James F. Slevin GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Angela Dowell, just completing her Ph.D. in English, specializing in rhetoric and composition, is about to enter the profession. Of course, in many ways she has already been "in" the profession--as a graduate student, and even as an undergraduate major. But by our usual ways of talking about these matters, we would consider her just now on the verge: she is considering a teaching position at a college. It is in the context of this imagined situation that I ask all readers--graduate students, new faculty, old faculty, administrators--to explore the professional politics of teaching writing. I am constructing these very specific circumstances to open up a discussion, not to conclude one. Angela Dowell's situation simply provides the occasion for introducing and exploring a range of issues facing teachers and scholars in the field.

The politics of writing instruction is not just about writing and its teaching; it happens, more often than not, in writing. We live and work among such documents as the four I will focus on in the next few pages, but these are only a very small sampling of the letters and memos and reports, the articles and reviews and readers' comments, the curricula and catalog copy and proposals, that fill our lives. ¹ These kinds of documents are part of an ongoing conversation that has power as its constant subtext. This is so even when the conversation is thoroughly candid and respectful, the conversants generous and good-willed--in short, even when we are being, in the current phrase, good citizens. We are in this conversation, like it or not, from the day we begin graduate study, and our decisions are always a part of this realm of discourse-embedded in it, shaped by it. What we can imagine for ourselves is in profound ways dependent on what this conversation imagines for us, and any departure from its norms depends first of all on a critical perception of the institutional norms, assumptions, and power relations that operate within it.

The four documents I am presenting are all parts of Angela Dowell's job search. Although fictional, each has its original in a real document I have seen, and all of them are quite conventional.

A. MLA Job Information List, October, 1991

English Department September 22, 1991 Eastern State UniversityThe department has four openings, all tenure-track positions at the assistant professor level.

Send application letter and CV to Professor Eric Knightly, English Department Chairman, by November 15. ESU is an AA/EOE employer and encourages applications from all minority groups.

Office of the Provost Eastern State University February 9, 1992

Ms. Angela Dowell 2333 Samson Street Arcadia, CA 99488

Dear Ms. Dowell:

It is with great pleasure that I write to offer you the position discussed during your campus visit last month. The English Department met and voted to recommend this offer, and university administrators concur with equal enthusiasm.

Professor Knightly, the English Department chairman, will write to confirm the details of your appointment. I wish simply to specify that it will be an assistant professor position on the tenure track, that it includes your appointment as director of Freshman Writing, that you will receive a three-year contract subject to renewal upon a third-year review, and that you will be eligible for tenure after six years of full-time teaching.

We are delighted to extend this offer, and I look forward to receiving your favorable response as soon as possible. Eastern State certainly needs you.

Sincerely, Arthur Magnix Provost cc: Eric Knightly, English Department

C.

 English Department Eastern State University February 14, 1992 Ms. Angela Dowell 2333 Samson Street Arcadia, CA 99488 Dear Angela: Let me say right off that I am delighted we can make you this offer, and the department eagerly awaits your acceptance. Art Magnix has requested that I write to you clarifying, from the department's perspective, the terms of your appointment. As we both agree, the Writing Program needs not only a Director but direction, which is what we hope from you. Please be assured that you have the department's complete support, for we consider the program one of our major responsibilities. As Director, you will have the opportunity to appoint and review a staff of very talented, dedicated graduate students and adjunct instructors, to implement and revise the Freshman Writing Curriculum, and to monitor the system of placement and exit examinations. Because of these administrative duties, your teaching load will be reduced by one course per semester. Your initial appointment as Director of Freshman Writing and as a member of the department, for three years, is subject to review by the tenured members of the department. There is no mason to be concerned about this stipulation. These reviews are customary, designed to assist you in your preparation for your tenure application, and worked out in consultation with you. We have every confidence that you will succeed admirably in the three areas of scholarship, teaching, and service that structure these reviews. I am enclosing the description of the Writing Program from the department's governance document. We are very much looking forward to your contributions to the effectiveness of this program. If you have any questions or concerns, please give me a call.

Yours truly,

Eric Knightly English Department Chairman

cc: Arthur Magnix, Provost

D. Eastern State University Freshman

Writing Program

The freshman Writing Program offers basic introductory courses to all ESU freshmen who do not pass a placement examination offered at the beginning of the fall semester. English 101 provides students with an opportunity to develop their skills in the discovery of their ideas and in the preparation of papers that organize and clearly communicate those ideas. English 102 provides students with an opportunity to develop their abilities as readers of both literary and non-literary works and as writers of analytical essays. These courses are the only two courses required of all ESU freshmen, who must either place out of them or pass them (and the program-wide exit exam) with a grade of C or better. Both courses rely on a workshop approach, with attention to the writing process and the conventions of college-level writing. Their purpose is to prepare students for writing across the curriculum throughout their four years at ESU.

