Journal 2 (1/5)

They created a curriculum that was:

Democratic: English was what the students made of it (you could craft your own curriculum and it all “counted” towards the major or specialization), adaptable, customizable

Diverse: English was many things, including…

Applied: English was something you did things with, including…

Utilitarian

Faculty are specialized by regularly teach a diversity of courses, including Scudder himself.

English as a field of study only really existed in the classical ideal and within the colleges and universities that trained students in the liberal/humanistic tradition… The creation of the land-grant universities offered higher education in general and English faculty, in particular, a historic opportunity to reconceive of their discipline, to develop an “applied” emphasis which would match or meet that of the ideal of the land-grant college.

The creation of the land-grant colleges created a new context for literacy education, prompting the question, what would post-secondary instruction in English look like that aligned with the emerging land-grant imperative “for educating the common people according to the needs of their everyday life” (W.J. Kerr, p. 8, “The Spirit of the Land-Grant Institutions”).

During the early years, when the land-grant vision was strongest and perhaps most strongly felt by those teaching at such institutions—how did this influence act on those teaching English, most of whom came from elite colleges and universities. There was no precedent or training grounds for preparing faculty to teach in such institutions. Faculty who had received their training at colleges such as Yale, Harvard, and Dartmouth had to discover or create a vision of English that was suitable for the land-grant college and which would be accepted by those in power. On the one hand, this was a problem—did the profession imagine it this way, as an opportunity to craft a new curriculum in English? Or, did it simply continue training its own graduates as it always had and sending them out in the world to meet whatever fate they would find. Likely, the latter. In some ways, this is not all that dissimilar from the current problem of higher education and doctoral training in America, where Ph.D.s in literature are trained at research-intensive institutions only to enter a job market which quickly places the vast majority of them in teaching-intensive institutions (if they are placed at all).

KEY POINTS:

I think I know the answer to the question: Why did this curriculum develop?

I think I know the answer to the question: Of what did this curriculum consist?

I don't think I know yet the answer to the question: Why was this curriculum discarded?