January 13, 2025, 2:22pm
Another major academic org is in turmoil over Palestine.
This weekend, members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) protested the group’s annual convention in New Orleans after the executive council refused to hold a vote on a pro-Palestinian resolution. As Ryan Quinn reported in Inside Higher Ed, members of the rank and file walked out of meetings, marched with signs named for Palestinian academics killed in Gaza, and even staged die-ins to affirm their cause.
These protests came on the heels of last week’s historic move from the American Historical Association (AHA) to condemn the ongoing scholasticide in Palestine. A similar resolution put to MLA leadership would have echoed the scholasticide charge while also urging the group to go a step further. That petition endorsed the international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli policy.
MLA leaders defended their refusal to hold a public vote on the BDS resolution as recently as last December. But many members took issue with that defense, which rests largely on technical, legal, and fiduciary concerns.
Pending a new response from the executive council, MLA Members for Justice in Palestine—a sub-committee responsible for organizing many of the weekend’s actions—are encouraging current members to relinquish or suspend their membership. As co-organizer Neelofer Qadir, an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, told Common Dreams, “We feel that it is our responsibility as the largest North American organization of scholars of literature and language to protest and stand with our colleagues who are being murdered for their existence.”
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Founded in 1883, the MLA is a year older than the AHA and just as revered in the proverbial groves of academe. Formed to promote “the study and teaching of languages and literatures both nationally and abroad,” the group started as an outcry against classic curricula. Charles Francis Adams II, the society’s inadvertent founder and famous presidential nepo-baby, launched this cause in an 1883 speech directed at Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa society.
In his contentious remarks, Adams criticized an education that overemphasized ancient (or “dead”) languages over arguably more useful subjects. (“In pursuing Latin and Greek we had ignored our mother tongue,” he lamented.) His speech caused such an uproar that a group of professors held a conference to debate the issue. And lo, the MLA was born.
Cut to today, where the organization grown from that blowback now boasts more than 20,000 members. In addition to an elected council, an appointed executive director steers the general ship. Today’s org aspires to build up “the humanities community through engaging programs, publications, the annual convention, and advocacy work.”
Making his case in 1883, Adams urged the crimson men to beware intellectual cowardice. “Vested interests always look upon a claim for simple recognition as a covert attack on their very existence,” he said.
And accounting for his then-new philosophy, the founder also emphasized the importance of responding to crises in real time. “Do what he will, no man can keep pace with that wonderful modern thought; and if I must choose—and choose I must—I would rather learn something daily from the living who are to perish, than daily muse with the immortal dead.”
Wise words.
Image via Common Dreams. Photo credit: MLA Members for Justice in Palestine.
