Conceding Composition: A Crooked History of Composition's Institutional Fortunes - Softcover

Skinnell, Ryan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607325047 ISBN 13: 9781607325048

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2016

Synopsis

First-year composition became the most common course in American higher education not because it could “fix” underprepared student writers, but because it has historically served significant institutional interests. That is, it can be “conceded” in multiple ways to help institutions solve political, promotional, and financial problems. Conceding Composition is a wide-ranging historical examination of composition’s evolving institutional value in American higher education over the course of nearly a century.
 
Based on extensive archival research conducted at six American universities and using the specific cases of institutional mission, regional accreditation, and federal funding, this study demonstrates that administrators and faculty have introduced, reformed, maintained, threatened, or eliminated composition as part of negotiations related to nondisciplinary institutional exigencies. Viewing composition from this perspective, author Ryan Skinnell raises new questions about why composition exists in the university, how it exists, and how teachers and scholars might productively reconceive first-year composition in light of its institutional functions.
 
The book considers the rhetorical, political, organizational, institutional, and promotional options conceding composition opened up for institutions of higher education and considers what the first-year course and the discipline might look like with composition’s transience reimagined not as a barrier but as a consummate institutional value.

About this title

About the Author

Ryan Skinnell is assistant professor of rhetoric and composition and assistant writing program administrator in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University. He is a coeditor of What We Wish We'd Known: Negotiating Graduate School, and his research has appeared in Composition Studies, Enculturation, JAC, Rhetoric Review, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and edited collections.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Conceding Composition

A Crooked History of Composition's Institutional Fortunes

By Ryan Skinnell

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-504-8

Contents

Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Unraveling an Alien System of Meaning: Composition as Concession, 
1 Genitive History: Or, the Exception That Suggests a Rule, 
2 Conceding Composition to Create a New Normal, 
3 Standardization, Coordination, and All That Jazz: Conceding Composition for Institutional Accreditation, 
4 Of Funding, Federalism, and Conceding First-Year Composition, 
Conclusion: Conceding (in) Rhetoric and Composition: On Questions of Seeing and Being Seen, 
Notes, 
References, 
About the Author, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Genitive History

Or, the Exception That Suggests a Rule

[The] theoretical mutuality between what we perceive as impersonal, even deterministic, structures and personal, even creative, identities is particularly relevant as we reread the history of composition.

— Susan Miller, "Composition as a Cultural Artifact: Rethinking History as Theory"

How we understand history depends on the method of writing history.

— Lester Faigley, "Veterans' Stories on the Porch"

French philosopher and polymath Giorgio Agamben begins his methodological treatise, The Signature of All Things: On Method, by observing: "Anyone familiar with research in the human sciences knows that, contrary to common opinion, a reflection on method usually follows practical application, rather than preceding it. It is a matter, then, of ultimate or penultimate thoughts, to be discussed among friends and colleagues, which can legitimately be articulated only after extensive research" (2009, 7).

Agamben's thinking accords well with my experience writing this book, which, as I described in the introduction, takes a non-disciplinary institutional perspective on the history of composition. While I was researching and writing Conceding Composition, I felt at many points compelled to situate my research in relation to the exceptional histories of composition that already exist. That effort, however, has been somewhat more challenging that it might seem for reasons I discuss below — reasons that for now can be characterized generally as methodological. Given the structure of books, this chapter is necessarily located near the beginning, as if to suggest that I thoughtfully located a research gap in composition's history, carefully developed my clever methodology, and then systematically set it into action — methodological precision informing methodical rigor. To the contrary and in keeping with Agamben's observation, it was only after extensive research (and extensive fumbling) that I felt as though I could legitimately articulate how this book makes sense in the context of rhetoric and composition's history and histories. The methodology unfolded from there. I have therefore structured this chapter to reflect in some small way the unfolding process by which I came to the methodology I theorize here.

On the one hand, it should be clear by now that this book is a historical examination of composition education in American higher education during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It therefore aligns with and extends a long list of historical work by well-known rhetoric and composition historians. On the other hand, it should also be clear that Conceding Composition diverges from other histories in the field inasmuch as it is a history of the discipline that focuses on institutional issues which are not principally, or even recognizably, disciplinary. In this chapter, therefore, I take up recent invitations in the field, particularly Michelle Ballif's in Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, "to envision alternative methodologies" that provoke questions about "what it means, what it should mean, what it could mean to write histories of rhetoric, composition, communication" (2013b, 3–4).

In the introduction I opted not to speculate about why the connection between non-disciplinary institutional changes at ASU and changes in the composition curriculum perplexed me for so long. I also do not intend to speculate about why it took me so long to recognize that my initial inability to shift perspective was a methodological obstacle. Nevertheless, it was. Events such as ASU's transformation from normal school to teachers' college in the 1920s, which brought first-year composition into being in Tempe, raise a number of questions that the field's conventional disciplinary historical methodologies are not well suited to ask or answer — about why the change from normal school to teachers' college occurred, why it occurred when it did, how composition education influenced the change, and how composition education could change dramatically on an institutional level without concomitant changes in intellectual or disciplinary practices. As it turns out, these are questions about how composition education was used positively to shape postsecondary institutions as much as they are questions about how higher education negatively shaped composition. That is, these are questions about how composition opened up institutional possibilities as much as they are questions of how institutions constrained composition.

