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Prince Andrew will launch an extraordinary public fight back today after US authorities made a formal request for him to be quizzed over the Epstein affair. The Duke of York is poised this afternoon to release “evidence” that he says will show he has been cooperating with U.S.officials. He is expected to say that the Department of Justice has made false claims that they have faced a wall of silence from him and his team. The dramatic update comes as it emerged that the US Department of Justice has filed a “mutual legal assistance” (MLA) request for help to the...

Humanities professors say organization evading moral, professional duties Dozens of humanities scholars cancelled their membership with their field's leading professional academic organization ahead of its annual convention, in retaliation for the group refusing to impose boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. The defecting professors wrote to the Modern Language Association—published in the days leading up to the conference being held this week in New York City—that they will not be renewing their membership, due to the organization "disgracefully" voting in June against BDS and in favor of a statement denouncing academic boycotts. Timothy Reiss, a professor emeritus of comparative literature...

There is at least one way in which the Modern Language Association (MLA) that thousands of English professors belong to lives up to its name: they traverse in a vocabulary most of us working stiffs would never contemplate employing informally, or even formally. Here is a sampling of what we got to hear for four solid days at their annual convention in Philadelphia, with a challenge at the end: • "An alternate way of thinking about thinking." • "dialectical thinking about thought." • "inscrutability about intentionality." • "materialist environmentalism" • "flat ontologies." • "analogically affirms." • "flattened ontology" • "Undermines...

At the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention in Philadelphia this year, we got to see some of the "Creative Responses to Black Lives Matter." They included: • A filmed street theater presentation on "The Shooting of Africa," presented by Kimberly Welch of UCLA, and featuring actors with signs. • A group called #Justice for Flint, that did a rap & music video which featured such lyrics as "Flintstones, yabba dabba do is a negro spiritual" and "Ready for your poison, the girls and boys in…," which was presented by Elizabeth Anne "Betsy" Wheeler of the University of Oregon. •...

As we saw from interviews with students at last weekend's protests, higher education, and lower, probably need to spend more time on self-improvement and less on self-esteem, just to further their own interests. For example, there was, as usual, at least one feminist who wanted to end women's suffrage. You would think our left-wing friends in academe would take the time to explain to their students the difference between suffrage and suffering. On the Greg Gutfeld recap of the protests which followed Donald Trump's inauguration as our 45th president, Katherine Timpf of National Review recalled leaving our nation's capital during...

Just as political careers are often launched from electoral defeats, so too do academic careers blossom when Left wing movements fail. Examples of the former abound, from Ronald Reagan's rise in the wake of the Goldwater defeat of 1964 to Barack Obama's in the wake of John Kerry's loss in 2004. For illustrations of the latter trend, one need look no further than the Modern Language Association's recent meeting in Philadelphia this month. Though the vote to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel went down by about two to one, one graduate student from the University of California gave a...

One of the speakers at this year’s Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting brought up a fascinating quote by William Wordsworth that may well be an indictment of the annual conclave of English professors: "To dissect is to murder." If that is so, much of the professoriat at the MLA meeting could be up on assault charges. If he hadn't already passed away, Herman Melville might want to file such a complaint. Melville, of course, is the author of Moby Dick. Many will probably recognize this as the one about a one-legged sea captain pursuing a great big whale. Yet and...

You might be surprised to learn that there are employment opportunities for college graduates with PhDs in the Humanities. You might not be surprised to find out that they are usually with left-wing cause groups. "The ACLS [American Council of Learned Societies] has placed over one hundred recent humanities PhDs in two-year positions with government and nonprofit hosts," the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention guide informs us. At the MLA’s annual convention in Philadelphia last week, John Paul Christy of the ACLS told us where some of them went: • The Union of Concerned Scientists; • The Nature Conservancy; •...

Colleges and universities are forever feeling shortchanged by taxpayers. They needn't worry. For one thing, they are far richer than those of us who actually pay federal levies. For another, academia has succeeded in securing millions for what look like panel discussions at the Modern Language Association. "The National Institutes of Health has spent more on exercise programs for refugees, anti-tobacco video games, weight-loss programs for truckers, and studies on gay hook up apps than it has to fight the Zika virus," Elizabeth Harrington reported in the Washington Free Beacon on August 8, 2016. And a good chunk of that...

One way in which the world's largest conclave of English professors--the Modern Language Association (MLA)--lives up to its name is to leave attendees at its annual conferences with a new vocabulary that they cannot shake. After a couple of days at one of these annual meet-ups, you find yourself uttering sentences such as, "We must ascertain whether we are witnessing a discursive binary or a recursive modality." Similarly, the MLA loves intersections. For example, the latest MLA convention in Austin, Texas featured a panel on "The Oldest Profession: Teaching and Aging." We learned that one of the speakers, Helene Meyers...

