Playing Heedless Politics at MLA

By Cary Nelson. The Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly, which met in Chicago on January 11, was a circus with a surfeit of clowns, incompetently run by people who had mastered neither Robert’s Rules of Order nor the association’s own procedures. After hours of debate and by a slim margin, the assembly voted to endorse a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to protest Israeli travel restrictions to Palestinian universities on the West Bank. More...