{"id":197263,"date":"2026-07-04T22:22:41","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T06:22:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=197263"},"modified":"2026-07-04T09:26:41","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T17:26:41","slug":"the-mla-a-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=197263","title":{"rendered":"The MLA: A History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Snow fell on New York in the last week of December 1883. Some forty men made their way to Columbia College<\/a>, then still a cluster of buildings on Madison Avenue at Forty-Ninth Street, to read a dozen papers to one another and to found an association. They were professors of English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, and in the American college of 1883 that made them second-class men. The curriculum belonged to Latin and Greek. A classicist held the commanding heights of the old college: the recitation, the entrance examination, the claim to mental discipline. A professor of French or German often stood closer in status to the fencing master and the dancing master, a purveyor of accomplishments, hired to give young gentlemen a conversational polish for travel. The men who gathered at Columbia wanted out of that position. They founded the Modern Language Association of America<\/a> to get out of it.<\/p>\n

The numbers behind the grievance were concrete. At Johns Hopkins, A. Marshall Elliott<\/a> (1844-1910) carried the Romance languages department alone from 1876 to 1880, graduate and undergraduate teaching together. In 1879-80 he taught sixteen hours a week. Basil Gildersleeve<\/a> (1831-1924), the great Hopkins classicist down the hall, never taught more than five. The disparity told each man his price. Elliott became the chief organizer of the new association and its first secretary. Franklin Carter<\/a> of Williams College became its first president. Forty people signed the constitution in 1884. James Russell Lowell<\/a> (1819-1891), who served as an early president and lent the enterprise his fame, put the founding claim in a sentence: modern literatures deserved a place in the course of instruction as “equals in dignity” with the ancient ones.<\/p>\n

The founders did not plan to win that dignity by making literature pleasant. They planned to win it by making modern languages hard. Elliott belonged to the first American generation trained on the German research model. Johns Hopkins University<\/a>, founded in 1876, was the model’s American showcase, and the ethos Elliott carried into the MLA came from the seminar, the archive, and the manuscript room. William Riley Parker<\/a> (1906-1968), the association’s mid-century secretary and historian, records the early insistence that modern languages be made “a solid study” in the spirit of Greek and Latin, and Gerald Graff<\/a> (b. 1937), in Professing Literature: An Institutional History<\/i><\/a>, describes the young profession as torn between humanistic cultivation and the prestige of science. Philology settled the question. Philology offered facts, method, verifiable results, and the look of a discipline. A man who could reconstruct an Old French manuscript or trace an Old English sound change produced knowledge a university president could defend to his trustees.<\/p>\n

The association’s journal shows the strategy on every early page. The proceedings that began appearing in 1884 grew into PMLA<\/a>, the flagship of the profession, and for decades its contents were philology, historical grammar, textual editing, dialect study, and medieval sources. Little of it resembled what a later century calls literary criticism. It was not meant to. It was meant to make the professor of modern languages a credentialed research specialist rather than a cultivated generalist, and it worked. Membership reached 551 by 1900. The convention, which had opened with forty men and a dozen papers, drew about a hundred participants a year by the turn of the century and moved among Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Nashville. Only the World War broke the rhythm. The association postponed its 1917 meeting, the first year since the founding it failed to gather.<\/p>\n

From the start the strategy carried a cost. Teachers who believed literature existed to form taste, character, and a common culture watched the prestige of the profession migrate toward research. The association did not abandon teaching. It rewarded publication. In 1916 the membership made the choice formal. The constitution had described the association’s object as the advancement of the study of the modern languages and their literatures. The amended version read “the advancement of research in the Modern languages and their literatures.” One word changed and the word decided the profession’s economy for a century. By 1929 an MLA president could declare research the association’s domain without expecting an argument.<\/p>\n

Carleton Brown<\/a> (1869-1941), secretary from 1920 to 1934, built the apparatus the research ideal required. The American Bibliography, launched in the early 1920s as an annual listing in PMLA, gave the profession a map of its own output. It grew into the MLA International Bibliography<\/a>, which now holds more than 2.7 million records and stands among the central research tools of the humanities. Membership approached 4,000 by 1927 and 4,500 by the late 1930s, with conventions of a thousand and then two thousand, organized into divisions by language and field. The professor of literature now worked inside a national system of indexing, citation, and review. He was a producer, and his production was counted.<\/p>\n

