Tenure and the AAA

Inside Higher Education has a current “article”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/05/tenure treating a task force on tenure at the MLA. It’s interesting in its own right, but also — following up on some of the recent discussion here about what the AAA actually does — prompted me to think about how (and why) the AAA is different from the MLA. I’ve always had the impression that the MLA is like some enormous spacecraft hovering over English and kindred departments, both protective and vaguely ominous. The AAA, on the other hand, seems more like a higgledy-piggledy on-the-ground network of anthropology enthusiasts. I can’t imagine it definitively taking up an issue like “how tenure ought to be given across the diverse array of institutions at which anthropology is taught” and having its recommendations taken seriously by deans across the nation. Are the MLA and the AAA as different as I suppose?

Blog post,

7 thoughts on “Tenure and the AAA”

  1. This is a great topic for the AAA to create a task force to investigate.

    The first thing the AAA task force could do, would be to condemn anthropology departments that are hiring such large numbers of adjunct anthropology professors, next it could condemn adjuncts for contributing to the problem. We’ll never get more tenure lines until adjuncts stop lowering the value of our labor power, the AAA could help us form some solidarity movement for more tenure lines.

  3. MLA, founded in 1883, over 30,000 members.
    AAA, founded in 1902, around 10,000 members.

    *Source: MLA and AAA websites.

    Besides scale (not as much bigger as I’d thought), the MLA has going for it the perception that English is an indispensable department in any college or university.

  4. Note, however, that what’s “indispensible” about English is the teaching of composition [which is what lots of those adjuncts do], not literature.

  5. The MLA is also effectivly the American humanities professional organization (I’m assuming it’s not an international organization). The AHS (history), straddles humanities and social science, is more speicalized that the MLA. The MLA is also almsot exclusivly acidemic. MLA memembers are all acidemics, and there can’t be many MLA memebers who aren’t acidemics, working in the Academy. Further more, it’s imaginable that the AHS, APA, AAA may cover people who don’t work in Universities and Colleges.

    There are no professional organizations in the social sciences or natural sciences which have that kind of coverage. The APA is big, but mostly, I’d say, because of the value of it’s acreditation on clinical psychology, again, in this respect the organization differes from the MLA.

    Having said that, Adjucnt issues, increased corporatization, which (at least in my view) reflect the ongoing erosian of tenure, should be of interest to all of the professional organizations. Having said that, it’s not at all clear if any of them will have the power to change very much. The number of tenure-lines couldn’t even pretend to increase in proportion to the number of a) new Ph.D.s or b) the number of students. Alas.

    Anyway, Cheers,
    sam

  6. I don’t know how to make this “link”:http://www.michaelberube.com/ work to get you to the right place in the blog, but Michael Bérubé has a post up (dated January 10th, scroll down to “getting our act together”) about why the AAUP rather than disciplinary associations is in fact the right place to go (and the right organization to join) for U.S. based academics worried about these and other things. Others might already know all about it, but the whole thing was news to me.

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