MLA Marches On

When most reporters cover the annual Modern Language Association national convention, they generally play it as a long feature on a fringe group of zany English professors but this approach belies the cross section of academic humanity that descends upon these annual confabs.

“These days, the MLA counts more than thirty thousand members, of whom ten thousand tend to show up for the annual convention,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in The Believer. “MLA membership, like academia itself, is weighted toward the East Coast, so conferences in California are not as well attended: only eighty-seven hundred professors were coming to San Diego.” Lewis-Kraus covered the MLA’s last West Coast gathering a couple of years ago.

“Over the course of four days between Christmas and New Year’s, those eighty-seven hundred professors would attend more than eight hundred academic panels featuring upwards of three thousand papers; endure countless job interviews; and socialize at scores of cash bars, not to mention the two open bars.”

To be fair, once at the convention, some more winnowing out occurs. In fact, the actual attendance at the seminars becomes so fine-tuned that the cast of thousands dwindles mightily. “I’m told the morning panels tend to be ill-attended, as are the night panels, and most of the afternoon panels, as well,” Lewis-Kraus writes.

As a one-time attendee, I can attest to this. My own head-count at more than a dozen MLA panels that I attended last year ranged from 6-50, but many in those audiences turned out to be Department chairs.

It should be noted that the 10,000-professor-attendance number breaks down to about 2 professors per English Department per college and university in the United States, which, from what I have seen at the last convention, about describes the crowd that attends the event.

Lewis-Kraus gives revealing capsule profiles of a handful of these attendees, including his convention guide—Assistant Professor Charles L. Bertsch of the University of Arizona. “In the early nineties, he and some other grad students in the U.C. Berkeley English Department founded an online journal of arts, politics, and culture called Bad Subjects, to which he still contributes,” Lewis-Kraus writes. “He also writes and interviews for Punk Planet, a magazine out of Chicago.”

“He’s as comfortable talking about the history of his favorite indie record labels—particularly his holy trinity of Matador, Drag City, and Thrill Jockey—as he is talking about Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and cultural critic Frederic Jameson.”

Lewis-Kraus arrived at the San Diego meeting prepared to offer a sympathetic take on the MLA that would serve as a counterpoint to the image most observers deliver. Unfortunately, he also aimed at realism, which worked against that goal.

“One of the first things I hear about that night, however, is that issues of tenure are inseparable from issues of pedagogy,” Lewis-Kraus writes. “Charlie complains that it doesn’t seem fair that your ability to continue working as a teacher depends on how your tenure committee evaluates you as a scholar.”

“Charlie’s colleague Corinne Scheiner of Colorado College—who has just effervesced for an uninterrupted half hour about a course on Lolita and butterflies she cotaught with a lepidopterist, complete with extended camping trips and campfire Nabokov-reading—sympathizes, but counters that she still thinks that you have to be actively engaged in the creation of new knowledge, as a scholar, to take a respected role in its university-level dissemination.”

If Lewis-Kraus lapses into tongue-in-cheek prose, the lapse is understandable given the subject, particularly when he is describing one of the grande dames of the MLA. “The first speaker is Judith L. Ryan; she’s a Rilke scholar and a Harvard professor and a commanding presence,” Lewis-Kraus recalls. “From what I can tell, she’s also a big deal and an elder statesperson of the profession, because when I ask Corinne who Ryan is, no fewer than nine people around us tell me that she is a Rilke scholar and a Harvard professor and an elder statesperson of the profession.”

“University presses, Ryan says, were until recently subsidized by their parent universities, because they were never supposed to be profit-making ventures. They were to publish small runs of esoteric scholarship that ordinary publishers would laugh at.”

But for sheer pathos you can’t beat Eric Hayot, now a Global Fellow at the International Institute at UCLA who calls Web-based video games “the most profoundly underestimated new cultural form of the last 20 years.”

“I meet Eric Hayot, a colleague of Charlie’s at Arizona, who tells me within minutes of our introduction how genuinely happy he is that the MLA convention is held each year between Christmas and New Year’s,” Lewis-Kraus remembers. “It’s such a special time of year, he says, a time for being with loved ones, and he’s glad he can spend it at the MLA.”

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