A small scene from the Washington Square headquarters catches the institution in that era. Brown, few members knew, was an ordained Unitarian minister. On July 9, 1939, he performed the marriage of the Middle English scholar Rossell Hope Robbins<\/a> (1912-1990) to Helen Ann Mins at the MLA office in the South Building on Washington Square. Brown had never performed a wedding and had to go to some trouble to get licensed in New York. For the ceremony, the long office table was cleared of its two-foot layer of books, pamphlets, and envelopes, the first and last time anyone saw its surface, and Brown set on it a vase of yellow iris from his garden. The anecdote survives in the MLA’s own archives. It shows what the association had become by mid-century: a bureau, a records office, a place of long tables buried in paper, run by philologists who married their students to each other under the flowers.<\/p>\n

The next war inside the profession was between historical scholarship and criticism. Through the first half of the twentieth century, the MLA belonged to the philologists, literary historians, and bibliographers, men who read texts through sources, editions, and influence, and who regarded close reading without historical grounding as impressionism in academic dress. The New Critics<\/a> attacked that order. Cleanth Brooks<\/a> (1906-1994), John Crowe Ransom<\/a> (1888-1974), Allen Tate<\/a> (1899-1979), W. K. Wimsatt<\/a> (1907-1975), and Ren\u00e9 Wellek<\/a> (1903-1995) moved attention from the history of the language to the poem on the page, to irony, paradox, ambiguity, and structure. The old guard heard a retreat from evidence into taste. The young critics saw a fortress of antiquarians. The association absorbed the insurgency the way it absorbs every insurgency, slowly and under protest, and in 1951 the constitution registered the settlement. The association’s purpose now included “study, criticism, and research.” Interpretation had become a way to make a career. A man could rise by reading a poem well, without editing a manuscript first.<\/p>\n

That same year Parker solved a humbler problem and created the association’s most famous product. Journals and presses each kept their own editorial rules, and writers wasted their lives reconciling citation formats. Parker’s 1951 MLA Style Sheet consolidated the conventions. In 1977 the first MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers<\/a> turned the style sheet into a mass educational product, revised over the decades for word processors, databases, the Internet, and e-books, with a ninth edition in 2021 and total sales beyond six and a half million copies. The irony is complete. An association founded to prove that modern literatures carried the dignity of Greek is known to most Americans as a set of rules for margins and works-cited pages. The handbook trained generations of students to document sources and to place themselves inside a scholarly conversation, and it made the MLA visible and solvent far beyond its membership. For the public, MLA means citation. For the profession, it means the institution.<\/p>\n

The Cold War gave the association something it had never held: a place in national strategy. Parker began the MLA’s Foreign Language Program in 1952 with foundation money, gathering data on language study in American schools and pressing the case that the country’s monolingualism was a strategic weakness. Then Sputnik<\/a> went up in October 1957, and Congress passed the National Defense Education Act<\/a> of 1958. The act is remembered for science and mathematics, but it treated foreign-language competence as a national-security asset, and the MLA, under executive secretary George Winchester Stone Jr. (1907-1993), stood ready with the surveys, the personnel, and the arguments. Deborah Cohn’s account of the period shows the association operating as contractor, data-gatherer, and policy broker, moving among federal agencies, foundations, and schools. Language teachers who had entered the profession as dancing masters’ heirs found themselves, for a decade, instruments of American power. The money built capacity. The capacity built confidence. The mid-century MLA sat near the center of a national consensus that language study belonged to the country’s global role.<\/p>\n

The convention, meanwhile, had become the visible body of the profession, and for the young it was a tribunal. Departments interviewed job candidates in hotel rooms during the last week of December. A graduate student flew in with a dossier and one good suit, rode the elevator to a numbered floor, and knocked. Inside, three senior professors sat on chairs and the edge of a bed, a schedule of candidates on the nightstand, forty-five minutes apiece. Careers turned on the performance. Members called it the meat market and kept coming, because the convention was also where the profession watched itself think, where fashions rose and fell in public, where an assistant professor could measure the distance between his department and the field. Intellectual glamour and institutional terror shared the lobby.<\/p>\n

