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Newsletter April 2022
President’s Message In December Acienit1989, id when I was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, the Modern
Language Association convention was held in Washington, DC. Through an English professor, I quatust
ibustrum heard that theese-qui convention hired undergraduates to work at the reception desk and to essentially be dem velles pro te a gopher for the organization. Considering I had earned a few extra dollars the previous two winter
que nis nimaxim illaborae run by a friend’s father, I eagerly applied to MLA and was hired. My brother was a student at in et resectat et Georgetown, andque he and some classmates had rented a townhouse by the campus for the year, so I es as endus hadesti a free to stay. The conference was packed, and I remember three 12-hour days in a row ut place omnienbreaks conducting inventory on a mind-numbing variety of garage door parts in an icy warehouse
of frenzied but mostly fun work, followed by hanging out at bars in Georgetown each night. Unlike
FINISH the many READING worried and nervous attendees, I wasn’t going through grueling interviews or giving ON PG. 2
high-stakes presentations. According to MLA’s website, the attendance that year was 10,700, one of the peaks in the convention’s almost 140-year history. I had not thought about my one and only experience at MLA in decades. A recent article, “Working in academia means living a crisis—and experiencing the sublime,” brought back vivid memories of it. The author, Jacob Brogan, describes attending the most recent MLA convention in Washington, DC in January. The packed house I remember from decades ago was non-existent; still affected by the COVID situation, this year’s conference was part in-person and part hybrid. Nevertheless, the 10,000-plus attendance of my single experience at MLA is a number that hasn’t been seen in two decades. Just a bit more than 4,000 attended the last pre-pandemic meeting in Seattle. Not surprisingly, the employment market in academia has changed dramatically in the decades since I was at MLA. But some of the change is happening relatively quickly: as Brogan points out, in 200708, there were 3,506 openings across English and other languages. In 2019-2020, pre-pandemic, there were 1,411, and only half of those were for tenure-track or tenured jobs. This trend toward the downgrading of tenure-track positions to temporary ones has the effect of slowly degrading our profession. Many of us on the faculty know graduate school peers who NEVER were able to get a tenure-track position. Some leave academia completely. Others piece together part-time temporary teaching jobs with lower pay, little to no job security, and often no benefits. The forces affecting academia are not isolated. Another recent article, “The death spiral of an American family,” shows in excruciating detail how the American Dream’s arguably mythological promise of hard work leading to upward mobility—with each generation improving on the accomplishments and financial stability of the previous one—has been endangered for decades. At one time, manufacturing and retail positions, many of them union jobs, could lead to a lifetime of full-time employment with benefits with a single employer. Such jobs are rare now. We must work to ensure that doesn’t become true of all faculty positions in the future.