Synopsis
One of the first collections to focus on independent writing programs, A Field of Dreams offers a complex picture of the experience of the stand-alone. Included here are narratives of individual programs from a wide range of institutions, exploring such issues as what institutional issues led to their independence, how independence solved or created administrative problems, how it changed the culture of the writing program and faculty sense of purpose, success, or failure.
Further chapters build larger ideas about the advantages and disadvantages of stand-alone status, covering labor issues, promotion/tenure issues, institutional politics, and others. A retrospective on the famous controversy at Minnesota is included, along with a look at the long-established independent programs at Harvard and Syracuse.
Finally, the book considers disciplinary questions raised by the growth of stand-alone programs. Authors here respond with critique and reflection to ideas raised by other chapters—do current independent models inadvertently diminish the influence of rhetoric and composition scholarship? Do they tend to ignore the outward movement of literacy toward technology? Can they be structured to enhance interdisciplinary or writing-across-the-curriculum efforts? Can independent programs play a more influential role in the university than they do from the English department?
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A FIELD OF DREAMS
Independent Writing Programs and the Future of Composition StudiesUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Utah State University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-440-6
Contents
Introduction: Cautionary Tales about Change Angela Crow and Peggy O'Neill........................................................................................................................1I LOCAL SCENES: STORIES OF INDEPENDENT WRITING PROGRAMS...........................................................................................................................................191 The Origins of a Department of Academic, Creative, and Professional Writing Daniel J. Royer and Roger Gilles...................................................................................212 Internal Friction in a New Independent Department of Writing and What the External Conflict Resolution Consultants Recommended Eleanor Agnew and Phyllis Surrency Dallas.......................383 Writing Identity: The Independent Writing Department as a Disciplinary Center Anne Aronson and Craig Hansen....................................................................................504 Small but Good: How a Specialized Writing Program Goes It Alone Louise Rehling.................................................................................................................625 Independence Fostering Community: The Benefits of an Independent Writing Program at a Small Liberal Arts College Elizabeth J. Deis, Lowell T. Frye, and Katherine J. Weese.....................756 No Longer Discourse Technicians: Redefining Place and Purpose in an Independent Canadian Writing Program Brian Turner and Judith Kearns........................................................90II BEYOND THE LOCAL: CONNECTIONS AMONG COMMUNITIES................................................................................................................................................1057 Learning as We G(r)o(w): Strategizing the Lessons of a Fledgling Rhetoric and Writing Department Jane E. Hindman...............................................................................1078 Creating Two Departments of Writing: One Past and One Future Barry M. Maid.....................................................................................................................1309 Who Wants Composition? Reflections on the Rise and Fall of an Independent Program Chris M. Anson...............................................................................................15310 Revising the Dream: Graduate Students, Independent Writing Programs, and the Future of English Studies Jessica Yood...........................................................................17011 Locating Writing Programs in Research Universities Peggy O'Neill and Ellen Schendel...........................................................................................................18612 Wagering Tenure by Signing on with Independent Writing Programs Angela Crow...................................................................................................................213III THE BIG PICTURE: IMPLICATIONS FOR COMPOSITION, ENGLISH STUDIES AND LITERACY EDUCATION.........................................................................................................23113 A Rose by Every Other Name: The Excellent Problem of Independent Writing Programs Wendy Bishop................................................................................................23314 Keeping (in) Our Places, Keeping Our Two Faces Theresa Enos...................................................................................................................................24715 Managing to Make a Difference Thomas P. Miller................................................................................................................................................25316 Stasis and Change: The Role of Independent Composition Programs and the Dynamic Nature of Literacy Cynthia L. Selfe, Gail E. Hawisher, and Patricia Ericsson..................................26817 Bigger than a Discipline? Kurt Spellmeyer.....................................................................................................................................................278Afterword: Countering the Naysayers: Independent Writing Programs as Successful Experiments in American Education Larry W. Burton................................................................295References........................................................................................................................................................................................301Notes on Contributors.............................................................................................................................................................................312Index.............................................................................................................................................................................................316
Chapter One
THE ORIGINS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ACADEMIC, CREATIVE, AND PROFESSIONAL WRITING AT GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY Daniel J. Royer Roger Gilles
There has been a great deal of discussion recently about the decline and fall of literature, about the lost agenda and corruption of the humanities, about our embattled profession. Andrew Delbanco opens a November 1999 article in the New York Review of Books with a stinging anecdote meant to explain something about how funds are allocated for faculty positions. He tells about a Berkeley provost who warns, "On every campus there is one department whose name need only be mentioned to make people laugh; you don't want that department to be yours" (32). Delbanco insists that we all know which department that is these days.
What can make one department a laughingstock involves a nest of complexities. As the list of seven books under Delbanco's review might indicate, the debate is not just about the discipline of English, but about social agendas, the humanities, the unity of a discipline, literature itself, and jobs. The "rise and fall of English," as Robert Scholes describes it, has occurred over the last century, but of course the antecedents of some of these conflicts are found even among the debates of ancient thinkers. Delbanco's point, and the point of Scholes and perhaps others whose books he reviews, is that the time has come to restructure a discipline that has for too long taken itself for granted and lost touch with viable purposes and social commitments.
