There has been a great deal of discussion recently about the decline and fall of literature, about the lost agenda and corruption of the humanities, about our embattled profession. Andrew Delbanco opens a November 1999 article in the New York Review of Books with a stinging anecdote meant to explain something about how funds are allocated for faculty positions. He tells about a Berkeley provost who warns, “On every campus there is one department whose name need only be mentioned to make people laugh; you don’t want that department to be yours” (32). Delbanco insists that we all know which...

In fall 1997, the Department of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University was formed when the Department of English and Philosophy was reorganized into two separate units. We, as tenured faculty who witnessed this reorganization, saw our new department of sixty full-time faculty embark upon a honeymoon period. With high morale, most of the faculty were energized to work on new projects and to create a distinctive identity for the department. The new acting chair, Dr. Larry Burton, envisaged a strong writing program with a major and a renovated first-year writing sequence. His vision also included the expectation of...

Is an independent writing program—actually, an independent department in our case—any different from any other writing program? In fact, we share the familiar struggle for academic identity and meaningful recognition. The perception of writing as a service course is so pervasive in academic culture that any attempt to expand that perception creates dissonance. Yet, in our attempt, we have experienced some progress, some frustration, and have learned much along the way. In this chapter, we describe our attempt to create a different identity—where writing is more than the service course, where writing is a major, and where...

My story is of a technical and professional writing program at a state university that grew out of a special major in the mid-1980s, then, unwanted by the English department, formed itself as an independent, interdisciplinary home for a career-oriented minor. The program now also offers a bachelor’s degree and a certificate, yet it remains disconnected in terms of administration, faculty, and budget from English, even though that is where both composition and linguistics are housed.

Thanks to its independent status, our program has no responsibility for service courses or general education requirements; nor are its students required to take...

In his preface to Developing Successful College Writing Programs, Edward White laments that “college and university writing programs usually develop organically as needs appear; they are not so much planned or organized as inherited and casually coordinated” (1989, xvii). Insufficient planning and inadequate organization may bedevil a writing program that emerges in response to local problems or needs, but such difficulties are not inevitable. On the contrary, effective writing programs can and do grow out of a clear perception of specific educational needs within a particular college or university. Such a contingent origin is perhaps the best guarantor that a...

In a recent, often brilliant, reading of the Rhetoric, Eugene Garver revisits a central distinction in Aristotle’s thinking: the difference between professional and civic rhetorics. Like other noble arts, says Garver, rhetoric has both a given (external) end and guiding (internal) ends. Its given end, persuasion, can be achieved by any professional rhetor with the appropriate technical skills or “know-how”; it doesn’t require honesty or breadth of vision. Yet the rhetor whose sole aim is suasive victory will eventually raise doubts about his character, and he may bring disrepute to his entire profession, occupation, or discipline. Indeed, his unethical approach...

Even before the Wyoming Resolution and certainly ever since, compositionists have debated how we might improve the material conditions of teaching writing. Like the promise of the New World shone for many an immigrant, our vision of a legitimate discipline and—even better—a stand-alone department of rhetoric and writing seemed to guarantee the changes we’d longed for and knew we’d earned. In actuality, however, this dream of independence has been less than liberating for many. Some argue that the status of the profession has improved at the expense of the material working conditions of many professionals. While the discipline...

It’s tempting to start this piece by invoking Martin Luther King’s famous “Free at last. Free at last.” The temptation to celebrate once given the opportunity to be “out on your own” is great. It’s not unlike the feeling many of us may have had when we found ourselves at age eighteen at college and “on our own.” We were free to live our lives the way we wanted without parental intervention. As some of us learned the hard way, just doing what we wanted or what felt good at the moment was not the most prudent course. Likewise, when...

In the summer of 1996, while at a conference in Europe, I was removed as director of one of the largest independent composition programs in the country—the Program in Composition and Communication at the University of Minnesota—by a temporary dean.¹ I returned to find that my administrative position had been given to a specialist in eighteenth-century literature, who had no scholarly background or training in the field of composition and who had expressed little interest in its work. As I withdrew to my regular status as full professor, the program was soon merged back into the English department...

