The MLA: Regional Independence and National Participation

117 THE MLA: REGIONAL INDEPENDENCE AND NATIONAL PARTICIPATION Geo. Winchester Stone, Jr., President, Modern Language Association of America As our political scientist and journalist friends know, we are witnessing in the latter half of the twentieth century the meteoric and, more often than not, frustrated attempts of dozen of so-called underdeveloped demographic areas in the world to build modern nations, quickly and well—nations that will quickly produce stable institutions of government, business, legal procedures , social and educational structures. These institutions, put together and properly jelled, can create for their voluminous, widespread and various peoples responsible and effective entities in the modern world. Most areas are finding the process terribly difficult, as they move into an unaccustomed exercise of their freedom from colonial patterns, and as they emerge loosely joined and tradition-bound into a harshly competitive world. Education and communication which customarily take such a long time to soudify become their most basic problems. These developing countries see nation-building as a systematic goal of public policy to be planned and prepared for every step of the way to the exclusion of almost all other goals. Paradoxically we, in the nationally oriented MLA, now face the application of a reverse process. The MLA has always been a national organization with international leanings . Now because of its vastly increased membership and its solid foundation, it has become a cultural force in our nation and must continue as such. Yet in facing its problems of bigness it has for some years looked carefully at ways and means by which the regional MLA's could best be served and best be developed to preserve and to increase the strength of the whole association and not weaken it by fragmentation. Philosophically, the basic issue we face is the preservation of individual values amid the onslaught of bigness . Our educational systems have long-since met the problem head-on, and solved it: Oxford and Cambridge by the college system; Harvard and Yale by the house plan; the state of California, and the city of New York by the multiple campus system, where under one central university achriinistration individual groups with varying interests and emphases can maintain their individuality , but join forces for some educational strength. This all takes planning in our modern world. It cannot be left to spontaneous growth. Fortunately, we in the MLA do not have to communicate across the barriers of alien cultures. I hope we all see the association in the proper perspective of its importance, for (1) the MLA is a cultural force in the United States, (2) its membership of 25,000 top-quality teachers and scholars has its particular kind of influence upon some 5,000,000 students annually, and (3) in a country just on the brink of recognizing humanistic scholarship as worthy of 118 RM-MLA Bulletin December 1967 notice and of federal support through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MLA must maintain, and quietly and soundly increase its effectiveness in the cultural affairs of the nation. These premises I stand on, but their effectiveness in operation depends upon the excellent performance of the MLA in furthering the cause of humanistic scholarship. Humanistic scholars are apt to think of themselves as loners. To be sure, most of their work is done, and has to be done individually (as each uses his imagination to gain some informing concept, then assembles the data to illustrate it, and finally works out the presentation with style and elegance). This individual activity stands hi contradistinction to the doublet, triplet, teamwork of our friends in the social and physical sciences. The humanist is a loner, but cannot live alone. His discipline demands that the sources of his scholarship come from many places and persons and that the fruits of his scholarship stand the close scrutiny of his peers across the land and across the world. Otherwise that scholarship has but a campus, or municipal fitness; makes little if any impact; and extends human knowledge and creative criticism only by an inch when it, if it is good, should spread for miles. The machinery for thus extending the arm of the individual scholar and magnifying his voice involves the...