In 1968 the lobby caught fire. The convention met December 27 to 29 in New York, at the Americana on Seventh Avenue, four months after the Chicago police had beaten demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention, ten months after Tet, eight months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. A group of radicals connected to the New University Conference, among them Louis Kampf<\/a> (1929-2020) of MIT, Paul Lauter<\/a> (b. 1930), Richard Ohmann<\/a> (1931-2021), and Noam Chomsky<\/a> (b. 1928), had announced their intentions in an open letter in The New York Review of Books that fall. They wanted the MLA made responsive to a society and a university in crisis, and they promised to stir things up, giving Kampf’s MIT office number for anyone who cared to join. Frederick Crews<\/a> (1933-2024) lent his name to the call for reform. At the Americana, insurgents put up posters in the lobby carrying a line from William Blake<\/a> (1757-1827): “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Hotel staff tore the posters down. In the confrontation that followed, Kampf and two graduate students were arrested. The literature professors of America now had political prisoners, or could tell themselves they did, and the business meeting turned into an uprising. The radicals nominated Kampf from the floor for second vice president, breaking the leadership’s controlled succession, and he won, which placed him in line for the presidency he assumed in 1971. The meeting passed antiwar resolutions and voted to move the 1969 convention out of Mayor Daley’s Chicago in protest of the police violence. John Hurt Fisher<\/a> (1919-2015), the Chaucerian who served as executive secretary through the decade, presided over an association whose procedures had been democratized by force of embarrassment. Florence Howe followed Kampf to the presidency in 1973. The message of 1968 held: the MLA’s business meetings were now political events, and resolutions on war, race, labor, and academic freedom became a permanent feature of its life.<\/p>\n

Feminism changed the association more deeply than the antiwar revolt, because it changed who the association thought its members were. In 1969, acting on a resolution from the previous year’s business meeting, president Henry Nash Smith<\/a> (1906-1986) appointed the Commission on the Place of Women in the Profession and named Howe its chair. In 1970 it became the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, and in 1990 a standing committee. Its early work was empirical and procedural: surveys of departments, data on rank and salary, pressure for anonymous review at PMLA, campaigns for representation on committees and governing bodies. Feminist scholarship then did what data alone could not. It asked who counted as a scholar, what counted as literature, and how the profession’s own machinery reproduced exclusion, and it added a body of writing by women to the field’s working canon. The commission’s methods, counting first, theory after, became the template for every group that followed.<\/p>\n

From the 1970s through the 1990s the MLA<\/a> convention served as the great public theater of literary theory. Structuralism<\/a> and post-structuralism<\/a> came through, then Marxism<\/a>, psychoanalysis<\/a>, deconstruction<\/a>, New Historicism<\/a>, reader-response criticism<\/a>, queer theory<\/a>, postcolonial studies<\/a>, race theory<\/a>, cultural studies<\/a>, disability studies<\/a>, ecocriticism<\/a>, film<\/a> and media studies<\/a>. To its enemies the association came to stand for jargon, politicization, and the wreck of the canon. Roger Kimball<\/a> (b. 1953) and Hilton Kramer<\/a> (1928-2012) at The New Criterion made the MLA a byword for the politicized humanities, and every December the newspapers mined the convention program for absurd panel titles. The attacks mistook the institution for the cause. The MLA invented none of it. It registered the field’s arguments and gave them a room, which is what it had done since 1883, when the argument was whether Old French deserved the standing of Greek. The recurring question underneath each fight stayed constant: what gives literary study its authority. Language science, historical knowledge, formal analysis, moral judgment, political critique, and identity each held the answer for a generation, and each generation fought for the answer at the MLA.<\/p>\n

While the theorists fought over authority, the labor system underneath them failed. Graduate programs produced more PhDs than the market could seat, a problem the association’s own commission studied as early as 1970, and universities learned to staff their classrooms with graduate students, adjuncts, and lecturers instead of professors. The Job Information List, founded to organize the market, became its grim barometer. The December convention, once the hiring bazaar, came to mean scarcity. The candidate in the elevator with one good suit now faced a market offering a fraction of the positions his teachers had competed for, at the end of a doctorate averaging nearly a decade, with the likeliest outcome a string of one-year appointments. The MLA had built the professional ideal of the scholar-teacher-critic. It now presided over an economy that could no longer pay for the ideal, and it knew it, and its reports said so.<\/p>\n

The association adjusted its machinery to the digital turn. A Committee on Information Technology arrived in 1990. In November 2016 the MLA launched Humanities Commons, an open-access network for sharing scholarship, teaching materials, and discussion, an acknowledgment that the profession no longer lived only in the printed journal and the December hotel. The convention itself moved off the December calendar in 2011, ending the century-old ritual of professors spending the days after Christmas in a Hilton, and after 2020 it went hybrid, with sessions in person and online. The 2026 convention met in Toronto and online. The association also remained an arena for the profession’s political conflicts, as it had been since 1968. A resolution criticizing Israeli restrictions on academic travel failed in 2014 amid charges of bias on both sides, and on January 7, 2017, the delegate assembly in Philadelphia rejected a proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions by a vote of 113 to 79. The membership had learned to fight about the world inside the association, and the association had learned to survive the fights.<\/p>\n

