A group demanding that the Modern Language Association better represent non-tenure-track faculty members claims to have made major progress in the organization’s annual elections, but has been stymied in its efforts to quantify how well its candidates fared.
The group, #mlademocracy, knows that one of its four candidates in the elections won a seat on the association’s Executive Council, and is asserting that the other three came close enough to winning their races to give it hope of prevailing in future elections. But its characterization of the election results has been disputed by the association’s executive director, Rosemary G. Feal, and the MLA does not release voting tallies.
The dispute over the outcome of the voting, tallied last month, reflects lingering unrest within the association as it begins its annual conference on Thursday in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Although the association has made substantial efforts in recent years to better represent non-tenure-track faculty members, graduate students, and research scholars in fields such as media studies and composition, members of those populations have been pushing it to do more. The #mlademocracy group, in putting forth its first slate of candidates for the recent elections, had billed itself as devoted to getting activists into leadership positions in the association and to ensuring the MLA “is responsive to the concerns of all members.”
“Basically, it is a platform that wants to both enfranchise people who are not as enfranchised as they should be, and also draw people into the MLA,” said David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University who was the slate’s only winner, taking one of three contested at-large seats on the Executive Council.
Mr. Palumbo-Liu said on Wednesday that he did not ask about his own margin of victory in the election, but the slate’s other candidates had sought to find out how well they had fared “for strategizing for the next go-round.”
Running the Numbers
The MLA uses a complex voting system that mathematically simulates runoff elections to produce winners among multiple candidates for an office. The system does not publicize election results but will provide candidates with information about how they fared if they ask. Ms. Feal said on Wednesday she had told candidates who inquired about election results what place they came in and how many votes separated them from the winners.
A point that remains in dispute is what candidates have been told they could do with such information. Ms. Feal said, “if they wish to share that with someone else, that is up to them to do so.” But Mr. Palumbo-Liu said he had been discouraged from sharing such numbers, and Marc Bousquet, an associate professor of English at Emory University who was one of the founding members of #mlademocracy, on Wednesday accused Ms. Feal of giving the slate’s candidates incomplete data and wrongly telling them such information was confidential.
Based on the information that the candidates did receive, #mlademocracy has said one of its candidates—Lee Skallerup Bessette, an instructional consultant at the University of Kentucky—narrowly lost a bid to become the association’s second vice president. It said Maria Maisto, an adjunct instructor at Cuyahoga Community College who is president of New Faculty Majority, an adjunct advocacy group, lost her bid for a seat on the Executive Council by just 50 votes, and Sharon O’Dair, a professor of English at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, lost her bid for an Executive Council seat by just four votes.
Mr. Bousquet argued on Wednesday that the candidates had come close to winning and the slate should feel emboldened in next year’s elections by the result.
The MLA has not disclosed how many people voted in each race, however, and Ms. Feal has accused Mr. Bousquet of misrepresenting the election results, calling his characterization “dramatically different than the information I gave those candidates.” Ms. Maisto and Ms. Bessette did not respond on Wednesday to emails seeking comment. Unless the MLA departs from its past policy and releases detailed election results, it will remain unclear just how well the slate’s candidates actually fared.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
