While most of us were opening the last of our "holiday" presents, basking in the glow of Lancome's "multi-defense protective tinted cream," or deciding whether to wear the new tie with prancing horses or the one with intertwined golf clubs, several hundred Nervous Nellies and Fearful Freddies, many with newly minted Ph.Ds in hand, were busy networking, i.e., job-hunting, at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Washington. This meant sitting through days of seminars on subjects of interest only to the authors of the learned papers. Their parents had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to...