R.I.P., MLA

After 3 days of Graduate Assistant Orientation, in which I learned how not to sexually harass someone or drive a student to suicide, I finally got to go to something useful: the Mass Communications and Media Arts Graduate Orientation. I got all gorgeous in a sort of secretary look (blue pencil skirt, black turtleneck, blue bobby socks, black patent oxford heels, and my little telephone earrings), and made my way over there. The day was going to be awesome, I just knew it.

I didn't melt from the heat the instant I stepped outside my door, so I decided to try a shortcut. And it worked! I made it there in 15 minutes, unlike the 30 minutes it was taking me to go the long way. Yeah, efficiency.

Once I was there, the day at the college of MCMA went stupendously well. (For those of you wondering, MCMA is, in fact, a college in and of itself, kind of like Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. Within it, there are 3 departments--Cinema and Photography, Radio and Television, and Journalism.) I met all 10 of the other doctoral students, immediately forgot most of their names, but was still welcomed into their circle of smokers for chatting/bitching purposes. It's so nice to finally have a bitch group. I missed that.

Anyway, long story short, I got all orientated as to what I have to do as a doctoral student. And along the way, I got some wonderful, stupendous, marvelous, couldn't-possibly-make-me-happier news, and then I got the news that may devastate me for the rest of my life.

First, the good news. No math. Yep. That's right. All the former Ph.D. students had to take quantitative research methods and inferential statistics. No longer. What this means for me is that if I want to just sit in a room and think about Freud and the sociology of death while I write my dissertation, I can!

HOORAY!!

Okay, now on to the bad news. According to the Ph.D. handbook, the college of MCMA uses only Chicago or APA styles of citation. Let me rephrase that, because I'm still having difficulty wrapping my head around this.

According to the college of MCMA, Ph.D. students should NOT use MLA format.

NO MLA!?!?

For the uninitiated, let me explain. When scholars do research and write about it, we're required to note exactly what source which information came from in order to avoid plagiarism and give proper credit where it's due. So let's say I quote a book in a paper I've written. In MLA format, after the quote, I would need to put in parentheses the last name of the author of the book the quote came from and the page number it was on. Then, at the end of the essay, I would need a list of citations for all the sources I'd used, properly formatted according to the standards of the Modern Language Association.

That seems complicated and scholarly, so let me be clear.

MLA is my best friend. I've used it, I've taught it, I've loved it like a long-lost child. I've spent so many long nights with it, trying to figure out how to properly cite all the ridiculous things my students and I work with, like a poem entirely encapsulated within a film, or lyrics to a song that was never released on CD, or a fake marriage license with a picture of Elvis on it.

And now it's gone.

And Chicago style has come to replace it, like an evil step-citation.

Sigh.

Goodbye, MLA, my dear friend. I'll always have a special place in my heart for you and think fondly of our nights together. And I'm going to bury you in my backyard with a bucket of salt to keep the slugs away.