Putting Professors into the FYW Classroom

In the most recent issue of Inside Higher Education William Major, associate professor of English at Hillyer College of the University of Hartford, has an article entitled "Teaching Composition: A Reconsideration." Addressing the question often posed by our colleagues in other departments (and even sometimes in our own) of why our students can’t write, Major asks questions that he describes as "more practical, if not more overtly political: Why is the teaching of writing so readily given over to the novitiate? If writing is that important as a university and life skill, why do we assign its teaching to graduate students and part-time instructors? Where are the associate and full professors of English, for it is exceedingly difficult to find them in writing classroom?"

He is not suggesting, he hastens to assure us, "that teaching assistants and part-timers are incompetent or careless; perhaps no one in the English department works harder, save for the staff. And there’s little doubt that the composition classroom is the best training for the part-time grunt work that often follows the Ph.D. in English. Even today - after more than 20 years of empty promises - the dirty little secret that doesn’t often make it to graduate orientation is that a large number of doctors of philosophy will be stuck in part-time employment fixing thesis statements and correcting schizophrenic syntax."

We all know why this happens, he says: "Graduate students and adjuncts are cheap labor. They fill untold numbers of sections and receive minuscule pay and laughable benefits, if any." But why do English departments not only tolerate this situation but actively perpetuate it, even like it? Why is teaching writing "work for the masses - graduate students, adjuncts, and those oddballs in rhetoric and comp" - and teaching literature is for the elite? "Since when did writing become anathema? If writing is so important that virtually every student at nearly every college and university must take at least one composition course (and usually two), why aren’t more professors of English teaching it?"

Well, obviously: "The English professor rarely teaches freshman writing courses because it is beneath her to have to worry over catchy introductions, pithy thesis statements, and thoughtful conclusions. Certainly she cannot be bothered by grammar and form, except briefly and in passing. There is a workman-like quality to the teaching of writing; it is as close to blue-collar as you can get in the liberal arts classroom."

Major also mentions with excitement and enthusiasm a post to Stanley Fish’s New York Times blog (presumably this op-ed piece from May 31, 2005), saying that if Stanley Fish enjoys teaching writing, perhaps there’s hope. (But see the reactions to Fish's insistence that the writing classroom should be "devoid of content" from rhet/comp bloggers like Steve Krause and Jeff Rice.)

Major then launches into his utopian conclusion:

At the very least, full professors of English belong in the composition classroom because they might learn a thing or two about writing themselves. Moreover, the benefits to those students who will not see a professor their first year could be intangible. They would understand that we in the university take writing seriously enough that someone with gravitas and experience is teaching it. They would benefit from close contact with instructors who are not looking to move up or into the more ethereal realm of literature, those who believe that strong, clear writing is as essential as oxygen.

There could be other structural and institutional benefits. Might we see smaller Ph.D. programs because there is less need for composition instructors and because the professors are more fully engaged with undergraduate education? Might we have fewer doctorates awarded? A meaningful loosening of the job market? Imagine a world where positions teaching literature and composition are actually available for the professionals we graduate from our programs.

I'm not sure this scenario is the best possible future for English departments in this country - do literature professors really make better FYW instructors than our current grad students and adjuncts? do we really need to cut back Ph.D.-production by a factor of what, 10? 20? 50? what happens to research, the construction of new knowledge, if teaching loads are increased to meet this new need at R1 universities? - but I think Major's article is extremely useful nonetheless. It may be utopian to reimagine the delivery of writing instruction in something like this fashion for the simple reason that the economic pressures are against this sort of change; but it is still an extremely useful thought-experiment to crumple up what we're doing now and rebuild it from scratch. What should the role of writing and writing instruction be in higher education? What kinds of resources do need to be devoted to it (them)? What kind of departmental division would best serve our students' need to be able to write? Shouldn't we really have colleges of writing, with departments of first-year writing, business writing, legal writing, technical writing, and so on? Some universities have created colleges of "the arts and communication," with departments of writing studies or rhetoric or professional communication thrown in with theater arts and theater management, design studies, arts and arts management, and so on; but if writing is as important as everyone says it is, do writing programs really need to be thrown in with the arts to make up a full college?