The FWP is monitored by a committee of English Department faculty, chaired by the Director of Freshman Writing, who is a member of the department and a specialist in rhetoric and composition. This committee will be made up of the Director, four faculty members, one adjunct instructor, and one graduate student representative. It is charged with reviewing the FWP and reporting to the Department Curriculum Committee any recommendations for change.

These documents make clear that Angela Dowell will be entering not simply a vocation but a profession. Eastern State University is both a forum for the intellectual pleasures of teaching and research and a site where different visions of knowledge, learning, and the aims of education will come into conflict. As an untenured faculty member, she will be deeply vulnerable to this conflict; that's a fact.

If we could imagine Dowell as Candide, then the story of her entanglements in these various documents would be simpler, allowing us the pleasures of utopian speculation or dystopic satire. Such perspectives of innocence enrich our literary apercus, evoking for us a set of ideals from which we might measure current realities. But these genres too often substitute longing or rage for understanding and deciding. So I choose instead a commentary that will try to think about--unpack-these various bits of writing that find our protagonist positioned to decide whether or not to accept the "opportunity" that Provost Magnix and Chairman Knightly offer her. My point is not to make that choice for her, but to suggest some of the issues and provide some of the information that might help her make such a decision or help anyone advise a colleague faced with such a choice. ²

The Changing Culture of English Departments

These documents are perfectly commonplace. Precisely because they are so ordinary, they reflect most clearly a series of contradictions and conflicts that mark the life of the profession right now, and it will be the burden of the following sections to consider these contradictions.

Let's begin at the beginning, with the announcement of the job. This is how the profession communicates a future to its young. In a field that among other things studies eloquence in all its forms, we announce ourselves in the spare, often grotesque genre of the paid advertisement in the Modern Language Association's Job Information List, published quarterly. It seems a meat-market approach, a commodification of intellectual labor so gross that we hesitate to elevate it with analysis. But it is worth noting that this "market quarterly" originated in a radical critique, in the late 1960s, of hiring practices that relied all too often on the "old boy" network, with positions often "advertised" through contacts with only the most prestigious professors at only the most prestigious graduate schools. The JIL was designed to democratize, if not the awarding of faculty positions, at least the opportunity to seek those positions. And, ironic as it may seem, the JIL reflects a democratizing of the profession that is apparent as well in the four positions listed in this particular ad.

The range of positions here points to changes in the discipline that mark both its increasing emphasis on specialization and its broadening of the fields of inquiry that get "certified" by its Ph.D. programs. This change testifies to the initiatives of both established and younger scholars who are taking us in new directions in both the content of what we study and the methods upon which our study depends. Different writers are being read in different ways, now.

Any announcement like this one most likely comes out of a series of complicated negotiations within the department and the university. ³ Two of the positions would seem to represent compromises--with more established categories (theory and American literature) qualified by "preferred specializations" that identify somewhat less mainstream critical approaches, though neither would qualify any longer as "marginal." Taken together, the four positions reveal a kind of fragmentation in how departments go about defining themselves--employing categories based on historical period, national literature (and subcategories therein), and different kinds of historical knowledge and theoretical orientation. It would be naive to think that departments do not have some hierarchy in mind when they construct such different kinds of positions. And, as it happens, this hierarchy is reproduced in the very sequence of this particular listing. Despite all the changes that have occurred, the historical periodization of national literatures still dominates our ways of imagining the needs of our departments.

For someone like Angela Dowell, interested in the teaching and study of writing, the listing must seem inevitable, yet strange. "Rhetoric and composition" is quite clearly marked here as a field, listed along with these others as areas in which one can--and so is expected to--specialize. Apparently, rhetoric and composition possesses an intellectual substance and a body of knowledge, conforming in this way to a sense of the field she has gained from graduate study, conferences, and academic journals. But the listing specifies as well--as virtually no other field-listing ever does--administrative responsibilities, and these are understood as somehow "included" in the nature of the field and so the job: "to include. . . . directing Freshman Writing." That is, the job that interests her is portrayed here as a discipline that involves institutional "responsibility" and service in ways that are not (or at least not so clearly) noted in the other listings.