In the Lone Star State, where open carry is now legal in public places, the Modern Language Association thought it was timely to protest guns on public college campuses, called "campus carry" by advocates and opponents alike. The language professors were in Austin, Texas for their annual convention and set aside time in their busy convention schedule to march up Congress Avenue to the limestone-colored State Capitol Building (which happens to be taller than the white-painted U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.). About 100 professors were in attendance, with a handful of couples with their children, marching eight city blocks from...

Harriet Beecher Stowe, European gardens and gender bias were discussed in a recent Modern Language Association (MLA) panel at their annual convention held this year in Austin, Texas. The panel was entitled, "Bootstrapping Broads: On the Work of Writing Labor." Gretchen Murphy, a professor of English at the University of Texas-Austin, spoke at length about Harriet Beecher Stowe and her experience in 19th Century England. She saw Stowe as "a female celebrity" in her time, but restricted in what she could do and saw because Stowe was "reproducing the vision of elite British philanthropists," hinting at the common feminist term,...

At year's end, we thought, looking over copy for 2015, that we could get a snapshot of how tenure works in academe. Ultimately, we came up with 14 arguments for tenure and thirteen against but that ratio is deceptive. The 14 pro-tenure arguments consist of individuals and the anti-tenure arguments include three associations (including the 26,000-member Modern Language Association, which we know all too well.) Moreover, our pro-tenure arguments include two conservative scholars who found it to be no protection at all--one got fired, one is currently being harassed out of his job--as well as at least two others who...

Every year we hit the road to find out what English Departments are up to at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention and always come back depressed. A look at some of the panels we have to look forward to at the next MLA meeting may give you some idea of why their annual confabs induce such profound melancholy in us: ~ Sublime Bodies, circa 1730-1830; ~ Touching Disability: Crip Theory in the Archive; ~ Teaching Animal Studies; ~ Queer Theory's Bad Objects; ~ Speed Mentoring; ~ The Pornographic and the Literary (this might be a good alternative title for...

Haider Eid, an associate professor at al-Aqsa University in the Gaza Strip, who also has a blog with Al Jazeera, pre-recorded his remarks to the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Vancouver, Canada. Eid apologized for not being able to attend the convention:“Unfortunately, I have not been able to leave Gaza” for at least eight conferences. He even remarked that he “had to think twice about participating in your extremely important panel” at the MLA, which had less than a dozen people in the audience. He then blasted Israel, “Gaza has been under a medieval siege by apartheid Israel since...

At the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Vancouver, Canada, the degree to which many professors are divorced from reality was brought into sharp focus. Few panels at the conference that draws thousands of English professors from around the world actually dealt with literature but no matter what issue was discussed in the hundreds of panels at the MLA, professing panelists kept a safe distance from the real world: o When the MLA gets through with children’s literature, neither the kids nor their parents will recognize it. Apparently, there are books and illustrated guides, praising the likes of Marx and...

At the Modern Language Association’s 2015 convention in Vancouver, Canada, Susan O’Malley, currently an English professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), lamented that remedial education could not be stopped in New York. She blamed remedial education for the drop in black student enrollment in Harlem and Queens. It’s not only students in those two boroughs that are in need of remedial education. “We are spending billions of dollars trying to send students to college and maintain them there when, on average, they read at about the grade 6 or 7 level, according to Renaissance Learning’s latest report...

The fall of communism and socialism have “robbed” the “post-Sovietized world,” Noemi Marin of Florida Atlantic University suggested at this year’s Modern Language Association (MLA) conference in Vancouver, Canada. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has ignored the “traumatic coloniality” and the resulting “trauma had been going on for forty-five years before now,” Marin alleges. The new focus of the debate should be “between communist studies and postcolonial studies” and create “subjective constructivist ideas about identity,” she avers. Herta Mueller, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for literature and grew up in Romania under communist rule, offers...

The Black Lives Matter protest movement, found its way to the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Vancouver, but failed to attract much support from the left wing attendees. With an estimated 7,000 left-wing professors and their protégé’s in attendance the protest managed to only attract about 150 people or so who listened to a litany of speeches vilifying police actions against blacks across the country. After the speeches it was time to actually march and more than half of those assembled apparently decided that their dedication to this issue didn’t extend to spending any time in the 40 degree...

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, U.S. and Mexico, signed by President Clinton encourages graphic posts of murders of Mexicans by cartels and corrupt officials, panelists on a panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in Vancouver, Canada claimed. Professor Hilda Chacon, Nazareth College of Rochester, said the graphic images of executed Mexican students and other civilians were due to the emergence of the Internet and cyberspace. This creation of “a complex, mirage of images of violence” has created “an exoticized good for violent consumption…[in]…post-NAFTA Mexico.” Ignacio Corona of Ohio State University, said, “There is no...