The Core of the Research We Do

In her provocative plenary talk at the opening session of the WPA conference this past weekend in Denver, Andrea Lunsford challenged her audience to rethink what it is we "compositionists" study. It is writing, obviously, or rhetoric and composition; but what is that? If, as Aristotle says, rhetoric deals with whatever subjects or ideas people have in common (ha koina) and does not have a field or discipline (episteme) of its own (1.1, 1354a2-3), perhaps the same is true of "writing studies," or "rhet/comp," or whatever we decide to call it? Perhaps, in fact, our uncertainty over what to call the field is reflective of its lack of a unified subject matter, and thus of an episteme of its own? One of Lunsford’s points, taken from John Guillory at a recent lecture delivered at Stanford, was that writing is the most important skill in the professional world today, and yet the discipline devoted to improving students’ ability to perform that skill is despised. Why? Because that field or discipline has no real field or discipline? Because the members of that field or discipline have been lax in articulating what it is they (we) do?

My first thought, listening to Lunsford’s talk, was that English doesn’t exactly have a unified field or discipline either. But of course many English professors specializing in the study of literature would say that literature is the core of English department research and teaching; and even though that notion marginalizes writing, linguistics, and English education, essentially making English departments an impure mixture of disciplines in need of purification or purgation, that doesn’t seem to pose a serious threat to the literary “core.” Many literature professors, in fact, have welcomed the splitting off of writing programs into separate departments or centers for that very reason: get rid of the stuff that doesn’t really belong.

So that inner protest against Lunsford’s challenge came to nothing, in the end: I realized, sitting there, that English departments do have a core, a center, and by contrast writing, linguistics, and English ed do not (at least in this country: writing studies is virtually nonexistent in other countries, and linguistics tends to be the core that organizes departments of modern languages, including English, in European universities).

And yet, obviously, English departments tend to remain highly respected even when they lose or expel their writing programs, linguistics course offerings, and other "peripheral" non-literary appendages. This suggests that the source of that respect has nothing to do with professional applications and everything to do with the socio-ideological clout of literature, perhaps based on the Romantic cult of the creative genius, but perhaps also on pervasive ideological assumptions about the "humanizing" power of literature—its ability to raise its readers to a higher cultural potency. Law schools, after all, are widely said to "like" English majors because "they can write"—but that liking and the belief it is apparently based on are almost certainly linked not to the course or two or three English departments typically offer in "writing," but to the dozen or more courses English majors are required to take in literature. Reading literature somehow magically teaches English majors to write.

This would suggest that the pathway to expanded institutional/intellectual respect for writing studies lies not through a convincing rearticulation of what we study but through magic—the magic of ideology—and since few of us, I suspect, are magicians, it may well be (this was my next inner protest) that there is nothing, really, we can do. It’s hopeless. Writing memos (Guillory’s example in "The Memo and Modernity," cited by Lunsford) may be far more important in the working world than reading literature, but that pragmatic professional importance is not going to alter the ideological balance between the production of despised written texts and the reception of venerated ones.

Still, as I walked away from Lunsford’s plenary, and in the days that followed, I couldn’t shake her challenge. It kept nagging at me. What is the core of the research we do? Is it just "writing"? Is it just the production of despised written texts, like memos and instruction manuals and proposals? Worse, is it just the production of "English papers" or "essays" or "themes" or "compositions"—texts that are not only despised but decisively cut off from pragmatic usefulness in the workplace, including the academic workplace? And even if we attempt to shore up the usefulness of the essay by theorizing the "academic article" as an essay, and thus our work as significantly contributing to academic literacy, how exactly does that help our case? Haven't the best and the brightest been learning how to write publishable academic articles without our help for centuries? And, given that our colleagues in other departments typically don’t believe in "writing" in our sense of the word, as a discipline-specific rhetorical appeal to a well-organized audience—writing for them is often sheer mechanics—how exactly does a close linkage between our field and academic writing help our case? First-year students, we say, need to learn to write "academic essays" for their other professors; but those other professors typically don’t want "academic essays" from their students, either because they don’t require their students to write at all (seniors in my applied writing classes almost without exception tell me that the last writing assignments they faced were in their first-year writing classes) or because all they expect from student writing is good grammar, punctuation, and spelling; and in any case instruction in "academic writing" only prepares students (if at all) for the next three-plus years of their lives. How, again, does our promise to deliver that instruction improve our intellectual and institutional status?