COMPOSITION POLITICS: BEHIND THE WRITING PROBLEM

AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE

by

HOWARD STANLEY RYAN

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON

June 1990

Copyright © by Howard Stanley Ryan 1990 All Rights Reserved Contact the author at howard@netwood.net.

2

COMPOSITION POLITICS: BEHIND THE WRITING PROBLEM

AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE

The members of the Committee approve the masters thesis of Howard Stanley Ryan Victor J. Vitanza ____________________________________ Supervising Professor Michael Feehan ____________________________________ Kenneth M. Roemer ____________________________________

3

CONTENTS

ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . 4

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . 5

PART I: THE CSUN STUDY

1. IS THERE A WRITING PROBLEM AT CSUN? . . . 8

2. WHY AREN'T CSUN STUDENTS WRITING BETTER? . . 15

3. HOW TYPICAL IS CSUN? A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE . . 59

4. SOLVING THE WRITING PROBLEM: EDUCATING, ORGANIZING 64

PART II: CRITIQUE OF THE CSUN STUDY

5. MODERN COMPOSITION AND POLITICAL VISIONS . . 74

NOTES . . . . . . . . . 133

WORKS CITED . . . . . . . . 135

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. CSUN Faculty Opinion of Student Writing . . . . 133

Table 2. Required Writing Preparation of Future Teachers . . . 134

Table 3. WPE Failure Rates . . . . . . . 134

4

ABSTRACT

COMPOSITION POLITICS: BEHIND THE WRITING PROBLEM

AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY NORTHRIDGE

Publication No. _______

Howard Stanley Ryan, M.A.

The University of Texas at Arlington, 1990

Supervising Professor: Victor J. Vitanza

Outmoded "current-traditional" teaching methodologies, and the second-class status of

composition faculty and programs, may be contributing to students' writing problems at CSUN, my

1988 study found. Proposed reforms include the wider introduction of contemporary "process"

pedagogies, better conditions for composition faculty and administrators, and replacement of the

Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination with a required discipline-specific writing course.

A 1990 follow-up chapter critiques the technocratic view of pedagogy that informed my CSUN

study, and which also informs the modern composition field generally. The search for better

instructional methods must begin with an articulation of larger educational and social purposes. In

modern composition, five general models of social purpose are observable: utility, individual growth,

individual mobility, collaborative growth, collective empowerment. Composition theorists and

practitioners should strive to be aware of our social goals and assumptions, and seek consistency

between our values and our pedagogies.

5

PREFACE

I worked as a writing consultant/tutor in spring 1988 for a fledgling writing-across-the-

disciplines program at California State University Northridge (CSUN), a 29,000-student campus in

the north of Los Angeles. The pilot program was initiated in response to a widely perceived problem

of student writing performance. In particular, many departments are worried about the numbers of

their students failing the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination (WPE) , a one-hour essay

test required for graduation. The WPE failure rate has risen steadily each year, reaching an

enormous 32.5 percent in 1986-87. In view of the apparent size of the writing problem, the writing-

across-the-disciplines program seemed paltry, even as a pilot endeavor. It involved only five

teachers, who attended workshops on teaching writing led by freshman composition director Thia

Wolf; in addition, four of us "consultants" met individually with the participants' students, helping

them with their writing assignments.

Thia Wolf told me she had asked for a much more comprehensive program, modeled after

one she had observed at the University of California, Santa Barbara. UCSB had created a separate

department offering writing courses across a range of disciplines--legal writing, business writing,

technical writing. The program also runs writing-intensive components attached to existing courses

in various departments. The cost of that program is $4-500,000 a year. Wolf's more modest version

would have cost $250,000. She received only $30,000, with projected incremental increases.

"What I got," says Wolf, "was a model we had discussed over the summer and thrown out as almost

completely useless. [The administration] felt it was what they could afford."* * All quoted comments from CSUN faculty, students, and administrators are taken from personal interviews listed in the works cited section.

6

The broad gap between what was requested and what the university felt it could provide to

expand writing instruction led me to a series of questions: How committed is the university to

teaching students to write? What exactly would be needed for a quality writing program? What are

the obstacles to getting those needs met? Pursuing these questions led me to many more

questions. I came to see the complexities of a university writing program, and how the requirements

for writing reform were not only pedagogical, but economic and political. In summer 1988, I wrote

up my findings as an independent study: students were being cheated, teachers exploited, and

CSUN's writing situation was but a manifestation of national school and college trends. Writing

programs needed to be geared to the new understandings of writing and learning processes

growing from modern composition research. Composition teachers needed a democratic voice in

their departments, salaries and conditions conducive to quality instruction, and support for in-service

training and professional involvement. The use of proficiency tests as a guarantor of student writing

achievement needed to be replaced by more and better writing instruction across the disciplines.

These and other reforms required strong funding, and called for the political mobilization of

composition teachers--initially at the campus level, finally at state and national levels, in concert with

other teachers and other social movements, demanding a shift in spending priorities away from the

military and toward education and social needs.

Since the time of my CSUN study, my more critical exposure to the composition field at The

University of Texas at Arlington has supported many of my proposals, but helped me see how my

view of writing pedagogy reflected a technocratic perspective that was not in keeping with the

otherwise radical politics of my study. My purpose here is to present the CSUN study as a critique

of a "current-traditional" writing program that is quite typical of American college writing programs.

An additional fifth chapter will critique this critique by placing under scrutiny the leading modern

composition trends that guided the technocratic shortcomings of my CSUN study. I will argue that

any approach to the teaching of writing implies politics and ideology, that writing teachers should

be aware of their ideologies and develop pedagogies consistent with their philosophical-social

beliefs.

7

My concluding chapter, then, is a self-correcting one that embraces a liberatory pedagogy

consistent with my own politics and vision of social change.

I wish to express my appreciation to the many staff and faculty members and students at

CSUN who made my study possible by sharing with me their frustrations with and hopes for the

university's writing programs. I am particularly indebted to Thia Wolf for fueling my interest in

composition, for teaching me about compassionate writing instruction through her own example, and

for meeting with honesty, clarity, and endurance my endless stream of questions about campus

writing politics. In UT Arlington's rhetoric program, I encountered a questioning, theoretically

"sub/versive" environment that helped me achieve a critical distance toward the composition field. I

would like to thank Victor Vitanza, Michael Feehan, and Kenneth Roemer for helping to create that

critical environment, and for guiding my thesis to fruition. In Dr. Vitanza, I enjoyed the aid of a

consummate adviser who, even while disagreeing with me on various fundamentals, confirmed the

value of my project and insisted on my very best work. I thank the University of Chicago Press for

permission to use illustrations from Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, copyright © 1980 by Ira

Shor.

8

CHAPTER 1

IS THERE A WRITING PROBLEM AT CSUN?

Identifying a "writing problem" is itself problematic, since any standard we apply is to some degree

arbitrary: absolute standards for good writing do not exist. Nevertheless, for the present discussion, we

will define a writing problem along lines suggested by the National Assessment of Education Progress,

i.e., that a piece of writing is problematic or deficient insofar as it fails to achieve the purpose intended

by the writer (Applebee, Langer, and Mullis). In a college context, students bring many and varied

purposes to their writing, but certainly one universal purpose is to produce what the students believe is

academic writing. Students want to produce papers that their professors will certify as college-

appropriate; students want to get A's.

At CSUN, the student's ability to produce academic writing is officially measured and

certified during their junior or senior year by the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination. The

exam's annual pass/fail rate has become the campus index of the student population's overall writing

performance. Unfortunately, the WPE has major flaws as a test of writing ability. While the 32.5

percent failure rate may indicate a large writing deficiency, this figure has questionable correspondence

to students' writing performance in classrooms or other contexts. In fact, the WPE's model of writing

may actually be contributing to the university's writing problems. The exam is "a throwback to the kind

of writing we used to do in English classes before we knew anything about the composing process,"

says Thia Wolf, who heads the writing lab responsible for counseling students preparing for, or who

have failed, the WPE. "One hour leaves no time for revision, or really even any prewriting. There's no

chance to make a topic your own." One of the key advances of modern composition over traditional

conceptions is its view of writing as a process--planning, writing, rethinking, rewriting. The WPE does

not reflect this understanding. I interviewed six students who had failed the WPE three or more

times. The exam's time limit was a major complaint. A finance major, who had attempted his

seventh WPE on the day of our interview, describes his normal routine for writing school papers:

I would write out all my thoughts in the first draft. Second draft I go over and try to put it into

more of a sentence structure that's understandable. Third draft I'm going in and correcting all

9

the run-on sentences and phrases. Fourth draft I'm correcting punctuation. That's my standard

way of writing for all business courses, all the papers I've ever had to turn in.

I asked if he didn't also have to write in-class essay tests under time pressure, as with the WPE. He

replied: "It's not the same, because you're going in prepared. You know the topic, you've been

studying it for hopefully the last month, and you know what's going to be on the test."

In the short time provided, the WPE expects students to write on subjects they may know nothing

about, or to produce a type of writing to which they are unaccustomed, such as personal description or

philosophical-cultural reflection. The exam is coordinated by the chair of the English department, and

its bias toward students of the humanities is quite clear. Two interviewees reported understandable

difficulty with the following essay topic:

"America is a great country because it has assimilated all cultures through one

central language, English." --Theodore Roosevelt

"America in the 1980's is a multi-lingual country, and all of its teachers should be

at least bilingual--if not trilingual." --Alfred Toffler

Write an essay in which you:

--examine the validity of each quotation;

--present your opinion on this matter. (Larson 1987)

Literature or philosophy students may be prepared to tackle this kind of question; many are used to

responding to ideas or texts with pages of social speculation. Not so for students of science or

business. A nutrition major, three-time loser on the WPE, describes his dilemma: "They want a certain

way of English. I haven't been taught this way--I don't know what they want. I have to guess and try to

give them what they want. I'm from a scientific background." Before returning to college to study

nutrition, this student had worked internationally as an agronomist. He showed me samples of his

writing in the field, including an article of fine quality published in a scientific journal. The WPE is

clearly not an accurate measure of his writing ability.

WPE essay topics also reflect a cultural bias that is unfair to foreign-born students. Nearly one-

fourth of the 7,309 students sitting for the exam in the 1986-87 academic year were identified as non-

10

native speakers of English by exam readers; 58.9 percent of the non-native speakers failed the exam.

The failure rate of students less familiar with English will naturally be higher than for native speakers.

But the WPE regularly asks students to address issues of American culture--advertising, freeways, the

melting pot, the state lottery--which are bound to pose problems for the foreign-born student. One

student attending a special WPE preparatory class put it simply: "Why don't they ask us questions

about Japanese culture?"1 Although the WPE's annual report claims that "accessibility of the topic for

all students is the major criterion for the use of any topic for the WPE," this is evidently not borne out in

practice (Larson 1987: 4).

