When Scholarship is a Ghost: The Professor Who Refused a Prize and the Crisis of Academic Conscience 

Purdue University history professor Tithi Bhattacharya declined the Modern Language Association’s prestigious Scaglione Prize for her book on colonial Bengal, framing her refusal as a direct protest against the MLA’s institutional silence on Gaza and its leadership’s suppression of a member vote on a BDS resolution.

This act transforms her scholarly work—which examines how colonial power manipulates fear—into a contemporary stance, arguing that true solidarity requires sacrificing professional recognition to challenge organizations she views as complicit through inaction. Her decision highlights a deepening crisis of conscience within academia, forcing a debate on whether professional associations can remain neutrally “above the fray” or have an ethical obligation to take a stand against what she describes as colonialism and state violence, using the platform of a refused honor to question the very economy of prestige and silence within institutional life.

When Scholarship is a Ghost: The Professor Who Refused a Prize and the Crisis of Academic Conscience 

The email announcing a major literary prize is a moment most academics dream of but few ever experience. It is a validation of years of solitary research, a beacon of peer recognition, and often, a career-defining achievement. For Tithi Bhattacharya, a history professor at Purdue University, that email arrived, informing her she had won the Modern Language Association’s prestigious Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies for her book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal. And then, in an act that reverberates through the quiet corridors of academia, she formally declined it. 

This was not a snub of the award committee or a critique of the prize’s value. Instead, Bhattacharya’s refusal is a profound political and ethical statement, a wrench thrown into the machinery of professional accolades to protest what she terms the MLA’s “institutional silence” and “appalling suppression” regarding Gaza. Her action forces a uncomfortable but necessary question: In a world of escalating crises and state violence, what is the ethical responsibility of scholarly organizations, and when does accepting honor within them become a form of complicity? 

The Specific Grievance: More Than Just Silence 

Bhattacharya’s blog post clarifies her stance. Her protest targets two interconnected actions by the MLA leadership. First, she points to a generalized “silence” on “the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” a charge leveled by many academics who feel their professional associations have been timid in responding to Israel’s military campaign. Second, and more concretely, she highlights the suppression of the MLA’s Delegate Assembly’s right to vote on a proposed resolution advocating for boycott, sanction, and divestment (BDS) from Israel. 

This procedural blockade is key. The MLA, like many large academic bodies, is a contested space where grassroots membership often pushes for political engagement, while leadership and some factions advocate for institutional neutrality, fearing polarization and legal ramifications. By preventing a vote, the leadership effectively chose a side: the side of non-action. For Bhattacharya, a scholar whose work examines how colonial power structures permeate every aspect of life—”not even spar[ing] ghosts”—this is a familiar pattern. It reflects a system that manages dissent by bureaucratically stifling it, maintaining a veneer of neutrality that, in practice, upholds a status quo she finds untenable. 

The Scholarship Informs the Protest: Colonial Ghosts and Modern Solidarity 

To understand her protest, one must engage with her scholarship. Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence explores how colonial capitalism in Bengal manipulated and institutionalized fear, a weapon that outlived its immediate moment to haunt the present. Her work is about the lingering specters of violence and exploitation embedded within systems of power. 

Seen through this lens, her refusal of the MLA prize is a direct application of her academic critique. She perceives the MLA’s inaction not as a simple oversight but as a function of a broader academic-political ecosystem that often remains complicit with power by claiming objectivity or avoiding “controversy.” The “ghosts” in her book are the unresolved traumas of colonial violence; the ghost in the room of modern academia, she suggests, is the unconfronted legacy of such violence and the ongoing suffering it enables. Her weapon against this, as she writes, is “solidarity”—a principled, disruptive alignment with the oppressed that transcends professional reward. 

A Historical Thread: Academic Prizes and Political Protest 

Bhattacharya’s act sits within a poignant, if sparse, lineage. While turning down an award is rare, it is a powerful tactic in the intellectual’s toolkit. It echoes, for instance, the 1973 refusal of the Prix de Rome by French composer Maurice Ohana in protest of the academy’s conservatism, or more recently, writers and artists refusing state-sponsored honors to protest government policies. Within the specific context of Israel-Palestine, numerous academics have declined invitations to speak at Israeli institutions or resigned from editorial boards in support of the BDS movement. 

However, refusing a prize for one’s own work is a uniquely personal form of sacrifice. It entails rejecting not just an opportunity, but a validation of one’s life’s labor. This personal cost is what makes the gesture so resonant. It declares that some forms of recognition are tainted by the inaction of the bestowing body, and that intellectual integrity cannot be compartmentalized from political conscience. 

The Deeper Dilemma: Can—and Should—Academic Associations Be Neutral? 

This incident thrusts the perennial debate about academic neutrality back into the spotlight. Defenders of the MLA’s cautious approach might argue that a 25,000-member organization dedicated to the study of language and literature cannot and should not take official stances on complex foreign conflicts. They might fear politicizing the organization, alienating members, or overstepping its core mission. 

Bhattacharya and likeminded scholars counter that neutrality in the face of what they view as overwhelming violence and human suffering is a myth—and a damaging one. Silence, they argue, is itself a political choice that benefits the powerful. For an association whose members often study the intersections of power, discourse, and oppression, to abstain from speaking on a contemporary issue where those very forces are starkly visible is, they contend, a scholarly and ethical failure. It creates a dissonance between the critical work done in members’ research and the timidity of their collective professional voice. 

The Ripple Effects: What Does This Act Achieve? 

The value of Bhattacharya’s refusal lies not in immediately changing MLA policy, but in its symbolic and discursive power. 

• It Disrupts the Ceremony: Academic culture runs on recognition—prizes, promotions, prestige. By rejecting a cornerstone of this economy, she disrupts its smooth functioning and forces a moment of reckoning. The conversation suddenly shifts from celebratory press releases to uncomfortable questions about institutional morality. 

• It Empowers a Constituency: Her public stance gives voice and a model of action to other academics who share her dismay but feel powerless within large organizational structures. It demonstrates that dissent can take the form of dignified, principled refusal. 

• It Bridges Scholarship and Activism: She seamlessly connects her historical research on colonial fear to modern political solidarity, showing how academic insight demands contemporary engagement. This embodies the idea that the humanities are not a refuge from the world, but a crucial tool for understanding and changing it. 

• It Places a Burden on Leadership: The MLA leadership must now respond, not to a critical resolution, but to the loss of the positive value of their own prize. The award, meant to bring honor to the organization, has instead become a symbol of its contested ethics. 

Conclusion: The Unsparing Light of Conscience 

Tithi Bhattacharya’s decision to decline the Scaglione Prize is more than a news item; it is a case study in the crisis of academic conscience. It underscores the growing impatience among scholars who see the missions of their professional organizations—to promote knowledge, critical thinking, and humanistic values—as fundamentally incompatible with silence in the face of documented humanitarian catastrophe. 

Her book studies how colonial capitalism spares nothing, not even ghosts. In refusing her prize, she argues that modern academic institutions, perhaps unwittingly, risk being haunted by the ghosts of their own inaction. By choosing solidarity over honor, she illuminates a path where scholarly rigor and ethical courage are not in opposition, but are inextricably linked. In doing so, she challenges every academic and every scholarly association to ask: When history is being written in real time with such devastating ink, what are the prizes we should truly be seeking, and what are the costs of accepting silence as their price?