We will look in a moment at some of the more unfortunate consequences of this way of understanding the field, with particular attention to the sometimes unreasonable expectations it engenders. But for the moment I want to suggest that this position may not really be an anomaly in the particular configuration of listings set forth in this ad. That is, the larger cultural and social concerns of rhetoric and composition place it among a number of areas of the profession concerned with the ways in which intellectual work can critique and reshape the immediate institutional circumstances in which this work occurs. The effort to redefine academic institutions marks the work of many areas of English Studies in our time--not just rhetoric and composition, but feminist studies, African-American studies, colonial and post-colonial discourse studies, and increasingly even American studies. What they have in common-and what might serve as a basis for a new order of our profession--is both a concern with history and social contexts and also a kind of activism, a merging of scholarship and praxis. They share a sense that the work of research and publication is inseparable from the work of shaping institutional structures such as the department, the university, and programs that connect the academy with the "outside" world. That these fields might have solid reason to affiliate--in scholarly projects and in political action within and on behalf of the university--is something that seems to me a quite conspicuous possibility inherent in this announcement. There is no saying for sure of course; but these jobs, though conceived through the old mechanisms of specialization and periodization, suggest a department well worth the attention of Angela Dowell, who obviously decided in any event that Eastern State was worth a letter of application.

Writing Programs and University Governance

The letters announcing the success of Dowell's application reflect two features of university governance. First, responsibilities are dispersed across various levels of the university. Second, power finally resides with the highest level of administration, with other levels serving in an advisory capacity. As you can see, the provost makes this appointment: departments, department chairs, and even deans just advise in this and many other matters. ⁴ While departments generally get their wishes in hiring, the peculiar circumstances of Dowell's appointment make the matter somewhat more complicated.

Dowell is likely to be flattered by the last line of the Provost's letter:

"Eastern State certainly needs you." She is not just being appointed, she is being wooed, and not just by the department chair but by the higher administration as well. Both see her as serving their interests, the former as director of Freshman English, the latter as director of the only university-wide requirement, designed to "prepare students for writing. . . . throughout their four years at ESU." This situation makes the role of the writing specialist, especially someone charged with particular administrative responsibilities, all the more difficult to describe and assess. For, if Angela Dowell decides to accept this position, she may very well find her allegiances split significantly.

Let us step back a moment to explore a range of ways that writing instruction and writing programs can be situated within an institution, and let us begin with a neglected but actually the most common situation of composition teaching. Since most college faculty members receive their training at large Ph.D. institutions, they are usually surprised to learn that the average English department in this country has about nine faculty members. It is fair to say that the "usual" English department is located at a small college, with a small faculty, all of whom are assigned the same teaching loads and similar responsibilities for all levels of the curriculum. So here, the famed literature/ composition battleground is felt, if at all, only in the inner recesses of each teacher's feelings about his or her work. By and large, freshman courses--usually, though not always, composition courses--are taught by all faculty members, from the oldest teacher to the newest hot-shot Ph.D. In the glaring spotlights of Ph.D. programs, we may easily forget that these liberal arts colleges still exist, offering careers in teaching that often mesh with some teachers' earliest visions of what a life in the academy could mean to them.

At larger institutions, the place of composition teaching is more complicated, and these complications are at the heart of the centurylong struggle for governance that marks higher education. Let me suggest several typical arrangements. In the first, of which Eastern State University is an example, the Writing Program is housed in the English department; as Writing Program Director, Angela Dowell would report directly to the department chair, who controls the entire department budget (including her program's) and assigns teaching and administrative responsibilities. The department chair in turn reports to the dean, who in turn is responsible to Art Magnix, Provost.

Such an arrangement has distinct advantages. For one, Dowell will have a home in an academic department, and this can be helpful in matters of tenure and promotion. Her work for the Writing Program might be seen as significant department service, as enhancing the contributions of the department to the university's well-being. Her thirdyear review and tenure application will be handled routinely, with the department's recommendation proceeding through a series of levels (the undergraduate and in some cases graduate dean and a university-wide tenure and promotion committee) before a final decision is made, either by the provost or the president.

On the other hand, governance, especially because she is untenured, may be problematic, even if Eastern State already boasts a supportive group of tenured composition specialists or fellow-travelers. Her budget requests will compete for the chair's attention with other department needs. It is unlikely that a program defined in terms of a university-wide requirement that serves all freshmen and only freshmen will have as much "clout" with him as more pressing demands (for research support, smaller class sizes at the elective level, stronger support for the M.A. program, and so on). And given that the first six years of Dowell's life will be spent "under review," she is not going to be in a very strong position to press for needed funding and changes, since any pressure will place her in conflict with senior colleagues having their own agendas.

Envisioning this predicament, Dowell may be tempted by other academic appointments that would establish her within a Writing Program separate from any academic department. It would have its own budget line; as its director Dowell would probably be a faculty member in the English department, but she would report directly to the dean or some other administrator. She would find certain real advantages to this arrangement, foremost among them being that high-level administrators are sometimes more likely to value the work of the Writing Program, esteeming more than would the English department's faculty (or any single department's faculty) the program's important contributions to general education. Moreover, the program could devote itself with uncompromised energy to writing across the curriculum.