Since the WPE could not provide reliable information about student writing performance, I

decided to consult the students themselves. Through a fourteen-item questionnaire distributed to a

broad sampling of majors and class levels in selected general education courses, I sought students'

opinion of their own writing and their assessment of the quantity and quality of writing instruction the

university provides them. Two key questions elicited interesting, and somewhat jarring, results. When

asked, "As a result of your education, do you consider yourself a skilled and competent writer of

English?" 210 students responded as follows:

Definitely not: 1.0%

Improving, but not quite competent: 11.4

Reasonably competent: 56.7

Very competent: 29.5

Not sure: 1.4

To the question, "Overall, do you believe this university provides satisfactory writing instruction?" 195

students responded:

Probably not: 3.1% Probably yes: 74.4%

Definitely not: 12.3 Definitely yes: 10.3

We find that 86.2 percent of the respondents consider their writing "reasonably competent" or "very

competent." Further, a strong 84.7 percent believe the university "probably" or "definitely" provides

satisfactory writing instruction. These results certainly do not support the continuing gripes one hears

11

from instructors about the sorry state of student writing, nor the periodic official calls made for more and

better writing instruction. From the students' point of view, the writing situation at CSUN is basically

fine. We should temper this by pointing out that 42 students added comments at the end of the

questionnaire criticizing various aspects of the school's writing program, and 30 of these critical

commenters had judged the writing instruction as satisfactory overall. The most common criticism was

that more writing should be assigned or more writing courses required: "We do not do enough writing

to prepare us for the WPE. I also think we should have more essay exams." Several complained about

their freshman composition course: "All freshman comp did for me was show me how to write a

formula essay, such as will help me pass the WPE. It in no way challenged or stimulated my creativity

or intellect." One may question why so many of the students who commented critically still gave the

university's writing offerings an overall satisfactory mark. But the survey's thrust is unavoidable: CSUN

students believe they are writing competently and receiving satisfactory writing instruction. My survey's

results are partly confirmed by a student survey reported in CSUN's Daily Sundial, 11 May 1988: 100

of 113 students, or 88.5 percent, said they were satisfied with the teaching in general at CSUN (Cole).

The results of my student survey were unsettling. I had set out to discover why CSUN suffered a

writing problem, and now the students were telling me there was no problem. What could we

conclude? Either the students were right, and many people on campus are sounding a false alarm on

the writing question; or the students were wrong and need better information about the quality of their

writing and the quality of their education. Suspecting the latter was true, I undertook a faculty survey. I

obtained statistics on the number of students in each major and proportioned my faculty respondents in

rough accordance; so, for example, there were 23 respondents from the huge school of business, but

only 1 from the small geology department. Warned that a mailing survey would get a low response, I

knocked on office doors instead. I kept the survey simple by limiting my questions to one: "How many

of your students are writing as college students should be writing?" Responses ranged from 5 percent

by a biology professor to 100 percent by a history professor; 81 responses produced an average of

42.8 percent. The faculty see a big writing problem: they believe that less than half their students are

meeting college standards. I should add that I asked faculty to restrict their estimates to undergraduate

12

courses--all but two in my student survey were undergraduates, and I wanted my faculty survey to

address a similar group for comparison. Also, to maintain my proportionate sampling across the

majors, I asked the faculty who teach general education courses to address their response to classes

attended primarily by majors in the teacher's department.

The faculty had a lot to say about student writing, most not complimentary. My visits were at the

end of the semester. Many teachers were working through stacks of final exams and term papers, and

were obviously pleased for a chance to air their frustrations. Here are some sample comments, along

with each teacher's department or school, and survey reponse:

The writing quality and analytic ability are disintegrating before my eyes. It's really scary.

(Sociology, 50%)

Only 20 percent can write up to standards I would apply if I were hiring them as engineers.

(Engineering, 20%)

When I suggest they go to the Learning Resource Center, they'll say, "I'm a graduating

senior--I'll never have to write again." (Psychology, 10%)

The papers I receive are messy, poorly organized. Most of my students can't develop an

idea or thesis. (Radio-Television-Film, 35%)

They can't write complete sentences. The spelling is atrocious. I've always tried to teach

good writing, but I'm not sure I made a dent. Maybe you can. (Business professor preparing to

retire, 25%)

I did receive a few positive comments, of which the following was most notable:

The quality of writing has improved in the last five-ten years. This applies to my general

education courses also. There's more awareness of the need to write well, and I think the WPE

has influenced this. (History, 100%)

There were also several faculty who gave estimates in the 75 to 85 percent range but who added

little comment, though a few of these explained, "Most of my students are seniors." But a clear faculty

consensus holds that a majority of students are not writing as college students should write. While

faculty notions of what constitutes good writing may certainly be called into question, the faculty are a

13

highly literate group who read and evaluate volumes of student papers, and their concern about the

quality of student writing must be taken seriously. If we define the college writing problem in terms of

whether students are meeting generally accepted academic conventions, my survey is a significant

indicator of a widespread writing problem at CSUN.2

14

CHAPTER 2

WHY AREN'T CSUN STUDENTS WRITING BETTER?

Behind the student writing problem at CSUN lies an instructional problem that is shared by

schools and colleges nationally, and which is attributable in large part to a traditional conception of

composition that still prevails in most writing classrooms. Traditional composition instruction attends to

the clarity and correctness of writing products, rather than to idea-generating writing processes.

Influenced by a positivist epistomology that sees the writer as an oberver and recorder of "objective

knowledge" that pre-exists outside the writer, traditional composition leaves little room for discovery and

the making of new knowledge within the writing process itself (Knoblauch and Brannon). Good

editorship and adherence to pre-assigned structures is given more importance than the development of

meaningful content. Students learn to avoid errors in grammar and usage; the less advanced the class,

the greater the emphasis on basic writing mechanics. Students follow the writing patterns and formulas

prescribed by the teacher or textbook. Paragraphs must include topic sentences and move from the

general to the specific. Essays must adhere to a given mode--description, argument,

compare/contrast, cause-effect; the writer should state a thesis, support the thesis, then restate the

thesis. Good writing practices are encouraged by the reading and analysis of professionally authored

essays.

Traditional writing instruction has been challenged by a modern process-based conception that

has been in rapid development since the 1960s. The modern approach puts first priority on fluent

writing and fluent thinking instead of correctness. The focus is on learning to generate ideas and order

them in different ways, using writing as a tool for thinking. Grammar lectures and workbook drills are

rarely or never used. Students are encouraged to set aside grammatical concerns during the

composing-revising process; only at the final editing stage is grammar attended to. The less

fluent the writer, the less emphasis is placed on mechanical matters--the assumption being that

students' technical prowess will follow as they gain greater confidence with the written word. Modern

composition also rejects most structural rules and formulas, such as topic sentences, thesis

15

statements, and the traditional modes. Emphasis is on the content of the writing, the ideas students

are trying to communicate; students will shape structures to suit their ideas. The classroom spends

little or no time studying professional essays; students learn writing best by actually writing, getting

reader feedback, and writing more.

An additional distinction between traditional and modern composition concerns the teacher's

conceived role in the classroom and her relationship to student papers. The traditional approach is

teacher-centered. Class time is dominated by teacher lectures or teacher-led discussions about

mechanics and style. The goal of writing assignments, and the purpose of teacher responses and any

student revisions, are directed toward what the teacher wants or expects or prefers. The modern

approach, on the other hand, is student-centered. The dominant classroom activities are writing, and

teacher and peer readings of and responses to student drafts. A workshop atmosphere is the preferred

mode, with the teacher as writing coach. The goal of assignments, and the aims of responses and

revisions, are directed toward what the student wants to say. The teacher's primary goal is to stimulate

students toward more thinking and more writing, and to help students achieve their intended purpose

as communicators.

Researchers and practitioners of modern composition disagree widely on issues of theory and

practice beyond the basics presented here. But there is almost complete consensus that traditional

methods stultify students' writing processes, leading neither to correct nor imaginative writing products.

Modern perspectives are represented in a rich selection of books and journals, and in regular

conferences and teacher institutes around the country.3 Composition has grown into a substantial field

over the past twenty-five years, with interests that include rhetorical theory, analysis of writing problems

and strategies for teacher intervention, studies of the cognitive processes involved in composing and

revision, studies of the relationships between reading and writing and between writing and speaking,

evaluations of classroom and writing program designs, and much more.

Unfortunately, while traditional writing instruction has been overwhelmingly discredited by modern

composition studies, most college English departments and schools of education still cling to the

traditional understanding. And because that traditional method consists primarily of teaching grammar

16

rules and essay modes, and then tediously correcting papers for errors, few colleges attach real

importance to either writing instruction or the training of writing teachers. The prevailing traditionalist

view has implications not only for the quantity and quality of writing instruction at the college level, but

heavily shapes how writing is taught in elementary-secondary schools. If college composition is taught

through traditional methods, then college-trained schoolteachers will tend to adopt these same

methods. If colleges do not require significant writing instruction, then schoolteachers will have little

writing know-how to pass on to students. In a 1983 study of 263 college catalogs, Clinton Burhans

found that most preparing teachers, even most preparing English teachers, were not required to study

writing beyond the freshman level; and only 10 percent of English education majors were required to

take a course in the teaching of composition.4

Writing Instruction in the Schools

We will consider briefly the impact of traditional composition at the elementary-secondary level,

then turn to its college manifestation at CSUN, and then in chapter 3 to its impact on college writing

instruction nationally. The kind of writing preparation American students bring with them to college is

suggested in Arthur Applebee's 1984 report of a national study sponsored by the National Institute of

Education. Applebee's portrait reflects well my own student experiences in the Los Angeles schools

during the 1960s, and schoolteacher friends advise me that the back-to-basics trends of the 1980s

have strengthened the routine nature of English instruction in many L.A. schools. Hence, there is good

reason to believe that Applebee's description of national trends reflects also the general school

experiences of CSUN students. The NIE study, which examined secondary school writing

experiences in all subject areas, found that students were seldom asked to produce writing of any

reasonable length. "Students were spending only about 3% of their school time--in class or for

homework--on writing of paragraph length or longer." On the other hand, students were frequently

engaged in mechanical tasks that involved slotting in missing information: "fill-in-the-blank exercises,

multiple-choice responses, direct translation from one language to another [in foreign language

courses], and the like." The emphasis on filling in the blanks, rather than on more creative and

17

intellectually challenging kinds of writing, was supported by the composition/grammar textbooks used

by English classrooms in the national study. "Only 12% of the exercises required writing of even

paragraph length--though all of these textbooks claimed that their primary purpose was to teach writing"

(Applebee 2, 3, 184).

Even when more extended writing was required of students, it tended to be limited in scope.

"The typical assignment is a first-and-final draft, completed in class, and requiring a page or less of

writing. Topics for these assignments are usually constructed to test previous learning of information or

skills; hence the students' task is to get the answer 'right,' rather than to convince, inform, or entertain a

naive audience." Again, the composition/grammar textbooks highlighted the problem: "95% of the

extended writing tasks they suggested were designed to test previous learning." Because assigned

essays were treated primarily as tests of previous learning, the essays became similar to the more

restricted slotting tasks, and students were denied opportunities to use writing for developing ideas and

higher-order thinking skills. "The task for the students was one of repeating information that had

already been organized by the teacher or textbook, rather than of extending and integrating new

learning for themselves." The study found that "writing is more likely to be assessed than to be taught."