Following these and other traces can take us far afield of more traditional disciplinary concerns with the goal of developing more complex, situated, historical, institutional understandings of composition's role in the academy. Conceding Composition might therefore best be characterized as an attempt to consider composition's concession not just in relation to institutional conditions of possibility but also as an institutional condition of possibility — as a mechanism that made certain institutional action(s) possible. Discussing composition as a "concession" in the ways I advanced in the introduction, therefore, requires that I stake my claims on different, if complementary, methodological grounds than other histories in the field.

Problems of Persistence and Longevity

In my introductory chapter, I elaborated a personal justification for developing the non-disciplinary institutional perspective that distinguishes Conceding Composition — as a teacher, researcher, and junior writing program administrator, I wanted to make sense of the historical circumstances at ASU in which "English 1" became "English 101" so I could better understand the contemporary conditions in which I was working. But as I intimated, there are broader questions that derive from this localized dilemma. First and foremost, why does first-year composition still exist in American higher education?

This question is not intended as mere provocation — I ask it in earnest given the apparent historical forces aligned against the course. First-year composition is the most common form literacy education takes in postsecondary institutions, and it remains one of the most common requirements in American higher education (Fleming 2011, 1–3; Slevin 1991, 5). John C. Brereton calls it "the largest single enterprise in American higher education" (1995, x). Remarkably, it has persisted in institutions across the country for nearly 150 years despite open hostility from administrators and faculty for nearly as long. In 1969, Leonard Greenbaum wrote: "If freshman English really began in 1874, the first complaint was probably registered in 1875. But on record, in black print, the assault against freshman English began in 1911, and continued in 1928, 1929, 1931, 19 ..." (1969, 175). Anyone with even a passing familiarity with composition's history knows that the critiques have not ceased in the nearly 50 years since Greenbaum's article was published, and neither has first-year composition succumbed to them. In many places around the country, the requirement is as strong as it has ever been. I submit that first-year composition's persistence and longevity are rather more curious than historians have considered to this point given the prolonged intensity of "the assault against freshman English."

To offer one instructive example, in 1916 the Modern Language Association (MLA) commissioned a wide-ranging report on first-year composition, and one of the committee's conclusions was that composition teaching was a professional dead end because the "ultimate administrators do not, in effect, regard this course as important" (quoted in Crowley 1998a, 124–25). The MLA is hardly known for its vigorous support of composition teaching, and this report was published just four years after the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) was founded to compensate for the MLA's disinterest in pedagogy. The MLA's teaching report was all the more striking, then, because the committee's conclusions were a powerful indictment not of composition's intrinsic worth but of the conditions in which composition teachers labored.

Intra-disciplinary politics aside, there is not, to my mind, a convincing disciplinary explanation as to why "ultimate administrators" at institutions far and wide have continued to require and fund a course they deemed unimportant, especially given the immense resources it requires and the well-known headaches associated with staffing, assessing, and maintaining it. William Riley Parker's provocative assertion that first-year composition "rarely accomplishes any of its announced objectives" makes its longevity even more perplexing (1967, 347). If ASU's president G. Homer Durham wanted to eliminate first-year composition in 1965, for instance, and especially if the English department chair concurred, and if furthermore the course failed to meet its educational charge, why did it remain? The same question can be directed at any number of institutions at virtually any time in the past century and a half, right up to the present moment. It seems worthwhile to consider why first-year composition persists year after year, seemingly against all odds.

Rhetoric and composition historians have not ignored this question, of course. The assessments about why first-year composition developed and persists are wide-ranging. Many relate to what Crowley calls "the discourse of student need" (1998a, 250). First-year composition exists either to bar the "Great Unwashed" from gaining access to higher education, the so-called gate-keeping function; or conversely because students are believed to "need" it for one reason or another, whether because they are negatively considered "under prepared" or positively considered "developing." Other assertions about composition's persistence may be characterized as socio-cultural: the course is a consequence of societal anxieties about correctness and propriety and is an increasing function of business and industry that students suddenly need to be prepared for. Still other scholars' claims might perhaps be best described as "experiential," based on rhetoric and compositionists' professional experiences teaching and administering first-year composition. One such explanation that circulates widely, if apocryphally, is that first-year composition is a "cash cow." As a result of the confluence of cheap labor and minimal material demands, the theory goes, first-year composition brings in more tuition dollars than it expends, unlike courses that require extensive laboratory space, full professors, and costly equipment or materials. The field is rife with different versions of these arguments, which are every bit as reasonable as they are familiar. But ultimately, I maintain that they are extrapolated from distinctly disciplinary observations about how composition, pedagogy, and students are valued in institutions — which is to say, they are apparently not.