But there are difficulties here as well. First, under this alternative system, tenure and promotion can often be quite problematic. Even though Dowell would be a member of the English department, her responsibilities would be viewed as "split," and so suffer all the dangers of any split appointment, especially severe in this case since the other side of the "split" is perceived as "mere service." Moreover, competition for funding here is not necessarily less factious and could be more intense. Budgets in such an arrangement depend on the dean, so the Writing Program competes with other programs and with academic departments for support. Like other battles, this too is usually unequal, and while the Writing Program is free of intradepartmental squabbles, its status in the institution is weaker than that of most of its competitors, academic departments.

Still another possible arrangement might present itself to Dowell, but it is one that she would surely have to think long and hard about accepting. This position duplicates the previous institutional arrangement, but her status as director would be non-tenure-track--what is commonly called an academic staff position. In cases where her position would not be on a tenure line, job security is often (ironically) less risky, because no decision on tenure would be absolutely required. A series of multi-year contracts would be arranged. But there's a price to pay. Lacking faculty status, she could aspire at best to influence, not power, and she would remain, technically, powerless within the governance system of the institution, unable, for example, to serve in the faculty senate or even to vote in faculty senate elections and meetings. And the absence of any protection of her academic freedom would make her position all the more precarious in times of conflict. These costs also come in matters of program governance, since non-tenure-line directors regularly have limited power in deciding the hiring and retention of teachers or changing the curriculum.

In any event, what is important to notice is that Angela Dowell is being summoned--with an enthusiasm that she takes to be genuine--to a position filled with possible difficulties. In this and other matters we will be taking up, it might be time now for her to negotiate seriously the nature of the position and the ways in which she can secure some authority and security for herself and her program, even during the probationary period leading to her tenure decision. And the nature of the tenure decision itself could surely stand some serious negotiation before she accepts ESU's offer. It is time to ask, for example, precisely what Knightly means when he claims that she will have "the department's complete support." Do they understand what they are asking of her and what it will take genuinely to support that?

Departmental Politics

In going to ESU, Dowell would be entering a department with her three new assistant professor colleagues, with a specialization like theirs, with the same desire to publish and participate at professional conferences as they have, with the same interest in teaching her specialty. Like any graduate student in these highly professional times, she has been trained to do research and has even begun to prepare essays for publication and give a few conference papers. She has ideas about which she wants to write, ideas she wants to explore in courses for majors and graduate students. In the most serious ways, she wants to be sure that she will receive the same research support as her peers, that the journals in which she publishes will receive the respect that theirs do, and that her teaching duties will include, as theirs do, graduate and undergraduate electives that allow her to do what she has been trained to do.

At the same time, she will have additional responsibilities that they do not have and she has been trained in a discipline that, while having a history of two millennia, is nevertheless, in its modern incarnation, perceived as less clearly defined and less established than theirs. These differences are not now--at Eastern State or most other institutionsfully grasped and respected. Some of the features of this misunderstanding deserve consideration, especially as they might bear on Dowell's future at the school.

As her letters from the provost and the department chair indicate, decisions about faculty retention are governed by three categories: teaching, scholarship, and service. The relative weight given to each category varies from institution to institution, but it is fair to say that service is universally the least significant factor, even though a faculty member might choose (or be "asked") to devote most of his or her time to it. It goes without saying that the one-course reduction her chair has awarded will be small relief indeed for a job that could very well consume all of her time. And, when it comes right down to it, no matter how brilliantly she does her job, it is unlikely to count for much toward securing her future. Equally troubling, her uncertain "tenure" at the institution and the general perception that her service will not count are likely to undermine the quality of her work, making this institutional policy self-defeating for both Dowell and Eastern State.

What will count are scholarship and teaching, and their relative importance decidedly varies. All institutions say, with a certain energy that occasionally aspires to eloquence, that teaching "truly matters"; virtually all say that it matters as much as scholarship; and many say that it matters more. That they can say this and often not mean it is a matter of some ethical interest, but it is not a concern that Dowell can dwell on at this moment. Her concern is rather with the measures that are used in making determinations about the quality of teaching and scholarship and how these measures affect specialists in rhetoric and composition.

To measure teaching, colleges and universities have developed elaborate systems of classroom visitations and computerized student evaluation forms. Unfortunately, these measures cannot reliably register what goes on in a writing class, and occasionally the most effective teaching practices are missed or misunderstood. Faculty visitors tend to expect a class in which the teacher maintains a strong intellectual presence (through lecture or controlled discussion) and so shapes the students' learning in immediately visible ways. Student evaluation forms do much the same, geared often toward the lecture as the standard way of "conducting" a class, and setting up implicit norms that overvalue the teacher's performance in the classroom and undervalue the students' performance. In significant ways, these norms work against some of the best work that goes on in a writing course. Decentered classrooms, workshop approaches, and lots of individual attention through conferences are simply not "seen" through the current mechanisms of evaluation. The review of Dowell's teaching needs to take into account the special circumstances of the writing classroom.

