Originally published in the Winter 2016 MLA Newsletter
The Executive Council has put a great deal of thought into the future of the association as we approach a transition to a new executive director. As many of you know, the executive director search committee expects to conclude its work by the end of the academic year. Because humanities professions are rapidly changing to adapt to shifts in higher education, the council has also been developing and refining an ambitious strategic plan to take the organization through 2020 and beyond (www.mla.org/Strategic-Planning).
I hope you will look at the brief summary of the strategic plan we released at the start of the fall semester. We are working to build a flexible, responsive scholarly association for the future. This endeavor means broadening the range of members that we serve, creating new opportunities for members’ professional development, facilitating new connections between members and among their communities, and finding new ways to get members’ work out to the world.
Yet all of that work requires investment, particularly in new technologies. Technological transformation is rarely straightforward and without complications, but we believe that investing in new technologies will enable the association to respond to developing member needs. The strategic plan will be a success if we sustain and support the vibrant intellectual communities within the MLA and create new ones beyond our current membership.
We might say, borrowing from Teresa de Lauretis’s pioneering notion of the technologies of gender, that MLA intellectual communities are both the product and the process of technologies such as the material forms in which we disseminate and interpret scholarship and the institutional discourses that establish and subvert hierarchies. The council has studied the association’s practices and technologies with an eye toward aligning them with our changing mission.
MLA members will undoubtedly be interested in what the strategic plan means as it applies to their research and teaching. By employing new technologies, the MLA will soon be able to do things like release individual chapters of Approaches to Teaching volumes for instructors preparing to teach only one short story of an author’s work.
The strategic plan will also serve members’ professional lives and bolster the humanities. Technology will help the MLA create regional advocacy networks; provide departments with resources for helping PhDs discover a wide range of careers; and, yes, raise funds to support teachers, students, and programs.
To make all this possible, we are launching a campaign, Paving the Way: For the Future of the Humanities, which you’ll hear more about at the convention in Philadelphia. In the meantime, I invite you to read the plan and offer feedback at strategicplan@mla.org.
Work Cited
de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Indiana UP, 1987.