The hardest news arrived where the story began, in enrollment. The MLA was founded to secure the place of modern languages in American education, and its own census now measures how insecure that place has become. The association’s 2023 report on fall 2021 enrollments found that college study of languages other than English fell 16.6 percent between 2016 and 2021, the steepest drop in the history of the census, and about 29 percent from the 2009 peak. Two-year colleges took the worst of it. Korean and American Sign Language grew while the old European mainstays shrank. Requirements had been cut, budgets had been cut, students had turned toward majors with visible salaries, and the American assumption that English suffices had reasserted itself. The condition of 1883 had returned in a new form. Then, modern languages fought the classics for standing. Now they fight the spreadsheet.<\/p>\n

Today the MLA holds more than 20,000 members in about a hundred countries. It publishes PMLA, Profession, the handbook, and the bibliography, runs the convention, gathers the data, gives the prizes, and lobbies for the humanities against legislatures and budget officers who need convincing. It is a learned society grafted onto an advocacy organization, and the graft shows. One half of the institution descends from Elliott’s seminar and still speaks of editions and evidence. The other half writes statements on academic freedom and counts adjuncts. Both halves work for the same claim the forty men carried through the snow to Columbia: that the study of languages and literatures deserves a serious and defended place in American life. The claim has outlived the curriculum that provoked it, the philology that first armed it, the criticism and the theory that fought over it, and the job market that once rewarded it. The association’s history is the history of that claim looking for ground to stand on. In 1883 the ground was Greek’s prestige. In 1958 it was Sputnik. The MLA is still looking, which is another way of saying it is still alive.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

Founding details, forty scholars, a dozen papers, membership growth, including 551 by 1900 and 4,500 by the late 1930s, Lowell<\/a>‘s “equals in dignity,” and the Kampf<\/a>\/Howe<\/a> presidencies, 1971 and 1973, come from Jeffrey J. Williams, “An MLA History, Minus the Nostalgia”<\/a>, The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Elliott’s sixteen teaching hours versus Gildersleeve<\/a>‘s five, and the forty signers, come from William Riley Parker<\/a>‘s PMLA<\/i> institutional history, “The Beginning, Development, and Impact of the MLA as a Learned Society, 1883-1958”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Snowy December of 1883,” the executive director list, and the Carleton Brown<\/a> wedding scene, including July 9, 1939, Robbins and Mins, the cleared table, and the yellow iris, come from the MLA Archives<\/a> and the MLA executive directors list<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Franklin Carter<\/a> as first president, Elliott as first secretary, the 1917 postponement, and the style sheet and handbook chronology come from EBSCO’s research starter on the Modern Language Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 1968 radicals’ open letter, the December 27-29 dates, the promise to stir things up, and Kampf<\/a>‘s MIT office number come from Richard Ohmann<\/a>, Louis Kampf<\/a>, and Paul Lauter<\/a>, “Reforming the MLA”<\/a>, The New York Review of Books<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Kampf’s arrest, election as second vice president for 1969, and presidency in 1971 come from the MLA obituary<\/a> and Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

John Hurt Fisher<\/a>‘s tenure and dates come from Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Handbook sales past 6.5 million, the convention move to January starting in 2011, the launch of Humanities Commons in November 2016, the 2014 Israel resolution failure, the January 7, 2017 Philadelphia boycott rejection, 113-79, and 20,000 members in 100 countries come from Wikipedia on the Modern Language Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reasonable extrapolations: the dancing-master and fencing-master comparison (a documented trope of the period that Graff discusses), the hotel-room interview scene (schedule on the nightstand, professors on the bed’s edge, the one good suit), and the general texture of the 1883 gathering. The Blake line is public domain and its use on the 1968 posters is documented in accounts of the arrest.<\/p>\n

The Mint: Bourdieu and the Modern Language Association<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pierre Bourdieu<\/a> (1930-2002) describes a field as a game that produces its own stakes. Players enter, invest, and compete for a currency that holds value only among players. The currency is symbolic capital: recognition, consecration, the authority to say what counts. A field wins autonomy when its members judge one another by internal standards rather than by the standards of the church, the state, the market, or the salon. Every field runs on a shared investment Bourdieu calls illusio, the conviction that the game deserves a life. The history of the Modern Language Association is the history of a field that built its own mint, struck its own coin, fought a century of wars over the coin’s design, and now watches the outside world refuse the exchange.<\/p>\n