That is, the instruction most students receive comes after their writing tasks are complete, in detailed

comments and corrections of their work. Help is rarely offered during the actual writing process.

"When they need [help], most students have to turn to friends or family members, rather than finding it

in instructional contexts" (Applebee 3, 184).

The results of this limited writing instruction are suggested in a 1984 assessment of writing

achievement conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The assessment

involved 55,000 participants from grades four, eight, and eleven in a nationally representative selection

of schools. The students performed a range of writing tasks, such as job applications, descriptions,

reports, analyses, letters, and stories. Papers were judged to be unsatisfactory, minimal, adequate, or

elaborated, and scoring allowances were made for the restraints of testing conditions, such as the time

limit and artificiality of the tasks. The findings, reported by Applebee, Langer, and Mullis, were "not

flattering":

18

Most students, majority and minority alike, are unable to write adequately except in response to

the simplest of tasks. . . . Even at grade 11, fewer than one-fourth of the students performed

adequately on writing tasks involving skills required for success in academic studies, business,

or the professions. In general, American students can write at a minimal level, but cannot

express themselves well enough to ensure that their writing will accomplish the intended

purpose. (9)

A particular concern was the lack of analytic writing ability and higher-order thinking skills among the

older students:

One of the most distressing findings is the continuing difficulty older students have explaining

and defending their ideas. Even at grade 11, relatively few students were able to provide

adequate responses to the analytic writing tasks, and fewer still were able to muster arguments

to persuade others to accept their points of view. . . . Some of these problems may reflect a

pervasive lack of instructional emphasis on developing higher-order skills in all areas of the

curriculum. Because writing and thinking are so deeply intertwined, appropriate writing

assignments provide an ideal way to increase students' experiences with such type of thinking.

(11)

The assessment also polled student attitudes toward writing, and discovered that enthusiasm for

writing, which is low in general, decreases as students progress through the grades. Only 57 percent

of the fourth graders reported that they like to write, which dropped to 39 percent by grade eleven.

When asked if people like what they write, 53 percent in grade four and only 37 percent in grade eleven

responded in the affirmative (60).

Writing education at CSUN, and at many other colleges, may work to reinforce rather than

remedy the trends observed in the schools. Again, we find a paucity of actual writing instruction;

moreover, those providing this small amount of writing instruction must work in unprofessional

circumstances, often with no specific composition training. As our point of reference, let us begin with

what a quality writing program at CSUN might require, and then consider how the present program

19

measures up. The following broad requirements are drawn largely from my discussions with writing

program administrators and faculty interested in writing program reform at CSUN.

1) The university should require several courses that include writing instruction: two semesters of

freshman composition, writing-intensive courses in students' majors, and writing-intensive

general education courses. Instructors teaching writing-intensive courses in the various

disciplines will need smaller classes and an introduction to the teaching of writing.

2) Writing instructors should have strong training in modern composition theory and methods.

3) Composition faculty should have full-time tenurable positions, full voice in their departments,

reasonable student loads and course loads, and professional respect and support.

4) Writing program administrators need adequate staff, office space, and project funds, and the

general support of their departments and university.

5) At least a two-course sequence in English conversation, reading, and writing, as well as

support services, are needed for students not fluent in English. Also, all composition

instructors should have introductory training in English as a second language (ESL)

concerns.

Certainly, the above represent rather ideal conditions that few, if any, American college writing

programs would satisfy. But when we consider how strikingly far is CSUN from meeting such

standards, then the poor student writing performance suggested in my faculty survey is

understandable. We will examine each point in turn.

Writing Course Requirements

The learning of writing, and learning of the critical thinking associated with writing, is a lifelong

project, to which college can and should have much to contribute. But the fact that many students

come to college under-prepared as writers, and that many have also learned to dislike school writing,

makes the college responsibility greater than it might be were progressive composition practices

instituted in the elementary-secondary schools. This is not to heap blame upon the schools which, after

all, draw their instructional models from the university. Nevertheless, given present circumstances, if

20

we hope to produce ably literate college graduates, then we must redress students' past writing

neglect. CSUN's current writing requirements simply cannot accomplish such redressing. The general

education requirement consists of only one semester of freshman composition. Roughly 30 percent of

students (majors in business, journalism, education, liberal studies, and some English options) must

also take one or more writing courses beyond freshman composition; and perhaps 10-15 percent of

incoming freshmen score low on the English Placement Test and must complete one or two

developmental writing courses prior to freshman composition. This leaves 55-60 percent of CSUN

students who can complete four years of college with only one writing course, and 70 percent who can

graduate with no writing course beyond freshman composition. Of course, a number of students will

take an additional writing course voluntarily to better their skills. Also, teachers in a wide range of "non-

writing" courses regularly assign writing in the form of term papers, lab reports, essay exams--though

such teachers do not necessarily become involved in helping students write better, and almost none

have been trained in the teaching of writing. But many of the students who need writing help the most

do not volunteer for more writing courses, and they learn to avoid teachers with reputations for

assigning writing. Religious studies chair Pat Nicholson believes this kind of writing avoidance is

widespread:

I have run into so many students in traditional liberal arts majors who don't have to write. I was

recently talking with a history major, a graduating senior, who for the first time had to write a

term paper. And he told me that most students talk to other students and just figure out a way

to get through the whole program with teachers who don't make you write.

While students in general have learned an antipathy for writing, the more troubled writers particularly

avoid dealing with their problem. Many have been battered with loads of well-intended but ill-conceived

criticism by English teachers schooled in the traditional pedagogy, and students do not want more of

the same. Large numbers do not believe they have even the potential to be good writers.

But simply requiring more students to take one additional course beyond freshman composition,

as is now required of 30 percent of students, would not suffice. The additional course required of

business majors, for example, apparently does not bring the majority of enrollees up to widely accepted

21

college writing standards. Three of my faculty survey respondents teach the writing-intensive business

communications course, OSBE 305, and estimated that 60, 10, and 33 percent--a paltry average of 34

percent--of their students were writing as college students should write. And my poll was taken at the

end of the semester. Writing and writing instruction must be integrated into a significant number and

range of required courses, and taught by teachers given appropriate composition training.

Training of Composition Teachers

The CSUN English department, like most college English departments, has long assumed that

anyone with an advanced degree in literature is qualified to teach writing. Only about one-third of some

sixty instructors teaching developmental and freshman writing within the English department have

significant training in composition, according to Thia Wolf's estimate. Most of the trained minority are or

were CSUN graduate teaching assistants and have taken a two-semester seminar in the teaching of

writing; hence, all teach in the modern mode. But the untrained majority teach with a traditional

emphasis, though employing some modern techniques. Wolf discusses the latter group:

I think a lot of them teach the modes; maybe half of them teach grammar. I mean, information

has seeped in to these people--some have been to a conference or two. Most of them use

peer groups. Most use revision. And in those respects they are not old-school at all. In terms

of their having a real vision of the writing process and what it can do for the individual student,

I'm not so clear about that. When I go in to evaluate classes, it seems to me they're doing fairly

traditional stuff. The major thing I object to--and in a sense it's not at all their fault, because it's

partly the way the department set the course up--is how much time they spend discussing

professional writing, rather than writing. It makes me crazy to walk into a writing classroom and

leave an hour and fifteen minutes later and the students haven't put pen to paper. That really

bothers me. I think that goes on a lot.

The trend toward combining the modern (prewriting, revisions, peer groups) with traditional (grammar

lessons, modes and formulas) is widespread in school and college writing classrooms, and composition

researchers have challenged this kind of "eclecticism." Using a "process" approach in order to produce

22

a teacher-prescribed compare/contrast essay gives students mixed messages, and the student is not

really the master of his/her paper (Knoblauch and Brannon; Applebee 187-88). CSUN's English

department has long encouraged a traditional approach by ordering traditionally oriented textbooks,

including an anthology of professional essays, and mandating their use. Most of the teachers

cooperate with this, although a few quietly ignore department policy and choose alternative texts. In fall

1988, under a pilot policy developed by Wolf and co-composition director Cherryl Armstrong, teachers

may select their own materials for courses; the new policy will later require departmental approval,

however.

The traditional model of writing instruction also predominates in the Pan-African studies writing

program. Pan-African studies shares with the Chicano studies department some 20 percent of CSUN's

freshman composition courses and 45 percent of the developmental writing courses (1987-88 school

year); the two programs serve heavily to black and Chicano students, but include Asians, whites, and

others as well. Professor Johnnie Scott, who helps colleague Tom Spencer-Walters coordinate the

Pan-African studies writing program, showed me the syllabi he designed, and which almost all the

department's writing instructors follow. The syllabi cover the traditional essay formulas, modes, and

grammatical concerns with unusual rigor, including an objective final exam that asks such questions as,

"What are the six types of fragment sentences?" As in many of the English department courses, the

Pan-African writing instructors combine traditional methods and assumptions with modern techniques

such as journal writing, peer groups, and revisions. While the Pan-African writing program holds a

workshop for its faculty before each fall semester, probably few instructors have strong composition

training. As for the program coordinators Walters and Scott, both are dedicated, veteran writing

teachers who have undoubtedly attended their share of composition conferences and workshops, and I

am not sure why their orientation remains so heavily traditional. Perhaps they have not been exposed

to the full modern theory and its critique of the traditional; or perhaps they do know the modern view but

have disagreements with it.

Be that as it may, the Pan-African writing program is nevertheless nontraditional in terms of its

emphasis on black authors for course readings and its infusing the writing classroom with a perspective

23

that affirms minority cultures. The program is also nontraditional in that it enjoys the support and

respect of the department as a whole. When Pan-African chair Verne Bryant refers proudly to the

writing program as "the lifeblood of the department," his sincerity is demonstrated concretely by, among

other things, a well-staffed and well-equipped Pan-African writing center. Similar words from the chair

of the English department, where composition is viewed condescendingly and where support is

minimal, would ring hollow. Johnnie Scott's particular enthusiasm for teaching developmental writing--

since "that's where the action is"--would also be less typical in the English department, as would Scott's

commitment to working with students' larger personal/academic needs:

In one [developmental writing] class, I had nineteen students, and not one of then had an

academic counselor. So when I conference I make sure that each and every one of my

students is placed with a counselor. I also make certain that they're placed with tutors--and not

just in the writing center. I take them over to EOP [Educational Opportunity Program] for tutors

in psych, sociology, geography, whatever it is. Cos', as I say, this is the Superbowl. It's not

about passing my course and then you're flunking everything else.

Students in the Pan-African writing courses undoubtedly benefit from the rigor and commitment of

Scott, his colleagues, and the Pan-African department. Still, as a proponent of the modern in

composition, I would argue that those benefits could be extended much further were the department to

break cleanly from traditional composition assumptions.

I was unable to interview the Chicano studies writing program director as the spring semester

busily closed, and I cannot address the content of the Chicano courses. I did, however, speak with

Chicano studies writing instructor Francine Hallcom, mostly about campus-wide writing issues. It is

probable that the Chicano writing program shares with English and Pan-African studies a predominant

traditional methodology and training gap, combined with the positive nontraditional aspects that apply to

Pan-African studies.