The formation of a separate department of academic, creative, and professional writing at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) reflects much of this current discussion-as well as its history. Our narrative affirms and broadly illuminates many of the general themes present in Scholes and other accounts of the conflicted state of affairs in the humanities and in English. However, our discussion also shines a directed light on three disciplinary functions that mark off contended boundaries in this ongoing conversation about English studies in general-and the viability of separate departments of writing in particular. These three functions-academic, creative, and professional writing-represent curriculum and activities within a department, but they also stand for larger purposes within the university, disciplinary activities, and social commitments beyond the campus boundaries.
ACADEMIC WRITING: SHOULD WE? WOULD WE?
It's largely with issues related to academic writing where the bid for a separate department of writing at GVSU began. First it's important to understand how much things had changed in the English department during the decade leading up to final approval of the new department. Back in 1990, the department, like many other English departments around the country, prepared for its first hire of a rhetoric/composition specialist. Certainly the department had its share of faculty interested in composition; such faculty had created both a writing center and a writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) program in the mid-1970s, and by the late 1980s several faculty regularly attended and presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and other professional conferences. Everyone in the department taught composition, usually every semester. But the university was growing rapidly; the department began hiring three to five new tenure-track faculty a year; more and more part-timers needed to be hired; and the composition directorship was no longer a simple job that could be passed casually from colleague to colleague. Soon these versatile English faculty-who still considered their main job to be teaching literature-took stock and decided to draw on the emerging pool of new rhetoric/composition Ph.D.'s. As in many English departments around the country, the initial thought was simply to hire one or two composition specialists who could direct the program and keep the other faculty abreast of the latest developments in the field.
The first hire lasted only two years. After being asked to take over the campuswide WAC program during her second semester, she simply burned out-a fate shared by many lone compositionists. Roger was hired in 1992, and he fared better. He became composition director in 1993 and was promptly asked to restructure the program. The administration-does this sound familiar?-had heard too many complaints about low standards and inconsistency across sections of first-year composition. Over the next two years the first-year composition courses were refocused, and a junior-level writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) course was added. Together with several colleagues, Roger initiated team-graded course portfolios and published a formal student guide, featuring course goals, sample assignments, grading criteria, and student papers. The department faculty started to see that having a "specialist" around meant a couple of things: one, they didn't really have to think about the composition program much anymore because Roger ran it-which was good; and two, the course wasn't much fun to teach anymore because now they had portfolio groups and grading guidelines and brown-bag lunches and all sorts of other things they hadn't had before that seemed to interfere with what they had been doing-which was bad.
Several of the faculty who'd been interested in composition during the 1970s and 80s remained interested and active in the program. But others lost interest; and as the university continued to grow, their teaching load moved more and more toward literature, linguistics, and English education courses anyway. The department continued to hire rapidly, two or three faculty a year, and most years one of those faculty was a rhetoric/composition person. Dan came along in 1995, when the new program that Roger and others had created went into effect. By this time some faculty had become openly resistant to the portfolio groups, and the chair of the department found it much easier simply not to assign such faculty to composition. In fact, in one faculty meeting Roger made his own position clear: he really didn't want faculty to teach composition who didn't want to teach composition. He'd much rather work with the adjunct faculty who, despite their low wages-or perhaps because of their low wages-seemed perfectly willing to work together as members of a program.
This was an important turning point. Before then, composition was a necessary chore, made more palatable simply by its being a required part of the job. As one literature faculty member later described it, teaching composition was like cleaning the toilet. No one liked doing it, but knowing that everyone in the house had to do it made it seem okay. But surely no one wanted to be the only one who had to do it. It had to be everyone-or no one.
Now Roger and Dan were running the composition program and saying they didn't mind if people chose not to teach it. Portfolio-group grading became a required part of the course, computer classrooms were being used for all three of the composition courses, a new writing center director had come along, and now writing center tutors were a required part of every class. In 1996, Roger and Dan instituted directed self-placement. That same year the program created a new position, a full-time "composition fellow," designed more like a postdoctoral program in teaching writing than a dead-end visiting position. By 2000, they had filled nine such positions-and these composition fellows were moving on to solid tenure-track jobs at other institutions. It was a non-tenure-track position that really seemed to work. In the meantime, ever since the 1995 revision of the program, Roger, and later Dan, made it a point to report annually to the university curriculum committee and the vice provost. Things were going well, the reports said. Very well. More rhetoric/composition folks were hired-one each in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000.
In the ten years since 1990, the look and feel of the composition program had changed utterly. Now there were eight rhetoric/composition specialists teaching and working in the program, and there really was something that could rightly be called a program. The program offered nearly 150 sections a year, taught almost exclusively by rhetoric/composition faculty, full-time composition fellows, and part-time adjuncts.
