Writing, Programs, and Administration at Arizona State University: The First Hundred Years (Ryan Skinnell) -- 2011

INTRODUCTION

a historical case study of writing instruction (1)

...this dissertation considers changes in the place of writing instruction in the institution's curriculum in relation to four major movements in American higher education during the period under consideration:

• the normal school movement, 
• the standardization and accreditation movement, 
• the "university-status movement," 
• the research and tenure movement (1)

This study looks at writing instruction at a single institution over an extended period of time and attempts to place the conversation taking place in a broad historical context. (2)

...this study argues that the place of writing instruction in ASU's curriculum has, at various times and for various reasons, been shaped as much by national movements in higher education--and administrators' responses to those movements--as other factors, such as rhetorical theory and English department politics. (2)

...I argue that the influences I describe as affecting writing instruction at ASU actually had important affects at post-secondary institutions across the country and markedly shaped many writing programs and classes that currently exist. (5)

I am interested in understanding the intellectual and administrative structures that sustained writing instruction at ASU over time and shaped how it was manifested. Additionally, I consider how the structures that shaped and sustained writing at ASU might be understood in relation to conditions and developments at other institutions, in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, and in American culture beyond the academy. (13)

I ask the following questions:

1. In what ways did local, regional, and national developments in higher education impact writing instruction at different times in Arizona State University's history? 
2. In what ways did the development of Arizona State University from normal school to teachers' college to regional college to nationally-ranked research university impact theories and practices of writing instruction and program administration at the school? 
3. And how has the place of writing, programs, and administration at Arizona State University shaped and been shaped by the field of rhetoric and composition? 

CHAPTER 2: LOCAL HISTORIES: METHODS AND MADNESS

I rely heavily on archival and oral historiographical methods...in an attempt to understand and describe some of the important ways in which writing instruction at ASU has been similar to and different from composition instruction at other schools in other places across the country. (19)

Specifically, I adopt a local history lens and an administrative focus to look at the relationship of institutional conditions at ASU, as shaped and affected by developments in higher education more generally. (19)

Composition historians recognize that diverse factors, including geography, size, institutional mission, student body, funding, and local politics have historically affected how writing was taught at a given school (21).

Great FRAMING Quote:

Running through virtually all local histories is a common assumption--one that informs this study--that a complex, nuanced history which includes and values multiple sites of composition history is a positive goal. (22)

...the more nuanced the history of composition is, the more valuable it becomes to modern composition scholars hoping to better understand the historical circumstances which have conditioned how composition historians, writing teachers, writing program administrators, and composition students function within the academy. (22)

Three kinds of histories (from Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration):

1. inquires into the ideological/pedagogical theories and practices of composition
2. more localized inquiries into the classroom practices of individual teachers
3. administrative histories "locates the writing program within the larger institutional context that so often explains their formation" (xix)

Because of the focus on larger institutional contexts, an administrative lens is well-suited to looking at the local history of a given institution, adding contextual breadth to geographic depth. It enables researchers to consider important contextual influences, such as local and national politics or intercollegiate antagonisms, which are often overlooked in other types of histories. (23)

The challenge of an administrative history, then, is to attempt to do justice to individuals, groups, local conditions, institutions, theoretical developments, national and international movements, and a host of other factors. (23-24)

An administrative lens enables shifts of focus in ways that pedagogically or theoretically focused lenses do not. Hence, an administrative lens entails studying writing programs, and administration in broader terms than prior histories have sometimes done. (24)

In the context of composition histories, an administrative focus offers a further advantage by enabling researchers to consider the institutional structures that shaped the conditions of writing instruction. (24)

The History of Composition: Reclaiming Our Lost Generations (Varnum)

...the sixty years between roughly 1900 and 1960 have been characterized as a period of stagnation in the history of composition and as a period in which "current-traditional" rhetoric, an approach developed in the late nineteenth century, operated as a monolithic and increasingly obstructive paradigm. (39)

Such characterizations of our history have the effect of denying the resources and lessons of portions of the past to many of us currently teaching composition. (40) 

 The way we see history affects the way we see our present field. (40) 

I would emphasize that we need to look at all of our history, including that of the first sixty years of the twentieth century, if we are to view writing and the teaching of writing from the full range of perspectives. (40) 

In addition to those in the "first generation" who struggled in the 1960s and 1970s to professionalize the teaching of composition and who thus have difficulty looking Objectively at the pre-professional history of the field, those historians who have relied narrowly on textbooks for information are especially guilty of promulgating the view that nothing much happened in composition between 1900 and 1960. Regrettably, according to Stephen North, most composition history to date has been based on textbooks or on previously published scholarship. Few composition historians have yet examined student texts, syllabi, or aSSignments, nor have they gathered oral material to any extent from teachers and students. North argues that textbook-based histories cannot tell us much about actual classroom practice (73-74). (40) 

