Colleges and universities are forever feeling shortchanged by taxpayers. They needn’t worry. For one thing, they are far richer than those of us who actually pay federal levies. For another, academia has succeeded in securing…
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Colleges and universities are forever feeling shortchanged by taxpayers. They needn’t worry. For one thing, they are far richer than those of us who actually pay federal levies. For another, academia has succeeded in securing…
The Modern Language Association (MLA) gave new meaning to the term “in-depth study” at the annual MLA convention in Austin, Texas in January. “What Crime and Punishment is really about is aberrant male sexuality and…
Occasionally you can actually learn about classic authors at the Modern Language Association (MLA). Attended by thousands of English professors from around the world, too often the MLA emphasizes the “Modern” part of their acronym…
Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared in The Observer and appears courtesy of the author and the Louis D. Brandeis Center. When New Jersey lawyer Stephen Flatow sent an email to some history professors earlier…
One way in which the world’s largest conclave of English professors—the Modern Language Association (MLA)—lives up to its name is to leave attendees at its annual conferences with a new vocabulary that they cannot shake….
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…