The English department's hiring of Thia Wolf and Cherryl Armstrong, and their fall 1987

appointments as directors of freshman composition and developmental writing, respectively, has meant

new possibilities for faculty development. Wolf notes: "The introduction of writing research into this

24

program has not been done until now. Cherryl and I are the first people who are trying to acquaint the

teachers with what's out there, with what we know about writing." Wolf and Armstrong, who have

Ph.Ds in composition and rhetoric, have obtained a grant to lead a workshop series planned for fall

1988. Four eight-hour meetings will involve sixteen faculty participants--eight from English, four from

Pan-African studies, four from Chicano studies. Says Wolf:

My faculty's really interested, and if I can pay them, they're even more interested because

they're used to being abused. They want to be taken seriously, like professionals. What I'm

hoping is that the workshop will be successful and we will get twice or three times as much

money the following year so that we can reach a lot more people or extend the time.

Wolf points out, however, that funding for the workshop was not obtained through the support of the

English department. "John Hartzog [of CSUN's Learning Resource Center] got us that money from the

academic vice-president. The only support we really have is from the academic vice-president, and

Hartzog's our liaison. Without him we'd be nowhere." In a later interview with Armstrong, I learned that

the workshop depended on "soft money" from the state lottery, and that the money was in question.

"We had money and now we may not have it unless we can spend it tomorrow. It's soft money; it's

money that doesn't really exist. That's one of the problems--there isn't any hard money going into staff

development." Hopefully, the funding snags will be worked out and the workshop plans realized. But if

composition faculty are to receive the training they need, there must clearly be stronger support from

the English department and from the university.

Composition Teacher Conditions

Teachers' working conditions are certainly crucial to the quality of instruction. CSUN, and the

nineteen-campus California State University system (CSU), demonstrate a questionable commitment to

quality writing instruction through the conditions imposed upon CSU writing teachers. At the center of

these conditions is an unrealistically low salary classification for composition courses. The

classification provides only for "assistant professor, step 1." And even though the CSU faculty's

collective bargaining contract provides that instructors graduate a salary step roughly every two years,

25

the CSU still only allocates its campuses a step 1 salary. "The problem is we get money for step 1, and

it costs us more than step 1," explains Pat Boles, budget manager for the School of Humanities, in

which the English and Chicano studies departments are housed. "This year our school will run a deficit

in our salaries of about $50,000." The CSU classification also makes no provision for the promotion of

composition instructors. Campuses manage to get by with the low salary provision by hiring part-

timers. While full-time faculty are assigned a twelve-unit teaching load, they get paid for an additional

three units to provide office hours and participate in department committees. Part-time faculty do not

receive those additional three units of pay, which alone means a 20 percent departmental savings for

each course taught. Part-timers are also denied many of the fringe benefits enjoyed by full-timers, and

are not promoted up the professorial ranks. Reliance on part-timers is a growing trend in all

departments across the CSU system, but is especially strong in composition programs.* In CSUN's

English department, nearly 100 percent of the composition courses are taught by part-timers. Pan-

African and Chicano studies, by contrast, have several full-timers committed to teaching composition,

and full-timers teach perhaps a majority of the writing courses in those departments.

Through low salary and denial of other rights and benefits, the university communicates to its

predominantly part-time composition faculty that they are not considered professionals, are not

considered full citizens in their departments, are not expected to provide more than minimal instruction.

Unlike regular full-time faculty, part-timers are not paid for office hours and departmental participation;

are not paid for release time to do research or write books or articles related to their profession; are not

offered travel or conference pay in order to take part in professional meetings and conferences; do not

have access to tenure and the job security that tenure provides; do not enjoy the full package of fringe

benefits such as health plans, retirement plans, full vacation and sick pay.

* At CSUN, and at most colleges, the terms composition program and composition course generally refer to freshman and remedial writing classes, and I use the terms this way here. Creative and narrative writing, and intermediate/advanced expository writing, enjoy higher status than composition courses, are regularly taught by full-timers, and are not administered by the English composition program.

26

Graduate teaching assistants are materially worse off than the regular part-time faculty. One

writer has aptly called regular composition faculty "serfs," and the TAs "slaves" (Kytle). TAs, who teach

either one or two courses, are paid at bare subsistence level, with no health benefits or sick leave.

Their lowly status is reflected in the office space afforded them. While full-timers are placed two to an

office, and regular part-timers typically share an office with four or five others, most of the twenty TAs

share a single office space that is reached through a forbidding, difficult-to-find stairway on the fifth floor

of the CSUN South Library. The TAs probably suffer less psychological stress than

27

regular part-timers, however. Since most are resigned to the unspoken vow of poverty that our society

demands of college students, TAs' expectations are not high. Also, the TAs are typcally excited about

their new teacher roles and the exquisite composition theories they are learning. Still, TAs perform the

same service as other instructors, their students generate just as much income for the university (CSU

campuses are allocated funds based on the number of students enrolled in each course), and their

underpay is a blatant form of exploitation.

Because of the CSU budgeting structure, most salary-related policies affecting part-timers and

TAs are beyond the capacity of a single department or campus to alter. But it is not beyond the

capacity of the CSUN English department to invite part-timers to the department's faculty meetings and

grant them the right to vote in those meetings. A majority of the English department faculty, roughly

sixty of one hundred, are disenfranchised part-timers. That is, sixty composition faculty have only two

voices, Wolf and Armstrong, to represent them in the faculty meetings that approve or disapprove any

major policies related to the composition program and the content of courses. The department's policy

toward full-timers recognizes that the role of a teaching professional includes participating in

discussions of departmental goals and how the job will get done. By denying this voice to its part-

timers, the department tells them they are not professionals and do not really belong. Composition

instructor Kim Gillespie adds, "I think it makes people feel like victims, powerless and uncaring, like

they can't do anything about it." Indeed, it's difficult to feel powerful or to imagine effecting changes

when you haven't a vote. Part-timers also cannot vote in Pan-African studies; part-timers do vote in

Chicano studies.

How do these conditions affect instruction? The low pay leads many part-timers--in all

disciplines--to hop across town between two or three campuses, some teaching five or six courses, in

order to secure a full salary. The workload is particularly great for writing instructors, who teach what

may be the most labor-intensive of any school subject. The most valuable instructional activities in

composition are also the most time-consuming: one-on-one conferences and sensitive responses to

student drafts. Even a four-course load is too heavy if they are all writing courses. Instructors must by

28

necessity devote less time to each writing student than they might with a more manageable load of,

say, two writing courses and two literature courses; but literature courses are generally reserved for the

full-timers. A general picture of part-time instruction is provided by Jack Friedlander in a review of

national studies comparing the practices of full-time and part-time instructors in two-year colleges.

Friedlander reports that part-timers had less say in choosing course materials, made less use of

instructional media and instructional support services, were less available for student conferences,

were less likely to base their grades on activities that required out-of-class time to grade (objective

tests, essay exams, reports), were less involved in professional activities (reading scholarly journals,

attending professional meetings and conferences), and had less contact with their teaching colleagues.

Kim Gillespie suggests further that the conditions of part-timers leads to less classroom innovation and

more traditional methods: "The low pay results in classes that look very much the same from year to

year, and that sameness is based on an unexamined pedagogy because teachers aren't going to

conferences and they're not reading journals. So you'll find modes and grammar exercises and some

lecturing, and then essays out of the Dolphin reader."

When we examine the conditions of composition teachers, we begin to see that the reform of

writing instruction must be tied to reforming a system that overuses and abuses part-time instructors

generally. Commitment and change are required at many levels. Departments must extend full

citizenship to their part-time faculty by granting them a voice and by actively seeking their participation

in departmental affairs. Full-time faculty can further contribute to the professional standing of their part-

time colleagues by granting them full membership in campus faculty senates; part-timers presently

cannot vote in the faculty senate at CSUN. English departments in particular must affirm the

importance of their composition faculty and the work they are doing by providing professional and moral

support; English full-time faculty, for example, can become involved in issues of college literacy and

writing program development. Finally, the CSU system and the state of California must provide the

funding necessary to convert the majority of part-time positions into full-time positions.

Writing Program Administration

29

CSUN and the CSU system show again their low regard for writing instruction through the little

support offered writing program administrators. My principal focus here will remain with the English

department, which accounts for 70 percent of CSUN's developmental and freshman writing courses

combined. While I have not a complete picture of Pan-African or Chicano studies, it is a safe guess

that the writing program administrators of those departments work under more benign conditions than

the English department's two writing directors. The latter not only have many more course sections,

faculty, and students to provide for, but they must operate within a traditional English department that

treats composition as "this bastard child."

The English composition program is equivalent to a department, but without the staff or office

space that departments are typically provided, according to Cherryl Armstrong:

We have an office because we're professors. But we really need an office for the writing

program--the same sort of setup they have in the English department office. We're running

ninety sections of writing courses in the fall. We're in fact a department inside a department.

We need a place for texts to be kept. We need a place for people to meet. We need a full-time

secretary who does scheduling, who meets with people. We do all the secretarial work

ourselves.

Armstrong's duties include hiring, training, and scheduling faculty; hiring and scheduling tutors;

supervising, evaluating, consulting, record-keeping. "The other thing I do is my teaching--I teach two

courses." I ask if she's tired. "Yeah. It's two full-time jobs."

Office mate Thia Wolf's workload is desperately unmanageable. Six of her fifteen assigned units

are allocated to running freshman English--hiring, supervising, making policy decisions, keeping track

of paperwork. "I lose maybe the first three weeks of each semester doing nothing but getting students

slotted into comp classes after CAR Repair Day" (for students who did not receive all the classes they

wanted through computer registration). She gets three units for teaching the TA seminar on the

teaching of writing, which includes visiting TAs' classes, writing evaluations, consulting and mentoring.

"It's exhausting because people teaching their first semester are often in a state of crisis." Three units

are devoted to running the department's composition committee. "That's a relatively difficult committee.

30

It meets a lot, with a lot of paperwork, a lot of decision making." Finally, Wolf gets 1.5 units each for

coordinating the writing-across-the-disciplines program and the writing lab. "Those, of course, are full-

time jobs at other universities." Wolf estimates that she is doing three or four full-time jobs, "which is

why I can work sixty or eighty hours a week and not get the work done."

One of the biggest frustrations for both Wolf and Armstrong is that the composition faculty do not

have meetings. The directors have little way of knowing what actually goes on in the classrooms.

"There's no calibration of that program," says Wolf, "no agreement about what should go on in any of

the courses. If we could just meet with these people a couple times a month, it would make an

enormous difference in the quality of the program." Since the program has no budget, it cannot pay

faculty to attend meetings, and Wolf refuses to hold faculty meetings unless faculty can be paid for their

time--as are the full-time faculty. Wolf and Armstrong do hold monthly potluck/rap groups that address

various teaching topics; but, while the rap groups have helped build community among some of the

faculty, attendance has dropped down, according to Armstrong.

