Friday, January 27, 2012

New MLA Prez Vows to Help Adjuncts

Modern Language Association of America 
n 
 26 Broadway, 3rd floor 
n 
 New York, NY 
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 10004-1789 
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 646 576-5000 
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 www.mla.org 
In January 2013, the MLA convention will take place in Boston for the first time since 1952, and I 
would like to invite you to consider participating in the presidential theme, Avenues of Access. 
Choosing the convention theme, a tradition established by Marjorie Perloff in 2006, is the privilege 
and the responsibility of the president. Themes now give each convention a specific character, an array 
of topics and concerns, encouraging focused concentration on matters of great importance to the 
profession. I hope that Avenues of Access will build on the accomplishments of recent conventions. 
Sidonie Smith’s theme in 2011, Narrating Lives, built on her lifelong work in life writing—and 
allowed MLA members to record their own narratives for the MLA’s YouTube channel. And last year, 
Russell Berman’s Language, Literature, Learning offered a constellation of initiatives that ranged from 
the acquisition of literacy to the desideratum of what Berman called “universal bilingualism.” 
I hope Avenues of Access will prove to be as capacious and rewarding as the themes of my 
predecessors. The three topics I have in mind are bound by the multivalence of the term access— 
that is, by the multiple desires and aspirations we attach to it. 
The accessibility of higher education. More than half the high school graduates in the United States 
enroll in college, but only about half of those enrollees eventually graduate. The world’s first 
experiment in mass higher education is not over, but college is increasingly out of financial reach for 
too many of our students. Cutbacks in state support for public universities and in financial aid for 
students, combined with rising tuition, have created a monumental student debt crisis in the United 
States. Meanwhile, the academy has become far less accessible for aspiring college professors: in 1970, 
three-quarters of all the people teaching in American universities enjoyed the essential job protections 
of tenure, allowing them to pursue inquiry—in their research and in the classroom—wherever the 
pursuit of truth took them. Today, only one-quarter of college professors are tenured or on the tenure 
track, and the new faculty majority consists of adjunct, contingent labor. Over the last forty years, 
college has been redefined as a private investment rather than a public good, but rising tuition and 
mounting student debt have been accompanied by the casualization and marginalization of the 
faculty. What can we do and say to begin to undo this dynamic and make higher education more 
accessible both for entering students and for new PhDs? What can we do to advance the discussion 
of alternative career paths for PhDs and reach out as an association to the “alt-ac” constituency? 
The implications of disability studies for the humanities. Since its creation of the Committee for 
Disability Issues in the Profession in the mid-1990s, the MLA has been at the forefront of disability 
studies in the humanities. What have the past fifteen years of disability studies done—or not done— 
to the practice and knowledge of the humanities? What do we now understand, and what questions 
do we need to ask, about the range of human embodiment and mindedness? Does disability change 
what we know about narrative, about textuality, about aesthetics? We might also think in terms 
of our students, some of whom may have mild to moderate intellectual disabilities ranging from 
dyslexia to autism. Congress’s 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act makes federal 
funding available—for the first time in United States history—to qualified students with intellectual 
disabilities. How can, how should, our classroom practices accommodate such students? 
Open access and the future of scholarly communication. Just as the MLA was the first major humanities 
organization to address the subject of disability, so too is it the first such association to reorganize 
itself to meet the challenges of the digital age. Similarly, the MLA is undertaking an innovative 
multiyear inquiry into the possibility of rethinking the dissertation, as part of its comprehensive task 
force on the future of graduate programs in the modern languages. The association thus seems well 
positioned to ask or encourage questions about the future of peer review, of monographs and print 
journals, of intellectual property and what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls “the Googlization of everything.”  
But how—and in what media—can we proceed from here? 
I hope Avenues of Access will provoke a wide range of responses, elaborations, and exchanges. If you 
want to propose sessions for the convention, please use forms that will be available on the MLA Web 
site at www.mla.org/convention. On those forms, you can indicate whether you wish your session 
to be considered for inclusion on the brochure that will announce the Presidential Forum. Although 
space constraints will prevent me from accepting all proposals, I would be most grateful for your 
help in identifying potential contributions to Avenues of Access. I would also welcome proposals that 
include alternative session formats, including (but certainly not limited to) workshops, seminars, and 
electronic roundtables. 
The 2013 convention will be exciting—and fascinating for all the right reasons. I hope that you will 
attend, and I look forward to meeting you in Boston. 
Regards, 
Michael Bérubé 
2012–13 MLA President

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