Published in the Spring 2024 Newsletter.
The past several months have been an exceptionally challenging time on many college campuses. We’ve confronted difficult questions about the right to protest, how to protect academic freedom, and how to keep students safe. As we navigate this politically and emotionally charged moment, we must ask how we can build relationships when competing interests are at stake. Building these relationships can be fraught, but the MLA offers us avenues of convening, conversation, and civil exchange—on the institutional, departmental, and individual levels—that we can use to take on the challenges facing us.
Institutional
In fall 2023, the MLA launched the Strategic Partnership Network (SPN), a new level of institutional membership that affords participants a host of benefits. Perhaps most importantly, the SPN brings together leaders at member institutions, creating opportunities for these leaders to form critical, cross-institutional partnerships. Too often in humanities higher education, we occupy a reactive position, putting out fires or moving from crisis to crisis. The SPN creates a space where leaders can be proactive, forecasting future threats to the humanities and collaborating on strategies that will allow our programs to thrive in the years to come. Many of the challenges facing higher education and the humanities, from decreasing enrollments to encroachments on academic freedom to the adjunctification of universities, are national in scale, requiring a national response. If you’re passionate about these issues and you are at a research institution (we’re working on a model of engagement for other kinds of institutions), urge your institutions to join the SPN, a community attempting to beat back these threats and strengthen our profession.
Departmental
Like many people, I first interacted with the MLA through my use of the style guide, glancing at it as I wrote. But when I became a department chair, I began to understand the value of membership much differently. The Association of Departments of English (ADE), a part of MLA Academic Program Services (MAPS), alongside the Association of Language Departments, became an invaluable resource for me as I transitioned into my new role. The ADE gave me immediate access to a preexisting community of established leaders, both through its discussion list and the annual summer seminars for new and aspiring department chairs. When I became chair of the English department, there was no formal orientation teaching me the best strategies for negotiating new administrative dynamics or how to advocate effectively for the best interests of my department. Through the ADE, I built relationships with other leaders who were able to share strategies and offer advice based on their years of lived experience in the role. New chairs: if you’re feeling unsure how to approach promoting your department’s interests, take advantage of what the ADE and ALD have to offer. Join the discussion lists and go to the summer seminars. You’ll leave your interactions with fellow members feeling well prepared to be an effective advocate for your colleagues.
If you’re looking to initiate conversations about improving conditions for your department, check out the MLA’s guidelines. Whether the topic at hand is salaries for entry-level employees (“MLA Recommendation on a Minimum Salary”), per-course compensation for part-time faculty members (“MLA Recommendation on Minimum Per-Course Compensation”), or how departments should evaluate publicly engaged humanities scholarship (“Guidelines”), the MLA has guidance that you can point to during exchanges with administrators. Make a point of identifying the recommendations in these documents as the minimum standards set by your professional organization, using these resources as the foundation on which to build a constructive dialogue about improving working conditions.
Individual
In addition to being a resource for building relationships with other institutions or on behalf of our departments, the MLA offers us chances to meet new people and share ideas on an individual basis. Our annual convention is the most well-known of these convenings, bringing thousands of humanities educators face-to-face in a scholarly atmosphere that encourages collegial exchange, whether through panels, workshops, or informal meetups. The convention creates a space for any number of interactions that could be the basis for an invaluable working relationship, allowing us to put faces to names and consider new approaches to our work. Come to New Orleans (in my home state of Louisiana) in January 2025! It will be an unparalleled opportunity to get to know peers from across the country, opening possibilities for new collaborations and projects.
I also urge you to take advantage of the smaller, virtual convenings the MLA hosts throughout the year. The MLA regularly has a robust slate of webinars scheduled on topics like the public humanities (“MLA Webinars”), professional development (“MLA Professional Development Webinars”), threats to tenure (“The Great Untenuring”), and educational gag orders (“What You Need”). Join our webinars and use these thoughtful conversations as starting points for further collaboration, generating strategies to take on issues like AI, working conditions, and shared governance.
As we live through this polarizing time, we must model the types of interactions and debates that we would like to see lived out by our wider community. After all, what is humanities scholarship but doing the work of discourse with civility? We teach our students how to use textual analysis to deal with conflict and communicate ideas in the classroom, and we can also provide living examples of how to grapple with conflict outside the classroom. As we embark on this process, think of the MLA as a key tool available to you, one that opens up opportunities for exchange and dissent that can be the first step on a path out of conflict and toward solutions.
Works Cited
“The Great Untenuring.” Modern Language Association, 15 Nov. 2022, webinars.mla.org/webinar/the-great-untenuring/.
“Guidelines for Evaluating Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship in Language and Literature Programs.” Modern Language Association, Aug. 2022, www.mla.org/Resources/Guidelines-and-Data/Reports-and-Professional-Guidelines/Guidelines-for-Evaluating-Publicly-Engaged-Humanities-Scholarship-in-Language-and-Literature-Programs.
“MLA Professional Development Webinars.” Modern Language Association, www.mla.org/Resources/Career/MLA-Professional-Development-Webinars.
“MLA Recommendation on a Minimum Salary for Full-Time Entry-Level Faculty Members.” Modern Language Association, Jan. 2024, www.mla.org/Resources/Guidelines-and-Data/Reports-and-Professional-Guidelines/MLA-Recommendation-on-a-Minimum-Salary-for-Full-Time-Entry-Level-Faculty-Members.
“MLA Recommendation on Minimum Per-Course Compensation for Part-Time Faculty Members.” Modern Language Association, Jan. 2024, www.mla.org/Resources/Guidelines-and-Data/Reports-and-Professional-Guidelines/MLA-Recommendation-on-Minimum-Per-Course-Compensation-for-Part-Time-Faculty-Members.
“MLA Webinars on the Public Humanities.” Modern Language Association, www.mla.org/Resources/Career/MLA-Webinars-on-the-Public-Humanities.
“What You Need to Know about Educational Gag Orders.” Modern Language Association, 21 June 2022, webinars.mla.org/webinar/what-you-need-to-know-about-educational-gag-orders/.