On Berlin: Berlin's work is flawed, moreover, by his use of an epistemological taxonomy that operates as a powerful terministic screen and all too often dominates his narrative...Berlin takes little account of disparities within any individual's or school's approach, or of changes in that approach over time. The distortions thus created are all the more glaring because Berlin spotlights the categories he prefers. (41) 

 --- 

 The unfortunate result is that due to the influence of Kitzhaber and his followers on the one hand and of Young and Hairston on the other, the history of composition between 1900 and 1960 has remained largely unexamined. No one has catalogued the methodological alternatives which were available to teachers during this reputedly monolithic period. No one has accounted adequately for the first moves toward professionalization in the 1930s and 1940s. The phrase "current-traditional rhetoric" has become a terministic screen that no one has attempted to see through. (47) 

I believe the period is eminently worthy of renewed historical attention. In order truly to understand the history of this maligned period, however, historians will have to look beyond textbooks,and even beyond the professional literature of the period, for new sources of information. Oral material from teachers and former students is a rich potential resource.7 Syllabi, assignment sheets, dittoed handouts, student papers and teachers' responses to them, course and teacher evaluations, student journals, teacher's journals, letters, interdepartmental memos, and similar ephemera may also give us new views of writing instruction at earlier periods. (50) 

 Until such material has been considered, it is premature to conclude that current-traditional rhetoric was the dominant and all-pervasive rhetoric of the period. (50) 

I am interested in English 1-2, among other reasons, because the course used student writing as its text, because its students wrote from experience, because its instructors taught collaboratively, because it addressed the issue of writing in the disciplines, and because it seems very different from the kind of "current-traditional" course said to have been standard at its period. Other studies similar to mine of other early and mid-twentieth-century courses, if enough of them can be completed, may show that current- traditional rhetoric was not so monolithic nor composition theory and pedagogy so stagnant as textbook-based histories have indicated. We need to reclaim all our history, including the history during the period before our field achieved its current professional status, if we are to have any hope of solidifying our academic identity, answering detractors, evaluating the appeals of reformers, and guiding students and the profession wisely into the twenty-first century. We need to know where we have been in order to know who we are and where we are going. (51-52)

Crowley: Notes on Post-War Composition (1945-1960/1970)

Crowley

Chapter 5: Literature and Composition: Not Separate But Certainly Unequal

Current-Traditional Rhetoric and Humanism (94)

Literature as Antidote (103)

Lit-Comp in the Sixties (111)

A Formal Partnership (115)

In sum: during the first three decade of the century, literary study was a fixture in the required composition course. Even though it was universally required, composition belonged to the English department, and English teachers everywhere conceived in the course as an introduction to the culture practice of English and the study of its literature. English teachers seemed unable to comprehend that writing instruction might involve anything other than literary study, on the one hand, and drill and in grammar, usage, and formal fluency, on the other. They understood required composition instruction to be an exercise in the improvement of character and good taste, which were enhanced, Not by practice in composing messages that might actually do work in the world, But by reading good books. In the absence of a viable rhetoric or series of composition, these teachers simply could not imagine composition as an independent discursive or pedagogical practice. (103)

Vacancy for the use of literature and required composition instruction was not a strong theme in professional literature published during the 1930s and 1940s. During the 30s, instruction in the required course settled into a comfortable pattern that combined current-traditional formalism with more or less literary study, depending upon the history and mission of a given college or university and the intellectual bent the faculty who designed the course. During the 1940s and 50s, however, traditional ways of teaching freshman English were seriously challenged by the absent of interest and communication skills. Because of the success of this challenge, English teachers defense of the use of literary texts in the required first-year course resurfaced during the 1950s. (103)

In the 1950s and 1960s, introductory composition was still being taught according to the dictates of the current traditional theory of discourse inherited from the people who have given the course it’s original shape in the late 19^th century. (103)

Alert composition textbooks suggest that literature was still being used in composition instruction I widescale during the 1960s and 1970s. (111)

A new and rather bizarre rationale for the use of literature and first-year composition developed between 1940 and 1960: literary texts begin to be read as models of current-traditional principles of discourse. (114)

