Graduate Students Win Concessions at Contentious MLA Meeting By COURTNEY LEATHERMAN San Francisco Graduate students had vowed to make last week's annual gathering of the Modern Language Association "a convention to remember." Critical of the M.L.A.'s response to the job crisis in the humanities, students had promised to use the convention to radically reform the association. ALSO SEE: San Francisco's Weather Befogs Job Seekers at MLA Meeting Technological Savvy in Short Supply at MLA Sessions If this was a revolution, it was an easy overthrow. Graduate-student leaders didn't stage any protests, demonstrate, or picket the convention. Instead, they calmly, deliberately, and simply won almost every item on their legislative agenda. The campaign was waged by the Graduate Student Caucus, a 5,000-member affiliate of the association representing nearly a third of the M.L.A.'s total membership. The group has grown in size and activism in the last few years as graduate students have become increasingly frustrated by the bleak job market and by their sense that the M.L.A. has done nothing about it (The Chronicle, December 18, 1998). "Today, the future of the profession belongs to those who, at present, have no future," said William Pannapacker, a graduate student at Harvard University speaking on the first day of the convention to a packed session organized by the caucus. Mr. Pannapacker's address was titled, "Enjoying Your Apprenticeship?" As he spoke, students passed around stickers that hammered home his mockery: "Graduate Student Caucus: We Work." Mr. Pannapacker continued: "It is self-evident that some of our leaders are not really interested in what happens to us, so long as we leave quietly and allow the system to continue running as it has. "'Let them eat cake,' our advocates are told. Let them wear Prada," Mr. Pannapacker said, taking a jab at Elaine Showalter, a professor of English at Princeton University who just finished her term as M.L.A. president and has written about her love of fashion in Vogue magazine. Ms. Showalter's year-long presidential message has been to encourage graduate students to look beyond academe toward alternative careers, as one way to deal with the job crisis. Her focus is controversial even among professors, but it has infuriated many graduate students who think she's missing the point, and both sides have engaged in some nasty written exchanges. While some professors here applauded the convention's new activism -- noting that the meeting had scheduled more sessions on professional issues than ever before -- others remarked on its acrimony. C. Jan Swearingen, an English professor at Texas A&M University and a member of the association's Delegate Assembly, attended the meeting where Mr. Pannapacker and others slammed the group's leaders. She was visibly disturbed by the rhetoric she heard. "They demonize the M.L.A.," she said. "It takes the place of the 'evil powers' they can't attack." Ms. Swearingen said that the graduate students' concerns were being taken seriously. Last year, the association's Committee on Professional Employment issued a report recommending that institutions reduce their reliance on part-timers and consider trimming doctoral enrollment. The M.L.A. also set up a Committee on the Future of Graduate Students in the Profession. If all that wasn't enough, Ms. Swearingen said, consider the agenda before the Delegate Assembly, the association's chief legislative body: Graduate-student concerns dominated. For all the rancor leading up to it, the meeting of the Delegate Assembly was decidedly civil. (A good thing, since three huge nets were suspended from the ballroom ceiling of the Fairmont Hotel, seemingly ready to drop if the crowd became unruly. Hotel workers said the nets were to hold balloons for a New Year's Eve party.) Graduate students had billed the assembly session as a possible showdown; instead, it was a cakewalk. The Graduate Student Caucus had put 10 motions before the assembly. All but three motions passed -- one was withdrawn -- and two of the caucus's four candidates for posts on powerful M.L.A. panels were elected. The winning candidates, however, were tenured professors -- Cary Nelson and Michael Berube, both of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- and not the two graduate-student candidates put forth by the caucus. Nonetheless, when the voting had ended after the four-hour session, Mark R. Kelley, president of the Graduate Student Caucus, declared the day "a big victory." He noted that the assembly had agreed to push for the nomination of graduate students to positions on the association's powerful governance panels, and restored the convention's welcome session for graduate students, which the M.L.A. had scrapped for this convention. But Mr. Kelley identified the biggest win as a motion co-sponsored by leaders of the Delegate Assembly. It requires the M.L.A. to collect and publish data on the salaries and working conditions of part-time