As a member of the mla executive Council, I participated in the discussions that led to this conference and felt moved by my colleagues and their sense of urgency, particularly as expressed by Rosemarie Scullion and Sylvia Molloy. At the time of our council meetings, however, I was thinking mostly about staffing issues and the various reports and resolutions related to the use of graduate student and non-tenure-stream labor—some of them useful, some of them not very useful at all. And there I felt a real sense of urgency—and I remember thinking that there might be a way these issues converged.

Forty years ago, when my department was established as one of the first departments of the new San Diego campus of the University of California (UCSD), its founders had a free hand to construct a new model for literary study by recasting the institutional infrastructure that traditionally divided the field by language or language group. The initial vision, as summarized in the introduction to an early graduate program review, was relatively abstract:

One of my favorite anthropological anecdotes is one Renato Rosaldo tells from his fieldwork among the Ilongots in the highland Philippines in the late 1960s. He was interviewing a very elderly woman about kinship and marriage and raised the topic of adultery. Did it ever happen, he wondered, that a married person became the lover of someone other than his or her spouse? The woman, uneasy and embarrassed, acknowledged that she did recall a few occasions when this had happened among the Ilongots:

There are approximately six billion people living in the world today, of whom roughly one billion are well off (living at or near Western standards) while three billion live on less than two dollars a day; two billion are in between, though even the most fortunate among them are at least fifty percent below the standards of the top one billion (Summers). The trend, unfortunately, is toward more wealth at the top, more poverty at the bottom, and the population is growing fastest where needs are greatest (estimates for population growth by 2050 range from about eight to nearly twelve billion). The United Nations Population Fund report from which these facts are taken furthermore points out that the

One does not have to be a prophet to predict large global crises—military, political, migratory, environmental, health-related, concerning international law, and so forth—that will affect if not us, then surely our students' generation.