[A couple weekends back I was in Niagara Falls for the 54th annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention. Longtime readers will know well how much I love NeMLA, the organization and the convention alike, and this year was no exception. So this week I’ve shared a handful of reflections on a great NeMLA convention, leading up to this post on scholarly organizations more broadly.]
On what
scholarly organizations can’t really do, what they definitely shouldn’t do, and
two related things they absolutely should.
As the
post hyperlinked above under “I love NeMLA” reflects, I served on the NeMLA
Board for nearly a decade, including a stint as the organization’s President
(itself a five-year process that includes a couple levels of VP and a year as
Past President). Throughout that time, and most especially for my Presidential
year and its 2016
Convention in Hartford, I had very clear and high hopes for how the
organization could make a difference in a number of ways: advocating for
adjunct and contingent faculty and challenging attacks on higher ed; connecting
with secondary and primary schools and educators for cross-network alliances
and efforts; expressing an organizational perspective on relevant national and
world issues in an attempt to help shape our conversations around them. At the
end of the day, what I can say is that we definitely talked about all these
things as a community, including in a number of great
panels and sessions
at that 2016 convention. But beyond talking, we took just one tangible action:
bringing some Convention attendees to a
Hartford public high school to connect with educators and students. That
was very nice, but it was also very specific compared to my lofty goals.
So maybe
scholarly organizations can’t really intervene in our public conversations
(although more on that question below). But I’ll tell you what they definitely
shouldn’t do, as recent events have illustrated all too potently: attack fellow
scholars for trying to make their own such interventions. I’m thinking
specifically about the August
2022 American Historical Association (AHA) president’s letter in which that
organization’s current leader James Sweet expressly criticized historians who
seek to produce public-facing scholarship, to be part of public conversations,
calling out their “presentism” as a problem in the profession. It’s not just that
I believe Sweet was deeply wrong, although I most definitely do (and I’m far
from alone in feeling that way). It’s also and especially that Sweet was
using his position and public pulpit—during, I believe, the one year in which
he had access to them—to criticize fellow scholars, to participate in the kind
of circular firing squad about which I griped in my non-favorites series back
in February. To level such attacks at all, much less to do so in our current
moment (he said present-ly), seems to me a genuine dereliction of duty for a
scholarly organization’s president.
To quote Will Hunting when
he takes that pretentious Hahvahd grad student down a few pegs: “Don’t do that.”
And reading Sweet’s letter and all the
thoughtful responses to it did make me recommit (now that I’m no longer an
organizational president, of course; but I’m certainly still part of these
communities) to a couple things that scholarly organizations should still be
trying to do. One, directly contra Sweet’s arguments, is to be part of our
present—whether individual scholars choose to do that in their work (which
again I support but is an individual choice), it seems to me a crucial role for
organizations like these is to try to help make all relevant collective
conversations more informed and more meaningful. And the other, directly contra
Sweet’s tone and even more important than the first, is to show genuine
solidarity with all those in the profession, to genuinely advocate for all
scholars and educators (and most especially those being attacked by outside
forces, which is the vast majority of us here in 2023). How we do those things
remains a complex question and one we need to keep figuring out together—but whether
it’s the AHA, NeMLA, or any other scholarly organization, we most definitely
need to keep trying to do them.
Next
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Ways we can make scholarly organizations more relevant and meaningful
in our current moment?
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