faculty members -- including graduate teaching assistants in departments of languages and literature. The motion passed overwhelmingly -- 126 to 3, with one abstention -- even though it is expected to cost the association $91,000 to survey 5,100 programs. "That is going to change the very nature of the M.L.A. to give it a more activist posture," said Mr. Kelley. "This is no longer a gentlemen's club." Several professors here said that a transformation of the association was apparent even before the delegates, seated in the gilded Grand Ballroom, began casting their votes electronically. Those observers characterized this assembly meeting as far more political and serious than those of previous years. Along with the many motions presented by the graduate students, delegates overwhelmingly passed a resolution sponsored by the Radical Caucus saying that the M.L.A. "deplores the hasty and ill-considered attempt by the City University of New York to phase out all remedial courses" and "condemns the politicization of the CUNY Board of Trustees." The Radical Caucus, like the Graduate Student Caucus, is one of 105 groups affiliated with the association. Still, the assembly was only willing to go so far. It narrowly defeated another motion presented by the Radical Caucus that would have censured departments that relied on part-timers to teach more than half of a program's credit hours. As the vote was displayed on a big screen -- 73 Yes votes to 80 No's, and three abstentions -- groans went up from the audience, with one observer in the back muttering, "Cowards." The delegates also tabled an emergency resolution condemning the U.S. government's "vague and sanitizing" language to "obfuscate the real reasons" for bombing Iraq. The politics of the profession dominated the meeting, but a sense of paranoia punctuated it. On the first night of the convention, leaders of the Graduate Student Caucus found themselves locked out of the hotel room where their session was to be held. Security guards came to the rescue, opening the door, but only after a crowd of about 50 had gathered, some of them floating conspiracy theories about the M.L.A.'s leadership trying to muzzle graduate students. At the same time, a caucus leader was stopped by three security guards when he tried to distribute leaflets outside a session led by Ms. Showalter. The guards cited M.L.A. policy as the reason for their action. M.L.A. officials apologized to graduate-student leaders, saying that there was no such policy. When the booze didn't arrive for the caucus's cash bar, the coincidences seemed too overwhelming to ignore. "They've screwed us again," one graduate-student leader said. Some professors had their own conspiracy theories. Some posited that the Graduate Student Caucus might have been responsible for the fog that blanketed San Francisco, wreaking havoc on air transportation and the convention. "At this M.L.A., I am struck by the sense in which we seem stuck in a distrustful and paranoid mode," remarked Marianna Torgovnick, an English professor at Duke University, during a session called "Nice Work: the Academy and Business," which was arranged by Ms. Showalter. Ms. Showalter didn't hear all the jabs aimed her way, but she used her presidential address on the day before the Delegate Assembly met to deliver a few whacks of her own. In her speech, "Regeneration," she talked about how the position of M.L.A. president had been transformed in recent years. "Once an honorific and largely ceremonial position which crowned a serene and distinguished career," she said, the presidency, "is now more like Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, in which one among us is selected as the annual ritual scapegoat and publicly vilified as elitist and insensitive." Undeterred by her critics, Ms. Showalter used her speech as a final plug for alternative careers. "At the heart of the unemployment problem, I believe, is that Ph.D.'s are a captive market willing to accept any working conditions in order to stay in the academy." Ms. Showalter said she didn't believe in limiting graduate enrollment. Instead, she believed in putting doctorates into the public domain. She argued that it would be good for academe, society, and the Ph.D.'s themselves. For one thing, she said, she had experienced the corporate world as a much more humane place to work than the academic world. "The M.L.A. has a crucial leadership role" to play, she said. But she disagreed with her critics that the association had to be torn down or remade into a dangerous weapon. "I reject the politics of punishment, censure, and sanctions, and believe that we can create the university together out of good will, intelligence, and a mutual desire that the humanities should endure." But leaders of the Graduate Student Caucus didn't hear her plea, because they weren't there. They had dismissed her speech in advance, saying they'd heard it all before. http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A15