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)

Authoring a Discipline (Goggin)

Preface

This book traces the post-World War II emergence of rhetoric and composition as a discipline within departments of English in U.S. institutions of higher education. It examines the disciplinary formation through the lens of one of the most important vehicles for this field, its scholarly journals.. (xiii)

...this book focuses more broadly on the institutionalization of rhetoric and composition as a discipline but at the same time more narrowly on its major scholarly journals. (xiv)

Here I am concerned with the role of journals, the practices of editors, and the engagement of contributors in the disciplinary formation of rhetoric and composition within the United States between the years of 1950 and 1990. (xv)

I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting that journals alone construct the disciplinary work of a field (xviii)

History consists of myriad converging stories. Moreover, history, like evolution itself, as Gould argued, is filled with accidental happenings. Other combinations of people, places, times, and whatever would have led to a very different present. (xix)

Disciplines are made up of individuals who are enmeshed in complex webs of institutions that both make possible a range of problems and activities but also limit these. That is to say, disciplinary practices are carried out in real places by real people with their own complex arrangements of political, social, cultural, racial, sexual, and gendered ideologies and identities. (xxi)

Ch. 2 (1950-1965): ...this chapter shows that a common set of problems emerged around which a discipline could coalesce (xxii)

Ch. 3 (1965-1980): [this chapter] shows that this period was marked by self-conscious attempts of scholars and researchers to foster particular kinds of empirical theoretical, and historical research agendas that would move rhetoric and composition beyond the practical day-to-day considerations of writing instruction to larger, generally more speculative, considerations of literate practices and pedagogies. (xxiii)

Ch. 4 (1980-1990): [this chapter] shows that this was a time marked by twin forces of expansion and contraction: As objects of inquiry, questions, and methodologies proliferated (along with debates contesting various theoretical frameworks and methods), rhetorical practices and legitimizing apparatuses being forged narrowed. The paradox of proliferation and convergence was made possible by the ground prepared in the previous decades. Procedural systems for controlling the construction and distribution of knowledge were put into place not only in journals, but in professional organizations, graduate programs, and tenure-track positions, all of which experienced tremendous growth. (xxiii)

Chapter 2

As I argued in chapter 1, rhetoric have been largely subordinated English departments prior to 1950 because it had little access to the kinds of forums in which disciplinary practices are constituted and legitimized. Moreover, having been transformed into composition, rhetoric had not been constructed as a knowledge making, Using, or preserving endeavor.  Instead, rhetoric’s intellectual activities have been largely restricted to the first year college composition classroom and, thus, were dispersed and localized within specific institutions. (37)

Yet these were only initial steps. Between 1950 and the mid 1960s, it’s founders laid a more extensive groundwork for a discipline of rhetoric in composition, in the process carving an independent intellectual and social niche that would eventually help to create for it the place within the Academy. They began modestly, focusing largely on specific and local administrative and pedagogical issues of first-year college writing instruction. However, by the early 1960s the limitations of this mission are being increasingly challenged especially by some members of the CCCC, and a struggle for new directions took place. (38)

However, confronting disparate groups of students that differed in socioeconomic background, culture, gender, and discourses not only from the instructors but also from each other probably through a much brighter spotlight on the ineffectiveness of composition. Further, the challenge of finding ways to prepare the large cadres of English teachers needed to instruct the swelling ranks of students became more pressing as the field braced for the “great title wave of 1963”—as it was then called in the professional literature—the baby boomers. (39)

These forces of change in numbers and kinds of students, and in demands for better educated and more literate workers, among other forces, contributed to the conditions that made the emergence of the CCCC not only possible but necessary. (40)

Until the CCCC and its journal emerged, there simply had not been a vehicle for concerted efforts to examine of the problems of composition. (48-49)

What virtually all of the articles published in the 1950s shared in common was a deep dissatisfaction with first-year college composition as it was then taught. What they also shared was a tacit acceptance of the need for a required composition course. The first decade was not one of questioning the validity of the course. (49)

