Because professors stand to gain so much through equitable evaluation of collaborative work (and we are not just talking tenure), we argue that the rhetoric of collaboration in the humanities can do more to support professors. . . .
I want to persuade you, therefore, to abandon any sense of complacency and to believe that we are facing at this moment—right now—a crisis in the humanities. Without action, we humanists, and the graduate and undergraduate students we care about and serve, stand to lose a great deal. . . .
In narrating the life and death of a literature professor, Wit asks what literature—particularly the study of literature in college—might offer in life and in death. Susie’s question gestures broadly: What is the end, or purpose, of literature? What significance does literature offer readers’ lives? How might teaching enable or hinder that significance?….
While Web-based literary projects tend to function like textual archives and repositories for commentary, this project enables readers to compare the various textual configurations of the Rvf and, in the process, participate in the seven-centuries-long tradition of actively reading, interpreting, and rewriting the text. . . .
We have learned that games can offer many advantages to language learners and can turn what is typically viewed as a mindless extracurricular activity into a vibrant learning experience that extends beyond the confines of the classroom. . . .
[T]he humanities are good for taking us out of our isolated selves and situating us among others who are both like and unlike ourselves, helping us both to see and to measure, to imagine and to create. . . .
Deflated, depressed, and undervalued, many humanities graduates finish their degrees with little confidence that they will have anything to offer employers outside the university. . . . Many students do not know how to articulate their time in graduate school as work experience. . . .
I say that a collection of articles can prove that someone can do original, publishable scholarship as well as a dissertation. But of course I don’t know, and neither do you. No one will know until someone tries it. . . .
Though tracking those who left the academy to pursue a range of careers postdegree looks from the outset to be an exercise in data collection, it is really about the stories—absent, untold, ignored—for which we use numbers as a placeholder. . . .
We recall (and treasure) individual classes and professors. But little else about why and how we were moving through this particular curriculum stands out. We can’t help thinking that we are not alone in having this experience and that this gap is, unfortunately, status quo in our profession . . .
Since 2013 new graduate internship programs have been announced from Florida to California, and practice-based fellowships have also proliferated. Both are welcome responses to today’s spirited national conversation on the changes absolutely necessary to doctoral education and training . . .
The first shock came in December 1969, at the MLA convention in Denver, Colorado. From projections developed in the 1950s, an assumption had grown to become conventional wisdom among knowledgeable observers that a severe shortage in the supply of PhD talent threatened a serious decline in the quality of the faculty and educational programs in higher education. . . .
What if teaching and research, for all this support, do not necessarily reinforce each other? The link between research and teaching may be important to the identity of many academics, but might it not perhaps be better described as a myth? . . .
Professors in the United States are socialized to view their jobs as some combination of teaching, research, and service. Teaching sometimes leads the tricolon, and sometimes research comes first. . . . But service always comes last. Why? . . .
There is no easy solution to the problems that beset research in the humanities today, but there are measures that might help. For one, the value of our research needs to be explained and defended to those outside our disciplines. . . .
The triad is our common measure, our common discourse, our common complaint. . . . The terms in our mantra appear coequal, but we know only too well that each term carries different weight, holds different value, and applies differently to those in different faculty appointments. . . .
1. Professionalism is a means not an end. Less is more. Professors are better off when they professionalize less and risk extinction when professionalization is primary.
2. Professionalized scholarly writing often seems to play off a list of master-theorists who must be cited, even if the subject is overcoming mastery. . . .
Consider a sacred place, the Teaching Rocks near Curve Lake First Nation at the northeast end of Anishnabwe territory, also known as the Peterborough Petroglyphs in southern Ontario. . . .
I would like to begin by invoking the memory of W. H. Auden, or at least one particular line of his—“Poetry makes nothing happen”—surely one of the most controversial assertions ever made. . . .
Given the amount of blood that has been spilled, it may be hard for anyone who does not live there to believe that Palestine and Israel together constitute an area roughly the size of Massachusetts . . .
Temporally complex like Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, negotiating sites of memory starts in the present and looks both to the past and the future. . . .
What kind of budgetary future do the humanities have in public universities? Dire predictions have been around for years and take many plausible forms (Donoghue), including the retreat of humanities research into wealthy private universities for the dwindling leisure class. . . .
On 1 October 2010, the provost and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York, Albany . . . convened faculty members in French, Italian, Russian, Classics, and Theater to inform them of the decision to deactivate all degree programs in their fields. . . .
The trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY) voted in June 2011 to implement Pathways—a project of the vice chancellor for academic affairs, Alexandra Logue, which purported to ease transfer among undergraduates, largely from two- to four-year colleges. . . .
As we have seen so often in Profession or the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many similar publications concerning American and global postsecondary institutions and their programs, the state of the humanities in general is a topic for debate and commentary. . . .
At institutions large and small, public or private, the rhetoric and reality of cuts, mergers, and closures have become familiar to anyone working in humanities disciplines, with the fields of classical and modern languages coming under particularly intense scrutiny in recent years. . . .
Let me try to set the stage for discussion of our announced topic, the cost of program mergers and closings. I first considered the topic of closings when, three years ago, the immediate past president of the Mellon Foundation, Don Randel, asked me whether we should consider a grant-making initiative. . . .
As I look to the ever-changing publication called Profession, I realize that it will increasingly need to speak to MLA members engaged in many professions and to serve the public humanities in different contexts and evolving ways. . . .
This is my proposal: to refuse to give up teaching in Spanish. . . . The English language is ubiquitous, but it is neither a universal nor a transparent, nondistorting lens through which all other modern languages can pass, in translation, without loss. . . .
The ethical situation seems simple: The market has fewer tenure-track jobs; therefore graduate programs should supply fewer graduates to meet the diminished demand. . . . The problem is that merely shrinking the body count is exactly the wrong thing to do. . . .
It’s been nearly a year since The Heart of the Matter, a congressionally ordered report on the state of the humanities and social sciences, was issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. . . .
The overall conference theme this year was vulnerability, so I address two issues of vulnerability specifically associated with the role of humanities centers in this endeavor we call public humanities. . . .
A week before the MLA 2014 Presidential Forum on the public humanities in vulnerable times, I walked through the corridors of the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature, reading doors. . . .
On landing in Chicago, the site of the 2014 MLA convention, I turned on my cell phone to find a number of texts and voice mails informing me of Amiri Baraka’s death. . . .
I begin by querying what we mean by the public humanities. For me, teaching is where I most often and most deeply engage in the work of the public humanities . . .
Ordinarily, considerations of the public humanities move very quickly to debates about the humanities: What do we mean by the humanities? Where is it to be found or relocated? How can it be sustained? Is there a crisis in the humanities? . . .
Calls for the recalibration of doctoral programs in the humanities at American universities are increasing in number and urgency, with suggestions aimed at length of study, alternative careers, and the role and shape of dissertations. . . .
On 21 September 2012, California Assembly Bill 2193 was approved by Governor Jerry Brown. The bill added sections to California’s Education Code defining the terms long-term English learner and English learner at risk of becoming a long-term English learner. . . .
In a recent education supplement of the New York Times, a piece advising recent graduates on entering professional schools begins with the words, “We’re not talking about humanities” (Hoover). . . .
The terms language and vulnerability come together in many ways. There is the vulnerability of infants, who quickly perceive they are nonverbal beings in a verbal world and for whom acquiring language becomes the central focus of effort. There is the vulnerability of the dislocated . . .
Languages are often made vulnerable for reasons beyond our control. Environmental factors, such as climate change or natural disasters, and social disturbances, such as ethnic conflicts and civil wars, displace people from their homes and displace, with the people, their languages. . . .
Marianne Hirsch, describing her choice of theme for the 2014 MLA convention, wrote, “Vulnerable Times addresses vulnerabilities of life, the planet, and our professional disciplines, in our own time and throughout history. Its aim is to illuminate acts of imagination and forms of solidarity and resistance that promote social change.” . . .
I would like to shift from vulnerabilities and catastrophes in the past and from the subsequent move into trauma theory to the politics of prevention. As humanists and readers engaged in memory studies, we are legitimately involved in reading extant texts . . .
The dominant scene of trauma theory has been one of victimization, and the figures who most frequently populate its landscape have been victims and perpetrators. This is no surprise . . .
In a recent lecture that explored the connections among bodily vulnerability, coalitions, and the politics of the street, Judith Butler reminded us that “it is not just that this or that body is bound up in a network of relations . . .
10 December 2013. The streets of Santiago in Chile are crowded, as they are every day. Only some police detachments distributed along the streets are evidence that this is not a usual Tuesday. You can breathe the tension in the city. . . .
Qualifying times—for example, as “vulnerable times”—implies, among other things, an effort to demarcate an era, our era, from a previous one, but also to call our attention to the era’s duration. . . .
