First-Year Composition is one of very few courses in university curricula across the nation in which all students are required to either take it or test out of it. Across the country, college composition seems, in theory, to be organized centrally around certain key cornerstones.

First, it seems fairly clear that this is a service sequence of courses: usually two, English 1010 and English 1020, but certainly not limited to this structure for the entire university. While situated and generally taught in English departments, and while basically funding all the other courses within these departments, the composition courses and those who teach them have a much broader responsibility to all those in the university.

Second, it seems clear that composition courses are implicitly designed to publicly certify our students' literacy skills to all the university. These courses are seen across the university as places for students to develop the basic writing skills necessary to move forward. This course sequence then is the unofficial certification for all open admissions students--the university community expects the faculty teaching these courses to certify students as literate.

It is important to realize that English departments agreed to all these points. English departments, as they saw their undergraduate majors dwindling as more and more new students decided on majors that could actually demonstrate employment opportunities, welcomed their only opportunity to avoid going the way of Classics Departments to virtual extinction. English departments in effect said "yes--send us these students; we are the best trained faculty on campus to deal with them." Of course, the average literature professor was neither trained nor had much inclination in actually teaching these students to write and read to appropriate levels, so the departments went about hiring an "underclass" to do this work for them. This underclass, the compositionists, can now provide a more realistic view of the place of composition.

THE COMPOSITION CLASS IN REALITY

Presently, the composition sequence is still very much embedded in the realm of the English department empire, but the department does not see it as a university core course to prepare students, but instead as a step-child in a new marriage. In sexist terms, the predominately male department does not mind the second marriage to the predominately female composition field because this marriage comes with a healthy financial dowry; but the male does not want to take much responsibility raising his bride's children, born out of wedlock and from an undesirable class.

Hence, college composition is seen as a necessary evil in English departments, as something that most professors are loath to teach and happy to get others to do in their place (as long as they don't ask for too much pay or tenure very often). Therefore, composition instructors are still generally the lowest paid and lowest ranking members of the English department; many are not even members of the department at all, but instead are adjuncts and graduate students who teach an alarmingly high number of these courses.

Second, this course is often not what the rest of the university wants it to be. Many departments have a two-course sequence and much of the writing that takes place here is writing about literature and personal realization writing. Of course this type of writing has its purpose and place, but as a university core course much more should be expected from this class or classes. The literature component plays an interesting role in the composition sequence. Many English departments are not rich enough or sufficiently large enough to be able to hire people to teach this odious sequence, and so literature faculty must from time to time get their hands dirty. Teaching literary works, short stories, poems, and drama in the second half of the composition sequence has become a way for many literature scholars to be seen to be teaching writing, but in fact, they are still teaching literature. What writing skills these prospective scientists, engineers, business leaders, and medical doctors gain from writing about literature has still to be demonstrated, and the call for writing across the curriculum came not from the English department, but from faculty across the curriculum, who still could not see students' writing skills improving sufficiently through this personal essay to literary analysis sequence.

Third, this course is not, no matter what others think it is, a refresher course for skills already learned. Simply stated, for so many of these students these communicative skills have yet to be learned, and the idea of writing as a process toward a product is still alien to most of these students. Many of the instructors and professors teaching these courses lack the training to teach writing, especially from the ground up. This lack of acquired communication skills is the result of a complex cognitive problems, and most, if not all, of the instructional staff are not trained in these areas. Indeed, most of our composition instructors still come to us from literature-based programs, and those who come from composition-based graduate programs (that long ago decided teaching grammar was wrong) still lack the grammatical knowledge and awareness to help students understand and correct their own work.

Fourth, because composition personnel are overworked and undertrained, writing centers and other tutorial centers also have been developed to help individually train these students and to work with more difficult or time-consuming individual writing problems. While in theory these are supplemental workstations for the composition personnel, many writing centers are, in fact, where a great deal of composition instruction actually takes place. For many students entering a writing center, this is the first time they get an individualized conversation about the demands of writing, and, for many, this is the first time they have talked with someone trained in the area, since even their composition instructor may be a literature graduate student just passing through. Unfortunately, the students must return to the writing classroom to an environment generally devoid of tried and tested composition successes.

Fifth, with the introduction of computer labs and electronic classrooms, compressed video labs, and internet-based courses, the composition instructor now has a variety of delivery systems and technologies to become proficient in. However, these technological applications, which promised to make writing easier, composition instruction more cutting edge, and to produce better writers have simply not lived up to their promises. Sure, students seem to like writing on computers more, but we have not seen the hard reliable, replicable results we were promised. In addition, instructors are generally not sufficiently trained in this technology, and at the end of the day the technology is too expensive to implement, too expensive in its upkeep, and too expensive to use given our class sizes.