...the struggle those in the field engaged in as they tried to define an identity and construct a rigorous discipline through which they could gain the respect and prestige of academia. It opened up the kinds of questions concerning methodology--what are acceptable research practices--and discourse--what are acceptable ways of writing in the field--and disciplinary training--what are acceptable disciplinary backgrounds--that would come to play a more prominent role in the next decade. (54)

By the end of the 1950s, however, the tides were shifting somewhat; a growing number of those committed to the field of rhetoric and composition began to rethink these questions and began to push for a more scholarly trajectory for the field. (59)

For more on the significance of 1963 see:

Endnote number 3, page 69

Finkelstein, Martin J.  the American academic profession: A synthesis of social scientific inquiry since World War II. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1984.

For a survey of freshman English circa 1950 see:

Wells, Edith. “college publications of freshman writing.”  College composition and communication 1.1(1950): 3-11. (meh...)

However, by far the two most common genres published in CCC during the 1950s and early 1960s were descriptive essays, and, for lack of a better term, what I call testimonial essays. The former as Walter Nash pointed out, “asks no more of an audience then to accept what they are told” (“introduction” 18). (Daly Goggin p. 45-46)

See

Nash, Walter. “introduction: The stuff these people right.” Nash 8–30.

–, Walter, ED. The writing scholar: Studies in academic discourse. Newbury Park: sage, 1990.

According to Merton, the process of constructing and claiming disciplinary authority involves two stages: first, establishing the phenomenon to be examined (the objects of study) and second, explaining the phenomenon (“Three Fragments” 1). These stages give rise to different kinds of rhetorical practices (Reeves 413). The first stage lends itself to describing the objects and the second to building arguments for explaining them. Descriptive and testimonial essays function to describe or name the objects. With the territory of objects staked, other kinds of genres that interpret, critique, explain, and evaluate can emerge. (47)

See:

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.

"English Writing Instruction" (Berlin and Cobbs)

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 givena  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. Thier most important opponent was situated at Yale and other established prestigious Atlantic seaboard colleges. These schools cam eot 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 literatrey text was the expression of hte 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 taht 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.

1960-1975

...the National Defense Education Act in 1958. This measure was at first designed to improve school instruction in math and the sciences, but by 1964 it also included the study of literature, language, and composition--particularly the latter two. (270)

James Berlin and Catherine Hobbs point to a number of measures by government agencies and private foundations during the late 1950s and early 1960s aimed at addressing the perceived crisis in public schools that arose, in large part, as a result of the Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957. The National Defense of Education Act, initially targeted at improving the teaching of math and sciences, ultimately expanded its mission to include the study and teaching of literature and composition. A "Basic Issues" conference on English studies was held in 1958 to investigate the issue of the English curriculum in the public schools. In 1959, the College Entrance Examination Board appointed a Commission on English to propose standards of achievement in English instruction. Berlin and HObbes argue that the most significant development for the teaching of composition during this time was the Woods Hold Conference of 1959 and its resultant report, The Process of Education (1960). Here, Jerome Bruner, the director of the conference, argued for a a school curriculum built around the structure of academic disciplines that would be presented to students in a sequential manner and according to their cognitive level of development. A final development was the establishment of Project English, a program for funding research founded in 1962 by the United States Office of Education. (270-271)

Berlin/Hobbes credit Bruner with providing the inspiration for what would become the "cognitive model" of composition instruction, for while Bruner was interested in the application of cognitive psychology to education, broadly speaking, the implications of his thinking for writing instruction, in particular, were clear....and developed by folks like Emig, Britton and Moffatt (see 270).

A second important development of this period came out of the 1966 Dartmouth conference. "Here the emphasis was not on mastering the composing process because of its value in solving writing problems, but experiencing it because of its value to the personal development of the student.