Securing an adequate evaluation of service will also involve a certain amount of change at most institutions. The Modern Language Association's "Report of the Commission on Writing and Literature" ( 1988) offers several helpful recommendations, including the possibility that, during renewal and tenure reviews, an outside evaluator be commissioned to visit the campus and evaluate the service contributions of the writing teacher/administrator. This visit would involve observing classes and training workshops, conversing with students and faculty, and examining relevant documents. The Commission recommends that, just as the "weighting" of service with respect to other factors should be adjusted for rhetoric and composition faculty, so too this outside evaluation should be afforded the same status as evaluations of research during the review.

The evaluation of research, of course, is itself something of a problem for many in rhetoric and composition. The MLA Commission Report describes some of these problems and offers four recommendations that modify the definition of research and expand the range of intellectual and professional work that gets included in this category. Though such recommendations come from the MLA, they are still often neglected or resisted by its members, who constitute the dominant figures in the profession generally and in most English departments. In summary fashion, the Report recommends that colleges and universities should: (1) recognize that composition textbooks are often the most valuable ways of communicating the results of serious scholarship, and so accord them the same status as other scholarly genres; (2) resist certain competitive and individualistic assumptions about research in the humanities, and so reward the kind of collaborative work that increasingly marks the field of rhetoric and composition; (3) count as serious professional contributions knowledge disseminated through workshops and seminars for teachers at all levels, including pre-college educators; (4) recognize that certain kinds of administrative work can be a form of scholarship, dependent on research and capable of reshaping our understanding of the discipline.

It is a healthy sign that the profession has begun to counter the unrealistic expectations that the academy has for its writing specialists, and to initiate official forms of support for their work. That some of our major journals ( College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and others) have initiated policies of blind submission and anonymous review makes cases for tenure and promotion stronger. It is helpful, too, that more scholars in this field have attained full professorships at prestigious universities, since their outside evaluation of a tenure candidate's research now carries more weight. In general, the chances for tenure of rhetoric and composition faculty are improving. Not so fortunate, however, are those off the "tenure track," who make up the majority of college writing teachers in this country. Angela Dowell, who may not have met them yet, will soon become closely acquainted with them if she accepts this particular offer.

Politics of Exploitation: The Writing Program's Professional Underclass

Eric Knightly's letter clarifying her appointment quite clearly states a set of hiring practices that Angela Dowell will inherit as Director of Freshman Writing. ESU's writing faculty--a misnomer, since they are precisely non-faculty--comprises almost exclusively graduate students and adjunct instructors. In taking on this position, Dowell will find herself responsible not just to the various levels of administration that will eventually review her work but for a teaching staff of sometimes experienced, sometimes utterly inexperienced instructors who have in common only their exploitation.

This exploitation has been addressed by the Conference on College Composition and Communication in its "Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing," issued in October 1989. Since then endorsed by many other professional associations, including the Executive Council of the MLA, this document establishes a foundation for challenging a series of practices that are now endemic to higher education.

We know, for example, that 50% of the teachers at two-year colleges are part-time, that 25% of the faculty at four-year colleges are part-time, and that a significant portion of the rest have only a temporary, nontenure-track appointment. And we know that even at those "distinguished" departments offering the Ph.D., over 50% of the teaching staff is made up of part-timers, TAs, and temporary appointments. Almost always, it is composition that gets taught by those teachers in the least privileged positions. The circumstances of their work are dreadful: they have little autonomy and no secured academic freedom; they have virtually no access to travel funds or support for their research; they lack even the most basic needs of writing teachers (sufficient office space, clerical assistance, and supplies, for example). And like many composition teachers, tenure-line or not, they often are confronted with classes that are too large and with teaching loads that are too demanding.

Graduate teaching assistants have similar difficulties. The size of many graduate programs is often dictated by the number of TAs needed to staff the Freshman Writing Program. Graduate students are "calculated" as a source of inexpensive labor, and they are used (or rather misused) accordingly. They often must teach courses for which they are not yet prepared, and they frequently must teach more courses than they can reasonably handle if they are to make satisfactory progress toward their degrees.

What these practices reveal is a debasement of what it means to teach writing. While both the provost and the English Department chair at ESU speak with enthusiasm of the importance of the Writing Program and the need for new directions, they still support (and in many ways depend on) this program's remaining marginal to the "higher" matters of higher education. In some ways, at this time, they cannot afford to think otherwise. The debasement of "writing" rationalizes the debased status of the faculty who teach it and the base salaries they receive.

