Employment of English. Michael Berube
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So much for Homans’s precarious sense of proper procedure. Nevertheless, the mailing itself quite clearly seems to accept Homans’s charge that “diversity of opinion” was not honored at the convention; no other explanation will account for the MLA’s curious decision not to seek opinions sympathetic to GESO for the purposes of the mailing. As a result, the claims of Yale faculty were allowed to stand utterly uncontested—including Homans’s unsubstantiated and grossly misleading “procedural” complaints that “the most basic standards of evidence were not adhered to in the formulation of the resolution” (regarding the status of faculty as “replacement workers”) and that “the resolution violates several of legal counsel’s criteria for acceptable resolutions: it is factually erroneous, slanderous, and personally motivated” (10).
When I first read over the special MLA mailing, I was appalled—so appalled that I did not consider it worth my time to complain to the MLA directly. Instead, I considered leaving the organization altogether. A great deal of effort and deliberation had obviously gone into the production and mailing of this unprecedented and one-sided document; a portion of my MLA dues had supported it, as had a portion of the dues of every graduate student and adjunct faculty member in the MLA; and as a result, my own professional organization had clearly given its members the strong impression that the Yale resolution was ethically dubious and factually mistaken. Ironically, Homans’s claim that the MLA had violated its commitment to “diversity of opinion” had been circulated to over thirty thousand faculty and graduate students without a single word of rebuttal; the claims of Yale faculty that the Yale resolution was ethically dubious were themselves circulated in an ethically dubious manner. It is testimony to the outrageousness of faculty behavior at Yale—and testimony to the air of unreality with which Yale faculty spoke of the self-evident rightness of their behavior—that despite the MLA mass mailing, the MLA membership voted convincingly, 3,828 to 2,474 (with 836 abstentions), to uphold the Delegate Assembly motion to censure.
Yet at the very least, the MLA mailing suggested that when confronted with a professional dispute between senior faculty and graduate students, the organization would go to extraordinary lengths, even “initiate a new procedure,” to publicize the views of seniorfaculty at the expense of the views of graduate students. It is worth remembering here that the Yale resolution is one of the few substantive resolutions the MLA has passed in many years that materially addresses the professional working conditions of MLA members; the other burning issues on the table for 1996, for instance, included a resolution expressing “appreciation of and respect for the support staffs in our departments” and another resolution recommending a “common application form” for fellowships in the humanities. It is difficult, in the wake of the MLA’s February 9 mass mailing, to imagine what the professional role of the MLA—and its Delegate Assembly, to which I was elected in the spring of 1996—can conceivably be. For the moment, it appears that the MLA is quite efficient at passing resolutions about being nice to secretaries, treating books with extra care, condemning U.S. foreign policy, and refusing to hold the national convention in forty-six of the fifty states. But when the MLA at last confronts an issue that addresses head-on the crisis of labor relations in American universities, the entire “resolution” system is thrown into profound crisis—by, of all things, the objections of a small handful of elite faculty seeking to win a fleeting PR victory.
And yet if recent MLA Newsletters are any indication of the state ofthe profession at its highest echelons, MLA inattention to academic labor relations may prove to be much less harmful to the profession than actual MLA attention to academic labor relations. In the winter of 1995, as the Yale standoff heated up and thousands of new and recent Ph.D.s made their preparations to attend the MLA convention for yet another costly and generally fruitless exercise in job hunting, the MLA Newsletter featured a column by the brilliant and internationally renowned Sander Gilman, who, writing his final column as MLA president for 1995, proposed a novel solution to the job crisis in the humanities. The column, “Jobs: What We (Not They) Can Do,” was written explicitly as a response to angry graduate students caught in the job crunch. Gilman opens by narrating a confrontation with such graduate students at the 1994 MLA convention, remarking that “it was clear that the candidates’ anger was directed not at any amorphous ‘they’ but at their own professional organization, the MLA, and that they were yelling at me not because I had done anything specifically to block them from getting jobs but because I represented that force of nature, the MLA—that is, ‘us’” (4). He proceeds thence to suggest that the MLA create “postdoctoral mentored teaching fellowships—nontenured, two-year appointments with limited benefit packages” (4). These mentored postdocs, writes Gilman, will solve the profession’s employment crisis by offering younger colleagues “serious, meaningful employment” (5) while also affording “the flexibility administrators demand in our fields” (4).
One can only guess at what “flexibility” might mean here (it seems to be a synonym for “fire-ability”), let alone why “flexibility” might be an employment criterion that a professional organization like the MLA would seek to embrace. Gilman notes, in a brief remark uncannily like that of Annabel Patterson’s insistence that Yale’s leading administrators are also Yale faculty, that his plan will be smiled upon by those above: “we can create new jobs in our departments if our administrators, many of whom are also members of the MLA, see that we are serious in our desire to reallocate resources” (4). In other words, our administrations are downsizing, but they are really “us”; the graduate students who were once part of that “us,” in an earlier paragraph, are now resources to be reallocated so that “we” can show “our” administrators how serious we are about signing on to the latest downsizing initiative. Gilman briefly suggests that his proposal is a kinder, gentler form of exploitation—“new Ph.D.s will become better teachers,” he suggests, as if they haven’t already done enough teaching as graduate students, and “faculty members will have rewarding mentoring tasks” (4). But what if the senior faculty don’t want to “mentor” these two-year, part-time, piecework pseudo-colleagues? No problem, says Gilman—we’ll just leave out the “kinder, gentler” part: “if we [note the “we” here] don’t want to take on a mentoring role because of our overloaded schedules, we can create two-year lecturer positions” (5).
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