In late October, the leadership of the Modern Language Association (MLA)—one of the largest and wealthiest US scholarly organizations in the humanities—refused to allow the organization’s Delegate Assembly to vote on a resolution stating that members support the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement, on the grounds that this would potentially lead to a drop-off in revenue in states with anti-BDS laws. In response to this refusal, seven of the MLA members who proposed the resolution have written the following.
*
We are seven of the dozens of Modern Language Association members who came together to write a resolution in support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.
Some of us have been involved in organizing around that call since it was issued by 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in 2005; others have come to Palestine solidarity work more recently. All of us feel the urgency imposed by the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, funded and supported in every way by the U.S. government. It’s crucial for the Modern Language Association, the world’s largest association for humanities students, teachers, and researchers, to take a clear and meaningful stance against this genocide.
We were heartened by the fact that an increasing number of academic and professional organizations have voted to stand with the Palestinian BDS call. Some, like the American Studies Association, National Women’s Studies Association, African Literature Association, Association for Asian American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and Critical Ethnic Studies Association, endorsed BDS a decade ago; more recently, in just the past two years, the American Anthropological Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association have all endorsed the call from our Palestinian colleagues. We were also strengthened by the surge of campus organizing—mostly by the incredible courage of student organizers, but also by the founding in 2023 of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, which has grown to 125 affiliate groups across the country.
Many of us have watched our students and colleagues being arrested for exercising their right to non-violently protest institutional complicity with genocide.
Another important consideration was the American Association of University Professors’ new Statement on Academic Boycotts issued this past August. The AAUP statement affirms that academic boycotts like the 2005 Palestinian BDS call “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” Humanities associations like the MLA should be emboldened by such a statement, particularly because the MLA’s own mission statement declares that our organization “supports and encourages . . . justice throughout the humanities ecosystem.”
Of course we knew this wouldn’t be an easy step to take. We were aware that this resolution comes amidst unprecedented repression. Many of us have watched our students and colleagues being arrested for exercising their right to non-violently protest institutional complicity with genocide.
So we studied the web of local, state, and federal laws designed to repress pro-Palestine organizing, specifically organizing around the Palestinian BDS call. Thanks to the work of legal scholars at organizations like Palestine Legal, the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and the ACLU, we know that the majority of these laws do not apply to universities or professional organizations like the MLA.
In fact, most of these laws are designed to stop short of actually suppressing civil liberties, since the U.S. Supreme Court has long held that boycotts to bring about political, economic, and social change are protected by the First Amendment. The goal of these laws is to give the impression that they “outlaw” support for BDS, in order to trick us into self-censorship. As a Palestine Legal briefing points out, the most common response when such laws have faced constitutional challenges is just to narrow the wording so that they do not apply to whatever entity has brought the lawsuit. For all their roar, they are mostly paper tigers.
The sole purpose of our resolution is to give MLA members the opportunity to support the 2005 Palestinian BDS call.
Nevertheless, we worked hard to craft our resolution responsibly. We consulted with legal scholars, and with colleagues in leadership positions at professional associations that have endorsed BDS, to weigh how to best address potential legal challenges. Most of all, we spoke with Palestinian scholars who have faced forms of repression those of us in North America can only imagine, and were continually inspired by their courage, resourcefulness, and steadfastness.
Recognizing that we came to this work as educators, we compiled extensive documentation in support of the resolution. This meant poring over expert sources enumerating the horrors of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It meant engaging with the work of Palestinian, Israeli, and international scholars who have documented the decades-long Israeli campaign of scholasticide—the systematic attempt to destroy the Palestinian education system—that has most recently involved destroying every university in Gaza. And it meant coming to terms with the workings of the apartheid system that affects every Palestinian, as documented by the International Court of Justice, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem. We have made both the resolution and the documentation publicly available and invite our colleagues to use them widely in teaching, writing, and organizing.
