Abstract: An examination of the role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century requires us to question ourselves about the value of our work, its place in the world today and its future?possible or impossible?in a world sub ject to the automatization of minds by technology and to wars of religion that encourage archaism and terrorism. The work we do daily cannot be disassociated from this vast horizon, a horizon that brings me to consider three questions: What power do the humanities wield today? Do today's religious conflicts discredit humanism, or, if they are accelerating its re construction, what would be the role of our disciplines in this possible resurrection? Finally, has the "French model" gone up in flames? The "intellectual" evoked in the title of our forum is a figure from the Enlightenment of which the prototypes date back to the French ency clopedists Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot. In the aftermath of the cri sis of religion to which the encyclopedists are connected, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave rise to new forms of thought that were to become the human and social sciences. These disciplines progressively

Abstract: On the morning of September 11,1 was delivering a lecture to New York University law students about postcolonialism and international law. More specifically, we were discussing Barbara Kingsolver's book The Poisonwood Bible, a story about the Congo's turbulent moment of independence from Belgian colonial rule in the early 1960s. The book is critical of Ameri can involvement in the assassination of the democratically elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba and the subsequent installation of the mili tary dictator Joseph Mobutu. It is narrated through the experiences of five women?the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, an American Christian missionary whose dream is to civilize the Africans. The source of his inspiration is the Bible. As the Price women discover, the Congolese are not savages who need saving. They take the Americans' message?elections are good, Jesus too?literally and expose the message's contradictions by holding an elec tion in church to decide whether or not Jesus shall be the personal god of the Congo. Jesus loses (334). The moment the planes ripped through the skin of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a profound emotional, historical, and political event shattered American security. The responses revealed in perhaps the most blatant ways in recent times the anti-intellectualism that has crept into our politics?without apology, breeding hubris and arrogance. In nanoseconds the world was severed and polarized through the rhetoric of

Abstract: As an undergraduate majoring in English and minoring in French, I was thrilled by many dimensions of the study I undertook in courses on British, American, and French literature; critical theory and cultural studies; and world literature (in translation). Reading Sterne and Diderot, Baldwin and Sartre, Ellison and Malraux, Burroughs and Derrida, I was keen to escape the pinched mentality of an upbringing in rural Missouri, where born-again Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat anyone admitted voting for, New York City seemed as far away as Paris, and San Francisco might as well have been as far away in place and time as Sodom (folks sure wished it was). It was the bracing wonderment of new taxonomies, of thinking previously impossible thats. As a doctoral student in English, I was required to have what was termed reading knowledge in two foreign languages or fluency in one. The requirement struck me as a logical graduate extension of my undergraduate education, and I opted for fluency in one language, relishing the prospect of integrating careful readings of Fanon and Lacan, dans le texte, into my work on American, African American,

Abstract: Who is that person standing next to you at the department mailbox? Sometimes the most mundane places and practices tell us as much about our profession as can any exhaustive survey. Social exchanges, or the lack thereof, in the departmental mail room are an apt metaphor for the state of collegiality in academia, and they acutely manifest challenges to col legiality that pervade the profession. The larger the department, the more likely that mailbox exchanges register in blank stares or brief, halting greetings rather than moments of genuine connection. In English depart ments, particularly those with graduate programs and those employing part-time faculty members, mailboxes are helpfully organized into subsec tions (full-time faculty members, part-timers, graduate students, and staff members). Here one can quickly ascertain who that person standing next to you is. The mailbox, more often than not, does not bring a department together; rather, it accentuates how stratified our departments have be come. If the person standing next to you is a graduate student or adjunct, will the person be here next year?is the person worth your valuable time? Cogently marking out the historical and institutional forces that impact faculty collegiality more generally, Philip Lewis's essay in this section of Profession also cautions that pressures on collegiality are situational. My own experiences as graduate student, adjunct faculty member, and then tenure-track faculty member provide one situational, on-the-ground view of broader institutional concerns as well as of more local problems and so lutions in English departments. I have seen how our profession sometimes

Abstract: Last night, at dinner, when you informed me that Julia Kristeva was not going to participate in our Presidential Forum because of health prob lems in her family, I must confess that, along with sadness at her ab sence, I found myself wondering whether this unfortunate circumstance might not allow me to save myself some embarrassment by reading out her speech instead of mine. But you had already asked someone else to do so, and I find myself, therefore, unable to cover for the fact that I cannot deliver the words I had prepared for today's plenary session. Something unexpected happened yesterday, unexpected and yet perhaps not surpris ing. Please believe me that this is not your typical "the dog ate my home work" excuse. This really happened. Yesterday, on my arrival from Latin America at Miami International Airport, at exactly 10:31 in the morning, two agents from the Department of Homeland Security impounded my speech on the role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century. You might think that such things cannot happen in the United States. And indeed, you have the right to remain skeptical. In fact, that was one of the points in my speech: that we have not only the right but also the obligation to remain skeptical. And rebellious. And vigilant. The only right we do not have is the right to remain silent. But I am getting ahead of myself. The point is that the batteries in my computer ran out al

