Slow dissolve: Manhattan, 15 years ago. I walk a few blocks from my place on Third Street – next to an anarchist squat, across from the NuYorican Poets Cafe — to the headquarters of the Modern Language Association (MLA), then in Astor Place.
I explain the agenda of the Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) to the director of the association, Phyllis Franklin. We want MLA to educate the public about the majority contingent workforce.
Inspired by a California law that set 75 percent as a minimum standard for classes that should be taught by a full-time stable faculty, even in its community colleges, we want MLA to establish educationally sound full-time/part-time ratios in the disciplines it represents.
We want the association to lobby for those standards with accreditation agencies and to urge the other big state governments like New York and Texas to follow California’s lead.
We want MLA to help California fulfill the promise of that law by lobbying for federal money to help fully fund it.
We want graduate-student representation on the governing committees of the association.
In short, we want MLA to stop promoting “alternate careers” for Ph.D. holders, and to get busy doing the political work necessary to rebuild professorial jobs out of what’s been converted to shabby part-time work.
Franklin just stares at me. “But all of that is AAUP’s job,” she finally says.
Jump cut to grainy historical footage: a decade farther back, 1984. The MLA has traditionally been directed for a short term by a distinguished tenured faculty person, but the Executive Council now feels that the staffing crisis in the humanities — of which it has been aware since 1970 — requires a full-time staffer at the helm.
A significant element in hiring Franklin for the job of director is the desire to have someone willing to devote their career to addressing the professional crisis represented by the accelerating permatemping of the faculty. Franklin represents herself as eagerly willing to do so.
Next: We Occupy the MLA
Related posts:
Occupy the AHA!
At the AHA: Huh?
Who’s a ‘Historian’ to the AHA?
History ‘Job Czar’ Shuts Down PhD Production
(Oversupply Continues for Two Decades)
x-posted: howtheuniversityworks
6 Responses to MLA Confidential, Part 1
xtylerc - February 10, 2010 at 7:00 am
It’s convenient that Franklin is dead: she can’t report on her side of that conversation.
jffoster - February 10, 2010 at 8:44 am
Marx (Karl) is dead too. But the postmodernists, cultural studiesists, and their ilk don’t seem to know it yet.
geochaucer - February 10, 2010 at 10:00 am
I worked with Phyllis Franklin for a dozen or so years, in several diffrent capacities, and found her to be a tirelessly hardworking advocate of professional, especially dealing with legislators and bureaucrats hostile to the humanities. In my own leadership roles, I’ve worked with the executive directors of organizations in which I served, and I came to appreciate that there are complicated reasons, including those as mundane as tax status, for professional associations hewing to their charters and constitutions. Putting those two observations together, I suggest that Franklin might have been spot on to say that this was not MLA’s issue at that time and that labor organizations were the best venue. –Doug Hesse, U of Denver
kardon55 - February 10, 2010 at 10:32 am
See http://web2.adfl.org/adfl/bulletin/V13N1/131036.htmI don’t know where you get your information about why Phyllis was hired or what she said she hoped to accomplish. Your concern in 1995 was only one in a long list of others in 1983. The Commission on the Future of the Profession “deplored” the part-time situation but saw alternative careers for humanists as one of the profession’s “most pressing tasks.” Of course, these were only recommendations in a report. Phyllis was perhaps the first MLA executive director to undertake or at least emphasize active lobbying efforts in Washington.Not even the first item in recommendation X: “We deplore the increased exploitation of part-time faculty members and urge the MLA to resist actively the growing inclination of language and literature departments to treat part-timers as second-class citizens. Shifts from full-time to part-time budgets serve the interests of administrators, not of students, the profession, or higher education. We recommend that every department develop programs to integrate part-time faculty. These programs should include regular meetings of faculty members who teach the same courses, opportunities for course work without tuition, assignment of new part-time faculty as apprentices to senior teachers, and a systematic review of experienced part-timers for transfer to tenure-track appointments. We all know that “work without hope is nectar in a sieve.””The entire recommendation XII begins: “One of our most pressing tasks in the coming decade will be to explore alternative careers for humanists. The MLA should publicize widely the encouraging results of alternative-career programs and the success of our colleagues within and outside the profession. We believe that accurate information would substantially aid the decisions and plans of those who are contemplating the pursuit of careers outside institutions of higher learning. . . .”
refling - February 10, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Isn’t it time we stop wasting our time fussing over ruffled feathers and get down to business? We’re under a Borg attack and the survival of the humaities is at stake.
gtkarn - February 11, 2010 at 1:18 am
For anyone interested in a little historical context, see:http://web2.adfl.org/adfl/bulletin/v08n1/081006.htmThis piece was originally drafted as a letter to the then (1976) President of the MLA and a plea that the organization pay greater attention to what was then a relatively recent phenomenon – the “job crisis” and casualization of teaching in higher education. The letter was passed on to someone who then wrote and asked me to turn it into an article, which was then published in PROFESSION. The beat goes on.