The CCCC "Statement of Principles and Standards" addresses these abuses and calls for significant reform. It begins with the status of the teaching of writing, and with the respect accorded both teaching and research in rhetoric and composition, because the connection between scholarship and teaching is of critical importance within the culture of the academy at this time. In demanding respect for the scholarly work done in this field, it connects the importance of that work to needed reforms in the academy's employment practices. So it asserts that writing courses should be staffed by tenure-line faculty; that graduate students should be treated as students and supported for their study, not their teaching; that the percentage of part-time faculty should be no more than 10% of the teaching staff at any given time; and that the treatment of any part-time faculty should include pro-rated salaries, adequate preparation and support, a role in governance and evaluation, and in some cases security of employment.

While these guidelines may seem, in the present landscape of exploitation, slightly quixotic, they represent a set of norms to which higher education should be made to adhere, even if the effort to do so takes more time than we would hope. How much time Angela Dowell will have, and the pressure on her to pay attention to many other matters (including the demands of publication), are genuinely open questions, questions she will have to weigh and answer for herself. What is certain is this: she must at least ponder these matters and make difficult political choices about where she stands and how and in what areas she will move toward change. For change will be required, if only because increasing opportunities for tenure-line positions will make it increasingly difficult to retain the same quality of teacher for part-time positions and the same quality of graduate student for an M.A. program like ESU's.

In her efforts to improve the status of writing teachers and teaching on her campus, Dowell can find valuable information and often support from other organizations concerned about reform. The MLA's Association of Departments of English, for example, has fairly up-to-date information about employment practices at English departments across the country. The American Association of University Professors publishes policy statements concerning faculty rights as they relate to issues of academic freedom and tenure, and most campuses have an AAUP chapter, whose president might be a resource in working for change. Increasingly, regional accrediting agencies are aware that the part-time situation has gotten out of hand, especially in English, math, and foreign language departments. Dowell can use all these resources to advantage when her university is preparing for accreditation visits. All these organizations can easily be contacted, and all have proven cooperative in the past. ⁵

Not everything will be possible at once, and different institutions are vulnerable to reform in different areas. Dowell may find, for example, that it will be easier to increase writing teachers' autonomy and upgrade their participation in governance; or she may find that raising salaries finds less resistance among a faculty very protective of its authority. These changes, however minimal at first, will make a difference in the long run. They will be powerfully assisted by any changes she can make in the Writing Program curriculum. Those teaching in it will be taken more seriously and rewarded more justly to the extent that it becomes more fully respected. So now, curricular politics.

Curricular Politics: Moving Toward Change

Throughout this volume, we find several representations of rhetoric and composition as a field, variant configurations of its sub-fields, and explanations of the differences among these sub-fields in terms of their competing interests, emphases, methodologies, and even ideologies. Angela Dowell, based on some combination of personal conviction and training, will locate her intellectual work within this array of possibilities. The degree of tact with which she will choose to counter or encounter different points of view seems very much a matter of temperament, and in matters of scholarship she will find a broad tolerance for even the harshest rhetoric of dispute and idea-assassination. In her publications and conference papers, she can address her professional colleagues pretty much as she likes.

How she manages her relationships at home, at Eastern State, is another matter entirely. Here, different ideas have immediate and palpable consequences, not just for the students, whose education is shaped by those ideas in the form of the curriculum, but for the faculty, whose intellectual and professional and even personal identities are invested in that curriculum. In effect, faculty members want to be its authors; they want it to reflect their convictions. These matters and how they get talked about count heavily. Solutions for curricular problems can emerge only through Dowell's continuing dialogue and negotiation with her colleagues. What she might anticipate in entering that dialogue, however, can be suggested with some degree of confidence.

That Dowell will be entering an arena of some disagreement, or at least contradictions, is apparent even from the few documents at her disposal. English 101 and English 102, courses hardly unique to Eastern State, represent a murky yoking of different, perhaps ultimately incompatible, ways of understanding the teaching of writing. Although the two courses are attentive to the students' writing process and the pedagogical value of seeing the classroom as a workshop, they seem, finally, "service" courses: "Their purpose is to prepare students. . . ." No matter what might actually go on in them, the institution regards them as "preps." Although the courses are concerned with discovering ideas and communicating them, both activities are described as "skills," so the nature of the work that students do in these courses is seen as inferior to the work of other courses. Although asserting their relevance and importance to a university education, the program description embeds a sense that these are not subjects necessary to everyone's university education but only to those who cannot pass a placement exam: that is, no matter how bright the students, a kind of remediation is implied here, bringing students up to speed. Implicit in these versions of 101 and 102 is the assumption that this is not work that really ought to go on at this level.

