Graduate students who had vowed to radically reform the Modern Language Association won nearly every item on their legislative agenda during voting at the M.L.A.'s annual gathering here last week.
Critical of the M.L.A.'s response to the job crisis in the humanities, the students had promised to make the meeting “a convention to remember.” But instead of using protests to make their point, the graduate-student leaders calmly and deliberately won approval on seven motions they put before the association’s chief legislative body -- including one calling for the M.L.A. to collect and publish data on the salaries and working conditions of part-time faculty members. The graduate students also saw two of their four candidates elected to M.L.A. panels.
The campaign was waged by the Graduate Student Caucus, a 5,000-member affiliate of the association representing nearly a third of the M.L.A.'s total membership. The caucus has grown in size and activism in the last few years as graduate students have become increasingly frustrated by the bleak job market and by their sense that the M.L.A. has done nothing about it. (See a story from The Chronicle on December 18, 1998.)
“Today, the future of the profession belongs to those who, at present, have no future,” said William Pannapacker, a graduate student at Harvard University speaking on the first day of the convention to a packed session organized by the caucus.
Mr. Pannapacker continued: “It is self-evident that some of our leaders are not really interested in what happens to us, so long as we leave quietly and allow the system to continue running as it has.
“‘Let them eat cake,’ our advocates are told. Let them wear Prada,” Mr. Pannapacker said, taking a jab at Elaine Showalter, a professor of English at Princeton University who just finished her term as M.L.A. president and has written in Vogue magazine about her love of fashion.
Ms. Showalter’s year-long presidential message has been to encourage graduate students to look beyond academe toward alternative careers, as one way to deal with the job crisis. Her focus is controversial even among professors, but it has infuriated many graduate students who think she’s missing the point, and both sides have engaged in some nasty written exchanges.
While some professors here applauded the convention’s new activism -- noting that the meeting had scheduled more sessions on professional issues than ever before -- others remarked on its acrimony.
C. Jan Swearingen, an English professor at Texas A&M University and a member of the association’s Delegate Assembly, said that the graduate students’ concerns were being taken seriously. Last year, the association’s Committee on Professional Employment recommended that institutions reduce their reliance on part-timers and consider trimming doctoral enrollment. The M.L.A. also set up a Committee on the Future of Graduate Students in the Profession. If all that wasn’t enough, Ms. Swearingen said, consider the agenda before the Delegate Assembly, the association’s chief legislative body: Graduate-student concerns dominated.
Graduate students had billed the assembly session as a possible showdown; instead, it was a cakewalk. The Graduate Student Caucus had put 10 motions before the assembly. All but three passed -- one was withdrawn -- and two of the caucus’s four candidates for posts on powerful M.L.A. panels were elected. The winning candidates, however, were tenured professors -- Cary Nelson and Michael Bérubé, both of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- and not the two graduate-student candidates put forth by the caucus.
Nonetheless, when the voting had ended after the four-hour session, Mark R. Kelley, president of the Graduate Student Caucus, declared the day “a big victory.” He noted that the assembly had agreed to push for the nomination of graduate students to positions on the association’s powerful governance panels, and restored the convention’s welcome session for graduate students, which the M.L.A. had scrapped for this convention.
But Mr. Kelley identified the biggest win as the motion requiring the M.L.A. to collect and publish data on the salaries and working conditions of part-time faculty members -- including graduate teaching assistants in departments of languages and literature. The motion passed overwhelmingly -- 126 to 3, with one abstention -- even though it is expected to cost the association $91,000 to survey 5,100 programs. “That is going to change the very nature of the M.L.A. to give it a more activist posture,” said Mr. Kelley. “This is no longer a gentlemen’s club.”
Along with the many motions presented by the graduate students, delegates overwhelmingly passed a resolution sponsored by the Radical Caucus saying that the M.L.A. “deplores the hasty and ill-considered attempt by the City University of New York to phase out all remedial courses” and “condemns the politicization of the CUNY Board of Trustees.” The Radical Caucus, like the Graduate Student Caucus, is one of 105 groups affiliated with the association.
Still, the assembly was willing to go only so far. It narrowly defeated another motion presented by the Radical Caucus that would have censured departments that relied on part-timers to teach more than half of a program’s credit hours. As the vote was displayed on a big screen -- 73 Yes votes to 80 No’s, and three abstentions -- groans went up from the audience, with one observer in the back muttering, “Cowards.” The delegates also tabled an emergency resolution condemning the U.S. government’s “vague and sanitizing” language to “obfuscate the real reasons” for bombing Iraq.
But it was the politics of the job market that dominated the meeting, and Ms. Showalter used her presidential address to pitch her solution to the dearth of teaching positions. “At the heart of the unemployment problem, I believe, is that Ph.D.'s are a captive market willing to accept any working conditions in order to stay in the academy,” she said.
Ms. Showalter said she didn’t believe in limiting graduate enrollment. Instead, she believed in putting doctorates into the public domain. She argued that it would be good for academe, society, and the Ph.D.'s themselves. For one thing, she said, she had experienced the corporate world as a much more humane place to work than the academic world.
“The M.L.A. has a crucial leadership role” to play, she said.
Background stories from The Chronicle: - “Embittered by a Bleak Job Market, Graduate Students Take On the MLA,” 12/18/98
- “MLA Reports 28% Increase in Job Openings for Ph.D.'s in English,” 12/9/98
- “Fewer English Ph.D.'s Land on Tenure Track, MLA Survey Finds,” 4/17/98
- “Job Market in Languages Holds Steady for Ph.D.'s, MLA Says,” 2/20/98
- “Citing ‘Crisis’ in Job Market, MLA Urges Changes in Graduate Education,” 1/9/98
- “Opinion: The Contradictions of the Job Market in English,” 12/19/97