Carleton co-hosts Modern Language Association’s 2024 Summer Leadership Seminar, ‘Humanities Leadership for Transformative Change: From Advocacy to Action’

From May 29–31, 2024, Carleton joined St. Olaf College and Macalester College to host the Modern Language Association’s 2024 ADE-ALD Summer Seminar. The Modern Language Association (MLA) is the primary umbrella organization for faculty working in English and non-English language and literature programs. This year’s seminar was titled, “Humanities Leadership for Transformative Change: From Advocacy to Action.”

MLA Summer Seminars are the premier professional development opportunity for current, new, or aspiring leaders in the humanities. Each year, the MLA’s Association of Departments of English (ADE) and the Association of Language Departments (ALD) partner with universities and nonprofit organizations to address current issues impacting higher education, the humanities, and the study and teaching of languages, literatures, and cultures. The seminars empower department chairs and program leaders from diverse institutions across North America, and Carleton was proud to be part of this summer’s iteration.

“Hosting a seminar like this involves significant collaboration and planning,” said Lydia Tang, head of world language programs at the MLA (and a former lecturer in Carleton’s German program). “The program of any given seminar is shaped by the hosts in collaboration with ADE and ALD staff members, reflecting the specific interests and priorities of the involved institutions. Hosting the Summer Seminar provides national visibility for the hosts’ programs, allows them to showcase specific initiatives, and creates new professional networks for their staff and faculty. It’s a unique opportunity to influence the direction of field-wide discussions on key issues.”

Juliane Schicker, associate professor of German and department chair of German and Russian at Carleton, co-organized the seminar with Andrea Kaston Tange of Macalester and Maggie Broner of St. Olaf. Schicker was pleased that all three organizing institutions this year were liberal arts colleges.

“Usually, these seminars are held at large, research-heavy institutions,” she said. “I believe this was actually the first time a coalition of liberal arts colleges has been involved. This decision amplifies the role our institutional model plays in the current higher education landscape and beyond: Our broad-based, interdisciplinary, and intimate educational setting allows students to understand and practice the importance of the connections between all fields of studies. In this way, we help guide the leadership of today and tomorrow.”

Schicker finds the usual academic divisions of universities — humanities, social sciences, sciences, etc. — a bit misleading. Everything we study has to do with being human, so “the humanities” are “part of everything we do,” she argues.

“Liberal arts colleges provide an education that merges the traditional divisions and allows students to become holistic, interdisciplinary thinkers and doers,” Schicker said. “Students who study computer science, for example, need to know how to code, but they also need to know whom they code for, what implications their coding has on the human being and our planet, and how to address the consequences of their work on a global scale, including implications for climate change, biodiversity, mental health, and more.”

Liberal arts colleges, Schicker says, also provide students with vital interpersonal skills that center humanity when critically addressing and eventually solving issues such as climate change, political conflicts and wars, global pandemics, racism, and more.

“They make us more self-aware, empathetic, and humane in addressing these difficult situations,” Schicker said. “The MLA’s decision to host the Summer Seminar at liberal arts colleges foregrounds this mission!”

It is also significant for Carleton, St. Olaf, and Macalester — all small schools — to host such an important event for such a large and nationally recognized organization.

“The MLA is a huge organization with well over 20,000 members that drives discussion among MLA-affiliated faculty nationally,” said Michelle Mattson, provost and vice president for academic affairs and professor of German at Carleton. “Being able to link Carleton, Macalester, and St. Olaf to this professional development program was a great opportunity to introduce people to our institutions on site.”

A full Campus Day happening in Northfield on Thursday, May 30 highlighted the locations of St. Olaf and Carleton. Carleton presenters, participants, and panel moderators throughout the seminar included Carleton President Alison Byerly as well as Schicker; Peter Balaam, associate professor of English; Vera Coleman, senior lecturer and Spanish language program director; Amna Khalid, associate professor of history and director of Asian studies; Kiley Kost, lecturer in German (in absentia); Sinda Nichols ’05, director of the Center for Community and Civic Engagement (CCCE); Seth Peabody, assistant professor of German; and George Shuffelton, chair and professor of English.

Shuffelton was a moderator for Khalid’s panel and was very glad to attend the seminar, as so many of the sessions addressed specific issues facing the Carleton English department and the humanities more broadly.

“There’s declining enrollments, the need to incorporate more academic civic engagement, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the challenge of communicating the value of what we do to students, parents, and the wider community,” Shuffelton said. “I appreciated the chance to hear from department chairs at other institutions about how they’re handling these challenges, even if there are no easy answers.”

