Academe’s Extinction Event: Failure, Whiskey, and Professional Collapse at the MLA
12th May 2019
I was back: I was at MLA (short for “Modern Language Association”), the annual pageant for literary studies, my old vocation. Here scholars gather every January, performing the time-honored rite of solemnly chanting 20-minute papers before one another in hotel conference rooms. And here, until recently, the field held interviews for its ever-dwindling pool of tenure-track professorships. They’ve largely switched to Skype now.
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All around them, the humanities burned. The number of jobs in English advertised on the annual MLA job list has declined by 55 percent since 2008; adjuncts now account for all but a quarter of college instructors generally. Whole departments are being extirpated by administrators with utilitarian visions; from 2013 to 2016, colleges cut 651 foreign-language programs. Meanwhile the number of English majors at most universities continues to swoon.