As Kantor has argued, the differences between the cognitive process of Bruner and the expressionist process of the Dartmouth Conference can be stated in a number of clear-cut oppositions: cognitive learning and intellectual development against affective response; a process of knowing "a body of material in a 'spiraling fashion' against a 'process of personal development"; communication for practical purposes against symbolic expression for self fulfillment; discovery through induction against creation through intuition. (273)

The result of the Dartmouth Conference was to reassert for United States teachers the value of the expressive model of writing. (273)

College English teachers who employed the expressionist process methods were Donald Murray, Walker Gibson, William Coles, Jr., Elizabeth Cowan, and Peter Elbow. It shouldn't finally be noted that the cognitivist process and the expressionist process were most often called upon to support divergent political perspectives. The expressionist process was frequently taught in classes organized around resistance to dominant political formations, particularly during the 1960s, in the interest of preserving the integrity of the individual. The cognitive process, on the other hand, most commonly adopted the stance of disinterested rationality, either avoiding political conflicts or addressing them as rational problems to be addressed in the terms of one academic discipline or another. The result was a tendency to reduce social, political, and personal problems to problems in technical management. Both cognitivists and expressionists emphasized the private and psychological elements of composing, the first the rational and the second the emotional. (274)

Revisiting the Current-Traditional Era: Innovations in Writing Instruction at the University of New Hampshire, 1940-1949 (Tirbassi)

Abstract

This institutional historical study highlights how the archival records of even one institutions's writing culture can complicate the field's current views of the current-traditional period and issues a challenge to some of the assumptions in composition studies about 1940s writing instruction. I argue that organizing writing theory and pedagogy in terms of periods can limit ways that we conceive of, study, and write about historical and current shifts in writing theory. (xv)

The findings from my study illustrate that institutional writing cultures emerge from reciprocal relationships between the formal writing curriculum and the writing initiatives in the extracurriculum. (xv)

Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that the study of institutional writing cultures is a productive means of understanding and analyzing contradictions, connections, and intersections among various sites of writing in localized contexts... (xv)

Chapter 1

Overall, my dissertation project explores innovations in writing instruction during the 1940s, using as its focal point a historical institutional case study of the University of New Hampshire (UNH) writing culture during this decade. (12)

However, we could also consider the possibility that the first-year course might be representative of traditional values of writing instruction--one of the last elements of the curriculum to change, rather than one of the first. Because all students entering the university must take the first-year composition course, and because faculty across the curriculum have opinions about the teaching of writing, the stakes are high in undertaking curricular change for this course and these changes must be vetted through a hierarchical series of institutional approvals (both official and unofficial). It seems that focusing our attention on the first-year course does not give us a complete understanding of the conversations shaping beliefs about writing and writing instruction--rather, this course provides us, in many cases, with existent, traditional or institutionally-approved views, rather than emerging views. (30)

One of my primary questions throughout this study has been how a focus on first-year composition histories can cause us to miss "writing instruction" in the periphery of the university setting. (31)

It is true, for example, that the University of New Hampshire first-year course looks much like the so-called current-traditional courses described by many composition scholars. However, we have the benefit of looking backward, of knowing what innovations in writing instruction came, in part, through scholars from this university just twenty years later, in the 1960s. Some of these scholars were students at UNH during the 1940s and were ostensibly influenced by the writing culture at UNH at the time, raising questions about what other aspects of the institution's writing culture we need to know more about. If we think of the first-year course as part of a larger writing culture, including creative writing or, under the larger umbrella of English Studies (since, at that time, the distinctions were not as solidified as they are now), then the field of composition might gain a more complete understanding of writing instruction before the field came into being...and perhaps how more current pedagogies, influenced by an institution's or region's writing culture, came into being. (32)

In this dissertation, I reconsider writing instruction in the 1940s and argue that innovations in writing instruction emerged in the 1940s in part due to the strictures of the formal curriculum, the diverse interests of the faculty, and extracurricular initiatives. I also discuss how external factors such as World War II, the GI Bill, and the interest in developing a nationalistic identity in the development of an American literary identity contributed to curricular shifts in formal and informal writing instruction. As part of this discussion, I do, naturally, include the first-year composition course at UNH, but I also look to innovations in the institutional periphery to gain a better understanding of how the extra curriculum and the formal curriculum shape one another (33).