THE REAL FAILURE OF COMPOSITION THEORISTS: LACK OF REALITY

In the last fifteen years we have seen a gradual change in the demographics of English departments. While certainly most departments are still literaturebased, more tenure-track positions are going to those outside the traditional literary fields to meet the ever-rising tide of badly prepared students entering college/university. As we noted earlier, these students must take college composition, and as their numbers have increased, so has the need for better trained writing specialists. Indeed we have seen the rise of undergraduate writing majors, and more masters and doctorate-level degree programs in composition. However, it is the current training of these writing specialists and our own poorly reasoned attempts at gaining professional respectability from colleagues who don't respect our work that have continued to damage the field; those of us who are really in composition know we undercut our own positions of strength in attempts to prove ourselves worthy to join our literature colleagues. Our profession, on the graduate level, quickly moved from what we claimed we were doing, producing writing teachers, to the more lofty, but less realistic, goals of producing rhetoricians and other theorists.

THE POLITICAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COMPOSITION AND LITERATURE

After spending years developing some of the best composition programs in the country and helping to produce people committed to making a difference with these new underprepared populations of entering undergraduate students in open admissions universities, composition studies ran off the tracks.

For many of these early years, composition was an honorable field among the minority of graduate students who entered it for the altruistic goals of helping others succeed. Of course, composition was considered a stepchild by our literature colleagues, as a weird subset of English education populated by people who for some odd reason wanted to teach students who should never have been allowed into our universities in the first place. Our first text in the field, Shaughnessy's, was essentially a manual on how to deal with this new population, and our first conferences and journals dealt with the day-to-day instructional needs of our students. We had a room of our own, we had dialogue among ourselves, and essentially we were being left alone to get on with a job no one else wanted to do--to educate people our colleagues wanted no part of.

Then the bottom fell out of the market. Through a combination of more open admissions students entering our colleges and universities, another even more serious decline in liberal arts enrollments, and the subsequent administrative decision to offer more composition classes and fewer literature classes, the market changed. In English departments, literature retirements were now replaced by composition positions, and new positions in English departments went to badly needed compositionists. Developmental Studies departments appeared on many campuses staffed by professionals interested in teaching writing and reading at their most basic levels, and fairly rapidly it became clear that newly minted Ph.D.s in the usual literary specialties were becoming unemployable (the fact that English departments continue to produce more graduates in these areas than there will ever be jobs for is also criminal--yet another, although related, essay).

What happened next was predictable. Composition doctoral programs could not sufficiently produce enough trained professionals fast enough to meet the demand, and the more savvy literature programs began to certify their students as compositionists, while still pushing them to pursue their literature specialties. These people, with perhaps one course in composition theory, a couple of years teaching assistantship duties (teaching a subject, writing, they had next-to-no love for), since their professors would not teach composition, and a literary dissertation with the word "Rhetoric" in the title started to compete and get composition jobs that a few years before would not have been open to them. Indeed, today one need only look at the number of English literature doctoral programs masquerading as Composition programs to see why we in composition have not advanced professionally as we should have. Frankly, taking a course in composition theory, a couple of courses in Classical and Modern Rhetorical Theory, and writing a rhetorical analysis of James Joyce for a dissertation does not a composition expert make.

OUR DISCIPLINE'S LATERAL MOVEMENT

It is perhaps compositionists' own fault that our discipline has become so sidetracked. One need only note just how few composition classes composition experts actually teach. Often these very experts are hired into assistant professorships and immediately take over writing program administration positions. In addition, many neocompositionists have never been entirely content with their role in teaching writing and have looked for more acceptance from their literature colleagues. This need for acceptance has led our field away from work in how to teach writing more effectively and how to more effectively help student writers become more proficient. Instead, because of some compositionists' need for more literary acceptance, we have essentially allowed our profession to lose its way. We were beginning, through empirically, based research, to develop concretely tested, replicable methodologies that helped students acquire certain writing skills; we were beginning to set boundaries for our emerging discipline. However, we fell (or were we pushed?) for the patently absurd notion that a discipline could exist without boundaries, and that anyone who brought the latest theory to our table, linked however thinly to writing, was by definition a compositionist.

Now when we have national searches for the next generation of compositionists, we are faced with applicants resplendent with the heavy respectability of work influenced by critical theory, by Marxist theory, by our supposed liberatory duty to help students resist and subvert the dominant discourse, and by postmodernity, by Habermas, and by Derrida. We saw the beginnings of this nonsense with the call for Students' Right to Their Own Language--a perhaps wellintentioned, although patently maternalistic, call that students never asked for. But now, so-called composition dissertations have been so infiltrated by so much extra-academic, polemic, diatribic influences that it is not clear where we are headed.