If the last thirty years of deconstruction, feminism, and poststructuralist criticism have taught us anything, it is that our stories are not innocent, that every plot is political, and that histories are subject—and subjected—to interpretation and revision. If this belief has become a foundation for scholarly writing in English studies, it is surprisingly missing from the writing scholars do about English studies. While research on literature, student writing, and culture acknowledge the constructedness of language and discourse, in the stories we tell about our field, poststructuralist layering gives way to prescribed plotted narratives.

The tendency to write about...

Typically those of us in higher education expect writing programs, particularly first-year composition programs, to be located within universities’ English departments. At large research universities, there is a stereotype about writing programs: they are run by English faculty members with the first-year writing courses staffed by English graduate students (most of whom are earning literature degrees) and adjunct instructors, who experience substandard material conditions (not enough office space, little pay, poor access to technology, not enough support staff, etc.).

Unfortunately, this stereotype seems to be an accurate description of many programs. The Modern Language Association reported that in a sample...

Subject: Job Opportunity

Date: Dec 1, 2000

From: Bill Condon

To: Writing Program Administration List

Victor Villanueva (my Department Chair) asked me to post this notice:

Imagine being a specialist in composition studies and rhetoric where your chair and your dean are also comp and rhet folks, where there’s a writing-programs administrator who handles WAC and assessment and writing center concerns so that the Director of Composition doesn’t have to, where there’s a separate administrator, also rhet and comp, who handles cutting-edge digital equipment, with programs that include 3D animation. Imagine being a junior professor but pretty close to tenure...

Perhaps I shouldn’t have started writing about independent writing programs immediately after returning home from a two-hour English department meeting on hiring needs, tenure criteria, and the election of the next year’s evaluation committee. My department is staffed at these approximate faculty levels—60 percent literature faculty, 35 percent creative writing faculty, and 5 percent rhetoric/composition faculty—yet offers a Ph.D. and M.A. degree program in each concentration.¹ However, I did. I thought about and began writing about such programs using all the essays in this collection at some point, mapping one narrative and argument after the other against my...

Reading through the chapters in this collection, I keep thinking how far we’ve come and how much we’ve stayed in place since we professed that we do indeed have a discipline, whether we call it rhetoric and composition, composition and rhetoric, rhetoric and writing, or whatever. But in our various namings, I think we have been careful to capture by these yokings our Janus-faced nature.

In a study I did some ten years ago of those who “live” rhetoric and composition, I reported that about twenty percent of the faculty I surveyed made a distinction between rhetoric and composition, rhetoric...

As we grow older and lose the ability to see the immediate world in vibrant detail, many of us are forced to put on bifocals to read and see. Those of us who were nearsighted are left unable to see what’s in front of our face as well as things coming at us from a distance. We shift our gaze back and forth across that line between nearsightedness and farsightedness, creating areas of striking acuity separated by a distorted boundary zone, usually centered on exactly what we are looking at. In popular books and films on academe, and often in...

As a collection, the essays in Field of Dreams tell a compelling story about our profession’s willingness to embrace change. They demonstrate, for instance, a commitment to rethinking the relationship between programs of literary studies and programs of writing studies and the role both play within twenty-first century universities. And they illustrate, as well, a recognition that writing instruction may need to be restructured to better address the needs of students and the university at large.

At the same time, however, these essays also attest to our profession’s investment in stasis—most particularly, in our continued investment in, and single-minded...

I hesitate to call it “composition,” and I’m dissatisfied with “rhetoric” as well, which has never really managed to free itself from the ponderousness of The Classics. But whatever we eventually call it, a field dedicated to the teaching and study of writing might enjoy brighter prospects now than at any time since the 1950s, when growing access to higher education made English 101 a standard feature of the undergraduate curriculum. For one thing, our society needs it. Many of my married friends have children who read less than those friends did when they were young—before computers, DVDs, CDs,...