Rather than focusing on extracurricular learning alone, I consider intersections between extracurricular and curricular approaches to writing instruction--how each arena influenced each other, and what influences contributed to a writing culture at the University of New Hampshire during the 1940s. I argue that the extra curriculum and formal curriculum blended, in a sense, to form that writing culture. (34)

Ch. 3: Considering the State of a University and of 1940s Writing Instruction

What is English Studies?: Establishing a Disciplinary/Departmental Culture (p. 89-102)

Throughout the 1940s (and even today), the faculty at UNH was comprised of primarily literature professors, yet there were many non-literature specialists in the department whose areas of concentration were quite varied: advanced composition (Carroll Towle), freshman composition (Lucinda P. Smith), reading (Robert G. Webster), speech and communications (Edmund Cortez, head, Ray Keesey, instructor), theatre/drama (William Hennessy), and journalism (Harold Scudder). In the mid-1940s, Professor Gwynne Dagger also added a Humanities course of study to the English Department curriculum. Though the interdisciplinary--as we might term it now--of the English Department was celebrated publicly by the faculty and by English majors, several of these specialized areas of study eventually separated from the English department. During the 1940s and even through the majority of the 1950s, however, these areas remained firmly seated in the English Department. While sub-fields in the department often struggled for legitimacy in proposing courses beyond the lower level, since upper level courses were reserved for the English major; upper level speech or writing courses were seen as additional or supplemental advanced electives that students could take if they had the time in their schedule. Although the literary emphasis of the department was well-established by the 1940s, the existence of sub-fields within--not yet splintered from--the English department and significant changes in the university culture that I have described above ensured that debates would continue about the nature of English studies as well as the types of training English majors should receive to be adequately educated in the field of English (90-91).

Such debates were also quite prevalent at the University of New Hampshire, especially after World War II. From 1945-1949, multiple departmental meetings were spent discussing the types of courses that English majors needed to take and the ways to measure whether an English major had gathered the knowledge the faculty had tried to impart. The discussion about which courses to take represented a theoretical tug-of-war regarding which subjects should be taught in English studies. Whether the discussion was about how to restructure the English Education track or whether to reduce course offerings, referred to in the minutes as "contracting courses," the core of the discussion always focussed on literary studies. (92)

A second example of the literature-centeredness of the department arose in the Fall of 1945, when the faculty considered "restructuring" the English major. (93)

(regarding fall 1945) What I want to highlight here is that while some advanced courses were offered in dramatics, speech and composition, almost all of the courses required for the English major were literature courses. (93)

Here are three specific examples of these views from an English Departmental meeting on October 24, 1945:

Mr. Bingham thought that the emphasis should be "on literature or reading" (94)

In practice, however, the Department Chair's literary focus seems to have had the most sway with the rest of the department. (94)

The primary nature of the senior examination at UNH was performance-based; the English faculty wanted to test students' knowledge of the literary canon. (96)

Each of these smaller departmental discussions as well as Young's letter highlights the fact that the UNH English Department, like many departments across the country, was engaged in a moment of disciplinary definition. These endeavors to articulate the types of courses English majors should take and to assess the knowledge of English majors represent incremental steps toward the creation of a particular vision (or version) of English Studies, one that, while consonant with the national trend, grew and developed in the local context of the UNH English department. For UNH English faculty of the 1940s, these attempts to define their daily work was both pragmatic and philosophical in the sense that as they were shaping and revising the curriculum, they were describing "what they do" and "why" to themselves and to other faculty, students, and administrators. The examples I have presented here, the course requirements and the comprehensive exam for the English major, suggest that on the macro level, the UNH department's theoretical leanings were towards literature as the "most" legitimate course of study for English. While some members of the UNH English Department faculty held wider interests than just literary pursuits, a point I will explore in the following section and in subsequent chapters, this structuring of the English major around literature courses privileged this pursuit of literary study in particular. That faculty took a more conservative approach toward designing the major provides some insight into the development of the English Studies department at UNH but it also raises questions about whether this design was motivated by personal philosophies or by other external influences such as institutional or administrative pressures. (100)

