The Single Most Important Decision Murray Ever Made

Here is a link to Murray's recommendation letter for graduate school from Dr. Bingham and his admittance letter.

Murray was admitted to advanced graduate study in English at UNH.

So here's the interesting thing that happened this morning. I'm reading Charles Moran's essay "Education: The E-Word in Composition Studies" in the Stock collection.

Charles Moran (2012), in his contribution to Composition’s Roots, details the ways in which compositionists like himself migrated, from the late 1960s to 1980s, from education or English education to English, tracing the familiar journey that he and so many others made during this period from the “low-prestige” work of teaching (or teaching teachers) to the more esteemed work of research, and, in particular, research which would be recognizable to faculty in college English Departments. Murray’s journey was different, however. For his part, Moran tells the story of his journey, after teaching high school English at a private school for several years in Rhode Island, to the campus of Brown University, where he planned to pursue a Master of Arts in Teaching and return to the secondary classroom but, instead, enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English and wrote a dissertation on eighteenth century English literature. In Murray’s case, the story is different. As he neared the completion of his undergraduate studies in English at UNH in the late 1940s, Murray was encouraged by his advisor, the department chair, to apply to the Master’s program at UNH. He applied and was accepted but ultimately declined the offer in order to pursue a career in journalism. If Moran’s journey was, as he argues, the more typical path of teachers and scholars of his era, Murray’s was its opposite. Whereas Moran’s story, as he argues, serves as an illustration of the ways in which powerful ideological forces work on and through individuals, Murray’s story illustrates the pull of different ideological forces.