Begin with position. In 1883 the men who teach modern languages occupy the bottom of the academic field. The classicists hold the consecrating power: the entrance examination, the required course, the claim that Greek disciplines the mind. The modern language teacher holds conversational skill, a commodity the college prices near fencing and dance. Bourdieu teaches that dominated agents in a field have two broad strategies. They can accumulate the reigning capital on its own terms, or they can work to change the terms. The founders of the MLA do both at once. They import a rival currency, German philological science, already consecrated at Johns Hopkins, and they build an apparatus to circulate it: an association, a constitution, a journal, an annual meeting. A. Marshall Elliott teaches sixteen hours a week while Gildersleeve teaches five, and the gap between those numbers measures the capital gap the new association exists to close. The demand James Russell Lowell voices, equal dignity with the ancients, is a demand for convertibility. The modern language men want their coin honored at the classicists’ bank.<\/p>\n

Philology wins the founders’ choice because it looks like the capital the university already honors. Bourdieu distinguishes the autonomous pole of a field, where producers produce for other producers, from the heteronomous pole, where producers serve external demand. The teacher who polishes undergraduates for travel serves external demand. The scholar who reconstructs an Old French manuscript for the twelve other men who can check his work produces for producers. The early PMLA, dense with sound changes and manuscript collations, is a portfolio of the second kind. Its remoteness from the reading public is the point. Autonomy in a field shows up as distance from the lay audience, and the founders buy distance as fast as they can.<\/p>\n

The 1916 amendment to the constitution codifies the currency. Study becomes research. One word, and the field’s principle of legitimation now sits in print. Bourdieu argues that the decisive struggles in any field are struggles over the dominant principle of hierarchization, the rule that decides which practices rank. The teachers who wanted literature to form taste and character lose that fight without a battle, because the fight happens at the level of the constitution, the field’s law, where the research party holds the pen. From 1916 forward the association speaks in the name of teaching and pays in the coin of publication. Bourdieu would recognize the arrangement without surprise. Fields routinely honor one value in speech and another in the pay structure, and the gap between them is where the game’s real rules live.<\/p>\n

Carleton Brown’s bibliography completes the mint. A currency needs a ledger, and the American Bibliography, growing into a file of 2.7 million records, is the ledger: a central register of who has produced, where, and how much. Once the ledger exists, accumulation becomes visible, comparable, and rankable. The professor’s product enters an accounting system, and the accounting system disciplines the professor. Bourdieu calls the durable dispositions a field installs in its players a habitus. The habitus of the twentieth-century literature professor forms around the ledger: publish, place the work in ranked venues, cite the consecrated names, convert publication into rank, rank into students, students into a school. The convention gives the currency a trading floor. Members read papers to establish claims, editors scout, departments shop, and every December the field gathers to watch its prices move.<\/p>\n

The New Criticism episode runs on a script Bourdieu writes out in The Rules of Art and Homo Academicus. Newcomers who hold little of the reigning capital attack the reigning definition of the game. Brooks, Ransom, Tate, Wimsatt, and Wellek cannot outbid the philologists in manuscripts and sound laws, so they propose a rival skill, interpretation, and a rival object, the autonomous poem. The incumbents call the heresy impressionism, which in field terms means counterfeit, coin struck without license. The heretics call the orthodoxy antiquarianism, which means dead stock, capital that no longer circulates. The field settles the war the way fields settle wars, by widening the definition of legitimate capital until the strongest heretics fit inside. The 1951 constitution adds criticism to study and research. The heresy receives a charter. Its leaders receive chairs. Bourdieu notes that successful subversion in a field rarely destroys the game. It re-founds the game with the former rebels seated at the mint.<\/p>\n

Theory repeats the cycle at higher velocity and with an imported currency. From the 1970s the fastest route to distinction in literary studies runs through Paris. Structuralism, deconstruction, and their successors arrive as capital already consecrated in the French intellectual field, and ambitious newcomers arbitrage the exchange rate, buying French prestige cheap and selling it dear in American departments. Bourdieu enters American English departments through this same circuit, a fact that gives the analysis its comic reflexivity: the theorist of consecration becomes a name to cite, a coin to hold. John Guillory<\/a> (b. 1952), the field\u2019s most rigorous Bourdieusian, makes the point in Cultural Capital<\/i><\/a> that the canon wars are fights over the syllabus as an instrument for distributing cultural capital, and that both parties overestimate the syllabus because both need to believe the school still controls the currency. The MLA convention serves the theory decades as the trading floor where each season’s coin gets priced. The panel titles the newspapers mock every December are position-takings, moves in a market the mockers do not play in, which is why the mockery never moves the prices.<\/p>\n