Themes, Theories, and Therapy (Kitzhaber)

Chapter 1: Teaching English Composition in College

Every fall thousands upon thousands of American young people enter college. Some of them come with no clear notion of what they want to study or what career they want to prepare for and are impelled only by a vague desire to "get a college education." Others know, or think they know, exactly what they want--degrees in engineering, chemistry, nuclear physics, law, home economics, business administration, journalism. Many girls frankly want only a college-educated husband because of his greater earning power, and they plan to remain students just long enough to get one, then quit to go to work or have babies. But no matter what the plans of the young people may be, no matter what their interests or expectations, they know they must count on one inevitable curricular fact: They will have to take freshman English. They will have been prepared for this course in various ways by their high school teachers--warned, threatened, cajoled, sometimes taught--but few of them look forward to it with confidence, fewer still with pleasure. Freshman English is one of those things like spinach and tetanus shots that young people put up with because their elders say they must. Whether it is called "Freshman English," "English Composition," "Freshman Rhetoric," or "Communication Skills," this course has been a staple of freshman studies for three-quarters of a century and is by far the most populous in the American college curriculum. (1)

The course is supported by two distinct arguments, sometimes advanced separately, more often combined in varying proportions. The first of these is practical: The course exists to provide immediate therapy for students whose academic future is clouded by their inability to manage the written form of English with reasonable ease, precision, and correctness. According to this argument the course must remedy deficiencies of high school training in English and develop each student's writing skill to the level of competence required by college work. This is the "service" concept of the course. (2)

The other argument supporting freshman English is not practical but liberal. This argument assumes that the primary purpose of the course is to focus the student's attention on fundamental principles of clear thinking and the clear and effective written expression of that thinking and to give him disciplined practice in applying the principles. This kind of intellectual training, it is argued, is essentially in any system of liberal education and is rigorous enough to merit inclusion without apology in a college or university curriculum; it is something that should have been begun in the lower schools but could not by any means have been disposed of there. (4)

In part because of these varying views of the essential purpose of the course, freshman English has assumed an enormous variety of forms from once campus to another. But there are other reasons, too, for its diversity. One is that the course in many colleges and universities is staffed primarily by graduate students and junior instructors who, though they are expected to carry out departmental policy towards the course in their classrooms, have little or no voice in determining this policy. The content and structure, for better or worse, are likely to be determined by the preferences of the director of the course or the department chairman, who usually does not teach the course (or if he does, teaches special sections of bright students). Being somehow insulated from the way their policies work out in most classrooms, the administrators are more free to indulge their particular professional interests or apply their pet theories. (4)

...forever beyond the reach of many people (7)

College professors have always been generous of advice to their high school colleagues, telling them what they should be doing that they are not and what they are doing that they should not be. Lately, moved by the general concern for improving American secondary education in the missile age, they have been even freer with their suggestions and have made them more specific. (8)

The deficiencies of high school English courses and textbooks and of the professional preparation of many high school teachers of English have now been made a matter of public concern, and rightly so if any large-sclae improvement is to be brought about. But what about the college English courses that nearly half of all high school graduates will take as freshmen? How good are these courses? How well are they being taught? What is in them? What are their announced purposes? What forms do they take? Do they avoid the weaknesses and errors for which college English teachers have blamed English courses in the secondary schools? (8)

The Data:

The syllabuses were all for the academic year 1960-61.
...the director of the study made an effort in 1961-62 [to visit] eighteen selected institutions, checking on the reliability of the syllabuses. (9)

