A while ago, two unreadable essays on MLA came out. One, by Andrew Kay, attracted a fair bit of controversy; the other, by Stephen Marche, didn’t seem to garner as much attention. I made attempts to read both of them and gave up. But also, I was privately amused because, like both of them, I was also there as a not-academic who had to be there for some other reason.
I didn’t hate MLA, but I understood I wasn’t included. It felt, for lack of a better word, provincial. The fights and dilemmas and so on were conducted in a pretty insular way. People would admit that they were living and working in an unsustainable space, but at the same time it didn’t really affect them. Unsustainable not because of some sort of general natural law, but because the universities they worked for didn’t understand why they should finance departments, publishing presses, academic journals. But that was the future.
I used to read a lot of commentary from academics on the state of the academy. My favorite was th…
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