Chapter 6: Terms of Employment: Rhetoric Slaves and Lesser Men

Composition was not always staff the way it is now until 1940 or so, composition classes were taught by full-time teachers, although they generally were the newest members of the permanent faculty. This changed when disciplinary specialization begin to affect staffing in the undergraduate curriculum. With the narrowing of faculty interests the company adoption of the research ideal, It became increasingly difficult to find a full-time faculty were willing to teach general or introductory courses, and by 1950, American universities with graduate programs have begun to rely on graduate students to staff the required first-year composition course. It also begun the practice of hiring part-time help to meet staffing demands imposed by the postwar explosion in college enrollments. (119)

In 1971, Ray Kytle recounted his history as a teacher of composition. At the large University where he did his graduate work, he noted, “composition was taught almost exclusively by ‘slaves,’” that is, by graduate students (339). At another university, where he was then employed, Kytle noted that “composition is taught primarily by serfs—untenured and, by present criteria, untenurable instructors.  These people, most of whom would prefer to be teaching literature, can expect to remain on the faculty for no more than 3 to 5 years.” By the 1970s, English department had begun the practice of admitting more people to doctoral-level graduate study  then could possibly find employment as full-time teachers of literature. While this practice provided plenty of students for graduate seminars and literature, it had the unhappy effect, Kytle thought, of lowering the status of composition instruction. (130)

Chapter 8: Freshman English and War

Universal requirements prosper in wartime… certainly the advent of World War II firmly cemented in place the universal requirement in introductory composition, even though it brought about enormous changes in the curricula of freshman English itself. (155)

The communication skills episode affected history freshman English and a number of important ways for one thing, the development of this new approach to the basic course instigated the establishment of a professional association for teachers: the conference on College composition and communication. The definition of writing as communication rather than expression moves teachers to consider rhetoric as a possible theoretical resource for composition instruction to the first time since the course was invented. The advent of communication skills upon the scene of freshman English also marks the first time that English departments ownership of the basic course was challenged by authorities at different clouds to diaper it from it humanist moorings in literature and current- traditional pedagogy. (156)

But general education was also motivated by quite different concerns that were foregrounded by the advent of the second world war. Once America entered the war, educators lost no time in arguing the point of education was the preservation of democracy, and those who town general education advertised it as the means by which the education of citizens in a democracy should be pursued. In other words, the war and its attendant rhetoric fomented desire for a return to the older, more centralized and unified approach to higher education that had formerly been  designated “liberal.” (162)

Perhaps the most important of these potentials was the emphasis on communication rather than expression. To make communication central to a pedagogy suddenly makes audiences, messages, and situations important. In such a milieu humanist focus on self improvement fades from view, and teachers attention is wrenched away from text outword, towards the world and it’s problems. (171)

In this passage Malmstrom  names all the innovations brought to the required first year course by persons who were truly informed and interested in communication skills: it’s emphasis on the social, It’s insistence that the point of language use his communication rather than expression; it’s melding of the practical with a patriotic ideal; it’s trust of students’ willingness and ability to learn on their own. (177)

The goal of freshman English was to create humanist subjectivities. Its pedagogy centered on the examination of humanist texts. Its instructional tools—literature, current-traditional discourse theory, and traditional grammar—we’re treated as a exemplars or standards to which students were expected to measure up. Communication skills, I’ll be other hand, we’re grounded in theories of discourse borrowed from the social sciences their indebtedness to social science was apparent in their use of impure cool testing, in their emphasis on the social uses of language, and their interest in public rather than private uses of discourse. Such courses supposedly fitted instruction to students’ ability rather than the other way around. (181)

Furthermore, the emphasis on communication open the course outward toward the world rather than in word for the students’ expression of their experiences and insights. (181)

Most communication skills programs have been phased out by 1960, although some of the apparatus they initiated, such as placement testing, remains as part of current composition programs… But resistance to communication skills on the part of traditional English teachers cannot be discounted as a factor in its demise. (183)

Most seriously, from the point of view of the study, general education offer the university a new rationale to support the universal requirement in introductory composition. (186)

Connors

Composition rhetoric is neither a stagnant survival nor any of a hundred proposed revolutions.  It exists, as it always has, as an ever shifting balance between the old and comforting and the new and exciting, the ways of lore and the ways of theory, the push of societal pressure and the inertia of academic traditions. (17)

Introduction

Postwar Composition-Rhetoric (1865-1885)

Consolidation Composition-Rhetoric (1885-1910)

Modern Composition-Rhetoric (1910-1960)

