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When professors drop their guard, you get to realize how decayed education is, higher and lower. “We prefer to pretend that bad students don’t exist,” Gerald Graff of the University of Illinois at Chicago told the panel.

A professor from George Mason University ran a slide show of naked lesbians to accompany her presentation at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention in Chicago this year.

Apparently Rachel Carson no longer provides enough inspiration to environmentalists. They are now going back to find environmental messages written long before the first Earth Day was commemorated.

A trio of academics at the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) annual convention took obligatory swipes at conservative critics of the president in a panel on his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father. Oddly enough, though, they confirmed the essential facts behind much of the naysayers’ criticisms of that volume.

Usually when a group gets “mission creep,” it’s because they’ve accomplished their original mission.

The recent Modern Language Association (MLA) held a session called, “Vulnerable Expression and the Arab Uprisings” to take a closer look at the post-Arab Spring world.

It is one thing to think Marx was a brilliant economist, despite more than a century’s worth of evidence to the contrary. It is quite another to think he was a talented poet.

If the Modern Language Association (MLA) had done to Moby Dick what they did to Herman Melville, Captain Ahab might have kept his leg.

Every now and then you go to an academic conference and actually run across people who take close reading literally.

It’s hard to say what is more astounding in academe: the projects academics get emotionally attached to or the odd disconnect their finished products have with reality.

One of the ironies of the academic tendency to constantly renovate old disciplines is that yesterday’s modernists become today’s “Whatever became of?” question.

In one of the better attended panel discussions, the MLA’s panel on academic boycott of Israeli universities was contentious and one-sided.