Seattle, WA—  At the 2012 Modern Language Association annual meeting, graduate students trotted out their dissertations in the hopes of landing their first job.

The conference featured 753 panels and more than one-thousand college professors, adjuncts, associates, and graduate students, and those were just the speakers. Additionally, more than 7,000 English professors descended upon Seattle from all over the world.

In the panel Revisionary Nation: New Frontiers in the War on Terror, doctoral candidates—Shawn Jasinski of the State University of New York and Alex Young of the University of Southern California—offered post mortems for the idea of American exceptionalism.

These kids should go far in higher education.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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