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One-third of college students need remedial coursework, teaching associate John Dunn told the crowd at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) late last year.

If the largest conclave of college English professors in the country sometimes sounded like a Democratic Party strategy session at the Modern Language Association meeting late last year, it might be because the two groups’ membership rolls have an overlap.

In a way, the largest collection of English professors in the country—the Modern Language Association (MLA)—is true to at least the first part of its name. What many laymen think of as the classics—British literature up to the 20th Century—is the focus of about one-tenth of the hundreds of panel discussions at the MLA annual meeting.

Even sympathetic observers of the Modern Language Association (MLA) offer up vignettes about what may be the world’s largest collection of English professors that make the group look rather odd.

The Modern language Association’s panel on “Terrorism, Technology and Visual Media” helped show just how loosely the higher education establishment now defines the term “liberal arts.”

Another religiously affiliated university trying to be diplomatic may be in danger of becoming Catholic in Name Only (CINO).

Among college English professors, the passing on of literary traditions and literacy has gone from avocation to afterthought to alien concept, as can be seen in the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association.

In their unguarded moments, college professors say the darndest things.

The Modern Language Association, which represents thousands of College English professors nationwide, is actually trying to understand religion in American life.

Philadelphia is not just a place where Broadway shows go on out of town tryouts. When the Modern Language Association meets there, Ph.D. candidates test their theses there too.

The often-esoteric Modern Language Association is commemorating a conflict too rapidly fading from collective memory—World War II— but the eclectic amalgamation of thousands of college and high school English professors is doing so in a manner that obscures key facts about the war, namely, what was at stake.

If you thought that the Modern Language Association was a highly politicized group whose real activities belied its innocuous-sounding name, you ain’t seen nothing yet.