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(Cue Stephen Greenblatt walking slowly out of a room, looking old, stooped almost, from a poorly attended event celebrating “ Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Thirty Years On.”) You will not be able to read a lot of books, think about them, write about them, and talk about them, the logic went, and it’s better to get with the program sooner rather than later. The apparent lesson was that whatever you do (spreadsheets, certificate design, networking, squeezing stress balls), in no way expect to emulate your professors, who read a lot of books, think about them, write about them, and talk about them.

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My colleagues offered tips on how to make oneself marketable by getting out of the academic job market how to reconfigure one’s ideas about employment since professorships are gone. I sat on a round table about possible futures for graduate students. Twelve percent of this year’s program was devoted to sessions about “The Profession.” In 1987, the first year I was on the program, it was about 8 percent, and few sessions, if any, offered this by-now-predictable range of topics: “A Tool Kit for Doctoral Student Career Planning” “Academic Writing in Graduate School” “Administering Feminism” “Careers Beyond the Professoriate for Humanities Ph.D.s: The Employer Perspective” (which is what counts) “The Circuitous Path Into Higher Administration” “Getting Funded in the Humanities: An NEH Workshop” “How to Get Published” “Humanists in Tech” and one of my favorites, “What Tenured Professors Can Do About Adjunctification” ( could do, but won’t).

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If so, the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession “is here to support you!” It offers to bring “graduate student issues to the attention of the MLA,” and it sponsors “panels about issues related to graduate studies.” (Who writes this stuff? Issues, so many issues.) The MLA provided a meeting room stocked with coffee, bananas, yogurt, and stress balls (appropriately black), all free for the taking.

“ARE YOU A GRADUATE STUDENT?” screams a flier. The MLA, it seems, has adopted new languages - of marketing, public relations, accounting, spreadsheeting, networking, helpful attitudes, and certificates - in teaching, in gender studies, in digital humanities, even in business. The meeting has become less and less scholarly, less and less literary. A lot has changed in that time, as it should, but not all change is good. I like the annual convention, which I’ve attended regularly for 30 years. I wasn’t the only one joking about Roland Emmerich’s film The Day After Tomorrow. A few weeks ago, despite the looming ice, snow, and bitter cold, I boarded a plane for New York City and the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association.

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