BY EVA CHERNIAVSKY AND AMIT R. BAISHYA

We write as former members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR). Both of us resigned from CAFPRR after the refusal of the MLA Executive Council to advance Resolution 2025-1 to the organization’s delegate assembly. Responding to the genocide in Gaza and citing the revised position of the AAUP on the legitimacy of academic boycotts, the resolution called on MLA members to embrace boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) actions against Israel. We recount some of the events that led to our decision and present three major concerns that arise from disallowing the debate.

Following the council’s action to preempt debate on Resolution 2025-1, two delegates attempted to interrogate the decision on the delegate assembly listserv. MLA professional staff, who moderate the list, rejected their posts. Instead, delegates heard from MLA President Dana Williams, who wrote to defend the council’s decision: “A vote by the Delegate Assembly could be taken by many legislatures as prima facie running afoul” of anti-BDS statutes in various states (our emphasis).

Following the resolution’s suppression, a slew of protests ensued, though notably messages of dissent were circulated on platforms such as LitHub, since moderation of MLA listservs precludes their use for direct member-to-member communication. In the face of this public pressure, the executive council issued a report to the delegate assembly. The central contention of the report was that the adoption of the resolution would be financially disastrous and imperil the core mission of the MLA, jeopardizing contracts with libraries and schools in states with anti-BDS clauses.

Die-in at the January 2025 MLA delegate assembly meeting in New Orleans. Photo by Hannah Manshel.

Significantly, the report failed to mention that two members of the executive committee had resigned in protest over the decision. Moreover, the association’s president, Williams, and its executive director, Paula Krebs, continued to offer this explanation on loop despite a robust challenge to the substance of their claims advanced by eight recent former presidents of the MLA. After a tumultuous gathering in New Orleans that included a die-in and walkout at the delegate assembly meeting, President Williams disclosed to Inside Higher Ed that a concern with “collegiality” had been weighed alongside the council’s “fiduciary” concerns.

We recount this messy series of events because we believe the crisis at the MLA reflects three issues of broad concern for higher education in this moment: first, the posture of anticipatory obedience presented as fiduciary obligation; second, structures of participatory governance (common to both professional organizations and universities) designed to limit participation; and third, the import of the Palestine exception in the face of an escalating assault on academic freedom. 

Note the pervasive operation of the subjunctive mood: The MLA’s central contention is that if the resolution were to pass, states with anti-BDS laws would suspend all business with the MLA. But state-by-state laws concerning BDS are highly differentiated; to know where and whether the existence of such laws might affect the organization’s revenue would require a careful and minute analysis—precisely the thing missing from MLA leadership’s studiously vague statements of financial harm. The former MLA presidents make precisely this point when they note “the lack of evidence of your core claim that passage of the resolution could put 2/3rds of the MLA’s revenues at risk.” Lawyers and financial managers are endowed with de facto veto powers, they state, and absent any specific data “to assess the scope and validity of the claim . . . the representation of danger to the MLA appears to amplify fears that are already quelling discussion in the academy.” This amounts to “capitulating to censorship before it happens.”

As universities and allied organizations confront a barrage of Trump administration executive orders and other direct assaults on academic freedom, this is the critical question: Will the posture of academic organizations be determined by the lawyers and financial consultants, or by the people on whose participation and whose labor they depend? Is the MLA an association reflecting the views of its members—or is it a publishing venture concerned with its bottom line? When we tried to raise this issue on CAFPRR, we were promptly reminded that the MLA is incorporated as a 501(c)(3). The fiduciary duty of the leadership, we were told, is to protect the revenue that supports its mission, an imperative framed as preempting members’ debate on the meaning of that mission and the priorities we believe should inform it. On this assumption, we propose that the MLA rebrand itself as the Modern Language Corporation. At least we will know where it stands.

When the attorneys and the financial consultants have the final word, we are delivered into Orwellian doublespeak: The trade-off, they tell us, is that capitulating in advance to repressive state power will preserve our capacity to do our work, quietly, on the down-low. When we stand up to insist that this posture of compliance is both dead wrong and deadly, that there will be nothing left of our academic organizations if the extent of our response is to stay as much as possible out of the crosshairs, then the rejoinder is invariably fiscal necessity—a necessity framed as beyond scrutiny or debate.

Critical to this structure of autocratic decision-making is the fundamentally undemocratic proceduralism of shared governance—through delegate assemblies in professional organizations and faculty senates in universities. The executive director was probably not wrong to insist that procedures had been correctly followed. But where procedures place the determination of legal liability and fiscal constraints entirely in the hands of executive personnel—where these determinations are presented without evidence as beyond challenge, as facts rather than constructs—then shared governance is a little more than an exercise in the accommodation of representatives to executive power.

Finally, we insist on the broader resonances of the crisis at the MLA to reject the proposition that the human rights of Palestinians are somehow a uniquely complex, incendiary, or uncivil matter—one, as President Williams implied, best squelched in the interest of so-called collegiality. As is now apparent, the escalating efforts to stigmatize and to criminalize the transmission of documented truths and peer-reviewed scholarship pertaining to the settler-colonial Israeli state (not to mention the expression of solidarity with Palestinians) were the leading edge of a full-scale assault on the university. The goal is nothing less than subjecting the academic study of both culture and science to direct political control by the state. We argue that ceding on Palestine is ceding everything: Either we insist that academic knowledge production as such, be it on climate change, public health, gender, sexuality, race, coloniality, and, yes, Israel-Palestine, must be robustly defended against state intervention, or we lose the battle before it has begun.

What does the MLA plan to do if the circulation of materials espousing critical race theory is outlawed—cull those materials from its bibliography? A particularly reactionary deployment of the subjunctive has already been institutionalized by the panicked response to the BDS resolution–what more is coming? Compliance does not protect us—it paves the way for escalating repression. We needed better from the MLA. We need better from our universities and professional associations.

Eva Cherniavsky is Andrew R. Hilen Professor of American Studies and director of graduate studies in the Department of English at the University of Washington and president of the AAUP UW chapter. Amit R. Baishya is associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma and secretary of the OU-AAUP chapter.