This is hardly surprising; as the historical sketch above suggests, the MLA was not founded to be a professional organization, and in pursuing such matters as the CPE investigated it was responding to a growing pressure, unacknowledged by the committee, to do something that both its founders and current leadership never, "ever dreamed of doing.
What this history tells us, I think, is that one should not have expected too much from those parts of the report and recommendations that would require the MLA to act in the manner of a professional organization.
And I shall "bracket" for the purposes of this paper Lennard J. Davis's larger, more trenchant questioning of our collective reliance on organizations like the MLA in the first place. For Davis, professional organizations in general are "by and large" not only "traditional" and incredibly "conservative," but also complicitous in the subtle businesses of aiding institutions in the domination and observation of their faculty.
What Davis calls "compulsory bureaucracies" like the MLA are incredibly resistant to change , so it is hardly surprising that the committee's sixth recommendation, one that promises an organizational response to cases of unethical or un- professional conduct, falls disappointingly short.
An Ethical Response? Recommendation six calls for the "Collection and Publication of Problems in Hiring Procedures Confronted by Job-Seekers" and is comprised of two parts: "We recommend that either through the current standing Committee on Academic Freedom or through another body, the MLA act as a clearinghouse for problems in hiring procedures confronted by job-seekers, and that job-seekers who encouner ethical problems report their difficulties to the appropriate MLA committee" Although the committee's motives in making this recommendation are not elaborated upon in detail, Gilbert states that "considerable evidence--much of it, to be sure, anecdotal--[suggests] that the tight job market has sometimes produced situations where job seekers feel in one way or another abused by hiring committees and department administrators" What these abuses might be are never made specific but, all in all, whatever its inherent vagaries, the recommendation sounds good.
But that's the point: it's supposed to sound good. And, equally obvious, a number of faculty and graduate students have been relaying these "anecdotes" what else could they be until investigated, documented, and proven?
Cary Nelson related the details of a particularly egregious on-campus interview in an article in Social Text over two years ago this has been reprinted in his Manifesto of a Tenured Radical , 62 ; and in On the Market: Surviving the Academic Job Market published earlier this year, Elisabeth Rose Gruner reiterates the "lowlights" of several sexist, clearly unethical, and perhap even illegally conducted interviews women have endured both at the convention and during on-campus recruitment trips.
Gruner asks, "To whom might a candidate report such questions? A lawyer? The MLA? And, to add even a few more interrogatives to the list, what in the CPE's opinion constitutes an abuse in the first place?
Departmental culpability in the incidents Nelson and Gruner report would seem more or less transparent, but other practices may be less clear and open to debate. Requiring applicants to send writing samples by Federal Express or overnight mail? The practice, refined by the East Carolina University English department in , of posting a job notice that promised one lucky Victorianist the "opportunity" to "bypass the traditional MLA 'rite of passage' interviews" by accepting ECU's job offer in November, thereby foregoing any alternative employment possibility that might arise at the convention Palumbo and Taylor, "Letter"?
The posting of job notices when a committee already knows who it intends to hire--or that it is not interested in candidates of a certain gender or ethnicity? Let's not be naive about this last matter, a delicate one to be sure: it happens. Indeed, it was apparently happening at the convention in Toronto while the CPE Report was being discussed by the Delegate Assembly if two of the "anecdotes" I heard there are true. I shall provide only the contours of these stories here to protect the victims of this sort of "abuse," but if the MLA wants to investigate and, after sufficient corroboration, publish these stories which of course it really doesn't , I'd be pleased to provide more details.
The first begins with the phone call on December 29th that every job candidate, after interviewing earlier at the convention, wants to receive: we liked your answers yesterday, and we want to speak with you further. I hope you can arrange your return flight accordingly. So, remarkably, it runs a national search for a junior position and winds up with a short list that just happens to include the senior professor's significant other, turning the longstanding spousal hire dilemma in a direction that effectively rips off every other candidate who paid to have dossiers and writing samples mailed to the department not to mention the time and emotional investment involved in applying for academic positions, and the mockery of law and ethical conduct inscribed in the department's job announcement with its perfunctory statement about equal opportunity.