Abstract: If you have ever thought that the work of facility planning was just bricks and mortar, if you have ever neglected to acknowledge the work of the physical plant staff, if you have ever passed by a new or renovated build ing on your campus without taking a guided tour, pause and reflect. Look around to evaluate how well college space supports the institution's mission. When architecture succeeds, it has been the work of a hard-hat-wearing team of colleagues from across the campus and beyond. Members of the team have tried, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, to treat one an other's needs with respect. They have attempted to balance the needs of in dividuals and programs with the constraints of resources. Colleagues have worked to define an in-progress identity while honoring long-established habits. Faculty members have measured a history of unfulfilled promises against changing values and future contingencies. That is, the team kept on trying to learn what it means to be collegial. They had no choice. Every Wednesday at 11:00 a.m. for the past six months I have joined colleagues for the Media Arts Center Phase 1 job meeting. During the last few meetings, spirits have been high, because hard-won efficiencies in this 3.5 million-dollar adaptive reuse construction project may permit the budget to cover a few more equipment expenses. The old dining commons has finally been cleared of asbestos and thoroughly gutted. Demolition is complete. We meet inside the rough, open, 27,500-square-foot space and walk the rooms lined out with fluorescent orange spray paint on the con crete floor of what will, in late August 2006, open as classrooms, faculty

Abstract: Does the long-term history of the words college, colleague, and collegiality offer us interesting clues about the particular relevance of the collegial order to the academic profession today? To consider the negative answer first, suppose we take the 1999 statement On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as our primary guide. Our ongoing preoccupation, it suggests, has to be the evolution of tenure policies. In this context, we must resist proposals to separate collegiality?understood as cooperative behavior in support of the collective enterprise?from faculty service and treat it as a fourth standard for tenure. To be fair and professional, we must define ex pectations of service by delineating the tasks we expect a faculty member to perform and then state clearly what satisfactory performance means. The candidate whose service meets these clear criteria will be regarded as a colleague worthy of citizenship in the academic community. If there is cause to entertain second thoughts about this position, it does not lie in faulty reasoning or inadequate understanding of what is at stake for the professoriat. The AAUP statement aptly underscores the threats to academic freedom, due process, and diversity that a collegiality standard?if it required faculty members to conform to established views or values? could entail. Implicitly, the statement advocates the promotion of collegial virtues through an understanding that links them to all three of the existing

Abstract: This is the third article to report on a project undertaken by the MLA to discover what factors make foreign language programs successful. The proj ect was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In the fall of 1999, the MLAs Office of Foreign Language Programs conducted a survey to collect data relating to rising enrollments and specific practices of depart ments of foreign languages. In parts 1 and 2 of our report, the focus was on BA-, MA-, and PhD-granting departments and institutions (Goldberg and Welles; Goldberg, Lusin, and Welles); less emphasis was placed on AA granting institutions. Because they are so different in structure and function, we decided to analyze language departments in AA-granting institutions in a separate article. While our project was undertaken to discover what features make foreign language programs successful, the results described in this report are not proof of a causal connection between program features and rising enrollments. What the results show are co-occurrences (associations, correlations) between features and enrollments; the frequency, strength, and circumstances of these co-occurrences do, however, suggest a causal link. We defined successful departments as those with increasing enroll ments. While such a quantitative measure excludes more subtle and com plex ways of determining departmental success, it is a consistent measure and one often used by administrators to evaluate a department's progress. In parts 1 and 2 of our report, BA-, MA-, and PhD-granting language

Abstract: [Extract] The Presidential Forum on the future of the humanities at the 2004 MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia was an impressive occasion in many ways. I remember vividly the ballroom in which it took place and which can only be described, Georgette Heyer-style, as "glittering"; the hundreds of chairs (mostly empty when I took mine, near the front); the sense of occasion clearly felt by all participants; the president's modestly arresting opening remarks; and the quality of the four presentations that followed and have since been republished in the 2005 Profession. I am a conference averse individual, and this was my first MLA convention, attending as I did from an Australian university, but in that ballroom I wondered where else on earth a meeting of that sort could be held in such style. Even if the ship of the humanities does sink beneath the waves at some time in the future, we were still doing some fine work rearranging the deck chairs.

Abstract: Recently, a colleague of mine whose field is art history and whose spe cialty is non-Western art made a presentation to our faculty entitled "Dis ciplining Art: The Effects of Museum Design on Art History Pedagogy." Through a provocative slide show, he demonstrated the way the Metro politan Museum of Art in New York City has constructed, and continues to construct, our understanding of Southeast Asian, African, and Pre Columbian cultures, marginalizing them in wings off the central space of the museum, where Greek, Roman, and European art are housed. As I began to read the four essays in the Presidential Forum of Profession 2005, devoted to an examination of the future of the humanities, I learned from colleagues whose institutions occupy the central space of our "museum" that one of the reasons for dwindling enrollments in the humanities is that we have failed to achieve real interdisciplinarity on our campuses. But learning communities?that is to say, courses clustered around a common theme and taught to the same group of students, a powerful example of interdisciplinarity flourishing on more than five hundred campuses in the