Take My Dean, Please: Advice from a Happy Chair-Turned-Dean
Being an administrator is hard work, but it can be done with grace, style, and humor…
Past Issues
In the Middle
Mentoring Midcareer Colleagues
It is important for midcareer faculty members to be open to change—to shifts in professional interests and projects, to changes in teaching, to different affiliations…
Curricular Innovation and the Degree-Program Explosion
Language and literature departments interested in creating new majors would be well advised to consider the changing landscape of higher education, in which niche programs are increasing in number.
Strange Beasts and Bedfellows: The Whys and Hows of K–16 Alliances
Founded in 2015, the MLA’s Working Group on K–16 Alliances, which I was an original member of, sought to connect the K–12 and postsecondary educational communities in order to build support for teaching modern languages, writing, and literature at all levels. Bridging the gap between K–12 and postsecondary humanities education is a large and daunting task, but it can be done.
Slow Down: On Dealing with Midcareer Burnout
No one is entirely sure what happens to academics at midcareer, but most would agree they don’t like it. Jeffrey J. Selingo describes it as academe’s “mid-life crisis.” Anastasia Salter compares it to the “let down” that comes after training for a marathon. She calls the many recent testimonials about midcareer dissatisfaction a new genre of academic writing.
A Position at the University: A Report to an Academy
It may seem counterintuitive, but there is a connection between the administrative university and its push toward hiring contingent labor, now approximately seventy percent of college instructors (Betensky), and the status of a damaged species: associate professors. Long forgotten, these tenured professors find themselves burdened with extensive service and administrative tasks and with little guidance and few incentives to seek promotion.
Humanities Rx
The Trouble with Numerical Culture
[T]he humanities now lose at games of allocation that numerical supremacism has rigged. With premises that acknowledge not only the value of data but also the value of complementary interpretive systems, outcomes will become less skewed. . . .
Against Smallness: How Successful Language Programs Reimagine the Humanities
[T]he use of smallness in this article does not refer to student enrollment or faculty size, areas in which we are naturally not small by choice. Rather, the term addresses the danger of a certain form of contentment with the tight-knit communities that we have built as well as the nostalgia for traditions. . . .
Holding Open a Space for the Millennial Humanities Doctoral Student
What would it look like if PhD programs responded to this emerging reality that the most valuable professional development experiences for a substantial percentage of graduates (even those remaining in academia) are increasingly extradepartmental and sometimes extracurricular?. . . .
Changing Our Classrooms to Prepare Students for a Challenging World
We need to do the very hard work in the humanities of taking the lead at our institutions to redesign our programs in ways that are relevant, urgent, meaningful, and indispensable to students’ lives, including work lives that do not resemble those of their instructors. . . .
What You Didn’t Know about Professional Development at Community Colleges
Higher education’s stigma against community colleges is strong, particularly since graduate programs and advisers don’t intentionally prepare their students for community college careers. . . .
Public Humanities
Public Humanities in Action
The more we bring our work to the communities around our campuses, the more our communities will understand the value of what we teach and study.
Beyond the Research Institution: Preparing Graduate Students to Teach in Various Contexts
I am suggesting that doctoral programs think more expansively about the concept of composition as a practice in the construction of meaning so that graduate students are prepared to recognize their ability to teach interpretive practices . . .
Pride and Presentism: On the Necessity of the Public Humanities for Literary Historians
The kinds of questions, concerns, and projects borne out of public humanities work are, in fact, increasingly crucial for scholars and teachers of historical literary periods before the early twentieth century for two core reasons . . .
Historicizing Presentism: Toward the Creation of a Journal of the Public Humanities
To be successful, presentism requires a change of genre from the academic articulations done in academic journals, books, and classrooms to the public articulations done through the popular press and community events.
Going Public: Rethinking Engagement and Access through Local Partnerships
To do meaningful public humanities work is to forge partnerships that reinforce local, public institutions and that establish clear public-public collaboration.
The Hows and Whys of Public Humanities
If we believe in the value of the humanities and want them to have a future, then more of us need to serve as ambassadors to audiences beyond these degree-attainment cohorts. We need to regularly seek public connections—to find or create them.
Academic Freedom
Demand for New Faculty Members, 1995–2016
Are tenured and tenure-track positions, and tenure itself, disappearing from the landscape of the disciplines and higher education? Are there data that can help us understand the level of institutional demand for tenure-track faculty members and its relation to the supply represented in the annual production of new doctorate recipients? . . .
Defending the Line on Academic Freedom
Each time a scholar is shouted down or denied a visa or arrested or killed because of the questions she or he might ask or the ideas and evidence she or he might share, the space for inquiry and expression shrinks. . . .
Academic Freedom in the Classroom: Students and the Trouble with Labels
What I want for my students in the classroom is freedom to explore their ideas regardless of how the world might classify those ideas—freedom to ask questions free from fear of punitive judgment. . . .
Talking out of School: Academic Freedom and Extramural Speech
Now is the time to insist that extramural speech is a vital aspect of academic freedom—precisely because the struggle for academic freedom is the struggle for democracy. . . .
Professionalization and the Precarious State of Academic Freedom for Graduate Student Instructors
As universities increasingly rely on contingent labor for undergraduate teaching assignments, graduate students are called on to lead the classroom despite having little to no institutional protection. . . .
A Case for Culture
The objective of a new humanistic approach that involves case studies would be to learn what works, what doesn’t, and why. Simply put, it would be to learn. . . .
Contingent Labor
A Note from the Editor
Profession brings articles, news, and resources to all MLA members—whether you teach, write, advise students, or work in a library or an archive or a faculty development center. . . .
Confessions of a Prize Heifer: From Adjunct to the Tenure Track
If you’re an adjunct and you think you’re not good enough and that somehow not being good enough got you where you are, don’t believe that. . . .
Social Intelligence in General Education Literature Courses
In reframing general education literature classes in the context of social intelligence, I don’t mean that we should resort to condescending platitudes—like the humanities teach us “how to be human.” . . .
Mentoring and Institutional Change
We therefore owe it to ourselves to adopt institutional arrangements that are best for carrying out the academic mission, and I would suggest that mentorship arrangements are a key part of doing so. . . .
One Hundred Job Ads from the Humanities Ecosystem
If academic job ads routinely ask for a wide range of skills, why does graduate school training often devalue the activities that would build these skills? What does a faculty member do—actually, fully? . . .
Common Good, Not Common Despair
We thought that institutions would be more likely to pay contingent faculty members a living wage, increase opportunities for advancement, and offer security if their rankings depend on their willingness to do so. . . .
Archive
From “I Still Can’t Work with You” to “Let’s Work Together”: Creating a Rhetoric of Collaboration that Supports Professors
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. . . .
The Sky Is Falling
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. . . .
Whether Wit or Wisdom: Resisting the Decline of the Humanities from Within
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?….
Hypertext and “Twitterature”
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. . . .
Assassin’s Creed Taught Me Italian: Video Games and the Quest for Lifelong, Ubiquitous Learning
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. . . .
The Relevance and Resiliency of the Humanities
[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. . . .