They Say / I Say with Norton Illumine Ebook, The Little Seagull Handbook Ebook, InQuizitive for Writers, Tutorials, Videos, and They Say/I Say Blog Gerald Graff , Emeritus Professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and 2008 President of the Modern Language Association of America, has had a major impact on teachers through such books as Professing Literature: An Institutional History , Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education , and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind . Cathy Birkenstein is a lecturer in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has published essays on writing in College English , and, with Gerald Graff in The Chronicle of Higher Education , Academe , and College Composition and Communication .