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Next year, thousands of English professors head to Vancouver for the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention. Let’s hope they stay healthy so they don’t get to use the type of national health care they’ve always wanted. The Canadian Frasier Institute offers a depressing recap on the results of Canada’s single-payer system: “Since 1993, the average wait for treatment has almost doubled (to 18.2 weeks in 2013), per capita public healthcare expenditures have increased by about 40 per cent (after adjusting for inflation), and it is becoming increasingly apparent that patients are suffering the consequences,” Bachus Barua reports in the...

English professors, it seems, want to teach anything but English. Hence the plethora of studies explored at the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) annual convention in Chicago this January: gender studies, disability studies and aging studies. MLA members are putting out a new journal focused on the latter. Really, if they wanted to study the deterioration that comes with advanced age, the 127-year-old MLA might want to do a self-appraisal. Reacting to recent media coverage of aging, E. Ann Kaplan asked the panel, “Was the concern over age a smokescreen for what humans, largely white corporations, are doing to the planet?”...

The recent Modern Language Association (MLA) held a session called, “Vulnerable Expression and the Arab Uprisings” to take a closer look at the post-Arab Spring world. Nineteen people attended the session, and the four-member panel was made up of College of State Island professor Suha Kudsieh, Miami graduate student Walter Temple, Nathaniel Greenberg of the University of Washington at Seattle and the University of Arizona’s Carine Bourget. Temple’s presentation seemed ill-suited for the discussion since he wrote on the gay fantasies and writings of a prominent gay Moroccan writer. His writing, said Temple, introduced “a new era of queer writing...

When professors drop their guard, you get to realize how decayed education is, higher and lower. “We prefer to pretend that bad students don’t exist,” Gerald Graff of the University of Illinois at Chicago told a panel at the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) annual meeting in that city. “It’s different in the faculty lounge where student howlers are a frequent topic of conversation but we scrub them from our public statements.” “We think we’re too progressive.” Graff is a past president of the MLA. Graff went on to say that he agrees with the 2005 statement of Margaret Spellings that...

A professor from George Mason University ran a slide show of naked lesbians to accompany her presentation at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention in Chicago this year. Although South Africa legalized gay marriage in 2006, there have been “assaults on black lesbians since then,” according to Rachel Ann Lewis. She did not provide details on those assaults. Lewis, according to her GMU page, “is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program at George Mason University.” “Prior to joining George Mason, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Transnational Sexualities in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality...

A trio of academics at the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) annual convention took obligatory swipes at conservative critics of the president in a panel on his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father. Oddly enough, though, they confirmed the essential facts behind much of the naysayers’ criticisms of that volume. “If you had googled Frank Marshall Davis ten years ago, you would have found next to nothing,” John T. Lowney said of the president’s controversial mentor. “If you Googled him now, you would find everything that is evil about Frank Marshall Davis.” “He’s one of the few writers who’s been recovered...

Usually when a group gets “mission creep,” it’s because they’ve accomplished their original mission. Yet and still, English professors at the Modern Language Association (MLA) think they can “solve” America’s financial crisis even while illiteracy is rampant in the United States. “How many errors in the financial crisis could be solved with freshman comp logic?” Matthew E. A. Seybold asked a crowd at a panel at this year’s MLA convention in Chicago. Seybold teaches at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Business and economics courses are “mired in Marx and not Marx,” Seybold averred. Then Seybold went on to quote...

It’s odd watching a group of left-wing academics buck up each other’s spirits after they’ve encountered the cold, cruel world outside academe. Such a gathering was on display at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago this month whenever the Radical Caucus of the MLA met. “The failure of communism did not result from Lenin, Stalin and Mao,” Grover C. Furr of Montclair State University told the group. “These were some of the greatest men in the world.” “Socialism preserved the contradictions of capitalism, such as differentiations in pay. We should abandon the term ‘socialism.’ Marx and Engels did...

When education reforms are attacked by both the Left and Right, maybe both sides have a good point. “Looking at the language of Common Core, you find that it contains a lot of weasel-speak,” Daniel D. Hade of Penn State said at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago last week. Indeed, it should be noted that the drafters of the Common Core State Standards on English Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects claim to be “internationally benchmarked.” How can you “internationally benchmark” something that by definition is tied inextricably to a particular language? The...

At the Modern Language Association’s “Cuba on Stage” panel in Chicago, which only had eleven people in attendance, (excluding the moderator and three panelists), Fidel Castro escaped criticism and mention by name from several art and music professors. David Lisenby of Albany-SUNY, Elena Valdez of Swarthmore College and Bretton White of Colby College, gave their presentations on Cuban music and art. Lisenby focused on one Cuban playwright, Estorino, and how his play illustrated the plight of gay plays and art pieces. He said, “…the institutionalized homophobia of the performing arts” limited and handicapped Cuban plays in the 1970s and it...