The 1968 revolt is a war between the field and its own reproduction system. Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (b. 1930) show in Reproduction how educational institutions transmit advantage while describing the transmission as merit. The MLA of 1968 reproduces its hierarchy through a controlled nomination process, a slate handed down, an electorate that ratifies. Kampf’s election from the floor breaks the circuit at its weakest visible point. The insurgents hold little field capital. They hold numbers, timing, and the embarrassment of the arrests, and they spend all three in one meeting. What follows tracks Bourdieu’s model of absorbed subversion for the second time in the association’s life: the rebel becomes president, the rebellion becomes procedure, resolutions become a standing genre, and the field adds political virtue to the list of capitals a member can accumulate. Florence Howe’s commission then does the most Bourdieusian work in the association’s history. It counts. Surveys of rank, salary, and committee seats map the distribution of capital by sex, and the map converts a grievance into a datum the field’s own research habitus must respect. The feminists beat the field with the field’s weapon, the ledger.<\/p>\n

The handbook shows the heteronomous pole funding the autonomous one. Six and a half million copies sold make the MLA Handbook a mass commodity, and the citation regime it teaches carries the field’s discipline out to the laity. Every high school student who formats a works-cited page performs, in miniature, the field’s central rite: acknowledge the prior holders of capital, place your claim in the ledger, submit to the rules of accumulation. Bourdieu calls such ceremonies rites of institution, acts that consecrate a boundary while appearing to test a skill. The handbook revenue then subsidizes the journal, the bibliography, and the convention, which means the autonomous field lives on the sale of its own etiquette. The Cold War runs the same subsidy at state scale. The National Defense Education Act converts language study into national-security capital, and the association trades a measure of autonomy for federal money, surveys on demand, materials on contract. Bourdieu holds that no field’s autonomy is ever complete or free. Someone always pays for the distance from the market, and the payer holds a mortgage on the game.<\/p>\n

Then the currency crisis. Bourdieu describes hysteresis as the lag between a habitus and a changed field, players executing strategies formed for conditions that no longer hold. The doctoral student of 1995 or 2015 carries the habitus built between 1945 and 1970: publish, present, place, wait for the market to clear. The market stopped clearing around 1970 and the association’s own commission said so at the time. The field responds the way fields respond to devaluation, by minting faster. More PhDs, more panels, more journals, more lines on the vita per job. Bourdieu analyzes credential inflation in The State Nobility: when titles multiply past the positions that redeem them, holders pay full price for entry and collect a discounted return, and the discount lands hardest on those with the least inherited capital to cushion it. The adjunct is the field’s devalued bond holder. He completed the accumulation the game demands, and the game pays him in the one currency it still controls, recognition among players, while the university pays him by the course. The illusio survives the payoff by decades, which Bourdieu might count as the field’s darkest achievement. People keep investing in a game because the investment has become who they are.<\/p>\n

The enrollment collapse attacks the field beneath the currency, at the base. A field of cultural production needs a reproduction market, students whose fees and requirements justify the positions that redeem the credentials. The 16.6 percent fall in language enrollments between 2016 and 2021 shrinks that base, and the 29 percent fall from the 2009 peak shrinks it further. In Bourdieu’s terms the field faces a conversion failure at both ends. Entering students decline to convert tuition into the field’s cultural capital, and exiting credential holders cannot convert the capital into positions. The association answers with advocacy, data, and public argument, which is a field pleading its case before external powers, the legislature, the budget office, the parent. The plea reverses the founding strategy. In 1883 the field bought prestige by building distance from the lay world. In 2026 it spends prestige trying to close the distance, and finds the lay world holds the stronger position at the table.<\/p>\n

Read through Bourdieu, the MLA’s century and a half forms one continuous operation with a turn in the middle. First the mint: dominated agents build an apparatus of consecration, win autonomy, and establish a currency. Then the wars of the coin: philology against criticism, criticism against theory, the incumbents against 1968, each war ending in a wider definition of capital and a bigger mint. Then the inflation, when the field’s output outruns the positions and the students that give the output its exchange value. The association did what fields do, and did it well, which is the hard part of the story. The apparatus worked. The ledger, the journal, the convention, and the rite produced a profession where none existed, and gave four generations of scholars a game worth a life. The game still runs. The players still invest. What has thinned is the exchange window where the field’s coin once bought a living, and no field, in Bourdieu’s account or in the record, has ever forced the outside world to keep a window open. Fields set the value of their coin at home. The rate abroad is set by others, and the others have moved on.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