When the time came to bring our resolution to MLA leadership, we made it clear that we wanted to work with them as the resolution made its way through the organization’s complex governance procedures. We exchanged many, many emails with the organization’s Executive Director, Paula Krebs, as well as the Director of Governance. We heeded their suggestions for rewording the resolution to better protect the organization from legal challenges. What’s more, we believed them when they said that legal concerns were irrelevant to the resolution, since MLA resolutions are expressions of members’ sentiment, and thus non-binding to the organization. The sole purpose of our resolution is to give MLA members the opportunity to support the 2005 Palestinian BDS call.
Shocking as MLA leadership’s initial decision was, we are much more taken aback by the cowardice and nakedly corporate, unethical, and anti-intellectual nature of their statement.
Finally, we made it clear that we would be happy to meet with the MLA’s Executive Council—a meeting that is in fact mandated by the MLA constitution as part of the approval process for resolutions. Knowing that the Council must review proposed resolutions for their potential financial and legal effects on the association (and not being naïve about the political landscape we inhabit), we offered to consult with them to discuss any concerns they might have. We were told by Dr. Krebs that such a meeting was not possible, thus making the handling of our resolution fundamentally unconstitutional from the beginning—although she assured us that despite our concerns, “the resolution should go through the governance process just like every other resolution.” In retrospect, we believe that if Council members had the opportunity to become more informed about the resolution, they would have reached a different decision.
We were shocked when Dr. Krebs informed us several weeks later that the Council refused to allow the resolution to proceed to the Delegate Assembly—a decision that is unprecedented in the history of the organization. It took another week before MLA leadership finally offered an explanation of this decision—not to us directly, but rather to a journalist at Inside Higher Ed. The Executive Council’s statement on the resolution, along with an FAQ, was eventually posted on the MLA website (although it is only accessible to members), and the rationale was summed up by the Executive Director in two recent articles.
Shocking as MLA leadership’s initial decision was, we are much more taken aback by the cowardice and nakedly corporate, unethical, and anti-intellectual nature of their statement. You would be hard pressed to believe that it was written by teachers and scholars of literature; it seems more like a document drafted by a team of lawyers and signed off by a CEO. It has nothing to say about our mission as professional humanists or about the MLA’s own mission and values, and it doesn’t even pretend to be interested in questions of justice (needless to say, the word “Palestine” does not appear). It has much to say, on the other hand, about the MLA’s “financial profile,” our “operating budget,” and, most important, the sales of MLA “products.”
the leadership of the world’s most powerful association of writers and teachers has decided that words no longer have any meaning when confronted by unjust laws.
The argument against allowing MLA members to consider our resolution boils down to this: there are many anti-BDS laws; some of these laws restrict state contracts (although no specific examples are given); two-thirds of the MLA’s operating budget comes from “sales of products to universities and libraries”; therefore, this resolution cannot even be discussed. Or, rather, MLA leadership will “allow” our elected delegates to discuss the resolution at the upcoming convention, but not vote on it. As a colleague rightly noted, this is not a democratic process—it’s an elementary school civics lesson.
Even by its own logic, the argument put forward by MLA leadership doesn’t hold water. They admit that anti-BDS laws do not prohibit an organization like the MLA from supporting the Palestinian BDS call. Moreover, they note that the phrasing of our resolution—“we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call”—makes it very clear that this is not an official position being taken by the organization. But they nevertheless fret that this will not be enough, and that the laws somehow are even more powerful than those who made them claim them to be.
In short, the leadership of the world’s most powerful association of writers and teachers has decided that words no longer have any meaning when confronted by unjust laws. MLA leadership has summarily censored members from speaking with the voice of conscience, making it clear that to be a member of MLA is to be silenced on the matter of Palestine.
This is an argument driven by fear rather than logic. But let’s imagine that as many as half of the twenty-seven anti-BDS state laws that MLA leadership cites—again, most of these are not even applicable, but let’s go with it—somehow get enforced, and the MLA loses one-third of its income from the sale of “MLA products.” In 2023, the MLA reported $17 million in revenue ($1.3 million net) and $38.9 million in total assets. We really couldn’t function if those numbers were cut by a third?