Another frustration is the difficulty of changing policies. For example, Wolf describes the

unwieldy process for hiring new composition teachers.

We sent out this job description that just says if you've had experience teaching writing, come

over and talk with us. And we wind up interviewing maybe eighty people for two jobs. And

most of those people don't know anything about teaching writing. That and a number of other

things that create a lot of work and a lot of paperwork are what wears down the people who run

the program. It turns out that the hiring process is extremely resistant to change.

Often, composition faculty will come to the program office with bright ideas about grading policies or

course descriptions, but then drop the ideas when they learn of the cumbersome processes for

obtaining departmental approval.

As with teacher conditions, many of the largest reforms needed in writing program administration

are beyond reach of the slim-budgeted English department and will require action at higher levels. But

again, the department could take a more supportive posture by, for example, insisting that the

university provide its writing program with proper staff. The CSUN administration would likely be

31

responsive because of continuing concern over the WPE failure rate. More immediately, the English

department could give composition priority in its personnel allocations, at least until the composition

workload approaches earthly levels. What keeps the department from taking such measures are the

competing interests within the department, and composition's low status among those interests.

Illustrative is the department's recent hiring of an ESL specialist. Wolf, Armstrong, and the new hire

herself had understood she would be working with the writing program to begin designing an ESL

program and ESL teacher training. But they later learned the department had assigned the new

professor four linguistics courses (for which there is big demand) and was listing her as a linguist. In

another instance, Wolf recounts that she had asked department chair Gale Larson for a desperately

needed office assistant but was told that the creative writing program had priority as they had asked for

an assistant earlier. "He was applying a first-come, first-serve principle," Wolf explains, "but he wasn't

thinking of size or need." (Ultimately, due to a state hiring freeze, neither program received an

assistant.) Wolf observes: "Actually, they're not totally opposed to hiring people in this field, but it's

always an afterthought. You go through the literature and linguistics hires first, and then there's a

discussion about whether composition will need anybody else."

Perhaps more fundamental than a shift in priorities is the needed shift in attitude. The CSU's

underfunding of composition programs draws justification from the traditional denigrating view of

composition that is perpetuated by college English departments (Howard; Szilak; Staples; Nash;

Robinson; Kytle). Freshman composition is defined as a "service course," Wolf explains.

It teaches "skills." The way that basic mathematics is a skill or learning to write your name is a

skill. That's what it's equated with, as opposed to a content course that has its place as a

discipline alongside other disciplines. It's not considered a discipline, and therefore the people

in charge of it are not--we don't count. And that's why people in our department say stuff to us

like, "When are you going to get tired of this and teach some real classes?"

Modern composition has challenged the narrow definition of writing instruction as the passing on of

mechanical grammar skills and avoidance of errors. It has opened up rich areas of inquiry, such as in

the relationships between writing, the learning process, and the development of critical thinking.

32

Insights from this growing field might hold the potential to transform teaching as we know it, and could

certainly offer broad applications in literature classrooms. But people must be open to the new

information and new understandings. For the present, composition remains what Wolf calls "this

bastard child" of English departments. "People make fun of it, they don't want to involve themselves in

it, they don't want to teach the classes."

It is unfortunate that the English department will soon be losing its freshman composition director,

who has given notice she will be leaving next year (after spring semester 1989). "The job is really

interesting, but there's too much of it for me. I feel so disillusioned that if I don't get a job at another

university next year, I'm moving out of academics." It appears the department had wanted someone to

run composition in the traditional and minimal way it had always been run; they did not want someone

who would advocate changes or try to create a truly meaningful writing program. With Wolf's

departure, the campus loses a particularly dedicated and gifted teacher/administrator, one whom I and

many others have treasured as a model and mentor. No doubt she will be replaced with someone who

is more accepting of the program status quo.

English as a Second Language (ESL) Needs

CSUN keeps no statistics on the number of its students who are non-native English speakers,

nor on the number of students who are less than fluent in English and might need assistance. When I

asked a worker at the CSUN Office for Institutional Research why such statistics weren't kept, he gave

the self-evident but interesting reply, "If we don't have the statistics, it means the university hasn't had a

reason to keep them." Certainly, there should be a reason. We do know that 24.6 percent of students

taking the WPE in the 1986-87 school year were identified as ESL students. But this cannot tell us the

percentage of ESL students in the general CSUN population, since ESL students have a higher WPE

failure rate than non-ESL students (58.9 versus 23.9 percent) and therefore take the exam more

frequently. Probably the best indication is offered by the Office of International Programs: the campus

has 512 foreign students living in the U.S. on student visas, and about 3,600 students who are

permanent U.S. residents but not U.S. citizens. These do not directly translate into ESL numbers.

33

Some permanent residents have been in the U.S. since young children, were never naturalized, but are

essentially native English speakers. Other students may be naturalized citizens but still learning

English; and still others may be U.S.-born citizens but raised in families and communities where English

was not much spoken. Still, the combined figure of 4,112 (14 percent of the students) is perhaps the

closest indication we have regarding the number of ESL students at CSUN. In any case, the large

presence of foreign-born students, particularly Asians and Mideasterners, becomes evident to anyone

who strolls across campus. And as a writing tutor here for two years, I know that many of these

students need concerted help with English literacy.

The university has essentially no ESL program for its considerable number of non-native

speakers. There is an intensive, twenty-hour-per-week ESL program offered separately through

university extension, but its students are not enrolled at CSUN. Also, the English taught through

extension is too elementary for most ESL students enrolled at CSUN, according to program director

Michael Steadman. The university needs to offer a bridge for students who have passed the TOEFL

(Test of English as a Foreign Language) but are not yet fluent with the language. What CSUN does

offer, under the English department, are seven sections of developmental writing and two sections of

freshman composition that are designated as ESL. However, while these are popular courses that fill

up quickly, the instructors have no training in teaching ESL. Neither Wolf nor Armstrong are sure what

takes place in these courses. Quite likely, the teachers--who have been unfairly burdened with courses

they are not prepared to teach--simply put greater emphasis on English grammar and mechanics. And

an emphasis on grammar is the practice most discouraged by modern ESL and language acquisition

theorists.

Some ESL proposals are being developed by English professor George Uba, whom the English

department is supporting for a year study of the subject. Uba recommends the model employed at

CSU's Long Beach State. "They require every foreign-born student who has not resided in this country

for at least ten years to take a separate placement test. Depending on how they score, they may be

sent into a pre-developmental language acquisition course." Long Beach offers a four-rung sequence:

two semesters of language acquisition (conversation, reading, writing), and two semesters of

34

developmental writing. Uba cautions, however, against the assumption that the ESL writing course

would be quite different from the non-ESL writing course. "In fact, most theorists would argue just the

opposite. The emphasis on process and on rhetoric that we get in a non-ESL developmental course is

also the primary emphasis we should get in an ESL course. Our primary emphasis should not be on

workbook exercises like grammar and things like that." Uba assumes, of course, that the teachers of

ESL developmental writing courses will have training both in modern composition's process orientation

and in ESL.

At the level of freshman composition, Uba points out, there are legitimate arguments for sending

ESL students either to ESL classes or to non-ESL classes. The ESL composition class can address

directly the problems of developing literacy in a second language; the non-ESL class can provide

opportunities for interacting with native speakers. Uba suggests we can have it both ways through

paired classes--one ESL, one non-ESL--taught by separate teachers. Once or twice a week, the pair

would meet in one large class. As we know from our classroom experiences, simply mixing ESL and

non-ESL students in the same class does not assure the kind of networking we would like. Hence,

Uba's proposal provides for monitored peer activities.

They'll conduct peer editing sessions in which the teachers purposely mix two ESL students

and two non-ESL students, or they'll assign them joint library work. Again, the interaction that

we hope for outside of class really does occur because we monitor it. At the same time,

because the integrity of the ESL classroom is maintained, if there are specific needs that have

to be addressed, that ESL teacher--who is going to be more familiar with ESL writing needs--is

going to be able to address those needs.

Uba believes we also need more social networking outside of class between ESL and non-ESL

students. The best way the university can encourage this is through the initiative of individual

departments.

For example, the business department might hold a colloquium on Japanese business

management, or Asian business management, and then invite Asians to talk about their

experiences as children of businessmen or, in some cases, as businessmen and

35

businesswomen themselves. In other words, each department can figure out a way to get this

networking into place. But it really depends on each department to do that, because they know

best what will serve a broad range of students.

While his proposals appear excellent, Uba has "no sense" of whether there exists the political

support to actually institute such measures at CSUN. For a political perspective, I spoke with professor

Francine Hallcom, an eighteen-year veteran of the Chicano studies department specializing in writing

instruction. Hallcom believes the university victimizes and exploits ESL students. Since the majority of

students in developmental writing classes are native speakers, she explains, "you teach to the majority.

And the ESL speakers just simply do the best they can. They take the class once, maybe twice, three

times; they're usually diligent. So they pass the class with a credit. Then they eventually do the same

thing in freshman comp, and then they fail the Writing Proficiency Exam." She acknowledges that

some ESL students contribute to the problem by putting off their writing requirements until the end of

college.

But I don't want to blame them for it anymore. It's more the fault of the university because we

accept them. If we're going to accept them with this kind of writing skill, I think it's our duty to

bring them up to par--rather than let them sit here, generate a lot of FTE for us and keep all of

our professors employed, and then tell them when they've accumulated 150 or 200 units [that

they cannot graduate because they've failed the WPE].* I saw a kid's transcript one time: 289

units and had failed the WPE five times or something--incredible! That's real dishonest. That's

really morbid.

* FTE, or full-time equivalency, refers to a formula the university system uses for generating teacher salaries based on the number of students enrolled in classes.

36

Yet, Hallcom is decidedly skeptical about the prospects for change. She has served on several

ESL committees during her years at CSUN, and invariably found the administration unwilling to take

real action on the issue.

I remember one time we had a very fancy committee. We had people from foreign languages,

special ed., English, admissions and records. Oh, God, there must have been ten or twelve

people. And we met, we were very diligent, we did our research. And we turned in this 5-6

page report. The bottom line was that we need to teach these people from a different

approach.

But the committee's report never led to a program. "I don't think the university's interest is sincere,

because after all of these years, I don't see that money coming forward." Underlying the ESL problem

is institutional racism, Hallcom argues, and the committees are a mechanism to divert those seeking

change.

As a white male caucasian, it is not fashionable for you to just come out and tell me you don't

really give a damn about me or--that would not be a healthy thing to do if you were an

administrator on this campus. So you would put a person like me, who might be a

troublemaker or who might struggle or something like that, on a committee. And as long as I'm

spinning my wheels on a committee and turning in reports, you've got me happy. I don't serve

on committees like that anymore.

The needs of ESL and minority students are simply not a CSUN priority. "The figures on minority

students, if you look at it eighteen years ago and now: worse. The figures on minority faculty hiring are

worse. . . . Basically, this is a school for white kids, and let's not kid ourselves."