What is clear however, it that none of these influences and clever discussions have very much to do with teaching writing. We seem content instead to bring theories from the "outside" and make them applicable to our "inside." Indeed, even the most sacred cow of the profession, the role of rhetoric, needs careful attention. Have we really ever demonstrated that classical rhetoricians have enough to offer the composition classroom, and for that matter have we ever really stopped to reconsider the so-called importance of medieval or contemporary rhetoricians' theories to our students' very current academic lives? The study of rhetoricians (classical to contemporary) may have more to do with looking like a "real field of study" for our literature colleagues than advancing our own!We must face facts soon! Our students still need--more now than ever--faculty trained and committed to the teaching of writing. We can neither find this practical training in classical rhetoric studies or in the works of Jacques Derrida! Instead, we must recapture the spirit that attracted the early pioneers to our professions--we must return to teaching writing and studying how to do this more effectively for our students. Our greatest paradox to date is that composition theory has been driven lately by too much theory and not enough evidence. As two who have spent a great deal of time in the trenches, what we see as the failure of composition studies is that the people offering the "competing theories" don't spend enough time in the trenches near the same battle as we do. One would think that with the amount of theory being posited that by now we would know more about what actually works--but we don't.The chilling truth is that we are no closer to knowing how to teach writing than we were at the beginning of the process movement. We have unsystematically bounced from one rhetorical theory to another critical approach to another speculator-du-jour, like sailors in search of wind and bereft of a compass; in this directionless process, we have moved away from many of the key pedagogical areas of writing instruction we needed immediate answers to. We are now instead being swamped by theoretical waves. We have too many competing theories, and not enough people sufficiently trained in research design actually trying to test some of these theories' hypotheses.

QUESTIONS THAT REQUIRE ANSWERS IF COMPOSITION IS TO BECOME A DISCIPLINE

With this influx of new student populations, most unprepared to meet the real writing demands of the academy and careers beyond it, we must again begin to provide trained and valued practitioners of composition. We must rebuild our discipline. Only this time we had better do it correctly or we will lose the moral and academic authority to serve this population once and for all. The challenges are great, and we already know many of them.

Our students lack the most basic writing skills. We know they cannot yet process thoughts into relevant, cohesive, coherent academic prose. We know they cannot proofread their written attempts into standard written English. We know they lack the skills to integrate others' work cohesively and correctly into their own writing. We know that they know little about audience concerns, and we know that they are unclear about rhetorical choices available to them. We know they have had limited success in writing; it is an act they detest or, worse, fear.

Our students lack the most basic reading skills. We know that they have trouble reading at age-appropriate levels and lack the requisite comprehension skills to gather information from various sources. We know that their analytical skills are weak, and they have trouble summarizing and paraphrasing. We know they read painfully slowly, and we know that their vocabulary is painfully limited--and that these two deficiencies attribute to poor comprehension and textual misunderstandings. We know they do not view reading as a pleasurable activity; it is an act they detest or, worse, fear.

Our students lack sufficient cultural information to begin to discuss issues they will meet, or are assumed to already know, in many of their university classes. We know they are unaware of the political and social events that have allowed them entrance into our colleges and universities. We know their sense of history and geography is incredibly warped. We know that these students have no real idea what their future holds, and many have only the vaguest ideas of why they are in college or university to begin with.

We hold all these deficiencies to be self-evident, and we need to use what we know about our students to better prepare the people who will teach them. It also seems evident to us that the current method of preparing composition specialists has not really improved our students' lot. We need a radical reformation of our profession and the reform must come from within. We know that jobs in composition are going to be plentiful for some time; more unprepared, than prepared, students are coming to colleges and universities, and open admissions institutions have really not seen the decline in enrollments that our honors colleges and selective admissions schools have. However, this needed reformation is disciplinary in scope; we must be about much more than job acquisition, otherwise we are not a discipline, but an available labor pool instead. We must do a better job of teaching students to write, and so we must do a better job of becoming discipline-specific professionals.

OUR SOLUTION

We see the need for a new academic structure and approach to teaching writing if we are to improve the teaching of writing in American open admissions colleges and universities. Our primary call would be that all developmental reading and writing courses, first-year composition sequences, and advanced writing courses be placed in their own department. We would see this department staffed by compositionists, whose only interests would be the teaching of writing at various levels and conducting applied research into how to teach writing more effectively. We must begin to rebuild our boundaries and in this spirit we posit the following boundary cornerstones:

No One Should Be Forced to Teach Writing Who Does Not Want To

The move from the traditional English department should include only those who have been trained in composition, or those who are willing to join such a department and take part in monthly training workshops. Professionals in literary fields who disdain teaching composition should not teach it. They should remain in the English Department and hope that students will flock to take their courses.