Most issues in composition methodology were decided, one way or another, by 1910, and after 1910 we emerge into what I call the Modern period of composition-rhetoric, a period of relative stasis that is usually associated with the pejorative uses of the term “current traditional rhetoric.” The Modern period of composition-rhetoric is defined by the almost absolute reign of a freshman composition requirement and the habits and industries that grow up around such a dominant institution. During this time, freshman composition programs take on their current forms, under the general direction of but somewhat autonomous from English departments. The huge courses are taught multiple sections by “section hands” who are either graduate assistants or instructors, many of whom are frustrated literary specialists who teach writing only because compelled. During the Modern period, it becomes a truism that student dislike for Freshman Composition is exceeded only by the dislike of its teachers. (13)

On the level of form and methods, composition rhetoric was forced bicultural pressures to insist more and more strongly on formal and mechanical correctness after 1900, and this formal obsession became the hallmark of the course. (13)

As young put it describing his “current-traditional paradigm,” this was a rhetoric consisting of

Emphasis on the composed product rather than the composing process; the analysis of discourse into words, sentences, and paragraphs; the classification of discourse into description, narration, exposition, an 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. (“Paradigms and Problems,” 31)

In addition, Gary Tate has identified as other key elements in this form of rhetoric “A focus on expository writing, they believe that reality is located in the external world, A denial of the personal voice of the student writer, A simpleminded prescriptiveness, an emphasis on reason to the exclusion of the other human faculties, A devotion to a simple, linear view of the composing process, and a belief that the primary job of a writer is to transfer to the page ideas that exist already in the mind” (“Current-Traditional Rhetoric,” 1).

Berlin and Hobbs

Berlin's Key Actors in the 20th century drama of "conflicting positions on the most effective method for teaching writing" (264):

Summary: During the between-wars period "the insistence of liberal culturalists on genius as the essential element of writing at its best was now given a democratic application. Each and every individual was seen to possess creative potential, a potential the proper classroom environment could unlock and promote" (260)

1. sponsors of socially-based rhetorics (Dewey & Scott): an "insistence that writing is a social act performed through a complex interaction of writer, audience, subject, and language" (263) & "Those in the camp of social rhetoric, on the other hand, lay the blame for these disorders at the feet of the social and political arrangements generated by capitalism" (263).
2. sponsors of expressive writing (Hugh Mearns, Harold Rugg, John T. Frederick, Theodore Baird): "writing from this perspective enables students to get in touch with the private and the personal, the source of all that is meaningful" (261) & "those supporting the value of expressive writing looked to private and personal resolutions to the economic and social catastrophes of the day" (263). Dominant during the between-wars period, according to Berlin.
3. Social efficiency movement (G.K. Hall): "This movement argued for considering a student's stage of psychological development in planning instruction. Schools were also to become attentive to the needs of the workplace...Finally, school and work were regarded as places of equal opportunity where the best, the brightest, and the hardest working were to be rewarded in accordance with the strictest meritocratic principles" (256-57)
4. Liberal culturalists: "genius as the essential element of writing at its best" (260)
5. Life Adjustment: "personal and social adjustment became the great concern of post war education" (264), the "dominant influence in secondary school writing instruction" (265)
6. Communications Course: "a combination of writing, reading, speaking, and listening activities" (265) & "strongly influenced by the General Education movement during the 1930s and by the General Semantics school of linguistics" (265)

My Periods:

• 1945-1960 (p. 264-269)
• 1960-1975 (p. 269-275)
• 1975-1985 (p. 275-282)

As Lester Faigley has pointed out, an enormous expansion due to Baby Boomers came about just as composition studies was aspiring to disciplinary status: from 2.7 million in 1949-50, to 3.6 million in 1959-60, to more than 8 million in 1969-70 (250)

YALE!!! And liberal culture...

Of course, current-traditional rhetorics did not go unchallenged in the new college and university. Their most important opponent was situated at Yale and other established prestigious Atlantic seaboard colleges. These schools came to stand for an ideal of English studies which has been labeled "liberal culture." It was Yale, after all, which in 1892 opposed Harvard's use of literature to teach composition, arguing that literature ought to be studied for its own sake. The proponenets of liberal culture argued that the literary text was the expression of the highest potential of human nature, representing the perfect fusion of truth, goodness, and beauty. From this perspecdtive, the claims of current-traditional rhetoric were altogether too democratic, arguing mistakenly that writing, like enginnering or farming or pharmacy, could be taught.

(this passage continues for another page or so and is useful in thinking through the backgrounds of Bingham and Towle, in particular)

See Palmer, Glenn. "Culture and Efficiency Through Composition." English Journal 1.8 (1912): 488- ?.
(A summary of the disagreement between Harvard and Yale was found in this essay...)