To quote from an email sent to MLA leadership by a graduate student colleague in protest of the decision: “What does safeguarding our surplus resources matter, when our peers in Gaza do not even have the resources to stay alive and study in safety?”
There is one point worth taking seriously: if anti-BDS laws were to prevent the MLA from selling its products in certain states, students and teachers there could lose access to these resources. To that, we offer a simple solution: make MLA resources free and open source in those states. An MLA actually committed to justice could do as the New York Public Library system did in 2022 when it offered free nationwide e-access to banned books. Furthermore, many states that have anti-BDS laws also have laws repressing Critical Race Theory and other anti-racist pedagogy, criminalizing access to gender-affirming care, and restricting women’s reproductive rights. In these states, it is particularly important that MLA resources be made available in a manner that is not bound by political or financial restrictions; offering free access to students and teachers in states with such restrictions would be more in keeping with the MLA’s mission than constantly trying to keep the lawmakers happy.
Instead of repressing a resolution against genocide—and setting a precedent by which any democratic deliberation over “unpopular” political issues can be suppressed in the name of maintaining the profit margin—perhaps we need to re-think the priorities of the MLA, and of our academic institutions more generally. Perhaps the MLA doesn’t need a slew of upper-level administrators earning six-figure salaries while the majority of those teaching in the humanities—our adjunct and graduate student worker colleagues—don’t even earn a living wage. Perhaps we don’t need lavish conferences with massive carbon footprints, or shiny data-driven reports that tell us that the humanities are in crisis. Perhaps this is exactly why the humanities are in crisis.
The MLA can choose a different path. We can, for example, recall the legacy of Edward Said, who served as MLA president not long before his untimely death in 2003. In his final essay, after dwelling on the horrors being inflicted upon Gaza—he described it over twenty years ago as “a human nightmare”—Said condemned the cowardly silence of academic organizations that refused to stand against the “profound abrogation of the Palestinian right to knowledge, to learning, to attend school.” Since then, many academic organizations have in fact spoken out, endorsed the call from our Palestinian colleagues, and taken a stand against genocide. Yet, even beyond the silence that Said condemned, the MLA is today actively silencing those who wish to take a stand against genocide and scholasticide in Palestine
Some of us became teachers of literature because we believe it helps keep us human, even in a world of genocide.
The Presidential Address that Said delivered at the MLA convention in 1999 was entitled “Humanism and Heroism.” Today’s MLA leadership lacks both.
Nevertheless, the organizers of this resolution will continue to push for what it represents: taking a stand with our Palestinian colleagues against genocide and scholasticide, and ending the institutional complicity that enables them. The results of the recent U.S. elections will make the organizing environment for MLA members, and for our students and colleagues everywhere, much more difficult. That’s all the more reason for our professional organizations to show some backbone, rather than responding with anticipatory obedience.
Most important, at the upcoming convention and beyond, we will center the voices of Palestinian scholars and students who continue to resist their erasure. We stand with Shahed Abu Omar, a student at Al Azhar University in Gaza until it was destroyed by the Israeli military; you may have seen images of her sitting among the rubble of a destroyed house, risking her life so she can find the secure internet connection that enables her to take online classes on her phone. We guard the memories of our murdered Palestinian colleagues like the Gazan poet, novelist, and teacher Hiba Abu Nada, killed by an Israeli missile at the age of thirty-two, who with her dying words recorded scenes from her neighborhood, where “teachers, despite their grievances, embrace their little pupils.”
Some of us became teachers of literature because we believe it helps keep us human, even in a world of genocide, of schoolchildren targeted by snipers and poets murdered by missiles, of unjust laws and profit motives and complicity where there should be courage. It’s not too late for the world’s largest organization of professional humanists to find its voice, stand against genocide alongside our Palestinian colleagues, and recall what it means to be human.
*
Anthony Alessandrini is Professor of English and Middle Eastern Studies at the City University of New York
Raj Chetty is Associate Professor of English at St. John’s University
Cynthia Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
Hannah Manshel is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
David Palumbo-Liu is Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University
Neelofer Qadir is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State University
S. Shankar is Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