Bourdieu<\/a> texts cited in the essay: field, autonomy, and position-taking come from The Field of Cultural Production<\/i><\/a> (1993) and The Rules of Art<\/i><\/a> (1992, trans. 1996); the academic field and absorbed heresy from Homo Academicus<\/i><\/a> (1984, trans. 1988); reproduction and controlled succession from Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture<\/i><\/a> with Passeron<\/a> (1970, trans. 1977); credential inflation and devalued titles from The State Nobility<\/i><\/a> (1989, trans. 1996); rites of institution from the essay of that name in Language and Symbolic Power<\/i><\/a> (1991); illusio and hysteresis appear across Pascalian Meditations<\/i><\/a> (1997, trans. 2000) and The Logic of Practice<\/i><\/a> (1980, trans. 1990).<\/p>\n

The Charge: Collins and the Modern Language Association<\/strong><\/p>\n

Randall Collins (b. 1941) builds his sociology on a small claim with long reach. Situations come first. Individuals come second. A person is a chain of situations, and what carries him from one situation to the next is emotional energy, the confidence and drive that successful interaction deposits and failed interaction drains. In Interaction Ritual Chains, Collins takes the ritual model from \u00c9mile Durkheim (1858-1917) and the micro-observation from Erving Goffman (1922-1982) and fuses them. A ritual needs four ingredients: bodies in one place, a barrier against outsiders, a shared focus of attention, and a shared mood. When the ingredients combine, the ritual produces four outputs: group solidarity, emotional energy in the individual, sacred objects that carry the group’s charge, and a morality that defends those objects. Institutions live as long as their rituals fire. The Modern Language Association built one of the great ritual engines of American intellectual life, ran it every December for more than a century, and now runs it at reduced charge while wondering where the solidarity went.<\/p>\n

Start with the ingredients, because the December convention assembled all four with a fullness few institutions match. Bodies in one place: eight to twelve thousand members in two or three hotels, the last week of the year, when the rest of the country rests. The timing did ritual work of its own. A professor who leaves his family between Christmas and New Year’s to fly to a Hilton makes a sacrifice, and sacrifice marks the gathering as set apart, which is what sacred means. The barrier against outsiders: the registration badge. The badge admits the wearer to the sessions and the book exhibit, and it does a second job Collins would notice first. In the lobby and the elevator, eyes drop to the badge before they rise to the face. Name, institution, then greeting, calibrated in that order. The badge sorts every encounter by rank in under a second, and everyone submits to the sorting because the sorting is the price of the game. Shared focus: the paper, the panel, the star at the podium. Shared mood: ambition, dread, and the low hum of a profession watching its own prices.<\/p>\n

Collins argues in The Sociology of Philosophies that intellectual life runs on the same engine. Ideas do not circulate as free-floating text. They circulate through chains of face-to-face encounters, and eminence flows through personal contact with the already eminent. The number of positions at the center of attention in any intellectual field stays small, a handful of rival camps, because attention is the scarce resource and rituals concentrate it. The MLA convention is the American literary profession’s attention market made flesh. The hot panel packs the ballroom, members standing along the back wall, and the packing is the point. Every body in the room raises the charge for every other body, and the speaker at the focus absorbs the pooled attention and walks out carrying more emotional energy than he brought in. He speaks next semester with more confidence. He writes faster. He takes the risk on the big book. Collins insists that creativity itself runs on this charge, that the productive intellectual is the one who has been at the center of successful rituals and carries the deposit. The graduate student along the back wall absorbs a lesser but real charge, plus something else: the sight of the star up close, the voice, the timing, the way the room bends. He has touched the sacred object. He will cite the name for years, and each citation, in Collins’s account, is a small ritual at secondary distance, recharging the symbol and reaffirming his membership in the circle that holds it sacred.<\/p>\n

The sacred objects of the tribe are the names. Not the books first, the names. A first-order name draws a crowd across fields; members attend who read none of the work, because presence at the ritual outranks mastery of the text. Below the names sit the derivative sacra: PMLA, the prize lists, the endowed lecture, the program in its thick booklet, members bent over it in the lobby with pens, planning their three days like pilgrims with a map of shrines. Collins would add that the profession’s morality forms around these objects on schedule. Attack a sacred name at a panel and watch the room defend it with a heat no methodological dispute explains. The heat is Durkheimian. The tribe protects its totems.<\/p>\n

