Data on Second Majors in Language and Literature, 2001–13

In some fields—notably, foreign languages—second majors make up an unusually large share of the students receiving degrees. If we compare the number of second majors in a field with the number of first majors, we see that second majors range from 3%–5% of the number of first majors in fields like communication and psychology to 10%–16% in economics and mathematics but jump to significantly higher percentages in foreign languages. In 2001 the number of second majors in foreign languages was 28.0% of the number of first majors, and it increased to 38.6% in 2013

Anti-Oedipalizing Great Expectations: Masochism, Subjectivity, Capitalism

Dickens, in his infatuation with the orphan, anticipates Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which argues against interpreting everyone's life experience in terms of the Oedipal conflict's family drama

The Foreign Language Requirement in English Doctoral Programs

The decline of the language requirement in English doctoral programs will have to be reversed if those in the English profession are to treat global and ethnic studies seriously, to refuse to replicate “spread-eagle” isolationism in their work, to research and teach world literature and English-language literature’s place in it responsibly, and to enrich their thinking with the extraordinary taxonomies that the other modern languages offer

Review of Scholarship on the Status of African American Faculty Members in English

Compiled to support the work of the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African American Faculty Members in English, this scholarship review is not comprehensive. Much of the relevant literature treats diversity and equity issues in higher education broadly, a consequence of the difficulty of obtaining reliable data on specific disciplines and the sometimes statistically insignificant numbers when one does. Broad treatments show, too, that the low number of black faculty members in English cannot be attributed to simple, local problems; instead, a complex interaction of social, economic, and educational factors leads black students, especially black men, away from higher education or, more specifically, away from English and militates against their success when they do pursue advanced degrees and faculty careers

The Master's Degree in the Modern Languages since 1966

The story of the master’s degree in English and foreign languages since 1966 is most dramatically a story about women’s access to areas of study traditionally dominated by men and more generally a story about how economic shifts influence students’ degree decisions

Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity

The members of the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada noted at a recent meeting that they often make generalizations about humanities doctorate recipients and faculty members of color that would benefit from the light that systematic national data might shed on them. This report responds to the committee’s call for such information

Academic Freedom: Norms, Methods, Contestations

Because academic freedom is a function of and entrusted to the corporate faculty, defenses of academic freedom must be articulated in the terms of curricula that are thoughtfully constructed according to disciplinary norms. But this potentially powerful system of protection is weakened when the faculty has little sense of how its curriculum fits together and how individual members’ teaching and research contribute to the mission of their departments and institutions, especially when that work challenges dominant disciplinary methods and narratives, as work in some less frequently taught languages and in literatures of people of color almost necessarily do

The Status of African American Faculty Members in English

The article addresses a topic of pressing but long-­standing concern to many in the higher education community: the disproportionately low number of African American faculty members in English, assessing the facts of the situation and how they might be addressed effectively

THE ILLUSIONS OF PHALLIC AGENCY Invisible Man, Totem and Taboo, and the Santa Claus Surprise

For the narrator of Invisible Man, the abjection of women and homosexuals operates at first as a discursive strategy for making the black male’s position more subjectively endurable, but the narrator must eventually confront this discursive strategy as an illusion of hetero-phallic agency, since he continually fails to acquire the sorts of instrumentalities of power associated with directly political speech. In the end, he recognizes possession of the phallus as a myth on the order of Santa Claus and opts for a more obviously representational, but less obviously political, discourse: his narrative. If we are to take the novel itself as the evidence of the invisible man’s agency, though, then this agency is entirely representational: it acts in and on the world only as a shifty fiction, a tricky Word

Taking Liberties: Academic Freedom and the Humanities

The state of academic freedom today, the particular vulnerability of certain areas of study, and the special relevance of scholarship in the humanities to defenses of academic freedom