What Can The MLA Do?
It does some things very well. Others, not so much.
I’d planned to ignore the MLA for awhile, maybe forever. And I know I’m not alone. Every week brings a new raft of public resignations across my feeds, no doubt mirrored by many private ones. Rebecca Colesworthy, formerly of the MLA Executive Council, posted her resignation letter on the blog of Chris Newfield, a former MLA President. Esther Allen, also formerly of the Executive Council, made powerful statements to Inside Higher Ed. And Anthony Allessandrini, one of the authors of the BDS resolution which the MLA denied airing to its delegates, after admirable perseverance, explained “Why I Walked Out Of The MLA For Good" just over a week ago.
I have read and learned from each of these, and several others, and been grateful for their insights and courage to speak. But I really didn’t think I had anything more to say, until I read David Palumbo-Liu’s resignation of his lifetime membership two days ago.
Portions of it gave me chills.
Palumbo-Liu concisely dismantles the rationales for denying delegates democratic consideration of the BDS resolution, for depersonalizing that decision, and for hiding “anticipatory obedience” behind “zeal to exercise your fiduciary duties.” The letter really must be read in its entirety.
But the part which provokes me to further comment is Palumbo-Liu’s suggestion that the MLA should revise its Mission Statement and, indeed, “all its public-facing documents” so as “to make clear what it does, and does very well, and delete what in fact it does not, cannot, and will not do.”
I heartily agree. As I’ve said before, while I personally support the BDS resolution, what has soured me on the MLA is not the failure to adopt it, a failure which might have also resulted from sending it to the delegate assembly, but rather the denial of democratic governance in favor of executive authority explicitly justified by Chicago School corporatism which is anti-democratic and also, avowedly, anti-humanist.
What irks me is not what the MLA prioritizes so much as what it pretends to prioritize.
Palumbo-Liu points to two of what the MLA publicizes as its three core values - equity and inclusion - and sees the organizations recent actions as clear violations of those values. I agree. I would further add that one of it’s so-called “strategic priorities” - to “expand services and initiatives that foster the improvement of working conditions” - is directly contradicted both the executive mantra - “MLA is not a labor organization” - and the lived experience of every MLA member I have ever talked to.
These are, following Palumbo-Liu’s reasoning, things the MLA "cannot” or “will not” do. And maybe that’s okay. So long as they stop pretending.
By far the most quoted line from my posts about the MLA a month ago was my parsing of the Executive Council’s December 16 Report as “We need our publishing business to pay for our publishing business.”
Even a cursory examination of the MLA’s public filings reveals that only about 10% of the organization’s revenue comes from membership dues, while more than 60% comes from publications, higher if we include digital advertising services like the Job Information List. With relatively little parsimony, the MLA could cease to collect dues altogether, and would still be able to pay its employees, administer its convention (which generates a surplus), maintain its web services, and, of course, publish profusely, blissfully free from fear of violating the censorious statutes of neo-segregationists in order to abide the whimsies of its fiducially-irresponsible membership.
In this marginally reduced capacity, the MLA could fulfill the surviving values and priorities related to its stated mission. Things like “promoting the study, teaching, and understanding of languages, literature, and culture,” “advocacy” for “the value of scholarship in, pedagogy of, and public engagement with the humanities,” and, of course, “broaden the reach of the MLA.”
These are not insignificant or undesirable goals. While we all, myself included, might quibble on the margins with the MLA’s strategies as a publisher, webmaster, and conventioneer, I would also be pretty quick to acknowledge, they do these things pretty damned well on the whole, and, by all indications, consistently on budget, while providing remuneration and benefits to their staff which make most of us employed elsewhere in academia and publishing envious. To reiterate what Palumbo-Liu says, the MLA should “make clear what it does, and does very well.”
Where the contemporary MLA goes wrong is purporting to run this going concern on direct behalf of its membership. Indirectly, of course, any success the MLA has as a humanities publisher and conventioneer nominally benefits humanities scholars and instructors. But there is no evidence that the MLA’s revenues from sources other than dues are being redistributed to the membership. There is a line on the 990 form for “benefits paid to or for members.” The MLA reported zero dollars on that line every year from 2008 to 2022.
It does report grants and awards (which, one presumes, are mostly paid to members or, at least, scholars and instructors who would be eligible for membership), but during that same 15-year span, the amount of those expenses never exceeded the income generated by membership dues. Nor did the costs of delivering conferences exceed the revenues generated by registrations. The relative immateriality of Membership Dues to the overall fiduciary health of the MLA, cited in the December 16 Report as justification for the Executive Council’s suppression of the BDS resolution, has not kept those dues from rising. In fact, they have significantly outpaced inflation at all but the lowest tiers (see table below).
At the last MLA Convention, then president Dana Williams said, “The association is the membership, we want to reiterate.”
In the interest of all involved: Maybe it shouldn’t be.
