Who is to Speak for English?

Extract

Men create institutions to do those things together which they cannot do satisfactorily alone. This of course is why there are learned societies. It must be a matter of particular pride to President Nicolson that the Modern Language Association of America, from its beginnings in a group of forty scholars on the Columbia campus more than eighty years ago, has grown to approximately 15,000 members. In its growth, it has performed a service for scholarship and education in foreign languages and in English which leaves the Nation in its debt.