Notes on "A History of Writing Program Administration"

From Writing Program Administration (Works Cited)

First year composition was born under the shadow of remediation and a focus on correctness (29) Hill’s influential text, Principles of Rhetoric (1878), took the stance that rhetoric was an art, not a science (Hill 321). Brereton argues that this was to be a devastating stance in an institution increasingly de- voted to the scientific paradigm of research: “To argue that rhetoric was not a science, not a way of knowing, was to consign it to training, to an introductory level of college, to pedagogy. If it was an art, its instruction depended on the skill of the teacher, not on a knowledge base build up by concentrated study, by research” (Origins 10). Harvard’s composition program depended on teachers, not scholars; it never developed a graduate program, after the fashion of other disciplines in the newly created research institutions, and did not develop the research that might have grounded the undergraduate program theoretically. (30)

The English department developed a system which prevails today: “professors teaching advanced literature courses, and instructors, part timers, and graduate students teaching composition. By 1910, composition had become almost totally apprentice work, and responsibility for its oversight became the province not of a scholar or curriculum expert but an administrator” (21), a bureaucratic functionary. (31)

Because of the fact that composition was “apprentice work,” the pedagogy developed accordingly into a formulaic approach that untrained (and usually unmotivated) teachers could take on immediately. (33)

the task of writing error-free prose (34)

The composition course that focuses on literature as a basis for writing actually predated the Harvard approach, invented and popularized by Thomas Lounsbury at Yale—an elective course in literature that had a heavy writing requirement (16). This sort of course became extremely popular, given the fact that English department faculty could draw upon their own expertise in literature. There were many variations of the course, all of which involved “some elements of the old rhetoric course’s emphasis on belles lettres, style, and examples drawn from English literature. (37)

A sort of canon of essays developed for the class, embodied in a rhetoric/reader textbook, sometimes accompanied by a handbook; this approach became identified with what has become known as “current-traditional rhetoric.” (38)

The term to describe this approach, “current-traditional rhetoric,” was first proposed by Richard Young in his 1978 essay, “Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention,” borrowing the term from Daniel Fogerty’s Roots for a New Rhetoric (and adding a hyphen). As Young describes it, the features of this approach are familiar: “The emphasis on the composed product rather than the composing process; the analysis of discourse into description, narration, exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and with style (economy, clarity, emphasis); the preoccupation with the informal essay and the research paper; and so on” (31). (38-39)

Our discipline has been long in knuckling from its eyes the sleep of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the real lesson of the modes is that we need always to be on guard against systems that seem convenient to teachers but that ignore the way writing is actually done. (“Rise” 455) (Connors cited in McLeod p. 40)

Both Charles Pain (The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present) and Randall Popkin (“Edwin Hopkins and the Costly Labor of Composition Teaching”) argue for a biographical approach to the early history of composition, stating that broad ideological studies have limited usefulness; we should also be looking at the relationship between a person’s life and his or her pedagogy and professional contributions. Such an “historical case study” approach seems particularly useful in considering the early history of writing program administration. (45-46)

Scott took a different approach. He tried to reduce the gap between the high school teacher and the college teacher, to show that both had essentially the same problems. For years he labored to bring about cooperation and understanding for the benefit of both groups. (Kitzhaber qtd. in McLeod p. 47-48)

According to Campbell, by “incorporating a romantic belief in the organic nature of language, Buck hoped to make composition useful and vital to a changing student population” (xxxvi).

Bordelon points out that Buck was profoundly influenced by John Dewey... (53) -- Who was Murray influenced by? No one? Experience...?

The most complete history to date of writing program administration during the period after World War II may be found in Amy Heckathorn’s doctoral dissertation, “The Struggle Toward Professionalization: The Historical Evolution of Writing Program Administrators” (1999) and her subsequent essay, “Moving Toward a Group Identity: WPA Professionalism from the 1940s to the 1970s” (2004). Heckathorn outlines how early WPAs “began to come together to create a group identity, an evolution glimpsed through primary research in journals, books, and direct interviews which demonstrate that WPAs have struggled to transform themselves, and others’ impressions of them, from bureaucratic managers of an undervalued discipline to dynamic administrators and theorists of their work and of their field” (“Moving” 191–92). She argues that although there were certainly writing program administrators before the Second World War, there was not yet a group identity. She points to the 1940s as the starting point for the formation of this professional group identity, dividing the period before the formation of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (1979) into what she terms the early era (1940–1963) and the transitional era (1964–1979); this latter category coinciding with what Robert Connors refers to as the “era of disciplinarity” in composition studies (“Composition History and Disciplinarity” 4). (59)


