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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.

David Yaffe of Syracuse University headlined a sparsely-attended (eight people) panel discussion on “The Seventies in Black and White: A Soundtrack.“ Yaffe said that he and singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell “smoked a joint together” when he was interviewing her.

He felt that he was “the Rip Van Winkle of the sustainability group” at the MLA and mentioned that twenty years ago, this was an issue at the MLA’s annual convention.

What do Diane Ravitch and the TEA party have in common?

The panel, titled “MOOCs, Boutique Subjects, and Marginal Approaches,” featured five college professors who expressed fear for the future of their humanities departments and courses because of the introduction of MOOCs, mostly from a feminist perspective.

When asked whether the college system was broken and what factors contributed to both programs and pay getting cut by their colleges, several professors reacted with strong opinions.

At the MLA session, “Online Innovations: From Distance Learning to MOOC Madness,” professors from Carnegie Mellon, Rochester and Utah addressed a myriad of concerns about MOOCs.

Gerald Graff, a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, presented a defense of Common Core after author and educator Diane Ravitch strongly criticized the federal education curriculum.