The use of placement and especially exit examinations points to an even deeper, and more troubling, institutional purpose for these courses. The historical analyses of Richard Ohmann and James Berlin, among others, have made clear that these kinds of courses have served, for at least a century, an aim not wholly consonant with those professed by specialists in rhetoric and composition today. For these critics, to different degrees, these courses have functioned to socialize students into the linguistic conventions and social habits of the dominant class. Because the university guarantees that it will provide society with well-behaved and efficient contributors to the operations of corporate capitalism, "Freshman Comp" must serve one of two functions: either it begins the process of socializing students, or it serves as a gatekeeper, weeding out those deemed inappropriately prepared to enter the various "communities" that make up the university.

In some ways, then, the courses with their exit examination serve as a check both on students and on their teachers. Both are under scrutiny here in this centrally monitored process of surveillance. For the courses' teachers, the exit exam just reinforces their generally debased professional status. They lack even the authority to evaluate their students. For the students, the courses and exam constitute the perfect site for surveillance and socialization; here the students' participation in the life of the academy (here they have to "put things in writing") can be most powerfully monitored and controlled. ESU's emphasis on evaluation reflects these larger institutional missions. What it rewards, under these circumstances, is the ability not necessarily to write but to pass, to construct a self in writing that will move one through the gate that bars the unworthy.

Understanding in this light the curriculum she will inherit, Angela Dowell will need to deal with a wide variety of views that will complicate or obstruct any changes she will want to make. I won't try to envision all the possibilities here, but offer just a sampling. Pressing from above and from without will be those who are perfectly satisfied with the course and its purposes as they are now defined; they will object only to the execution of this "mission" ("Why can't my students write clearly and correctly?"). Here, Dowell is likely to get caught in a web of disputes about the purposes of the course and the course's relationship to the kinds and quality of students being admitted to Eastern State. She will also encounter at least some who continue to think that the function of Freshman English is the teaching of literature and who may very well seek a return to this, especially if Dowell persuades tenured colleagues to teach in the freshman program. As it is, English 102 could very easily be, in the hands of certain faculty members, a course in the close reading of literary texts.

Many of Dowell's colleagues, especially in the kind of English department reflected in the job announcement, will want to resist both of these conservative tendencies, and they can serve as valuable allies in Dowell's effort to give a new direction (that, after all, is what her appointment letters ask her to do) to the Freshman Writing Program. Some of her literature colleagues may derive from their own research and experiences in the classroom ways of understanding the importance of "writing" that will bear on the very conception of her program. Feminist scholars, especially in literature, linguistics, and psychology, have argued that certain linear forms of organization enforce a way of thinking and writing that is inimical to women students, and these colleagues may have a role to play in reconceiving the freshman curriculum. Researchers who are studying the way universities generally dis-serve their (increasing) non-mainstream student populations (minority students, foreign students, students from lower social classes) will also have much to contribute.

Such allies can be helpful, but Dowell would expect to find most helpful of all, of course, her colleagues in rhetoric and composition. Unfortunately, they are more likely to agree on what's wrong with the current system than on what might be substituted for it. All might agree, for example, that the point of a writing course is student empowerment, the opening of each classroom (and in that way the university) to all students. They might even agree that the courses should be devoted to rethinking what goes on at the university.

But their ways of arriving at this empowerment, indeed what they take empowerment to mean, are likely to differ, as will the different curricula and pedagogies that derive from their convictions. Some will no doubt argue for a freshman curriculum that focuses on expressive writing and the development of students' individual voices. Others will argue that freshman English should afford students a critical perception of the constraints and genuine intellectual possibilities of academic discourse, providing them with the opportunity to use for their own purposes, and not just simulate for the purposes of the institution, the genres of the academy. Others will argue for a radical liberatory pedagogy that politicizes the aims of the courses. There might even be a small knot of anarchists who will argue that the problem with Freshman English is that it exists at all, that it ought to be done away with, leaving the socializing of students and the weeding out of the inadequate to some other, less ethical, department, if one can be found.

Dowell may find, in fact, that nearly all these conflicting positions are represented on the Freshman Writing Program Committee that she chairs. And given the Gothic administrative twist that has this committee virtually powerless in itself, reporting to a Department Curriculum Committee, she may sometimes feel that change is impossible. Negotiating all these areas of disagreement within her department and beyond it, drawing in others from the department and across the campus who may assist her, and doing all of this while still making sure that the current system gets administered with some care, may provide her with all the turmoil she needs to contemplate another career. Things will certainly seem, on occasion, bleak.