1945-1960

For expressionistic rhetoric, writing--all writing--is accordingly art. This means that it can be learned, and learned by all, but not taught. The work of the teacher is to provide an environment in which students can learn what cannot be directly imparted in instruction. The expression of the writer is the product of a private and personal vision that cannot be expressed in normal, everyday parlance. This language, after all, refers to the public world of sense data and social experience. The writer must instead learn to use metaphor to express meaning that is separate and above this limited realm. Sensory experience, on the other hand, is also very important since it provides experiences that can be used as materials for metaphor. Writing from this perspective enables students to get in touch with the private and the personal, the source of all that is meaningful. It therefore empowers the student to shape a newly uncovered and better self--that is, half creating and half discovering the source of all truth and value. Furthermore, this product of the authentic writing experience--the truly personal--is organic, representing the perfect fusion of form and content. Finally, this method of teaching writing is concerned with power and politics, sometimes by implication and at other times openly in its critique of the dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism. Its response is to enable each individual to realize his or her true self in order to bring about a better society. In other words, the private and personal is always prior to the public and social, the latter being an effect of the former. (261)

...the communications course was varied in the form it assumed in colleges during the late 1940s and the 1950s, even including attempts to introduce life adjustment into the college. Most of these courses, however, were conservative, offering a current-traditional approach that presented communications in the service of the democratic ideals recently challenged from abroad. (265)

The distinguishing feature of the 1950s in considering the relation of literature to composition is that, for the first time since the Uniform Lists, college professors were in large numbers insisting that the best way to teach composition is through reading literature and writing about it. This was, in large part, a result of the sense of professional identity achieved by teachers of literature following the war... As indicated earlier, the arguments offered in defense of this view came directly from the tradition of liberal culture, still alive in literary studies. Students, it was charged, had nothing to say and literature provided them with rich subject matter. Writing about themselves required "a flair amounting to genius," and most were certainly "not geniuses." Reading literary texts and writing about them provided the knowledge and stimulation that the student needed to become liberally educated and enabled the teacher (almost certainly at this time a male) to keep his career alive and vital.  (266-67)

...the liberal culturalist notion of the uses of literature in the writing class is offered in the name of democracy. College is to prepare the leaders of a democratic society, and literature is the best means for doing so. (267)

Writing about literature was also offered in the interests of the college teachers themselves: after all, it was literature that they knew best and, if they were to be forced to teach writing, they ought certainly to do so by focusing on their own area of expertise. That this might mean serving the professional interests o the teachers more than the instructional needs of the students was not considered. (267)

The New Rhetoric and its proponents--including such as Janice Lauer, Richard Young, Frank D'Angelo, Richard Larsen, James Kinneavy and George Yoos--would in the next decade work to establish rhetoric and composition as a discipline. Their vision of composition teaching would continue to impact theorists and practitioners through the end of the century, with the majority of graduate programs offering coursework in historical rhetoric. (269)


Steward, Randall. "The Freshman Course Needs a Current of Ideas." College English 17 (1955): 16-19.

The Life and Legacy of Fred Newton Scott

Some Very Loose Observations:

• Order: Chronological (boring)
• Short on autobiography or personal life
• Summaries of Scott's writing are often BORING

Introduction

This biography intends, then, to reexamine the career and contributions of Fred Newton Scott, a remarkable renaissance man, whose passions and interests ranged unrestricted within the vistas of intellectual experience. (5)

The Formative Years

Important educational influence[s] in Scott's early life (9)

The profound and enduring effects of Scott's schooling are immediately apparent in his life and work. (9)

Scott's teaching schedule... (15)

First, he was clearly not in sympathy with the position that the ability to express oneself was primarily a matter of inherited gifts and therefore unteachable, essentially a Romantic position. If one could systematically identify and describe rhetoric's effects, then it follows that one could learn, to some degree anyway, to produce them. (15)

Scott's assignments... (16)

From the beginning, Scott's published work reveals his deep and thorough scholarship; an ability to organize his material systematically, from large general concepts to the smallest of details; original and provocative insights; and a prose style that is lucid and unpretentious. (20)

Discovering a Career

A few great quotes on Scott's philosophy:

Scott says the aims of this work are simple: "If we can get [students] first to think straightforwardly about subjects in which they are genuinely interested, and then, after such fashion as nature has fitted them for, to express themselves clearly and connectedly, we have done about all we can hope to do (120-21) (22)

To realize his goals, Scott directed his energies toward three essentials: "first, continuity and regularity of written exercises; second, much writing, much criticism, and much consultation; third, adaptation of method to the needs of the individual student. To secure the first, the students is made to write frequently and at regularly recurring periods, and is encouraged to write at set hours regardless of mood or inspiration. The second point I may be permitted to illustrate by saying that I have read and re-read this year something over 3,000 essays, most of them most written by a class of 316 students. The third essential seems to me the most important of the three. That the instructor should somehow lay hold of the student as an individual is, for successful composition work, simply indispensable" (Payne 121) (22).