From Uba and Hallcom, we can derive that CSUN's failure to develop ESL programs is not due to

a lack of university awareness or lack of proposed solutions. Nor is it wholly attributable to budget

limitations: Long Beach State has budget troubles like all CSU campuses, but has nonetheless

established a substantial ESL program. The bottom line is priorities and attitudes. We learn from

Hallcom that relying on the committee process does not produce ESL programs, since it leaves white-

37

biased institutional priorities intact. Perhaps more active forms of pressure and protest will be

necessary to meet the needs of ESL students.

We have suggested that a majority of CSUN students may not be meeting the university's writing

expectations, and we have attributed this deficiency to inadequate and ill-conceived writing instruction

at school and college. The university could potentially redress the problem through rigorous,

pedagogically sound writing programs, and by offering better instructional models to future

schoolteachers and curriculum designers. But we find instead that the university perpetuates the

writing problem. The English department trivializes the composition profession and keeps its

practitioners disenfranchised; perhaps influenced by this trivialization, the university system allocates

meager composition salaries and meager program budgets. If the slighting of composition has its

source in a narrow, mechanistic conception of writing instruction, or in an epistomology that reduces

writers to mere recorders of pre-existent knowledge, it is not at all clear that the situation will be

remedied simply by making better epistomologies and pedagogies available. Wolf and Armstrong have

offered better models, but the English department may not really want to listen, especially not if the

better models cost money. So long as literaturists, linguists, and others are committed to a strategy of

sectional competition, each group guarding its precious slice of a too-small budget, the department may

have a political interest in continuing to see composition as a "service course."

38

CHAPTER 3

HOW TYPICAL IS CSUN? A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

I could find no national studies of college writing performance. However, college writing

instruction and programs have been nationally studied. The studies, along with numerous journal

articles on "the state of composition," reveal a consistent pattern among college composition programs,

one which broadly mirrors the writing situation at CSUN. If we take into account the "minimal" writing

achievement of eleventh graders in the NAEP's 1984 national assessment, and the pattern of college

writing instruction indicated by surveys and journal commentaries, we can reasonably conclude that the

student writing problem at CSUN is a national college problem.

One ready indicator that U.S. college students may not be getting the most helpful writing

instruction is the continuing predominance of the traditional classroom methods which composition

research has widely shown to impede the learning of writing. Although the modern composition

following is growing, and some observers are quite optimistic about its growth (Penfield), even the

optimists would probably agree with Maxine Hairston's 1982 assessment:

The overwhelming majority of college writing teachers in the United States are not professional

writing teachers. They do not do research or publish on rhetoric or composition, and they do

not know the scholarship in the field; they do not read the professional jounals and they do not

attend professional meetings. . . . They are trained as literary critics first and as teachers of

literature second, yet out of necessity most of them are doing half or more of their teaching in

composition. And they teach it by the traditional paradigm, just as they did when they were

untrained teaching assistants ten or twenty or forty years ago. (78-79)

Persistence of the traditional mode in composition courses is suggested by Burhans' study of

writing course descriptions in 263 college catalogs. Burhans set forth criteria for a "contemporary"

teaching model and a "current-traditional" model, along the the same lines I have outlined in this paper,

and measured the course descriptions accordingly. He found that only 3 percent of the "basic writing"

courses (i.e., freshman composition) and 1 percent of the remedial courses reflected “any influence

39

whatever from contemporary knowledge about writing and the teaching of writing." The traditional view,

on the other hand, was reflected in 89 percent of the basic and 83 percent of the remedial courses; the

remainder were "indefinable." Burhans acknowledges that catalog course descriptions do not always

coincide with actual classroom practice, and that recent program changes are often not reflected in the

catalogs. But he argues that his methods are reliable enough. Most college departments take their

course descriptions very seriously, according to Burhans, and usually develop them from carefully

revised multiple drafts to best reflect the department's goals for the course. Also, Burhans did not

choose his colleges randomly, but instead weighted his sample toward schools "from which we expect

the highest levels of professionalism in theory, research, and application" (641, 645, 646).

Staying power of the traditional mode is further evidenced by surveys of college composition

textbooks. Donald Stewart in 1978 found that only seven of thirty-four widely used textbooks, or 21

percent, contained "any appreciable awareness" of the modern composition field. "The other 27, and

some are the products of people with enormous reputations as literary scholars, were strictly current-

traditional in their discussions of invention, arrangement, and style" (174). Burhans' review of a writing

textbook bibliography compiled in 1982 found that only 31 of 121 texts, or 26 percent, reflected any

influence of the modern concepts. Burhans says his assessment is generous, that many texts will

devote minor sections to the writing process "and then concentrate on primarily current-traditional

concerns" (652).

A very clear indicator of substandard writing instruction in the nation's colleges is the conditions

of composition teachers. As at CSUN, composition teachers nationally are underpaid, overworked,

second-class citizens of the academic community. The conditions are regularly cited and denounced in

the composition journals and conferences. The following account by a community college writing

instructor is representative:

I went to graduate school in pursuit of the contemplative life. I found it in graduate courses, in

textual study, in literary translation. I also found it in teaching the composition and technical

writing courses which paid my way. . . .

40

I was much less happy when, Ph.D. in hand, I found that I was qualified to fill a role as a

writing instructor that shattered my illusions about academic life. Most of the jobs I found were

for part-time employment, that is, less salary for a heavy teaching load, few or no benefits, and

no departmental voice in policy or decision-making. . . . As a part-time and non-tenure track

teacher, I was shocked to find how little the departments in which I taught cared about the

quality of my work and how little supervision or administrative support I received, and how

reluctant department members were to have anything to do with me. I was, after all, not a

colleague. (Staples 3-4)

The universality of these conditions is strongly suggested in a 1987 resolution adopted by the

Conference on College Composition and Communication, the major professional organization for those

involved in college composition:

WHEREAS, the salaries and working conditions of post-secondary teachers with primary

responsibility for the teaching of writing are fundamentally unfair as judged by any reasonable

professional standards (e.g., unfair in excessive teaching loads, unreasonably large class

sizes, salary inequities, lack of benefits and professional status, and barriers to professional

advancement). . . . (Robertson et al., Slevin)

The resolution calls for establishing grievance procedures and public censure of institutions not

complying with professional standards for post-secondary teachers of writing.

Wide reliance on part-time faculty and TAs, or nontenurable (and hence usually temporary) full-

time faculty, for teaching composition courses is indicated in a 1981 national survey of college and

university writing program directors conducted by Stephen Witte et al. Among 127 responding

institutions, Witte et al. found that introductory writing courses were taught by faculty in the following

proportions:5

Full-time tenure track: 30% Part time: 21%

Full-time nontenurable: 12% Graduate TAs: 37%

Of 15,252 course sections, 58 percent were taught by faculty whose positions were part time, and 70

percent by faculty whose positions were probably temporary. (As at CSUN, tenure-track faculty were

41

more apt to teach non-introductory writing courses; they taught 51 percent of such courses.) Noting the

predominance of temporary faculty teaching writing classes, Witte et al. observe that "while many

schools pay lip service to the teaching of writing, they have obviously not worked this 'commitment' into

their rewards system" (57, 58). Witte et al.'s point about rewards is corroborated by Jeriel Howard's

two-year study of job ads listed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Less than 15 percent of all BW

[basic writing] positions offered tenure track appointments. When possible salary was mentioned, BW

positions averaged approximately $6000 less than appointments at the same rank for literature

teachers" (5).

One figure in the Witte survey that provides an interesting contrast to CSUN is the number of

introductory writing courses that are taught by tenure-track faculty--30 percent. It appears that the

almost exclusive reliance on part-time faculty by the CSUN English department's writing program is not

the norm among colleges nationally. Still, while a significant minority of writing courses nationally are

taught by tenure-track faculty, students in those courses do not necessarily benefit from their teacher's

higher status. Firstly, many English departments require tenured faculty to teach a minimum number of

freshman writing courses. Such policies are well-intended but of questionable value: the vast majority

of tenured English faculty have no interest or commitment to teaching introductory writing. Their

freshman composition duties are an unwanted distraction from literary pursuits, and the courses are

often taught perfunctorily. Commitment among tenured faculty was the most frequently cited "least

successful aspect" of the programs surveyed by Witte et al. "They really don't give a damn about

teaching freshmen to write," complained one program director (109). Secondly, the few tenured faculty

actually committed to teaching composition--whose students undoubtedly do benefit from their

teacher's full-time tenured status--may still find that their departments consider their work less important

than that of literature or linguistics professors. Howard notes that full-time faculty seriously interested in

basic writing are often denied tenure appointments or are restricted in rank:

I could relate stories, now all too familiar, of tenure and promotion committees which have

refused to recognize work done in the area of BW as valid criteria for either retention or

promotion. I know highly competent teachers, some with names you would recognize should I

42

use them, who have been denied tenure and/or promotion because they work rather

exclusively in BW. These people speak at our conferences, publish in our journals, and, in

some instances, consult nationwide. But they do not research bird imagery in Keats or

nominalization in Chaucer. They are not quite real members of the fraternity of English

teachers. (6)

American college English departments are increasingly characterized by a caste system in which

a male gerontocracy of senior tenured literature professors lord over a younger, predominantly female

group of part-time composition instructors. (At CSUN, for example, English part-timers are 77 percent

female; full-timers are 67 percent male.) However, the size of the ruling group is shrinking, while the

ruled are multiplying. A 1982 Association of Departments of English survey showed 62 percent of

instructional effort in English departments devoted to writing and only 30 percent devoted to literature.

Moreover, enrollment in writing courses was growing fast, while literature enrollment slowly declined

(Young, Gorman, and Gorman 56, 57). In these times of lean college budgets and especially small

budgets for liberal arts and humanities, it is perhaps understandable that the tenured literati would

guard their narrowing turf by keeping the composition majority disenfranchised, demoralized, transient.

But does this not undermine the educational ideals of literaturists and compositionists alike? And would

not a cooperative effort to develop critically thinking minds through the joint teaching of literature and

writing be preferable to division and oneupmanship? And could we not collectively challenge the heads

of state who, through wrong priorities, dole out ever smaller slices of the tax pie to education? And how

long will writing teachers continue to be abused before we pull ourselves together and fight back?

43

CHAPTER 4

SOLVING THE WRITING PROBLEM: EDUCATING, ORGANIZING

Achieving quality writing programs and quality conditions for writing teachers will require action at

all levels--classroom, department, campus, state, federal. The plight of writing teachers is ultimately

bound to that of all educators and to the country's spending priorities. But let us begin with what

individual writing teachers and others can do today, and then proceed to larger goals and more

ambitious tasks.