It is precisely this bleakness, however, that makes the work so important. Dowell does not need to be committed to "pluralism" to believe, finally, that the university is valuable precisely to the extent that it brings together and empowers a faculty with a genuine diversity of points of view. Moreover, institutional resistance usually occurs for significant reasons, because something fundamental is at stake. The politics of teaching writing is about the most important issues now confronting higher education: it is about the kinds of students who get to attend and to succeed at the college and university, about the authenticity of our commitment to democratic education; it is about what happens to them there and how their writing can make a difference for them; and it is about our understanding of what it means to know and change what is claimed to be known.

The field of rhetoric and composition has emerged in our own time with these aims very much in the forefront of its concerns. ⁶ It has emerged, that is, as a form of educational and political reform. It has asserted that student and faculty commitments need to be freed from the institutionally established purposes to which they have been reduced. It has addressed broad questions about the aims of education and the shape of various educational institutions--from the social institution we call the "classroom" to the general education curriculum to the discipline itself. The catch phrases with which we are all familiar--writing as process, writing to learn, writing as a way of thinking, writing as a way of knowing, writing as empowerment--are responses to a concern, not that students are incompetent or unprepared, but rather that they are often led by their educations to be uncaring--about ideas, about their own learning, and often about other matters that transcend the more immediate interests of any particular classroom. Concern with "access" and "empowerment" is finally a concern with students' alienation from the very institutions that are supposed to make possible their intellectual lives.

Finally, the politics of teaching writing should not be merely a defensive maneuver, protecting our turf, rationalizing our self-interest; it should rather involve initiating change that is deeply needed in American higher education. I am thinking, broadly, of the entire academy, more narrowly of individual colleges and universities, and more narrowly still of English Studies and the English departments where many rhetoric and composition specialists teach. For in considering the politics of teaching writing, we need to be concerned, finally, about imagining and enacting new possibilities for ourselves and the profession. Our aim, then, should be not simply to re-situate ourselves within institutions but, in doing so, to reconceive and reconstruct those institutions.

So perhaps the most fundamental question is this: Has Angela Dowell been prepared for this most important work?

Preparing for the Work of Change

Does she, for example, know what it means to accept this position? If she knows what it means, in some sense, will she know what to do? If she could do what she wanted, would she know what that was--and how to make it happen?

I have suggested that the politics of teaching writing must be a politics of change and reform, not adaptation and accommodation. Graduate training currently makes such a politics most difficult, for in failing to assist students in preparing themselves to initiate change, the profession leaves them virtually helpless in their efforts to survive, among other things, the first six years of their careers, that tenure-probationary period meant to test their mettle. Too many graduate students, including rhetoric and composition specialists, leave graduate school without a clue.

A graduate seminar preparing new faculty members to meet their responsibilities and envision change would want to begin with a broad historical analysis of change in our discipline. It would trace how we have narrowed our concern to reading canonical works, to the detriment of our understanding of how those texts came to be (the process of textual production) and to be deemed worthy of our scrutiny (the process of canonization). It would investigate not just how to teach writing but the history of writing instruction, including its role in socializing new student populations historically called "remedial." It would draw on the work of other disciplines (psychology, linguistics, and much of contemporary literary theory) as they contribute to our changing understanding of textuality. And it might even address the current preoccupation of nearly all humanistic disciplines with "discursive practices" by bringing to bear on this question major texts from the rhetorical tradition. As a forum for disciplined inquiry about the aims of education and the meaning of liberal learning, this course would provide a crucial preparation for graduate students embarking on a new career.

Recent efforts, particularly of Berlin, Graff, Ohmann, Lentricchia, and Fish, to situate scholarship and teaching within their institutional settings and larger historical contexts provide a solid framework for organizing such a seminar. It could thereby consider the origins of English Studies in relation not only to the system of departmental governance but to the norm of specialization and the ideology of professionalism that rationalizes it. It could investigate the ways in which the teaching of writing became incorporated within and subordinated to other intellectual purposes in higher education. In such an inquiry, it could examine historically how specific curricular arrangements were formed and how one's own theoretical inquiry into the writing process, authorship, canonicity, textuality, and genre can be brought to bear in understanding and reconceiving those formations, with particular attention to the composition curriculum. And of more immediate consequence, it would examine how the profession's system of rewards and accompanying constraints (research expectations, teaching loads, evaluation procedures) came into being and how these rewards/constraints mold both the intellectual lives and professional careers of university faculty. These hardly exhaust the possible topics of such seminars; others can easily be imagined. The aim, however, would be to pose those questions that will empower graduate students as agents in reconceiving and shaping the institutions whose faculties they will join.

With such a program, Angela Dowell would be no less prepared for her career, and she would have made herself far more ready for her work. She would know, at least, what she needs to find out. Eric Knightly's letter asked her to call if she had any questions or concerns.

With the right training, she'd know how to take him up on that offer. With the best training, she'd know to call collect.