Anyone reading this many syllabuses or visiting this many freshman English programs--or even a fraction of the number---would almost certainly be struck by at least three main weaknesses of the course as it is now constituted. First, he would be impressed by the confusion exhibited in the course--a widespread uncertainty about the aims, a bewildering variety of content, a frequent lack of progression within the course. Second, he would notice a variety of administrative adjustments and precautions that indicated little confidence in teh expertness of those who teach it. And finally, he wold notice that the textbooks for this course are for the most part less rigorous and less scholarly than those for other college freshman courses. (10)

In the most general terms, the principal aim of freshman English is usually said to be the improvement of the student's ability to read and write, the assumption being that these two skills necessarily go hand in hand. (10)

And if the particular college does not have a separate literature requirement, the statement of aims usually includes teaching the student "to read literature with understanding and appreciation." (10)

...ironically, most of the confusion in freshman English stems from differing notions of how writing ought to be taught. The most diverse content may be dumped into the course on the grounds that it will help the student learn to write better. (10-11)

Often there appears to be little real difference between the kind of content and writing assignments found in the freshman course and those with which the student has grown all too familiar during the three or four years before he entered college--topic sentences and the uses of the apostrophe, sentence outlines and the subject-verb agreement, papers to be written on "My Favorite Teacher," "A Happy Vacation," "My Most Embarrassing Moment." (13)

Although there are exceptions, especially in smaller colleges, the freshman course is most commonly assigned to graduate students who teach part-time while working toward an advanced degree and to junior instructors newly out of graduate school or recouping their finances by a few years of full-time teaching between the master's degree and the doctorate. The latter are found most commonly where no advanced degree in English is offered. The former flourish at almost very university that offers a doctorate in English and at many institutions where only a master's degree is available. (13-14)

On many campuses freshman English has been a subcollegiate course, one that is clearly more appropriate to the high school than to an institution of higher education. In intellectual rigor it has too often been inferior to other freshman courses. Most English departments have regarded it as a kind of therapy that they perform without enthusiasm, and they have made it into a narrowly practical how-to-do-it course with few if any intellectual pretensions. (14)

Because of the kind of course that freshman English has become as a result of these circumstances, the best minds in the profession have rarely concerned themselves with it or its problems. Few first-rate men have taken the trouble to write textbooks for freshman English. (14)

Under either plan this one year of English will be, for most students, the only required work in the subject. The second semester is, then, more often than not the terminal course, and with this in mind a little over two-thirds of the English departments operating on the semester plan require the reading of literature in this term to ensure that all students will have at least a minimal exposure. The writing tends mainly to be analysis and criticism of the literature. (23)

In the second term, three-fourths of the freshman programs require a long paper, and a little more than half of these ask for the usual "library" paper. (24)

The great majority of young people entering college each fall can expect to do a lot of impromptu writing in their freshman English classes. A few colleges, in fact, require all themes to be written in class, and many require half. The mean would probably be at least a third. ...These paper always count more heavily than those written outside of class. The explanation is that class papers are the only ones that the instructor can be absolutely sure are the result of every student's unaided labor. (25)

The special variety of freshman English course called "Communication" (sometimes "Basic Communication") is distinguished from the usual composition course by its primary focus on the process of communication, often in a fairly sophisticated way, and on the four "communication skills," reading, writing, speaking, and listening. The typical course of this sort is oriented more toward the social sciences than towards the humanities. The orientation of the composition course is the reverse. The communication course is concerned more with the accuracy of verbal expression and less with its esthetic qualities. The composition course tends to be equally concerned with both. (25)

But for the most part, except for the surviving communication courses, freshman English programs do not attempt to give formal instruction in oral discourse. (26)

Freshman English in the nation's colleges and universities is now so confused, so clearly in need of radical and sweeping reforms, that college English departments can continue to ignore the situation only at their increasing peril. (26)