Now the hotel room, the frame’s darkest and richest site. For decades the convention doubled as the hiring market, and the job interview ran as a ritual with the stratification dial turned to maximum. Ingredients: five bodies in a room built for two, a closed door, one focus of attention, one mood of judgment. The candidate performs for forty-five minutes. The committee holds the power to charge or drain. Collins describes stratified rituals as encounters where one side absorbs energy and the other side supplies it, and the December interview is the model. The candidate who connects, who catches the room’s rhythm, who feels the questions bend toward interest, leaves with a charge that carries him through the hallway, the lobby, the flight home, sometimes the career; members can recall their good interviews decades later, minute by minute. The candidate who misfires leaves drained in a way the word disappointment undersells. He must then perform again in ninety minutes, two floors up, with the drain still on him, and Collins’s model says the drain compounds, because emotional energy is the resource each ritual spends and a man low on it fumbles the next encounter. The convention ran hundreds of these rituals a day in December, minting confidence for a few and extracting it from the many, and the extraction was structural, since candidates always outnumbered jobs. Members called it the meat market. Collins might call it an energy pump running uphill, from the young to the established.<\/p>\n

The frame reads 1968 as the engine at peak output. Collins treats conflict as ritual intensifier: an enemy sharpens the barrier, danger deepens the shared mood, and a crowd that acts together generates the effervescence Durkheim found in the corroboree. The Americana lobby supplies the sequence. The Blake posters give a focus. The hotel staff tearing them down gives an enemy. The arrests give martyrs, and a martyr is a sacred object under construction. By the time the business meeting convenes, the insurgents have what movements need and rarely get, a room already charged, and the floor nomination of Kampf converts the charge into an outcome while it is still hot. Collins holds that political victories of this kind depend on timing the ritual peak, and the radicals timed it. The elected rebel then becomes a sacred object of the movement wing, the story gets retold at every subsequent convention, and the retelling recharges it for forty years. Note also what the frame predicts about the aftermath: the association keeps the resolutions, the political business meeting, the annual controversy, because conflict rituals produce solidarity for both camps at once. The members who deplore the resolutions gather to deplore them together, and their deploring binds them too. The MLA learned in 1968 that a fight in December warms the tribe through the year, and it has scheduled one most years since.<\/p>\n

Feminist organizing after 1969 shows the chain model in a second register. The Commission on the Status of Women gives women in the profession what Collins says every insurgent network needs, a ritual site of its own: meetings with a closed door, a shared focus, a mood of grievance turning into purpose. Emotional energy accumulates in the caucus and gets spent in the open assembly. The women who count salaries and committee seats between conventions arrive in December charged, and the charge shows in who stands up at the microphone. Movements run on chains, and the commission built one.<\/p>\n

Then the decline arc, which the frame carries built in. It begins with the calendar. In 2011 the association moves the convention off the days after Christmas, ending the sacrifice that marked the gathering as set apart. A January meeting is a conference. A December meeting was an ordeal, and ordeal binds. Next the interviews leave the hotel rooms for video calls, and Collins has an argument waiting: mediated interaction transmits information and starves the ritual, because bodies read each other through channels a screen cannot carry, the micro-rhythms of voice and posture that entrain two nervous systems into one rhythm. The video interview drains the candidate without the compensating possibility of the full charge; even the winners report a flatness. Then the pandemic pushes the convention hybrid, sessions online, the hot panel a grid of squares. Attendance thins. The adjunct majority stays home because a plane ticket and four hotel nights price them out of the ritual market, and here Collins’s stratification turns bitter, since the members most in need of solidarity can least afford the assembly that produces it. The profession faces legislatures and budget officers in the decade it needs collective confidence most, and its energy engine idles. Solidarity is not a resource an institution stores. Collins insists it decays between rituals and must be renewed in co-presence, on a cycle, or it thins into nostalgia and a dues payment.<\/p>\n

The frame also concedes its limits on this record, and stating them keeps the analysis honest. Interaction ritual chains illuminate the convention, the interview, the caucus, and the insurgency, the places where bodies meet. The bibliography, the handbook, the constitution amendments, and the enrollment census sit outside its reach; a ledger fires no ritual, and the frame has little to say about why students stop enrolling in French. Collins covers intellectual content thinly by design, since for him the content of a position weighs less than the network position of the man who holds it, and a reader who thinks arguments sometimes win on merit will push back. Within its range, though, the frame explains what the other frames treat as decoration: why the profession met in the dead week of the year and felt the meeting as fate, why members flew across the country to hear papers they could read at home, why the badge, why the packed back wall, why the retold stories of 1968, and why a discipline that moved its gathering onto screens finds, a few years on, that something has gone out of the tribe that no database restores. The MLA built a fire and met around it every winter. The fire made the profession feel like one thing. The frame’s cold conclusion is that feelings of that kind are manufactured goods, the factory ran on assembled bodies, and the factory has been half closed for fifteen years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Snow fell on New York in the last week of December 1883. Some forty men made their way to Columbia College, then still a cluster of buildings on Madison Avenue at Forty-Ninth Street, to read a dozen papers to one … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t