In examining Scott's teaching assignments... (24)

...what material he covered and his effectiveness with his students (24)

Opposing the Romantic notion of a muse, he suggests setting a time and place to work and disciplining oneself to get there at regular times. (25)

Several points about Scott's composition teaching emerge, even from this brief sample of his directions to students. First, we note his curiosity about the composing process itself. Second, we note the lack of dogmatism in these instructions. Third, the preponderance of the questions suggests that Scott placed high priority on the generation of subject matter, rather than on organization and style. Fourth, he consistently opposes flowery or decorative language and stresses the fact that good figurative language grows out of the subject. Finally, his instructions remind students that writing, to be effective, must have a context. (26)

Fragments of his correspondence (27)

Scott's perception of writing is anti romantic insofar as it distrusts emotion not brought under control. In the 1890s his approach was much more original and advanced than that of anyone else working in this field. (35)

In the Public Arena

the textbooks of the time (what were they during the Murray years?)

Analysis of first textbook (Paragraph Writing) (40-42)

Relationship with secondary teachers.

Scott's concern with the full range of English education from the primary grades through college... (46)

Reorganization, Recognition, and Reality

Administrative and curricular achievements: "In the fall of 1903, The Department of Rhetoric was created. (52)

Scott's own perceptions of his students and classes are contained in his diaries. The portrait they provide is engaging and intensely human. (56)

While letters from colleagues and friends across the country and public records of his involvement in professional organizations tell us about his public life, they do not begin to give us a complete picture of the work and activities which occupied him daily. For that we must turn to his diary and daybooks which, while incomplete, do, for the years he kept them, provide a remarkably detailed and intimate account. (60)

Involvement with professional organizations (Murray, NCTE? CCCC?)

Some Major Publications

Scott's publications in the first decade of the twentieth century were, like his interests, prolific and eclectic. (70)

Types Discussed:

• Teacher training/pedagogical projects
• 'The Figurative Element in Grammatical Terminology" (77)
• articles on rhetoric for New International Encyclopedia (78)
• The papers he published in PMLA

A Reputation Established

His teaching schedule

the effects some of his publications were having on teaching at other schools... (87)

This one brief swing through the East illustrates Scott's professional contacts... (88)

Scott continued to speak at teachers' meetings and at individual high schools, usually in and around Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Chicago. (89)

Speaking with Authority

A review and evaluation ("overall, this book is somewhat disappointing" [101]) of Scott's textbooks...

Scott's relationship with publishers and commercial interests

A review of several of Scott's "best philosophical papers" (starts on p. 106)--What the West Wants in Preparatory English" and "Rhetoric Rediviva"and "The Genesis of Speech"

He makes an interesting judgment... "Of all the papers Scott produced during this period, none occupied him as long or as intensely as "The Genesis of Speech" (how does he know that--evidence? Daybooks...?). (112)

Two great quotes:

To reveal to him [the student] the effectiveness of the tools which he already knows how to use and to show him how to sharpen them and use them more effectively, is the language teacher's first task." (107)

...the main purpose of training in composition is free speech, direct and sincere communication with our fellows, that swift and untrammeled exchange of opinion, feeling, and experience, which is the working instrument of the social instinct and the motive power of civilization" (109).

Old and New Ventures

Relationship with newspapers/journalism...

Association with professional organizations (MLA, NCTE, journalism organizations)

Publications of Consequence

This chapter is just what the title suggests... Mostly a review of his published work of significance between 1905 and 1915:

There is no question that the materials Scott developed between 1905 and 1915 are the most consequential among his theoretical statements. His scientific and interdisciplinary approach to research were original in the language arts. Ultimately, he worked to reform the profession, to provide rhetoric, in its broadest context, the same dignity, respect and admiration accorded to all other academic fields. Scott believed he had made progress toward his goal. Unfortunately, he was overly optimistic. (143)

The Shadow of the Great War

Not much here--just an idea for research:

In reflecting on Scott's teaching at this time, one would had to take notice of the productivity of his rhetoric students. (153).

A Shift in Interest

The shift refers to his shift away from an interest in composition and rhetoric and towards journalism.

Nothing much of note here--mostly, he's just summarizing the papers that Scott wrote and delivered at professional meetings. I find these summaries incredibly boring.