First, composition instructors should get active in the composition profession, and those already

involved professionally should invite colleagues to join them. True, the time and cost of attending

conferences, workshops, or meetings is prohibitive for many, particularly when the university is not

sponsoring participation. But professional involvement can be a source of emotional sustenance, as

well as classroom method and theory. Modern composition is inspired by visions of what education

could be; for some, the vision is suggested in Donald Graves' descriptions of first- and second-grade

classrooms turned into buzzy, productive, child-centered writers' workshops. We can't effectively

challenge the abuses of academe without a vision to guide us, and professional activity can help us

shape visions with our peers. It can also help us find ways to make our job more satisfying, less

exhausting. Maxine Hairston reminds us that many traditional composition teachers work harder than

they need to. "They devote far more time than they can professionally afford to working with their

students. . . ." But because they haven't read the modern theorists, "they don't know that an hour spent

meticulously marking every error in a paper is probably doing more harm than good. They are

exhausting themselves trying to teach writing from an outmoded model, and they come to despise the

job more and more because many of their students improve so little despite their time and effort" (79-

80). Activities might range from informal rap/study sessions with co-workers to five-week summer

institutes offered by National Writing Project affiliates in many states.6 As composition staff develop

cohesion, they can collectively insist that the department and university take more responsibility for

faculty training.

44

Another important step for writing teachers is to make the critique of education a topic for the

writing classroom. Teachers can encourage students to talk and write about their school experiences,

to imagine what education could and should be, to ask critical questions about American schooling. I

think the reason students in my questionnaire and in the Sundial survey reported a general satisfaction

with school is that they have so little exposure to alternatives. Students need opportunities to build a

critique of their school experience, and they need models and direct experiences with student-centered,

egalitarian classrooms.7 At the same time, teachers need student allies in the struggle for educational

reform.

Thirdly, writing teachers can join the faculty union, where one exists, and get active in it. Part-

time lecturers are a growing voice within the California Faculty Association (CFA), the union

representing CSU faculty. Part-timers have organized a statewide committee that is fighting for such

proposals as the conversion of part-time positions to full-time positions. The union has recently won

small but significant reforms for the lecturers, who now have built-in salary advances and, after twenty-

four units taught, at least reasonable certainty of being rehired each year. "Different faculty groups get

their voice represented at the bargaining table by being union activists," says Pat Nicholson, who

presides over the CFA chapter at CSUN. "There's no magic about this. If you want to be on the

agenda, come and get in." Broad changes in the conditions of composition faculty are barely

conceivable without large numbers of composition teachers working in the union. Unions not only unite

the strengths of part-time and full-time faculty, but can wield that power on a statewide basis--which

must be done when taking on a statewide university apparatus. The union can be a source of support

for campus-level changes as well, such as in advocating for a part-timer voice in the faculty senate and

within departments. Use of the union structure as a tool for writing program reform is a potentiality that

has still to be explored, and could only be explored in the context of strong composition participation in

the union.

Faculty in disciplines other than composition can support writing reform by asking their

departments to participate in writing-across-the-disciplines programs. In fall 1988, CSUN's "WRAD"

program is expanding to involve ten faculty from the School of Engineering and ten from the School of

45

Communication and Professional Studies. Departments in which several faculty are calling for WRAD

participation can in turn lobby the university to help with funding. My teacher survey suggests that large

numbers of faculty are disappointed with the quality of student writing. Those faculty should insist that

their departments and universities make writing instruction a priority.

Program Modernization

A larger objective for writing reformers would consist in modernization of university writing

programs and removing institutional barriers to that modernization. The CSUN English department has

made an historic move toward the modern by hiring the campus's first composition specialists to run its

writing program. But the department contradicts that move by making the program answerable to, and

dependent upon, a literary faculty largely unsympathetic to composition and unfamiliar with the modern

field. Writing specialists need real authority over their writing programs in order to apply what they

know. As constituted, the English department drags modernization, and the writing program could

benefit tremendously by separating off and forming its own department. Composition instructors could

immediately be enfranchised. Those involved in composition could discuss and decide on the content

of courses and the goals of the writing program without having to negotiate with literature professors.

Composition would no longer be the departmental underdog competing with more "respectable"

disciplines for funds and staffing (though it must still compete with other departments for finite university

funds).

"I don't think it's healthy for English departments and writing departments to be split," says Wolf.

"But so many universities are run like this one where people who teach writing are treated badly. It

would be so much easier and the program could get so much more done if it didn't have to answer to

the English department." Wolf describes the experience of a colleague who tried to run a writing-

across-the-disciplines program under the English department at UCLA. "It nearly drove her out of her

mind, because they have all kinds of strange priorities that have nothing to do with the priorities of a

writing program." A literature department could influence a writing program in healthy ways, Wolf

believes, but this is not happening at CSUN. "The department forbids us to teach literature in

46

composition classes. And I think, especially for developmental writing, that's extremely damaging.

These students are going to be most helped by reading for pleasure." Wolf explains that reading fiction

tends to be more pleasurable than reading essays, and language acquisition theorists believe that

reading for pleasure supports our syntactic development as writers.

Barring a major shift in faculty attitudes toward composition, the English department will continue

to be a fetter upon the writing program. A chief obstacle to "liberating" the program from the

department is that it would require an approving vote from the English faculty. Only two faculty

members, Wolf and Armstrong, represent composition among some forty voters. Although the question

has yet to be raised in departmental meetings, knowledgeable observers have advised me that the

faculty would resist the writing program's secession. Composition may be viewed condescendingly, but

it does give the English department authority over campus literacy. With composition gone and

literature in a steady national decline, English faculty might begin to feel inconsequential. Campus

sources have also suggested that the department has an economic interest in keeping composition. It

is apparently not uncommon for English departments to subsidize small graduate seminars and the

comforts of senior literary faculty by packing composition programs with underpaid part-timers and TAs

(Szilak; Nash). English department chair Gale Larson denies this goes on at CSUN or anywhere else,

and he holds that the department's composition courses actually produce a net loss. My discussion

with School of Humanities budget manager Pat Boles seemed to confirm Larson's contention with

respect to CSUN. Admittedly, the complicated budget formulas remain a bit mysterious to me. But it is

certainly clear that separating the writing program from the English department may be a necessary

step toward putting composition under the control of composition people.

A second key institutional barrier to a modern writing program is the writing tests required for

college graduation, or for passing lower-division writing courses, at CSUN and many other colleges.

We have already observed how CSUN's Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination is a poor

measure of writing ability. But the role of such tests in keeping university writing instruction within

traditional bounds, and in upholding the political status quo, deserves consideration as well. CSUN

instituted the WPE in 1980 in fulfillment of a CSU mandate that all CSU students, during their junior or

47

senior year, demonstrate writing proficiency before graduating. The CSU mandate, known as the

Graduate Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR), came in response to the so-called literacy crisis

of the 1970s. The literacy crisis was actually a deliberate fiction based on misinterpretations of

declining SAT scores (Shor 1986: 59-103; Howe; Steelman and Powell; Brodinsky). It served to

accelerate a new conservative political agenda in education, including the now unprecedented use of

proficiency tests in the nation's schools--tests to graduate high school, tests to pass from grade to

grade. Instead of the expanding education budgets and broadening curricula of the 1960s, we would

have smaller budgets and narrow "back-to-basics" curricula emphasizing rote drills to prepare us for

the tests. The proficiency tests pleased conservatives because testing focuses attention and blame on

the individual, rather than the institution or society, for the inadequacies of education. Ira Shor in

Culture Wars says it succinctly: "In the 1960s, masses of people confronted the system together.

Now, the system was confronting you, alone" (89).

Some positive measures did accompany the CSU's GWAR. Pre-freshman composition

developmental writing programs were introduced on CSU campuses (remedial courses had formerly

not been allowed). Also, a few CSUs added an upper division writing course requirement, instead of an

exam, to fulfill the GWAR. Yet, the majority of campuses, like CSUN, opted for an exam. And the

broad conditions that undermine quality writing education in the CSUs--too little writing and too few

writing courses required, inadequately trained writing faculty, overuse and abuse of part-timers,

understaffed and undersupported writing programs--went unaddressed. Now students take WPEs

which the universities have not prepared them to pass, and the universities can blame the students. In

1986-87, 32 percent of CSUN's test-takers received notices in the mail saying not that the university

had failed them, but that the students were failures. One group of students known to WPE counselors

are particularly hurt by the CSU priorities. These students have completed their coursework, have

devoted four or more years of study and possibly gone into debt, but are denied degrees because they

cannot pass the WPE. The tests and the university have dealt them serious defeats. "They are the

human beings who have been destroyed by a vicious, vicious institution," says one CSUN observer.

48

Tests like the WPE serve hidden political purposes: they deflect criticism of the university by

assuring legislators and taxpayers that higher education is enforcing "rigorous" literacy standards; and

they provide a cheap substitute for the quality types of writing programs that would make relics of

writing proficiency tests. Their official purpose, on the other hand, is to prompt students to take more

writing courses or seek tutorial aid to upgrade their writing skills. Perhaps, some may argue, the WPE

is still beneficial because it does encourage some students to work seriously on writing improvement.

Undoubtedly, this is true for some students. But it is common knowledge at CSUN that large numbers

of students complete freshman composition and then avoid further writing involvement. Their reasons?

Some may not need more writing instruction or not believe they need it. Others know their writing does

need work; but with heavy class loads and the knowledge that more writing courses are not required,

they let the writing go. Probably many have fears about writing or have had bad experiences in writing

classrooms. I asked a marketing major, four-time WPE failer, why he had not taken English 305

(intermediate expository writing) to prepare for the exam. "It's psychological," he said. "If you're not

good at something, most individuals are apt to shy away from it, instead of attack it. And basically

that's my attitude with writing." If the official goal of the WPE is to prompt more students to better their

writing skills, the failure rates certainly do not suggest this is happening. The percent of failures has

climbed every year since the test's inception.8

The WPE's net effect on university writing may actually be negative, particularly in terms of its

traditionalist assumptions. Wolf warns, "It's a very dangerous test philosophically, because the

message it gives to the university is that this is what writing is all about." The exam is based on the

traditional five-paragraph theme that modern composition theorists have widely discredited as a model

for writing. By assigning the topic and directing how the student must address that topic, the WPE

subverts the rhetorical understanding of writing as meaningful communication. The exam's message is

that it doesn't matter what students want to say or how they want to say it; what matters is what

teachers or test administrators want said and how they want it said. The preordained topic and sub-

questions also discourage viewing writing as a discovery process. Writing instead becomes a rigid,

49

mechanical activity that fails to engage the confidence and fluency with language which students bring

to their daily speaking.

We have not studied or measured the extent to which the WPE affects teacher and student views

of writing, or affects writing instruction practices, but there must be considerable impact. The test very

likely reinforces the traditional writing beliefs and classroom methods prevailing in the university.

Teachers and departments are rightfully concerned that their students be prepared to pass the WPE.

One student told me his business communications course gave WPE practice exams, and this likely

goes on in other writing courses. The university writing center gets frequent teacher requests for

classroom presentations on the WPE. Until recently, the center sent WPE counselors who would give

talks and then have the students take sample tests; the counselors would mark the tests and later

return them to students. Wolf abolished that policy after she discovered that a video presentation

would serve the purpose. Wolf resents the use of the writing center to support the WPE, believing that

the six counselor-tutors--who are part-time faculty or TAs--should devote their time to genuine writing

instruction, rather than to test-taking strategies. "These people are capable of conducting excellent

writing instruction. They're highly trained, highly competent. What they wind up doing is saying over

and over things like, 'Eat a good breakfast before you go take the test. Be sure all of your points are

well-developed.' It reduces them to machines." But there is a big demand for WPE assistance: two-

thirds of lab tutoring time is spent in WPE counseling. The center also runs WPE prep sessions,

workshops, and classes, which Wolf describes as helpful for students who haven't serious writing

problems but need strategies for taking the test. The WPE has become an axis around which much of

the university's writing attention seems to revolve.

