Strange Days at the Modern Language Association

I n October 1927, the world’s leading physicists met for a six-day summit in Brussels to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. This month, 8,000 or so leftist midwits will descend on Toronto to consider “translanguaging” and “pornographic genres.” Yes, the academic conference has fallen on hard times.

Of course, it is not entirely fair to compare the 2026 meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) to the fifth Solvay Conference. The latter featured 29 world-historical geniuses, 17 of whom were, or would go on to be, Nobel Prize winners. (See the famous “most intelligent photo ever taken” for details.) The former, conversely, is open to anyone willing to cough up $400 and traipse to the Great White North in January.

Yet just because it’s wrong to ask the MLA convention to live up to the standard set by Einstein and Bohr, that doesn’t mean one can’t “interrogate” the gathering on its own terms, to borrow a favorite word of English-department types. According to its “Mission and Strategic Priorities,” the MLA exists in part to “develop mechanisms that help us address the decline of humanities enrollments and funding.” Is what gets said in Toronto next week likely to further or hinder that design?

A mere glance reveals the distressingly obvious answer. Like last year’s MLA conference, this year’s meeting promises to stir grievance-mongering and inscrutability into an unappetizing hash. Far from restoring the humanities’ appeal, the convention is practically custom-built to antagonize and exclude the normies who might otherwise take a class or toss a dollar colleges’ way. How, for example, would regular people likely react to the following session and presentation titles?

• “Goofing with the AI Boyfriend: Quantum Gender, Asian Racialization, and the Queer Labor of Language”
• “From the Spectral Borderlands to Latinx Vampire Lore: Tracing a US Latinx Horror Genre”
• “Reimagining Passing: The Aesthetic and Cultural Politics of Racial Transformation”
• “The Need for Doubt: Sexual Abuse Victims and Trump’s Predatory Politics”
• “‘Codecloseting,’ Opacité, and the Racialized Politics of Linguistic Performativity”
• “Centerfold and Periphery: Racializing the ‘Russian Woman’ in Cold War–Era Print Pornography”
• “Queering Sinophone Genders and Kinship”
• “Transcending Embodied Gender Norms through the Graphic Novel”

My guess? All but the most ideologically deranged would respond with utter perplexity and further harden their hearts against the American campus. Or let me put it another way: If the presentations just listed were replaced with AI-generated parodies, would anyone be able to tell the difference?

It matters that the nation’s English professors have descended into absurdity. Done well, literary scholarship can unlock doors that have been closed for centuries, helpfully refining our understanding of human nature and the past.

Take, for instance, the work of my former colleague Michael Karounos in analyzing Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. In an 1813 letter to her sister Cassandra, Austen famously wrote that her novel-in-progress was about “ordination.” Karounos demonstrates, in sophisticated but readable prose, what that term would have meant to the author herself, thereby solving an important literary mystery and giving further depth to a great book. Will any human being be similarly grateful to Cal State’s Alexandro Hernández for explaining “Chicanx Nerdcore at the Intersection of Horror-Comedy”? To ask that question is to answer it.

The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, where I work, recently published model legislation intended to defund research that almost no one reads and does not meaningfully advance human knowledge. Note, however, that the challenge presented by the MLA cannot be solved simply by turning off the spigot of taxpayer funding in the form of lightened teaching loads, travel allowances, and other perks that accrue to campus “scholars.” Were the MLA’s problem merely that its conference offerings are frivolous, circular, buzzwordy, and unworthy of serious attention, we might indeed stop paying for it and watch the whole enterprise crumble. Sadly, the MLA isn’t itself the cause of professorial radicalism. It is merely the platform on which those already radicalized strut and dance.

A look at the organization’s convulsions over Israel illustrates the point. As Inside Higher Ed reported last January, MLA’s executive council blocked a potential “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” vote in advance of the 2025 conference, thus thwarting the will of its pro-Palestinian members. (Please click through: Photos of the “die-in” staged in response are worth it.) In advance of this year’s conference, Tithi Bhattacharya, winner of the MLA’s prestigious Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies, made news by declining the award in protest of “the institutional silence and policy decisions made by the Modern Language Association regarding the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” This spring, Bhattacharya will teach Survey of Global History, an introductory course that fulfils a general education requirement at Purdue. Whether or not the citizens of Indiana pay for her conference hotel room, they have hired and tenured an instructor who cannot possibly survey global history in an unbiased fashion. Go up and down the MLA’s roster, and you will find more of the same.

One is tempted, therefore, to wonder whether anyone really wants to “address the decline of humanities enrollments and funding” in America. If that is the MLA’s true goal, its members are going about the business very strangely.