By William Pannapacker
SEATTLE
As you know from yesterday’s Chronicle coverage, the theme of this year’s MLA convention is “Language, Literature, and Learning,” following last year’s theme, “The Academy in Hard Times.”
The job seekers are still desperate. Slightly more positions were advertised this year than last year, but this year’s hiring season can’t be described as a “recovery.” At least we are no longer in free fall. It’s a small comfort.
Meanwhile, the percentage of tenure-stream faculty is still going down. Faculty governance is being eroded. Humanists are portrayed as sherry-swilling radicals in taxpayer-supported sinecures (even though most of us are adjuncts and grad students). Language programs, in particular, are on the chopping block for lack of students. Year after year, we’re on the receiving end of a stern lesson like the one given to Howard Beale in Network.
Before the convention, there were rumors of an “Occupy MLA” movement.
Yesterday, Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed, was dishing out the tough love in one of the opening sessions, “Making a Case for the Humanities: Advocacy and Audience”:
“By and large you are losing,” he said. There is no political price for saying ‘Florida doesn’t need any anthropologists.’ “Get out of the MLA and NPR bubble,” he told the audience, “and into one where people do not necessarily share your values.” Scientists, Jaschik argued, are much better at marketing themselves. Humanists talk about the value of “critical thinking,” but no one knows what that means. “Your neighbors are not proud of you for teaching that,” Jaschik said.
After the talk, Rosemary Feal, the executive director of the MLA, responded that we might be in a period when the economic and political forces are so strongly against us that nothing we say—no argument—could change the course we are on.
But the focus of the year’s convention on teaching and learning is surely a step towards something that non-academics—and even politicians—can support. Very few of this year’s papers are vulnerable to mockery for being cutesy-obscure and decadent. (“How dare they use voters’ money for such nonsense!”) So far, from my perspective, the 2012 MLA conference has not focused on minor points of theory—or radical posturing—so much as it has involved discussions of teaching practices, collaborative workshops, and poster sessions that emphasize what we are learning from neuroscience and what we can accomplish with digital technology.
Another major panel, on “The Future of Higher Education in a Digital Age,” included a mix of humanists and scientists discussing how technology has transformed their research and pedagogy. It began with a five-point plan, proposed by Sidonie Smith: Transform doctoral education (replace the dissertation with projects that emphasize flexibility and collaboration); rethink our scholarship (seek multiple audiences, not just other scholars); embrace the open-access movement (if it isn’t online and free, it doesn’t exist); redefine scholarly productivity to include collaboration in research (not just tenure monographs and journal articles); and, in the course of doing that, we can “update our narrative on the humanities.” We can begin to “move away from nostalgia and playing the victim.”
Vision statements tend to summarize what is already taking place “on the ground.” Based on what I have seen on the first day of the MLA, we are reaching a consensus about the future of our profession that will involve not just language and literature, but all of the humanities in partnership with technologists, scientists, and information professionals. It will become increasingly difficult to say what the humanities disciplines represent, by themselves—and to target them for elimination—because we are enmeshed increasingly in the transformation of every discipline in higher education.
William Pannapacker is an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He is a Chronicle columnist, and this is his fourth year live-blogging the MLA convention.Watch in coming days for his further dispatches from the meeting, and for other MLA coverage elsewhere in The Chronicle.