Change, Loss, Recovery

Scott's value to the department and the devotion of his students to him is reflected in a number of incidents and letters during this period. (174)

Very personal reflections taken from his diaries about his wife's death.

Retirement

Not much here...

In Memoriam

Not much here...

---

Summary: A boring book that lacks credibility as Stewart's strong allegiance and affection towards his subject are everywhere. The chronological movement of the book seems obvious--but is there any other way to write history? Actually, if I look closer, there are certain themes within the chronology:

1. Teaching
2. Department of Rhetoric at Michigan
3. Scholarly writing
4. Travel and scholarly engagement

The Stewarts come back to these throughout the book. His significance is made clear throughout the book, in small ways and brief passages, rather than in some kind of summative statement at the end (which is, I think, what I was hoping for). Clearly, Scott touched many lives, but I found this book tedious to read, even though it did give me many good ideas of places to look for sources/evidence. I don't think I would read it had I not had this anterior motive.

Lone Wolf or Leader of the Pack?: Rethinking the Grand Narrative of Fred Newton Scott

Aside from his accomplishments, which speak volumes about him, Scott indeed meets the requirements for a hero set forth by historians. The very term great man theory is ascribed to Thomas Carlyle. In his 1841 work, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Carlyle classified six types of heroes, including the divinity, the prophet, the poet, the priest, the man of letters, and the king (10). Scott meets Carlyle’s definition of the hero as a man of letters—an “unexpected” hero who gathers students around him and imparts his wisdom (152). When he cannot gather students to him, he instead travels to them (159). Ultimately, the qualifications that Carlyle lists as common to the hero as a man of letters include “wit, wild laughter, energy, directness, [and] sincerity” (178). He also includes strong beliefs and healthy skepticism. (249-250).

I would like to argue, however, that while he was a great teacher, he also was very much of his time—part of the larger, organic movement in education, a networked group of teachers and scholars with shared goals and teaching practices. Many other teachers and scholars, some of whom worked closely with Scott, were just as progressive and lauded as he was. To fail to remember them is to continue, as Griffin says, to keep an entire history in the dark.
Acknowledging this larger tradition will also allow us to reposition composition and rhetoric as a field during the Progressive Era—a field with key figures who knew one another, working around the country, doing scholarship, administration, and teach- ing. (251)

Berlin also makes it seem as if Scott’s ideas were original, and not shared by others. (254)

While Mencken’s and Roethke’s assessments of Scott are not ones with which most scholars (and most of Scott’s former students!) would agree, they are wholly missing from any descriptions of Scott by other composition and rhetoric scholars. A balanced history of Scott should include his detractors as well as his supporters. (256)

The history that we tell about Scott (and other key figures in the field) needs to be complicated—radicalized rather than essentialized. While we cannot simply add in other figures and attempt to stir, we must envision what our history would look like if we not only added, but used and privileged other stories that we know to exist. What would this history look like if we added the negative as well as the positive? Avoided blanket statements and overviews in favor of specifics? Questioned the histories that we do have, not to knock them down, but to complicate them? Ultimately, we must recontextualize our history so that we can place other players where they belong—squarely within the box with Scott. We must create a lineage for composition history that is circular rather than linear, creating a three-dimensional collage rather than a flat picture. (256)

However, what struck me most as I reviewed documents concerning Buck and Scott was the evidence that Buck, who is often listed as Scott’s “most famous graduate student,” likely influenced Scott as much as Scott influenced her. A direct argument can be made for their being closer as peers than as teacher and student. (261)

So, what about the relationship between Murray and Graves?

What would a history look like if it put Scott in conversation with the people he knew, rather than putting him on a pedestal above them? What would a fuller exploration of scholar/ pedagogues in the history of composition and rhetoric, as well as the networks they belonged to, reveal? (263-64)

We must change our lore—Scott’s work must be better contextualized in relation with others, and the histories that we currently have must be rewritten in order to give us access to a fuller, richer history than we previously thought existed. We must be careful to understand the complexity of our own history, and our reflections about important figures in the field need to reflect this care. We should not ignore or dismiss nega- tive commentary, but seek to understand its value and place in our history. Blanket statements about scholars and pedagogues being the “only” people to do something, or the “only” models to look to, should be carefully evaluated rather than taken at face value. We must be more careful researchers and better historians in order to create accurate and reflective models of our history. (264)

Joseph V. Denney, the Land-Grant Mission, and Rhetorical Education at Ohio State: An Institutional History (Mendenhall)

Mendenhall, Annie. "Joseph V. Denney, the Land-Grant Mission, and Rhetorical Education at Ohio State: An Institutional History." College English 74.2 (Nov 2011): 131-156. Print.

