Search results for "Modern Language Association"

At a time when most people pick out pine trees, many English professors make plans to travel to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association.

Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” But some in the ivory tower would prefer that the sunlight of transparency not shine too brightly into the classroom.

For the Palestinian people, martyring themselves in an attempt to attack their Israeli “occupiers” has become a sign of honor, not only for men but also women. At a recent convention one Professor of Language and Cultural Studies explored the “gendered space[s]” of Palestinian women’s resistance against Israel in the context of the First Intifada.

Since its inception Accuracy in Academia has catalogued the inner politics of a series of Humanities disciplines, including women’s studies, queer studies, fat studies, labor studies, and others.  This article will introduce a lesser-known Humanities field: age studies.

Three MLA speakers draw a parallel between ageism and “neoliberal” economic policies.

The good news: George Washington University is laying off professors.

The bad news: in the hard sciences.

As one blogger notes, it is an academic tradition for professors to “try to one-up their colleagues by exchanging unintentionally hilarious sentences from students’ exams and final papers.” In a similar spirit, I will be providing some of the more striking statements made by professors discussing at the 2009 MLA Convention.

For supporters of David Horowitz’s student Academic Bill of Rights, academic freedom is about protecting vulnerable students from indoctrination at the hands of radical professors. However, one DePaul University professor recently argued that Horowitz’s conception of academic freedom promotes a “distinctly right-wing agenda” and “contains within it a backhanded insult to the intelligence of the students he is purporting to protect.”

Accuracy in Academia would like to offer its own, uncensored, top-ten list of this year’s MLA presentations.

In the effort to radicalize students willing to work for social change, “critical” teachers may be forgetting to let their students freely choose their own ideological positions in the first place.

The tragedy of too many college courses on William Shakespeare these days is that students may be learning more about literary criticism than the Bard himself.

What do psychology, Jurassic Park, Star Trek, and Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have in common? They represent lessons in developmental miscarriages, deadly toilet training, and inflamed bestial passions, according to three professors.