Graduate-student activists at this year’s Modern Language Association tasted the thrill of victory -- again.
They demanded proportional representation on the M.L.A.'s top governance panels. They got it. They called for an endorsement of unionization for graduate students. They won it. They wanted to ban the word “apprentice” from descriptions of teaching assistants in the association’s official policy statements. They succeeded.
For the second year in a row, the graduate students got almost everything they asked for at the association’s legislative session, including a new policy urging departments that require graduate students to express mail their job applications to reimburse them for the cost. But it was only a partial victory. The graduate students wanted the M.L.A. to require departments to sign an oath pledging to honor the reimbursement policy. After lengthy debate, the motion was tabled. That was the only loss of the day for the Graduate Student Caucus -- the 5,000-member affiliate of the M.L.A. that represents a quarter of the association’s membership.
Time was the enemy for other groups, like the Radical Caucus -- another affiliate. That group’s more sharply worded endorsement of unionization never made it to the floor. After the meeting of the M.L.A.'s Delegate Assembly had dragged on for nearly five hours, attendance had dropped from about 130 to only 54. A merciful call for a quorum ended the day.
Most members of the graduate-student caucus hadn’t even stuck around for the finale. They’d already headed off to the caucus’s cash bar.
Last year, the graduate students had to make a lot of noise to get their way. They threatened to take over the M.L.A.'s leadership, bombarding officials with testy e-mail messages and making loud pronouncements about their plan of attack. This year, they left the rabble-rousing to their tenured allies and instead played parliamentarians, forging ties with professors within the association and beyond it -- like the American Association of University Professors.
“We’re not interested in tearing down the M.L.A.,” said Gregory Bezkorovainy, a graduate student at the City University of New York Graduate Center and president of the Graduate Student Caucus. “We’re interested in reforming it to make it a better association for all of us.”
After all, Mr. Bezkorovainy told the audience at one session, given the spate of attacks on tenure in recent years, tenured professors share a “natural commonality” with adjuncts and graduate students.
In recent years, the Graduate Student Caucus has clashed with the association’s leaders, accusing them of doing too little to deal with the bleak job market in the humanities.
Mr. Bezkorovainy’s style has been more conciliatory, in part, graduate students say, because the M.L.A. has shown a greater willingness to meet the graduate students half-way.
Linda Hutcheon, an English professor at the University of Toronto and the new president of the M.L.A., has promised to make the concerns of graduate students a priority of her administration.
“Graduate students currently make up about a quarter of the M.L.A.'s membership,” she said. “So, in a very real sense, this is your organization. Having said that, it isn’t just your organization,” she added, rattling off its various other constituencies.
Despite that reminder, last week she promised to confront the issues of “the pre-professionalization, hyper-professionalization, turbo-professionalization” of graduate students who feel more and more pressure to publish and present papers just to be competitive on the market.
Given the new, cooperative stance, “I think we should look outside the M.L.A. for the demons,” said Victoria Smallman, a long-time member of the graduate-student caucus and now a paid organizer for the Canadian Association of University Teachers. “Our opposition is not the bureaucracy of the M.L.A., it’s the corporatization” of universities. Ms. Smallman, a former Ph.D. student at McMaster University, is happy to stop the debating and eager for the association to start moving.
Patrick Kavanagh, a doctoral student at Rutgers University, explained one tool for reforming “a corrupt academic labor system that privileges the bottom line over the rights of faculty and students": a graduate students’ bill of rights. He told an audience at one M.L.A. session that just such a document will be circulated by the A.A.U.P. this month for comment by its members. The A.A.U.P.'s Statement on Graduate Students, if adopted, would set standards recognizing graduate students’ rights to academic freedom, intellectual property, and institutional governance.
At the welcome session for rookies, convention veteran Michael Berube, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gave some tips for lowering the level of anxiety for first-time attendees. The M.L.A. is not a “secret society of stars,” he told the crowd. Furthermore, clothing doesn’t count for much in job interviews, and for a decent cup of coffee, don’t queue up with the masses -- leave the hotel.
Graduate students who go with the flow risk being flushed out of the academic-career pipeline altogether, said Marc Bousquet in a paper called, “The Excrement Theory of Graduate Education.”
An assistant professor at the University of Louisville and a former president of the graduate-student caucus, Mr. Bousquet argued that degree-holders in language and literature have essentially become “the waste product of the academic labor system.” And he told graduate students that “in response to your excremental circumstance, you have got to be solids not liquids, blockage not flow, committed to solidarity and confrontation, not particularity and personal acceleration.” Activist politics, he argued, could jam up the “official M.L.A. fantasy that says it’s ok to flush our degreed persons away.”
Clearly, not all of the demons from last year have been purged.
Mr. Bousquet and many others here referred to the battle between the graduate-student caucus and last year’s M.L.A. president, Elaine Showalter, an English professor at Princeton University. Her platform highlighting alternative careers as part of the answer to the job crisis was roundly attacked. But amid the snickers and the grimaces over memories of that fight, there was actually a willingness to consider alternative careers as a topic worth discussing.
“Part of the hostility toward Elaine Showalter was the sense that we don’t want alternative careers. But I wonder if that’s true,” said Kirsten M. Christensen, an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame and a long-time activist with the Graduate Student Caucus. In fact, it was Ms. Christensen who suggested that the M.L.A.'s new Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession look into the topic.
Other graduate students at the conference were clearly interested in the subject. One session on nonacademic careers for foreign-language Ph.D.'s -- where attendees learned about options such as working as a translator -- drew a larger crowd than did some of the sessions sponsored by the graduate-student caucus.
Ms. Showalter wasn’t around to see the about-face. She sat this convention out.
Without Ms. Showalter to stir up emotions, it was tough for adjuncts to marshal their forces for this convention. Some adjuncts said that last year’s furor between Ms. Showalter and the graduate students called attention to their cause, as well.
But this year’s quiet success by graduate students did little to help the adjuncts’ situation, some said. Out of the 20 sessions devoted to employment concerns over the course of the four-day meeting, only one was specifically geared toward adjuncts. Only a dozen people attended.
Last year, the room was packed.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A16