That was the upside. The downside was that almost none of the other thirty-five or so English faculty chose to teach composition. Some did, either out of a lingering sense of duty or continued interest-or perhaps simply because of a canceled literature seminar. But from the administration's point of view, not enough tenure-track faculty were teaching composition to justify the steady stream of hires that had been given to the English department over the years. It appeared that composition was very low on the department's priority list, and by the spring of 1998 the administration made it clear to the English chair that in order for the department to continue receiving those new positions, the tenure-track faculty had better start teaching more composition.
At this point, the department held two meetings devoted to the twin issues of growth and composition staffing, and these meetings evolved into a summer task force charged with investigating various options for restructuring the English department, which in turn evolved into a proposal to form a separate department of writing. But even at that first meeting, the issues seemed clear enough. There were only three ways to increase the percentage of tenure-track faculty teaching composition: insist that more faculty teach it, hire new faculty to teach it, and/or reduce the number of sections we offer. The first two options meant increasing the size of an already large department-forty tenure-track faculty, twelve full-time visitors, and twenty-five to thirty part-time adjuncts-so the department also had to discuss ways of administering a department that had grown well beyond what any faculty could have imagined only ten or twelve years earlier.
Most of the literature faculty resisted the first option. They were teaching what they were best at-literature-and, after all, the department now had specialists around who could and should teach most of the composition. Best to have the compositionists teach two or even three sections a term and hire a few more to join them. Option three also made sense: perhaps we could eliminate the basic writing class or attach it to the writing center somehow and grant composition waivers to some of our brighter students, and pretty soon we'd have a healthy percentage of first-year composition courses being taught by tenure-track faculty, and we wouldn't even have to add many faculty to the ranks. Smiles and backslapping all around. Not surprisingly, eliminating courses and granting waivers didn't seem like the best answer to us rhetoric/composition faculty. We resisted the idea of changing the foundation of a program that had actually begun to work. Even at this first meeting, the rhetoric/composition faculty argued from the basis of creating a writing-oriented community of teachers, either inside or outside the English department. We could support going back to insisting that all English faculty teach composition, but we'd expect all of the faculty to participate in the program and community that we had begun to build up. Nobody could slip back into the old "Intro to Lit" composition course. Composition-and writing in general-would have to be recentered in a department of faculty who increasingly defined themselves according to specialty area. The department offered more sections of composition than any other kind of course, so in a literal sense composition already was at the center of the department's work. Certainly the administration viewed us that way. But there would have to be a rather radical adjustment in the minds of the majority of English faculty for this recentering to occur.
On the other hand, the rhetoric/composition faculty wouldn't mind teaching more composition ourselves and hiring more new faculty to join us, but we wanted to do so within the context of a whole department that was behind it, in an academic culture that was supportive. If the English department didn't want to make composition a central part of its identity, it would be a never-ending source of tension, and it would be difficult to develop writing as a central, departmental focus. We knew that composition deserved to be at the center of some department on campus; if not English, then perhaps a new department-a department of writing.
It is important to keep in mind that after our programmatic successes of the 1990s, the rhetoric/composition faculty felt very good about our relationship with the rest of the campus community, particularly the administration. Our association with the composition program benefitted us in that larger community. The English chair understood this, and during this first season of departmental discussions she discouraged the notion of dividing the department. Much of the department's budget, and many of the new faculty positions, could be traced to the composition program, which was the economic center, if not the curricular center, of the department. English was one of the two or three largest departments on campus, in large part due to the 150 sections of composition printed in the schedule book every year; and though the size of the department made it increasingly difficult to manage, the chair understood that removing composition from the department would dramatically reduce the department's overall presence on campus.
Despite her resistance to the idea of splitting the department, the English chair did want everyone to understand the implications of whatever decisions were made; and at the end of the 1997-98 academic year she circulated a document that ended up turning the tide toward the formation of a separate department. In order to highlight the implications of sharing the responsibility for composition instruction, she reworked the fall 1998 schedule, for illustration only, with everyone in the department teaching at least one composition course. What would a schedule look like where everyone taught one section? But this was after the fall 1998 faculty schedule had been fully arranged and printed, so to virtually all of the faculty the mock schedule represented a loss of some plum class, or at least a class in their specialty area. The faculty were horrified. Since we normally don't offer contracts to adjuncts until shortly before each term, the fall schedule gets printed with "Staff" typed in next to most of the composition classes. Now, in this illustration schedule, "Staff" had been typed in next to British literature surveys and linguistics classes-even modernism seminars and the capstone course! The faculty were aghast.
The talk turned to faculty specialties and the principle of staffing classes with the most qualified people. Clearly, argued the British literature, linguistics, modernism, and capstone faculty, we best serve our students by staffing classes with faculty with the most training in the course material. And surely we owe it to our English majors to staff our own English electives with tenure-track faculty, not adjuncts.
Nearly everyone agreed that in this age of increasing specialization, the sensible thing to do was to staff classes according to specialty. Someone asked the chair if she'd really make us follow this revised schedule. No, she assured us, it was just an illustration. Relief spread through the room like a cool breeze. In that one moment, as faculty members relaxed their shoulders for the first time in days, the main issue was clearly settled: the majority of the English faculty would not support any plan requiring the universal teaching of composition.
(Continues...)
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