Only Those Trained in the Teaching of Writing and Reading Skills Should Teach Writing

If we are a profession, then let us begin to behave as one. We must exclude those who teach writing simply for job security. We must only employ those who love our profession, not those who simply choose it for employment safety. These people make bad teachers; they are easy to spot, and we all know it.

In addition, the relationship between reading and writing is inseparable. When there is a deficiency in a student's reading comprehension skills, it is quickly evidenced in his/her writing. Compositionists, as academic professionals, should be able to recognize, evaluate, and prescribe solutions for students who struggle with writing because their reading skills are so poor. For too long, students have been encouraged to guess at or parrot the English language, and that is not good enough. We must be able to evaluate our students' reading comprehension skills. No matter what an ACT or SAT score suggests, we must note if a student can comprehend what he/she has learned to "read" through the wonders of whole language. It's time that we ensure that our graduate students, future professionals in the composition field, are securely grounded in the theory and practice of teaching writing and reading.

No First-Year Composition Program Should Exist Without a Writing Center

A writing center must play an integral part of any department charged with administering first-year composition. It is an ideal training place for new graduate students, for faculty learning about new techniques, and for outreach programs across the curriculum. This facility should be staffed and directed by professionals in the field.

No One Should Direct a Writing Program Who Is Not a Trained Compositionist

The days of giving the composition program directorship to someone willing to do this "drudge work" or to someone else to keep an eye on it must come to an end. The composition program directorship should never be a "plum job" used to employ another literature specialist.

Composition Directors Should Always Teach Composition Courses

Composition specialists who seek to escape the rigors of first-year composition should be automatically suspect in our profession's eyes, but, at present, they are not. If a Director wants to impose direction, she/he must also be subject to the experience he/she is proposing on his/her teaching staff.

The Use of Masters-Level Trained Compositionists Should Be Encouraged, But Not Abused

These professionals should teach three composition classes per semester, with real salaries and benefits, and no other class loads. The use of personnel trained in real M.A. composition programs, i.e. not those with a glorified M.A. in Literature (with some teaching experience), would greatly cut down on the number of badly prepared students coming out of badly thought out programs.

Graduate Students in Composition Departments Should Always Be Supervised Teachers

In effect teaching assistants should be just that, assistants to the master teacher in the course. They should apprentice with this master teacher before ever getting a class of their own. And even then these apprentice's should be observed and evaluated bi-weekly.

Composition Departments' Primary Focus Should Be on University Service

While the teaching of advanced composition, business communications, technical and professional writing courses, creative writing, applied rhetorical theory, and composition theory and practice, and perhaps even full B.A, and M.A curricula in teaching writing might be added emphases, the composition department members should remember that their primary role must be to train first-year writers to succeed in the university. To do this they must teach composition courses as their first responsibility.

Only Compositionists Should Evaluate Compositionists

In a department designated as the one serving the writing needs of an entire university, compositionists should be reviewed for tenure and promotion by other compositionists who can accurately and fairly evaluate their worth. An obvious point perhaps, but one forgotten in the current academic structure.

Composition Classes Must Be Shown to Work

Compositionists must be able to show empirically that their techniques and approaches actually produce better writers. In order to proceed in this manner, doctoral programs will have to ensure that their graduates can work in this empirical realm, and such research into the effectiveness of approaches must become a natural, ongoing process within this department. This means that compositionists must be more scientific than they have been in the past, and that they must be fully aware of the principles of accountability that are running most universities today.

We are facing uncertain times in composition classrooms. We have to better deal with students who are unprepared for tertiary education, and we must be seen as a community of scholar-teachers who have some concrete answers to some very pressing questions. We must be seen as knowledgeable practitioners of an art and a science who can teach students to write and read clearly and effectively. We must be seen as professionals who care about our students as individuals, who understand that not all of them will succeed, and that many of them can be taught to communicate more effectively through methods that have been empirically tested and proven successful.

We must begin to draw boundaries around our discipline; we must build a discipline by recognizing what our mission is, what areas fall "inside" and "outside" these boundaries, and who can and cannot work within these boundaries. We must make promises slowly and carefully to the rest of the academy, and then we must live up to our promises. We must realize that we cannot cure everyones' ills, and that the educational system still will admit people we do not have much hope in reaching. Finally, we must be realistic--we will exist as professionals and be treated as such if we are seen to be providing a service that the students, the university, and industry really need and can profit from.