One of the most pressing questions for historians of composition today is how to make local histories of individuals or institutions speak back to the dominant historical narrative of the field—a narrative that nearly always begins with Adams Sherman Hill’s development of English A at Harvard in 1874. (131)

Histories to consider:

• UNH
• Higher Education during my period: 1960s/1970s/1980s
• composition history (of this period)

Books on Composition History:

• Rhetoric at the Margins (David Gold)
• Local Histories (Gretchen Flescher Moon)
• A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck (Suzanne Bordelon)
• Mastrangelo, Lisa. “Lone Wolf or Leader of the Pack?: Rethinking the Grand Narrative of Fred Newton Scott.” College English 72.3 (2010): 248–68.
• Moon, Gretchen Flescher. “Locating Composition History.” Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition. Ed. Patricia Donahue and Gretchen Flesher Moon. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2007. 1–13.

Local histories, then, prove valuable because they reflect the diversity of institutional goals and initiatives that have been effaced in composition history. (131)

When she writes,

These and other scholars have shown that writing instruction in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was far more variable than we have previously assumed. (131)

...this essay provides an account of The Ohio State University’s (OSU) rhetoric department during the tenure of Joseph Villiers Denney, arguing that he appropriated and repurposed national trends in education and rhetoric in ways that complicate the narrative of rhetoric and composition’s decline in the late nineteenth century. (131-132)

...I'm thinking about the importance of an attention to era. A historian is attuned to how his/her figure figures into his/her era and I have only just begun looking into this or thinking about it with Harris' book. Needs much more.

This passage, and the italicized phrase, in particular, captures what I am after...

David Russell alone has discussed Denney’s innovation of discipline-specific and vocation-specific writing courses at Ohio State (58–59), but has not provided a detailed account of Denney’s work. Recently, Lisa Mastrangelo has called for additional research on Denney’s and other progressive educators’ contributions to the history of rhetoric. She notes that little research has been conducted on Denney’s work at Ohio State, despite his collaborations with Fred Newton Scott, a figure lionized in rhetoric and composition because of his well-known rhetoric department at the University of Michigan. (132)

SOURCES: Using a variety of archival evidence, including course catalogues, annual reports, faculty meeting minutes, and Denney’s writings, I detail how Denney’s attitudes about rhetoric underpinned his department’s curriculum. (132)

PURPOSES AND ARGUMENTS: In addition to recovering Denney’s educational ideals, I argue that the institutional context in which Denney worked also shaped the curriculum.

Organization of findings:

1. Background on OSU and higher ed during the period
2. Curriculum:

• Early years
• Expansion and Growth
• Consolidation with English

WHY DOES THIS STUDY MATTER: Ohio State contributes to our understanding of the larger narrative of the history of rhetoric and composition in two ways.

• First, it establishes that other progressive educators in addition to Fred Newton Scott attempted to elevate the study of rhetoric and composition and to provide extensive opportunities for writing instruction. Although Denney’s rhetoric department did not have the life span that Scott’s did, it nevertheless represents a significant movement in rhetorical education, and it deserves to be recognized in histories of the field.
• Second, my history of Ohio State asks us to complicate the narrative of rhetoric’s decline in the university system. The rhetoric department at OSU was both prosperous and progressive during its fourteen-year existence. (150)

With the expansion of local histories like this one, we might tell a more nuanced history of the field, one that accounts for the relationships between local, national, and international contexts. (150)

On Land Grant Colleges:

The unusual success of the Department of Rhetoric (at a time when, according to most historians, rhetoric was declining in academia) was a result not only of Denney’s progressive ideals and his influence as dean of the College of Arts, Philosophy, and Science, but also of Ohio State’s commitment to land-grant values of practical and democratic education. While practical courses of instruction were eschewed at more elite institutions as remedial or unscientific, they remained integral to Ohio State’s definition of itself from its founding well into the twentieth century. (132)

Historians of higher education agree that this dual (but unequal) emphasis on technical education and traditional liberal studies created an ambiguity that was a subject of contention in land-grant institutions (Thelin 76–77; see also Veysey; Renker). At Ohio State, notes university historian James Pollard, the role of liberal education was a divisive issue among the founding board of trustees: “A major issue of the formative period concerned the nature and scope of the as yet unborn College: [. . .] whether it should take the utmost advantage of the language of the Morrill Act or confine itself to a minimum practical program which would make it vocational rather than educational” (16). The board finally voted in favor of a larger scope for the university, and in 1878 they changed the name of the institution to The Ohio State University to represent this new direction. (134)