But even if mitigating circumstances existed to explain both instances--I am, however, pressed a bit to imagine what these might be--can the MLA really operate as a "clearinghouse" to disseminate such information? That is to say, can it simply publish the name of any department or individual against which someone levels an accusation?
Of course such charges cannot be published without careful investigation--and published where? The topics of abusive, or just plain thoughtless, recruit- ment practices and MLA waffling in responding to them are, admittedly, hobbyhorses of mine.
I intimated as much in a letter to the MLA Newsletter Spring protesting the practice of departments ordering expensive materials from candidates-- dossiers and writing samples--at the beginning of the recruitment process for an initial screening. If a committee wants to order these expensive documents after reading a letter, vita, and dissertation abstract, as Nelson had argued as well in an earlier issue of the Newsletter , fine.
Before my letter could appear, however, it had to be revised several times and, as I learned in a phone call from an MLA official, vetted by some anonymous legal staff. You see, I had the temerity to respond to a department chair who defended the practice of a committee ordering everything "up front," and who also expressed his dismay that the MLA would dare tell him how to conduct a search.
Using the example of the several hundred applications I had received as chair of a search committee in Twentieth-century Literature in , I maintained that it was impossible for a committee to read this many writing samples with any degree of attention.
This line had to be dropped. Because no evidence existed that the committee did not read all the essays it received, my supposition could not appear in the letter--at least not in any letter the MLA Newsletter and its legal counsel deemed safe to print. Recommendation six, therefore, cannot possibly work as stated. The MLA cannot serve as a "clearinghouse" by collecting and disseminating every accusation it hears, and it knows it. It is obliged to investigate before it publishes anything, even so innocuous a letter as I just described.
And, presumably, the threat of being "outed" by the association in some unspecified publication constitutes the element of sanction Elisabeth Gruner calls for and Nelson ponders in Manifesto. As Nelson observes, however, "Professional organizations are very reluctant to police either members or member departments. Even those that have accepted such responsibilities--like the American Medical Association--do not have a very impressive record of results" Still, he contends, the publication of a "censure list" of offending departments comparable to that published by the AAUP might persuade departments to "clean up their acts" how is it that this recommendation so closely parallels Nelson's without any citation, I wonder?
Recommendation six, in sum, implies that the "gentlemen's club" will "boldly go" where no MLA official has taken it before: near the ambit of a professional organization. Recommendation six also clearly marks a change in the MLA's view both of itself and of its capacity to intervene in its members' conduct. It wasn't that long ago when, after irritating a number of members with an ill-advised "President's Column" in the MLA Newsletter , then president Patricia Meyer Spacks claimed, "MLA action does not issue from a mysterious monolith, nor does the MLA possess the power to make administrators, department chairs, or individual faculty members do its will.
Guidelines are only guidelines; there are always many who will ignore them " "Voices" 3. We'll simply have to wait and see how "abuses" in the hiring process relate to violated "guidelines"--and see if the MLA can fulfill the promise of the CPE's strategically ambiguous recommendation by doing what it never "dreamed of doing" before.
Whose Recommendations? The difficulty with this particular recommendation for improving our collective hiring practices, however, is far from the most significant failing--or achievement--of the CPE report. Before discussing some of these failings, let me also urge every member of the MLA to read the CPE's report and suggest that every Director of Graduate Studies implement the kind of self-study the committee outlines: surely such a departmental and programmatic introspection will produce positive results.
That said, the most significant failing of the report is the committee's inability to provide, especially in the last phrase of the following, what Gilbert advocates in the report's preface: a "nuanced under- standing of the way the [higher education] system now functions, the way it has failed, and the ways it can be adjusted" 4. When no publisher name appears on the website, write N. When sites lack a date of publication, enter n. The most recent copy of the manual will present the reader the most recent and proper version of the MLA style.
The manual may be used to proof one's work for final submission. This guide may prove invaluable for a writer in keeping a professional and respectful style for the reader. Modern Language Association. Compopedia Wiki Explore.
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