In August 2013, a few months before the twentieth anniversary of their armed uprising against the Mexican government on 1 January 1994, the Zapatistas decided to throw a party. . . .
I want to approach the question of vulnerability from the perspective of two of the greatest crises of our time: the environmental crisis and the inequality crisis. . . .
My remarks on vulnerable times are drawn from my forthcoming book, “Reparations and the Human,” which explores the politics of reparations, the human, and human rights in the context of Cold War Asia. . . .
When I proposed the theme “Vulnerable Times” for the 2014 convention, it was my hope that the idea of vulnerability, and of vulnerable times in particular, would pull together a number of strands. . . .
Thinking about vulnerability and thinking about it together on this occasion are both notoriously difficult things to do. Is our thinking about vulnerability together a merely contingent fact, or is there something about vulnerability that becomes understandable only when we understand it as social relation? . . .
In great part, the history of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) reflects the efforts of people both inside and outside schools to reform them. Stoking these efforts is a fear that educators either cannot or will not do it themselves. . . .
“Public education is not broken,” says Diane Ravitch in her new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. “The diagnosis” of the corporate reformers “is wrong,” Ravitch writes, and their solutions are also wrong. . . .
As an organization of teachers and scholars devoted to the study of language and literature, the MLA should be deeply involved in the debate about the Common Core State Standards. . . .
It gives me great pleasure to present the 2013 issue of Profession in this electronic format. While some members will miss having a print copy of the journal, others will be glad to access the essays on their mobile devices for reading on the go. The decision to forgo paper reflects not only a concern for the environment but also a new vision for the journal. . . .
There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the pressures reshaping universities: the emergence of the corporate university, the increase in upper-level administrative appointments, the sharp shift toward sessional labor and the concomitant loss of tenure lines, the relentless raising of tuition fees as class sizes creep up as well (or expand exponentially in MOOCs), and myriad other responses . . .
The Spanish department at Mount Holyoke College has in the last six years profoundly transformed itself. It merged with the college’s Latina/o and Latin American studies programs to form a new academic unit possibly unique in the United States, while it thoroughly reconfigured its major. . . .
In January 2012 the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a report titled Accommodating Faculty Members Who Have Disabilities, and in January 2013 the presidential theme of the MLA convention was Avenues of Access, calling attention to disability and access, broadly conceived, in higher education. . . .
The amount of education required to prepare a human being for meaningful, effective interaction with the information infrastructure that undergirds the contemporary social order has increased exponentially in the last seventy-five years. . . .
Our introduction’s title, “Facing the Data,” signals the twofold aim of this special section of Profession: to assess the statistics documenting people of color in humanities doctoral programs, given in the MLA report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity, and to bring into focus the faces of those composing the report’s data. . . .
In her recent On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed concludes her reflections on dealing with the challenges of creating diversity in European universities with the image of a brick wall as a metaphor for institutional inertia. . . .
When W. E. B. Du Bois wrote “The Field and Function of the Negro College” in 1933, the “Negro” college, still in its youth, grappled mightily with its ability to introduce unique curricular approaches to enhance higher education in America and to help the country meet its potential as a democracy. . . .
When W. E. B. Du Bois wrote “The Field and Function of the Negro College” in 1933, the “Negro” college, still in its youth, grappled mightily with its ability to introduce unique curricular approaches to enhance higher education in America and to help the country meet its potential as a democracy. . . .
Half a century ago—at a forum on nationalism, colonialism, and United States foreign policy—James Baldwin cautioned, “We are misled here, because we think of numbers. . . .
The 2013 MLA convention in Boston featured the first Presidential Forum panel consisting entirely of faculty members off the tenure track. “Avenues of Access: Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members and American Higher Education” sought to put non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty issues front and center at the MLA convention, both for MLA members and for the national higher education press. . . .
The following story was posted on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Adjunct Project Web site by an adjunct who identifies himself only as dancesintheruins, for fear of retribution by his institution . . .
From June 2009 to June 2012 I served on the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession (CLIP), chairing the committee during my last year. One of the greatest benefits of working on a professional committee of this sort is the opportunity to learn about the profession as a whole . . .
The title of my essay was inspired by the fact that around the country, adjunct faculty members—and not exclusively those in English departments—have seized on The Scarlet Letter as an allegory of what they have experienced in their contingent appointments. . . .
The problems facing higher education cannot be resolved in a piecemeal or institution-by-institution process. We need a comprehensive plan to deal with tuition increases, student debt, decreased degree attainment, questionable educational practices, and the casualization of the academic labor force. . . .