Published in the Spring 2025 Newsletter.
Fellow students and teachers, as never before, we’re in the crosshairs. I write first to update you on our lawsuit. As many of you know, in early May, the MLA—along with the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the American Historical Association (AHA)—filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, in an effort to prevent the gutting of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). More recently, the judge for our case ruled that it should be combined with another case that had been brought by the Author’s Guild, on behalf of its individual grantees. Our attorneys are now engaged in a back-and-forth with the government: a preliminary injunction opposed by the government, to which our attorneys have responded: “Rather than address the lawfulness of their actions, Defendants throw jurisdictional spaghetti against the wall.”
Before the MLA could even sue, we first had to prove legal standing—namely, that we had sustained immediate harm. Even if an individual had the financial means, they cannot sue the government without proof of standing. This moment highlights precisely what the MLA is and what we’re for: the only organization that represents all teachers, researchers, and students of languages and literatures, connecting everyone from undergraduates to scholars at all ranks and institutions. We are a noisy, loving, cantankerous, highly verbal family connected by a shared calling, and it is only by representing all of us—from graduate students to teachers and scholars at all ranks and institutions—that the MLA can fight back as it is now. If you are reading this and you are a member, then you are currently filing suit against the federal government. I hope you share my pride.
So thank you for standing with us. And thank you to the hundreds who have taken an additional step and helped with our legal expenses, through the fundraising campaign spearheaded by our former presidents. If you’d like to support these efforts, please go to www.mla.org/donate. No matter their size, your contributions have an impact.
What else can we do in this moment? We’ve aggregated lots of resources on the website: strategy sessions, tool kits, and recordings of webinars. And I’m so grateful to all of you for your continued acts of citizenship.
For me, this moment of existential threat has also been one of clarity, for what we do and what we are. I hope that like me you continue to take pleasure and find meaning in teaching—and in reading both for pleasure and for scholarship.
A few weeks ago, I received a call from a philosopher who is working on a comparative philosophy of fiction; they wanted me to theorize Chinese fiction for them. I floundered a bit before asking, “What have you read?” They listed some secondary literature. I interrupted, “No, I meant primary literature.” They hadn’t read any: no stories, no novels, no nothing. Even after agreeing that this was an odd lacuna, they forged ahead, continuing to ask me to theorize the tradition according to their framework. I finally stopped them and ended the call.
In some sense, those of us in the MLA’s smaller fields (and mine, seventeenth-century Chinese fiction and drama, surely counts as “smaller”) have always been involved in outreach—but nowadays pretty much all of us are engaged in the work of explaining why, paraphrasing Audre Lorde, “The humanities are not a luxury.” We tirelessly explain the importance of learning world languages, how research in cognitive science shows that experiencing narrative through reading novels differs fundamentally from reading AI-generated summaries, how students majoring in our fields are better prepared for the job market than those in many if not most preprofessional fields.
But at a certain point, one just hits a breaking point, which is why my response to this colleague was a visceral recoil. Because even as our service to others—our students, our fields, the world—can be a source of joy as well as our livelihoods, its flip side is a constant pressure to meet others where they are, to justify ourselves according to the standards of others, whether those are of other fields, of utility, of capitalism. It gave me immense joy to say for once straight-up: go read a book. There is no explaining literature other than to experience it. And while you’re at it, it would be great to read something in a language other than your own.
And that in some sense is the core of all our fields: something constantly translated that can’t be translated, something constantly interpreted whose worth is intrinsic.
These days, the very acts of reading and writing contain political valence. And for reason: they always have. Words have power. As Jean Paul Sartre wrote, “The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverberations.” Go forth and reverberate, my friends.