Chapter 2: English Composition at Dartmouth College

Most other colleges and universities in the country are struggling desperately, in the face of mushrooming enrollments and a dwindling supply of qualified teachers, to maintain a semblance of quality in the teaching of this course, keeping the size of sections within reason and the number of sections assigned a given teacher within the bounds of human endurance. It appears to be a losing fight so far, with class size and teacher load rising steadily in many colleges, and closed-circuit television, large lecture sections, and theme readers burgeoning in others. (35)

The literature instruction in Dartmouth's Enlgish 1 and 2 is expertly conducted. The instruction in composition, though enjoying almost ideal conditions of class size and teacher load, often is impaired by the limitations that the prevailing patter of graduate study in English has imposed on the staff, who have been trained to teach literature and not composition. In laboring under this handicap, Dartmouth is by no means alone; to a large extent every college English department in the nation suffers from it. (72)

Chapter 3: Trends in Freshman English

In all of these changes, one can detect the outlines of a pattern emerging. 10 or 15 years ago it was usual to find at, say, a state university a full-fledged remedial course (often conferring credit); a lengthy "review" of grammar, usage, and mechanics in the first semester of the regular freshman course; and a writing clinic or laboratory. The marginal student was most carefully attended to and nursed along as far as he could be induced to go; it was much less common to find the superior student being given a comparable amount of attention. Today and colleges where there has been the greatest improvement in the caliber of entering freshman, it appears that the remedial course is the first to go; then the regular freshman courses freed from the "review of fundamentals"; next the writing clinic is dropped; and in a few instances freshman composition itself has in effect disappeared, being replaced by course in literature with a certain amount of required writing. It seems likely that this is the way most four-year institutions are now headed, and they will move in this direction just as fast as the caliber of their students will prevent them to. (93-94)

Finally, major efforts are now being undertaken to upgrade the teaching of English schools in much the same way that instruction in science, mathematics, and foreign language has recently been improved. The commission on English of the college entrance examination board sponsored institutes on 20 university campuses in the summer of 1962 at which 900 high school teachers to graduate courses in literature, language, and composition. The United States office of education has initiated "project English," which is promoting research to improve the English curriculum at all levels. Six "curriculum study centers" have already been established as a part of this program. Each of these will spend up to five years working out sequential curricula in English and writing curricular materials to try it out in the classroom. Many local and regional projects, some of them of great scope and consequence, have also been undertaken and will soon make their influence godly felt, project in Pittsburgh, in Westport, Connecticut, in Lincoln, Nebraska, in Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere. (96)

The changes already mentioned in freshman English courses are evidence of some adjustments to these changed conditions, but so far there is little sign of a really searching reevaluation of the English courses of the freshman and sophomore years and the relation to the English curriculum of the schools. If college English departments continue to delay such a reassessment of their own horses, there likely within less than five years to find themselves in the unaccustomed position of having major changes forced upon them by the lower schools. (96)

But when one takes a close look at the freshman English courses which nearly half of all the young people graduate from high school will take, it becomes painfully evident that the muddle in the college course is scarcely better than the one the college teachers have to deplored in high school English courses, with the sobering difference that so far almost nothing is being done in the colleges to reform the freshman course. There is no widespread impulse to think through afresh the premises and purposes of this course (or perhaps one should say to think them through for the first time); to match it with instruction in the high schools and make it the end link in a chain instead of an isolated phenomenon; to anticipate prepare for important changes that are imminent in the English curriculum schools; to offer instruction in prose composition at an intellectual level compatible with college or university study. Instead, college English departments seem increasingly willing to abandon the responsibility for giving systematic construction and composition just as soon as a majority of entering freshman show themselves able to observe a minimum standard of correctness and written English--as though near correctness were all that one should try to teach in a composition course, as though correct writing were necessarily the same as good writing. (98-99)

There are quite many things wrong with freshman English in college as with English in high school, and it is just as urgent that something be done about them. Some of the weaknesses of the college course are undoubtedly the result of having to remedy (or try to remedy) efficiencies earlier instruction. But most of them arise from a vast uncertainty about aims, about content, about methods--the same uncertainty that has afflicted the teaching of English in high school. (99)