At the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2014 convention in Chicago, delegates defeated a resolution to boycott Israel akin to one proposed by the American Studies Association (ASA), which had put forward an academic boycott this past year with the public support of Stephen Hawking. At the MLA, though, the delegate convention failed to pass a resolution to support an academic boycott in a fairly close vote, as reported by Inside Higher Ed. Instead, the MLA delegates passed a resolution to ask the U.S. State Department to consider a boycott of Israel for occupying Palestinian territories. This was a far cry...

When you get right down to it, the institutions that cry the loudest for diversity, particularly in academia, aren’t that diverse themselves. “The pro-Israel campus groups Hillel International and the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) have been denied the right to present a discussion on Israel at the Jan. 9-12 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Chicago,” according to the JNS news service. “MLA’s convention includes a roundtable discussion that will feature supporters but no opponents of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.” “The discussion—titled ‘Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel and Palestine’—is seen as a possible...

The Daily Caller has been banned from the convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), an annual showcase for academic d**chebags. TheDC had been looking forward to the four-day hothouse of leftism, which this year will feature a session on a controversial academic boycott of Israel. Sadly, TheDC won’t be able to cover the session because the fascist, Stalinist d**chebags at the MLA flatly denied TheDC’s routine request to cover it. “The convention office reviewed you request but will not be issuing media credentials for the Daily Caller,” wrote Mark Aurigemma, the MLA’s press liaison, in an email. The communications...

The Muslim Lawyers Association (MLA) in Johannesburg has submitted a 600-plus page document to the Office of the National Director of Public Prosecution calling for the arrest and prosecution of President Barack Obama when he visits South Africa later this month. The submitted document calls for authorities to “arrest Obama when he visits.” The group says Obama has ordered drone strikes that killed innocent civilians, warranting a formal investigation. “The complaint, dubbed the ‘Obama Docket’ encourages South Africa to take seriously its domestic and international obligations and to act against International War Criminals lest they consider South Africa a safe...

A pair of professors objected to our coverage of them at the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in Boston this year. Near as we can figure out, what they objected to was the fact that we covered them. “Glad you could make it to my paper on 1930s propaganda and popular culture,” Matthew Stratton, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California-Davis wrote in an effort at cordiality that belied what was to come. “I must admit, however, that I’m a bit confused by your account of the panel.” “What exactly in my paper did you find objectionable...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been called many things but he may soon become a business ethics course. Kathleen V. Willis of Indiana University-Purdue University, Columbus, is exploring the possibility of doing so. “Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006 to challenge world hegemony,” Willis said at the 2013 annual meeting in Boston of the Modern Language Association. In order to do so, he “leaked military and diplomatic correspondence,” Willis noted. Willis admits that Assange’s own background makes him problematic but focuses her inquiry upon his enterprise. “Where is Assange’s ethical slippage?” Willis asked. “According to his own business ethics?” “Who is...

At the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2013 Boston meeting, at least on the program, homosexuality seemed to be the new heterosexuality. This year’s conclave, where just about every English department is represented, at least once, featured panels on: • Queer Theory without Antinormativity; • Postqueer? Postrace? The Political Stakes of Queer; • Queer Theory in a Post Colonial World; • Queerness as Form; • Transgender France; • Movements, Incantations, and Parables of Queer Performance • LGBTQI Graduate Students and Academia; • Queer Sexualities in African Literatures and Film; • Queer Occupations; • Gay Culture in Eastern Europe and the Former...

Those who think college offers no material relevant to the current scene might be pleasantly, or unpleasantly, surprised. At the 2013 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Boston, Corrie Claiborne of Morehouse College told listeners of a new computer application that enables students to obtain historical background on rap songs. “Like if you hear, ‘I’m Che Guevara with bling on,’ you can click on Che Guevara and find out who he was,” she explained. One wonders whether this is an ambition to be pursued. Guevara was the military advisor to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who overthrew the Batista regime on...

Seattle, WA—Finding a panel dissecting the idea of American Exceptionalism at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual gathering of English professors is not akin to locating a needle in a haystack. What made this one special, or, if you will, exceptional, was the fact that it was presided over by an instructor from the United States Air Force Academy. Led or cheer-led would probably be a better verb. “American exceptionalism is a form of cultural narcissism,” Wilson N. Brissett, who teaches at the academy, told an appreciative crowd at the MLA. “Belief in grandiosity, paranoia and focus on self are...

At the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual meeting in Seattle last week, English professor Joseph Ramsey pretty much said at a panel that when college activists in the faculty and the student body are finished hibernating, they will go back to doing the one thing that we know collegiates for decades have been trained to do—protest. In 2011, the world turned “from the Arab Spring to the American autumn,” Ramsey said at an MLA panel on “Class in the Classroom.” The Class they were talking about was not a course. “The Arab Spring put the stake in the blood-stained, hegemonic...