Even those positively disposed toward the Modern Language Association, such as Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed, acknowledge that (in his words) it has “a bad image.”

Mal Kline reports the following anecdote recounted by Jaschik in his talk at the last annual MLA conference:

Before the MLA convention, I tried to get a hold of a professor through a public relations department and said I was going to see the professor at a meeting. . . . When the PR man asked “What meeting?,” I said, “the MLA.”
He got very nervous because he assumed, in this case correctly, that it would involve a body part.

Good for Jaschik. It’s time the off-the-wall “progressives” in what passes for humanities departments get their due from the mainstream higher education media.