It’s three weeks after the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting, and Michael Bérubé, the organization’s new president, has been spending time writing his first letter to members. He wants to discuss what the MLA can realistically do at such a volatile moment for language and literature studies, and during a time when there are growing calls for the association to retool itself and assume more of an advocacy role.
In his letter, Mr. Bérubé asks some pointed questions that he wants people to mull over: What effect, if any, does debt have on our students’ choices of majors and careers? What role, if any, should scholarly associations play in responding to what he sees as a monumental student-debt crisis in the United States? What can the MLA do to advance discussions of alternative career paths for Ph.D.'s and reach out to the growing number of scholars who are working in “alt-ac,” academic jobs that are off the tenure track?
He wants to find answers to other questions, too: How can he encourage more non-tenure-track faculty members to join the MLA? What can the association do for them besides providing access to publications and online resources? How can the MLA become more of an advocacy enterprise?
Over the last 20 years, he says in a phone interview, scholarly associations have become more aggressive in taking on advocacy roles. During his tenure at the MLA, he says he plans to accelerate the group’s activism, particularly on behalf of the growing numbers of non-tenure-track faculty in humanities fields.
Scholarly associations “are not just about the networking, resources, and places to interview for jobs,” he says. “They are also about literally addressing the declining working conditions of faculty across the board.”
An Activist Scholar
Mr. Bérubé, who is a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, has a reputation for being outspoken. A liberal voice, he has frequently criticized corporate incursion into academe and articulated his strong views on his personal blog and in opinion essays that have appeared in The Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and several other national publications.
A public defender of the humanities during the culture wars of the 1990s, he engaged in spirited and sometimes nasty debates with David Horowitz, a conservative activist and writer, who called Mr. Bérubé “mindless” and “shallow” and listed him as one of the “101 most dangerous academics.” Mr. Horowitz, who is the founder of FrontPage Magazine, led a movement to protect students from professors who he said were squelching conservative views. Mr. Bérubé referred to his nemesis as a “sorry old fraud” and a “right-wing lackey.”
Mr. Bérubé has supported adjuncts and graduate students at Penn State by persuading administrators to adopt MLA recommendations for fair treatment of nontenure faculty, and he supported graduate-student unionization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At Penn State he supported voting rights for nontenure faculty and helped create a nontenure-faculty review committee, which oversees matters of promotion and demotion and includes members of that group.
Mr. Bérubé's teaching and research has focused on 20th-century American literature and the politics of higher education, including new areas like cultural studies and now disability studies. He is the chair of the subcommittee on program closures for the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom.
By all those measures, he is more of an activist than many of his predecessors who have led the MLA. So what does Mr. Bérubé expect to get done at the MLA during his yearlong term?
Ask him, and he fires off a four-point agenda that focuses on how the association can deal with rising student debt, improve deteriorating labor conditions of non-tenure-track faculty, raise faculty consciousness about providing reasonable classroom accommodations for students with disabilities, and adapt to changes to scholarly communications in the digital age. These four areas are at the core of his presidential theme, which he calls “Avenues of Access.”
The most-urgent item on his agenda, he says, is the plight of non-tenure-track faculty, whose ranks continue to grow.
“This year should represent, for adjuncts, graduate students, and non-tenure-track faculty, a real opportunity to bring their issues to the forefront of the association,” says Mr. Bérubé.
His goals are to make sure that non-tenure-track faculty have access to campus resources and professional development, as well as a meaningful role in their departments. He also wants to build job security and professional dignity for non-tenure-track faculty who have been in their positions for a decade or more.
“We’re already at a point where too many of our colleagues do not enjoy professional working conditions,” Mr. Bérubé says. “We need to make the case that we need professional working conditions, not just because they are matters of basic professional dignity—for example, not having your office in an elevator—but because they allow us to offer our students our best efforts.”
‘We Haven’t Done Enough’
Critics of the MLA, including an anonymous group of non-tenure-track faculty who used blogs and a Twitter feed to announce plans to “occupy” the MLA’s recent annual meeting, in Seattle, have complained that the association hasn’t been doing enough, especially on behalf of adjuncts. Some said they were tired of the group’s task forces, committees, reports, and endless discussions.
Mr. Bérubé is not apologetic about what the MLA couldn’t do in the past. He says he understands the frustration, but maintains that there is confusion about the kinds of actions scholarly organizations can and can’t take.
“The MLA has guidelines and recommendations for standard wages for faculty, and we would love to simply implement them campus by campus, but we can’t,” he says. “It’s true. We haven’t done enough to get our recommendations and guidelines out there to the people who can implement them.”
He says that the challenge for his leadership will be to move the MLA “beyond making recommendations to actual actions,” and to arm its nearly 30,000 members so they can bring structural changes to their campuses, as he did at Penn State.
“We can’t negotiate labor contracts. We don’t do investigations. We don’t have the investigative staff and legal teams like the AAUP, but we can articulate what we think are ethical standards for the treatment of our members,” Mr. Bérubé says.
There’s no way that one scholarly organization alone can broadly improve non-tenure-track labor conditions, Mr. Bérubé says. That is something that has to be done through building alliances, which he plans to do, with organizations such as the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, the New Faculty Majority, the AAUP, and accreditors. He hopes that his dual roles with the MLA and the AAUP will help.
On another front, Mr. Bérubé is writing a report for the AAUP on program closures that advocates the importance of having faculty input from the moment that administrators determine there is a budget crisis.
“What happens now is that administrators declare, ‘There is a crisis. You will be cut,’” Mr. Bérubé says. “Faculty don’t have any input into whether there really is a crisis or not. I will be pressing the case for shared governance much further than it has ever been pushed.”
The AAUP has guidelines in place for program closures, but he says they don’t go far enough to require faculty input throughout the process, nor do those guidelines require that programs slated for cuts be given the opportunity to to defend their existence.
Practical Steps
Mr. Bérubé says he also will use his term to continue to press other key efforts. He mentions, for example, plans by Russell A. Berman, the departing president, to chair a committee on graduate education that will focus on issues such as shortening the average “time to degree” for Ph.D.'s and rethinking dissertation requirements.
“If Russell’s task force on graduate education succeeds in getting people in the humanities to agree that ‘time to degree’ in doctoral programs should be cut in half, from nine years to four and a half, that will be huge,” he says.
Reducing time to degree, he says, would reduce student debt, making a dent in one of the key problems he hopes his presidency at the MLA will begin to solve. Another practical step he will press the MLA and academic departments to take is to look more seriously at alternative academic careers as viable options for students, he says.
When people look back on his term 10 or 20 years from now, Mr. Bérubé says, he hopes they will say: “That was the year that the MLA got the ball rolling and finally got accrediting agencies to care about non-tenure-track faculty. That was the year advocacy organizations and scholarly organizations sat down and agreed to negotiate fair terms for student loans.”