In the Carleton English department, Shuffelton says, they’re figuring out how to move forward after recent retirements. This includes planning for future hires, of course, but could also mean changing some major requirements.

“It was helpful to think about the big picture with colleagues from other institutions and learn from them,” Shuffelton said. “Nationally, it’s a scary time to be a humanities professor. In addition to the enrollment and budgetary pressures, the threats to academic freedom are real and deeply worrying. Thankfully, Carleton has a relatively healthy budget, an administration that understands the importance of the humanities, and some insulation from the worst kinds of threats to academic freedom. But we’re not an island. The health of our department and our discipline at large requires collaboration and solidarity with our colleagues elsewhere.”

This type of collaboration was a throughline for the entire Summer Seminar, showing that learning from peers is not just great for students — it’s also great for their teachers.

“Leadership development among peers is particularly useful as faculty are invited to think about what leadership looks like in related disciplines,” Mattson said. “This Summer Seminar also brought together all sorts of faculty members in an environment in which networking professionally is facilitated and in which we can all learn so much from each other. The program was quite diverse in the topics that it covered, so it spoke to the interests of everyone.”

Such diversity was appreciated by a diverse group of attendees, as Schicker and her co-representatives brought together a national audience of nearly 150 participants, including faculty and staff from access-oriented institutions, HBCUs, and HSIs, representing a broad range of disciplines — even from outside English and other language departments.

“Coming to this conference means getting into a dialogue with others that is not always based on consensus but rather on pluralistic opinions — interestingly a subject I study myself, which may have drawn me to this conference in the first place,” Schicker said. “Conference participants practice ways of active listening, of critically considering, and of focusing on the issue while holding multiple viewpoints at the same time. These skills are crucial when leading in any capacity. At the same time, participants also make connections with others and start lifelong academic — or personal — friendships with others that support them in their work… The participants were ready to have hard conversations and I think we modeled how we can have these conversations with others beyond the conference, even if we disagree on the solutions. The seminar offered an environment where we could practice this skill, and I think it succeeded! We need more of these spaces.”

Professors involved in these kinds of conversations also bring that knowledge back to their classrooms and pass it along to their students, which will be a huge benefit for Carls when they return to campus this fall.

“Our faculty and staff will bring new perspectives to their teaching and work at the College that are evidence-based, tested, and suggested by others who have implemented them at their own institutions,” Schicker said. “All these perspectives are focused on equitable approaches that center diversity and accessibility, embrace the whole person with their human experiences, and face the challenges of our everyday head-on.”

Such a substantial experience leads to many favorite moments for many people — Tang and Schicker offered a few as examples.

“Returning to Carleton for Campus Day held a special significance for me,” Tang said, “as I taught there from 2013 to 2016 and lived on Winona Street. Collaborating with former colleagues and revisiting the Weitz Center in my current role as MLA’s head of world language programs made this experience particularly meaningful. [One memorable moment] is the welcoming remarks offered by the presidents of St. Olaf and Carleton, Susan R. Singer and Alison R. Byerly. Both took time out of their busy schedules to address the seminar attendees on their campuses. Their thoughtful remarks demonstrated strong support for the humanities at the highest level of leadership at both institutions.”

“I truly enjoyed the panel my colleague Seth Peabody and I were on about the practical ‘toolkit’ on how to implement positive changes within the (co-)curriculum,” Schicker added. “We shared ways we went about curricular changes in our German curriculum that focus on centering social justice issues starting in the beginning German classes, and we heard from others how they integrated real-world issues into their strategic planning, highlighting how humanist subjects are crucial to address global challenges. I loved how one panelist brought my own thinking about my field to the point: world languages are the driver of institutional diversity! Another favorite of mine was the evening panel on academic freedom with Amna Khalid. She and the two other panelists discussed the connections between DEI efforts and academic freedom and underlined how the right of professors to academic freedom also means the freedom to learn for our students. We need this right so we can make the best decisions by knowing all sides of an argument, even if it’s a side we don’t agree with.”

Schicker also made sure to point out that even within this cross-college collaboration, nothing would be possible without cross-campus collaboration at Carleton.

“I want to give a shout out to PEPS’s Matt Burr, Paul Bernhardt, and their student workers (no light and sound without these folx); Bon Appétit’s Colleen St. James, Renee Nord, and their team (full and happy bellies because of them); and Auxiliary Services’ Jana Lelm and her fantastic people (without whom we wouldn’t have had seats, tables, or rooms to meet in),” Schicker said.

Learn more about Schicker’s work within Carleton German on the department website, and learn more about MLA on the organization’s About Us page.

Erica Helgerud ’20 is the news and social media manager for Carleton College.