I contend, on the other hand, that understanding first-year composition's persistence entails a reconsideration of institutions' decisions to invest in first-year composition (sometimes explicitly in economic terms but oftentimes not). Moreover, I contend that such reconsideration is predicated on developing a more capacious understanding of first-year composition's relationship to institutions than a distinctly disciplinary lens affords. Of course, like first-year composition's persistence, institutions have long received attention from composition historians, most directly in Susan Miller's, Thomas Miller's, and David Russell's influential work. In his Writing in the Academic Disciples, 1870–1990, Russell even designates his investigative lens an "institutional perspective" (2002, 31–32). But Russell's "institutional perspective" is not focused on the institution proper so much as it views writing instruction in places throughout the institution. The same can generally be said of Susan Miller's and Thomas Miller's institutional perspectives, though with slightly different emphases. In other words, "institutional perspective" has commonly designated an attempt to locate the discipline (i.e., writing instruction) in nontraditional spaces within institutions (i.e., outside the English department or first-year writing program). My institutional perspective, in contrast, is a perspective on institutions themselves and how composition education was used to advance institutional goals. Mine is not a history of institutions exploiting composition — it is a history of symbiotic development. As such, it requires investigating non-disciplinary institutional matters that exceed, and sometimes ignore, writing instruction. Examining such matters, I contend, can better illuminate "ultimate administrators'" decision-making about why composition perseveres.

To carry out this analysis, I develop a new historiographical methodology, for which I coin the term genitive history. Genitive is a term I borrow from linguistics, and, as I explain below, I introduce it as a means for retaining valuable historiographical concepts that circulate in rhetoric and composition while also facilitating the methodological shift necessary for writing a different kind of history. In brief, genitive history allows me to balance the concentrated focus of local history against the broader visions of "universal" histories and to retain disciplinary connections while also exploring non-disciplinary avenues. Before I define "genitive history" more specifically and explain how it informs this book's larger claims, it is first worth the effort to sketch some common historiographical methodologies adopted by rhetoric and composition historians as a way to stake out their affordances and limitations.

Scope: On Macro and Micro

The main purpose of developing a genitive history is to address two methodological concerns implicit in my introduction: one of scope, the other of focus. My goal is to clear theoretical ground for the non-disciplinary institutional investigation I have been describing. But one consequence of this particular aim is that I need to proceed via negativa — that is, defining a genitive history by what it is not — before offering a more affirmative definition of what it is. In the next two sections of this chapter, I put Conceding Composition's investigation in tension with the field's commonly shared historiographical scope(s) and focus.

Histories of rhetoric and composition traverse an impressive range of subjects and emphases. Still, they might best be, and have been, characterized by their adoption of one of two historiographical scopes: macro-historical or micro-historical. Henze, Selzer, and Sharer offer a succinct characterization of macro-histories: "Histories of composition since 1945 have sometimes represented themselves as Grand Narratives. Such narratives are useful, to be sure, for staking out in broad terms the boundaries of and developments in the field, for defining important trends, and for clarifying those developments that have persisted most stubbornly into current practice" (2008, 4). In sum, macro-histories survey historical developments broadly to present a far-reaching, comprehensive view of the discipline.

In contradistinction, Henze, Selzer, and Sharer argue for more intensely focused histories that preserve "the astonishing range of practices, personalities, and messy particulars that strove for a hearing, however temporarily, within the mixed aggregate that has been known as composition" (ibid.). These kinds of locally focused histories emphasize depth instead of breadth and can generally be grouped under the term micro-historical. Rhetoric and composition historians have productively turned to micro-histories in recent years to complicate macro-histories' broadly drawn view of composition education. As one example, in her history of basic writing, Kelly Ritter draws on her drastically varied experiences teaching basic writing at three different institutions and her intensive local, archival research at Yale and Harvard to argue that "basic writing is exclusively an institutional construct, a locally specific course designation that stems from, develops from, and ends with the unique culture of each institution" (2009, 9, original emphasis). Ritter's micro-historical research illustrates that basic writing existed even in the most prestigious universities in the country five decades prior to the famed "open admissions" movements of the 1960s and 1970s. As Henze, Selzer, Sharer, and Ritter ably demonstrate, there is much to be learned from sharply narrowing one's historical scope.

In many ways, Conceding Composition is a micro-history. It is based on detailed analysis of archival documentary materials; it focuses predominantly, although not exclusively, on the local conditions of a single "obscure" institution; and it carefully considers the situated "movements, moments, mentors, and mandates" (Gannett, Brereton, and Tirabassi 2010, 426) that shaped composition over the course of nearly a century. It could easily be classified among a growing number of disciplinary histories that attempt to illuminate the development of composition "from the bottom up."

However, Conceding Composition also aspires to something different than micro-history. For one, Conceding Composition examines non-disciplinary institutional exigencies rather than rhetoric and composition micro-histories' principal emphasis: "the history of composition as a teaching subject" (ibid.; see also Enoch 2008, 12). Actually, composition instruction — as opposed to composition education — plays a relatively limited role in this history, for reasons discussed in the introduction. In addition to my decidedly non-pedagogical emphasis, this study uses concentrated, local inquiry to tell a broadly drawn, even "comprehensive," story about composition education in American higher education.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607325047
• ISBN 13: 9781607325048
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188