Court case involving education, reporters should cultivate sources outside of the educational establishment, lest they run the long-term risk of being caught flatfooted by the ruling…
Articles By: Malcolm A. Kline
From Stalinist Russia, With Love
In Stalinist Russia, they had a love-hate relationship with the United States: Stalin hated it but the writers he dispatched to the U. S. on investigatory trips got to rather like it. Ilya Ilf and…
Disabling Dickens
Truly, some authors are just too important to be left to academia. Charles Dickens is one of them. Yet and still, the Modern Language Association (MLA), at its annual conventions, regularly tries to modernize the…
MLA Deconstructs Middle East
When the Modern Language Association (MLA) deconstructs something, it stays scrambled. Thousands of English professors attend the annual MLA conferences and just about every English Department is represented there. At this year’s meeting in Austin,…
Patchwork Girl @ the MLA
Growing old is hard enough without a cadre of pedagogues telling you what it means. “Critical aging does not toss the baby out with its ideological bathwater,” LaSalle professor Emily Mattingly said at this year’s…
Good News for English Majors, Sort Of
When thousands of English professors gathered in Austin, Texas earlier this month for the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, they were rather pessimistic about the future of their profession, with one small but notable…
MLA Creates a New Word and World, Apparently
Somewhat true to its name, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has transformed the word “imaginary” from an adjective into a noun. “In the dominant United States imaginary, some children are more sacred than others,” Sarah…
Ecologically Correct: It’s Academic!
It’s interesting that although liberals are the ones who most like to talk about protecting the environment, conservatives are the ones most likely to do yard work. “There is a conflict between the politics of…
Academic Animal Studies/Farm
George Orwell might have been amused. Academia is well on its way to quite literally becoming Animal Farm. Indeed, the very first day of the latest Modern Language Association (MLA) convention featured a panel on…
Rock, Paper, Scissors
It’s interesting that some of the same people who go ballistic at the suggestion that corporations are people are quite willing to ascribe human attributes to inhuman things. “I’m out to prove that rocks are…