Thomas Masters provides a general history of composition in the period just after World War II in Practicing Writing: The Postwar Discourse of Freshman English, based primarily on archival evidence from three institutions in Illinois (The University of Illinois in Urbana and what was then its branch campus in Chicago, Northwestern University, and Wheaton College). Masters found that the first priority at all three institutions was “the attempt to instill in students a code of correctness and style,” that weekly papers were required in all three, and that the papers “were read not as attempts to convey or construct knowledge, but as proof that they had internalized the code” (136). (60)



Lloyd-Jones, himself (like Edward Corbett) a returning veteran, (61) -- These are Murray's contemporaries, but we don't think of it like that...

But evidence from the early years of the journal [i.e. 1950s shows that much of a freshman English director’s time was taken up not only with administrative issues but also with designing entirely new curricula to meet the needs of a new group of students, (65)

The 1960s and 1970s were revolutionary decades in academe for more reasons than sheer numbers, including, among other changes, the paradigm shift in composition studies from a current-traditional focus on the finished product to a focus on students’ writing processes; Donald Murray’s “Teach Writing as Process Not Product” (1972) became a ral- lying cry for WPAs who were involved in staff development and/or TA training programs. (67)

This period also marks the beginning of composition as a discipline in its own right. A number of markers may be used to demonstrate this fact. Most often quoted is the 1963 publication of Research in Written Composition (Braddock et al.), which was both a summary of research so far and a call for a research agenda in the field. At the same time, the Commission on English of the College Entrance Examination Board was holding a series of institutes to improve the academic preparation and pedagogy of English teachers in the schools, a format followed by subsequent institutes for teachers established by the National Defense Education Act in 1964; Richard Lloyd-Jones documents these institutes and also the rise of the National Writing Project in “On Institutes and Projects.” These institutes, Lloyd-Jones argues, helped to establish composition as scholarly and professional work at the uni- versity level. One can also point to the rise of professional journals in the field, as documented by Maureen Goggin (Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition), the increasing numbers of doctoral programs emphasiz- ing rhetoric and composition (as documented in periodic surveys in Rhetoric Review), and in the case of WPAs, the increasingly sophis- ticated job descriptions appearing in the MLA’s Job Information List (as documented in Heckathorn’s dissertation). Specialized professional organizations, often off-shoots of the larger ones, were beginning to form as well among people with common concerns and issues, not all of them having to do with research and teaching; the Associations of Departments of English, an organization for English department chairs, was formed in 1962, and The Council of Writing Program Administrators was born in the late 1970s. (67-68)

Community colleges, which had existed in small numbers since the turn of the century, became the new growth industry in higher education, in part to deal with the sheer numbers of students but also in part because of the growing democratization of higher education, a sense that everyone, not just the elite few, had a right to attend college. [...] In the 1960s, 457 new community colleges opened their doors, and the American Association of Community Colleges was formed during that same de- cade. (Today, according to the website for the Association, community colleges educate more than half of college graduates in the nation.) Responding to this growth, NCTE and CCCC began in 1965 to sup- port the development of two-year college regional conferences, an ar- rangement that eventually resulted in the formation of the Two-Year College English Association. (69)

Just after World War II, when the rapid growth of universities demanded more formal administrative structures, various existing members of the English Department were asked to take on the task of administration, but were called “freshman composition coordinators” or “directors of composition.” As Richard Bullock states, it was “a shared burden rotated, as are many chairmanships, among all faculty” (14); medievalists, specialists in nineteenth century romantic litera- ture, Shakespeareans, Melville scholars, or the faculty members who taught the secondary education methods classes were put in charge of designing a curriculum and training the rapidly growing numbers of teaching assistants. Writing in 1958, John P. Noonan noted that these faculty were chosen on the basis of their administrative ability and personality rather than any particular special background or training they might possess. It was not considered a professional task, but was considered university service. (73)