Del director

Del director The profession is in crisis. Again. Like not a few of our readers, I just returned from the annual Convention of the Modern Language Association where we dutifully interviewed overqualified job candidates, listened to uneven papers, and ate overpriced food. But also enjoyed telling conversations. MLA may be taxing -all those excellent young folks competing for so few positions; a vast book exhibit with hundreds of titles we longingly surveyed , selectively purchased, and ruefully admitted that we'll only get to read "some day"- but the yearly ritual has a cleansing, confessional aspect to it. We gather to declare our discontents with our careers, departments and universities, and sometimes worry about where Academia is heading. And, to read the Convention program, it's heading down the tubes. Sessions on "The Future of the Humanities" are a staple at the MLA, ofcourse, but even the Chronicle of Higher Education, as world weary a publication as one finds in this business, ran its own story this year about how "Scholars Mull Their Separation From die Mainstream" (1/7/2005; A31). At issue is our perceived estrangement from die discourse of notjust the man in the street but the well-educated citizen who cares about the life of the mind. Robert Scholes noted in his presidential address that we have suffered a "loss of authority and respect" although he resists speculating on what a reformed profession would look like in another 15 or 20 years. Our image is at stake and pride is worth something, I suppose - but so is our educational mission. We socialize as well as teach, and the two converge in good conversation, a more volatile commodity than we've recognized to date on our campuses. We struggle to foster incisive conversation among undergraduates who find their discourse models on Jerry Springer (see Rick Livingston's "The Humanities for Cocktail Parties — and Beyond" in the same issue of the Chronicle, B5). Our sector of the profession, Medieval Studies, and Medieval Iberian Studies at that, is an awfully modest patch of the Humanities, and some understandably feel that we should cultivate our garden and keep quiet. But the crisis in the profession at large touches us as well. The general ferment implies both luxuriant growth and chaotic cultivation : deans and administrators may call for a comprehensive weed- 2 George D. GreeniaLa coranica 33.1, 2004 ing and unless our roots are deeply embedded across the curriculum, showing our responsible engagement with a wider community and encouraging useful conversations among our students, it will be easy to prune Medieval Studies and toss us aside. I would argue that our first limb has already been amputated. That vital member was historical Romance linguistics, once a core experience for all Hispanists, then an optional one, and now something generally unavailable even for students who would like to include it in their program of study. Steve Dworkin organized an excellent Critical Cluster on the virtual demise of this field in Nordì America under die rubric of "The Death of a Discipline?" in this journal in Spring 2003, and in our next issue, Spring 2005, another fifteen respondents will offer their perspectives on the same subject in a special follow-up Forum. The death we're speaking of is not an intellectual one, of course. Creative and challenging work is being done in historical Romance linguistics in Europe where (admittedly) nationalism and institutional guarantees assure continuity for Old French and Old Spanish that we cannot count on on diis side of the Adantic. But the death we witnessed here was not only administrative: the fact that we stopped offering the courses meant diat we, the faculty, stopped imagining ways in which historical linguistics could mesh with die humanistic enterprise we assign ourselves. Cultural studies, fronder studies, film studies , subaltern studies, alterity studies ... none of them seemed to need the accumulated scholarship of historical linguistics, or any sort of linguistics for Üiat matter. Given our present trajectory, do our evolving departments of Hispanic Studies even need a medievalist? Many programs have done away with single author, single canonical work courses - that is, no more coursesjust on thePoerna de mio Cid; no more coursesjust on Cervantes...