The CSUs also use writing proficiency tests in the developmental writing programs. The

developmental courses are required for students whose low scores on the English Placement Test

(EPT) prevent their direct admission to freshman composition. At CSUN, students must pass two

developmental courses (097 and 098) or only one course (098), depending on how low their EPT

scores are. Fifty-minute essay tests that are exactly like the WPE are administered at the end of each

course. Until spring 1988, the written exit exams were the sole determiner of whether students passed

50

the English department's developmental courses. As an 097-098 tutor from 1986 to '88, it was obvious

to me that the exit exams were accentuating the traditional orientation of the courses, with preordained

topics, and formulaic modes and structures. Moreover, the late part of semesters inevitably turned

toward taking practice exams. One instructor administered practice exams every Monday for the

second half of the semester. My tutoring time during those weeks was devoted almost wholly to

scoring these exams on a six-point scale, and showing students how they could improve their scores.

We did cover many healthy, substantive writing concerns in these sessions--clarity, development, and

so forth. But the students were also imbibing a narrow and decidedly unhealthy conception of writing,

void of discovery, process, experimenting with ideas and structures and topics. This is not to criticize

the instructors, who understandably wanted to ensure that students passed the exams. The problem

lies with the use of proficiency tests at the end of writing courses. Fortunately, Armstrong has now

introduced a pilot program in which students are graded on portfolios of essays produced over the

semester; the exit exam is only one entry in the portfolio, reducing its significance in the class. Rough

drafts are attached to the essays to verify that the essays were written by the students. The portfolio

grading method still needs to be evaluated and given the English faculty's approval, but it is clearly a

modernizing measure for the program. The Pan-African studies developmental program has been

grading portfolios--which include an exit exam--for years, according to program director Tom Spencer-

Walters. Perhaps one day the programs will wean themselves completely from these traditional exams.

Writing proficiency tests are widely used among colleges nationally. CSUN professor Rosentene

Purnell observed a "proliferation of testing" in the wake of the "perceived literacy crisis." Her 1979 and

1981 surveys revealed, respectively, that 45 and 47 percent of responding institutions were using such

tests (407). Most required them for passing beyond the freshman year; others, for passing into upper

division or for graduating. The tests undoubtedly play an important role in other universities as they do

at CSUN, and they are probably influencing instruction in similar traditionalist ways. Many of the

respondents in Purnell's surveys also used writing proficiency tests as a diagnostic or placement tool.

A placement test--to determine, for example, the appropriate writing course for incoming freshmen--

seems a legitimate practice, depending on the test's design. But the use of writing proficiency tests for

51

passing courses, advancing through college, or for graduating, creates unhealthy pressures on writing

instructors and can limit a school's concept of writing.

Wolf proposes that CSUN eliminate the WPE and instead fulfill the GWAR through an upper

division writing course within students' disciplines; that is, we would meet the CSU requirement while,

at the same time, encouraging the growth of writing across the disciplines. Passage of the GWAR

could be determined by committees of portfolio readers in order to avoid inconsistencies of instructor

grading across the courses. Supporters of the WPE will no doubt argue that such a method allows too

much variance: student papers would not address the same topics; students might cheat by getting

others to write their papers, even their attached drafts. But the WPE itself has plenty of variance. One

test asks students a fairly accessible question about their experiences with shoddy products (80

percent passed), while another asks about the relative roles of technology and human behavior in

major world problems (59 percent passed) (Larson 1987). The bottom issue is not consistency, or

protection from cheating, or other reliability concerns. It's dollars and priorities. The WPE is cheap and

calls for little in the way of writing instruction; Wolf's proposal would cost more, and would require a

significant university commitment to writing instruction. While proponents of writing reform are

educating and advocating to win that commitment, we can also expose the hidden political agendas

behind the WPEs and GWARs, and their counterproductive role in writing education.

Long-Term Requirements: Coalitions, New Priorities

Many important writing reforms can be accomplished at the campus level--provided, of course,

that proponents of change can organize. But the big economic items on our list--professional salaries

and benefits, conversion of part-timers to full-timers, smaller teaching loads, a substantial writing

curriculum and well-funded programs--will take action at state and national levels. Here, college writing

teachers will need plenty of allies to wield influence. We will need to work with other college faculty and

with schoolteachers; with other unions; with advocates for health care, child care, the elderly, the

homeless.

52

In California, one of the tasks of such a coalition is defeating the "tax revolt" led by real estate

and corporate interests. The tax revolt laws, notably Proposition 13 in 1978 and the Gann Initiative

which followed, have reduced property taxes while putting a strong cap on state spending, reducing the

moneys available for education, health, and other public services. In 1988, a coalition of groups

including the California Faculty Association placed Proposition 71--a measure to moderate the Gann

Initiative and release more state funds--on the June ballot. Tax revolters, on the other hand, put

forward Proposition 72 to strengthen Gann. California voters heavily rejected Prop. 72 (38% yes, 62%

no), but they also turned down Prop. 71 by a narrow margin (49% yes, 51% no). While the Prop. 71

coalition was not successful in June, the undoing of the tax revolt laws and the directing of state funds

toward social needs will ultimately depend on the strength of such "human needs" coalitions.

Because state coffers are finite, our broad human needs coalition must finally target Washington,

which collects most of our tax billions. There we find the military thriving at $300 billion a year, while

the ax continues to fall upon education, health, and welfare. We also find the general tax burden

shifting away from wealthy corporate owners to bear more heavily upon middle- and lower-income

groups. Our country certainly has the money to hire full-time composition teachers. But again, it's

priorities. Our coalition will need to muster the strength to introduce our priorities.

53

CHAPTER 5

MODERN COMPOSITION AND POLITICAL VISIONS

Two years after my CSUN study, I see its reform and action proposals as broadly legitimate and

worth supporting. Yes, writing programs need stronger funding, modernization, and administrative

autonomy from the English department literati. Yes, composition teachers need to get professionally

and politically active, and must join hands with allies to demand a shift in government spending

priorities toward education and the meeting of human needs. But I have come to a more critical view of

the "modernization" proposed in the study. My call for the introduction of "modern" composition

instruction as against "traditional" instruction reflected a dualism that I had imbibed from composition

modernists at Northridge and from the composition literature generally. Richard Young, Maxine

Hairston, C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon, and many others had taught me of a "paradigm shift" from

"current-traditional rhetoric" to "contemporary rhetoric," from product-oriented, teacher-centered writing

instruction to process-oriented, student-centered instruction. While I was aware that there were

differences and debates among the moderns themselves, these debates seemed less important to me

than that there was an "old" way of teaching and a "new" way. Composition teachers and others

needed to study the new paradigm and help move our writing programs toward the humanistic

pedagogies of the modern field.

Today, while I continue to regard modern composition as constituting a broad pedagogical

advance over current-traditional approaches, I also see the modern field as fraught with problems

whose significance does not pale beside the great divide between process and product pedagogy. In

particular, this chapter will suggest that the modern field is as lacking in a well-examined sense of

pedagogical and social purpose as the current-traditional model we have come to reject. My CSUN

study speaks of how composition should be taught, and of the need for modern methodologies.

But it does not ask why composition should be taught in the first place, i.e., toward what end are we

educating. Even as my study brought a radical activist edge to writing program reform, I did not apply

that same radicalism to the teaching project itself. I saw the unions and human needs coalitions as

54

vehicles for political resistance, but I did not yet see the classroom itself as a terrain for resistance.

Chapter 4 does discuss briefly the need for engaging students in a critique of education, but I myself

had not yet embarked on a broad critique. I had not yet made the link between my own political values

and my conception of writing instruction.

The technocratic narrowness that informed my work likewise informs the widest sectors of the

composition profession, whose discussions, proposals, and theories overwhelmingly gear to how

writing can better be taught, while rarely stepping back to ask why we do what we do. My proposal

here is that the composition profession cannot adequately address student writing problems, such as

those we observe at CSUN, without a wider sense of our own purposes. In fact, theoretically speaking,

I think it a mistake to even to attempt to define what constitutes a writing problem--much less propose

classroom strategies to solve what we consider the problem--without first establishing why we are

teaching writing. Our "whys" provide--or should provide--the basis for the "hows" that follow; our goals

for the writing classroom define what constitutes a writing problem. Furthermore, the goals and

methods we do choose for the classroom imply certain goals for the world, imply values. Such

commentators as James Berlin, Patricia Bizzell, Victor Vitanza, and Greg Myers have been suggesting

how debates on pedagogy, composing process, or rhetorical theory involve often-covert debates about

values, ideology, politics. This chapter is informed by, and hopes to contribute to, the efforts of such

writers to make the covert overt, to locate and assess the ideologies that guide modern composition.

My particular focus will be toward questions of purpose and ultimate ends. I will explore and critique

the prevailing purposes of modern composition, with special concern for the social visions implied by

those purposes. Though I will argue on behalf of the purposes and visions that I favor, I more generally

hope to encourage writing teachers to more fully explore and articulate their own purposes.

By clarifying our larger world aims, we may not only have more appropriately directed debates in

the composition profession, but we will set firmer ground for making pedagogical choices, and for

judging different models and theories. Our larger social why can also provide our students a clearer

basis for participating in the writing class. As Philip Brady observes, in a valuable and under-distributed

little collection entitled The "Why's" of Teaching Composition, "many students are no longer willing to

55

simply take our word that writing 'is part of a basic education' or that writing 'will be good for you in the

future….' " (v-vi). Sharing our broader why with students can, ideally, open up the kind of discussion

that will help students determine their own whys and why-nots with regard to writing and to education.

Classroom Purposes and Better-World Visions

This chapter assumes that the purposes we establish for the teaching of composition will be in

accord, or should be in accord, with our better-world vision--our notion of how the world can be made a

better place, and of what that "better place" should look like. Most of us do not carry explicit world

visions in our mind; rather, we carry implicit visions, or a set of values which may or may not be strongly

articulated. When we make our implicit vision explicit, we also draw the contours of our ideology.

Göran Therborn in The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology offers that an ideology addresses

three questions: What exists? What is good? What is possible? (Berlin 1988). To create a vision, we

would first ask ourselves what our values are, and then imagine how a society would be arranged that

put our values into practice (what is good?). Next, we would ask whether our ideal society is realistic

(what is possible?). For example, do certain aspects of human nature pose insurmountable obstacles?

(what exists?) Finally, we would determine what is the best we consider possible for humanity, and

what steps might be necessary to move us from our present global mess toward our (realistically) ideal

society. We will call this our better-world vision. Most of us describe our values through a common set

of words--democracy, equality, justice, compassion--but we mean different things by the words. When

we link our values to a vision of how society should be arranged, our values take on more definite

meaning.

The proposal that we shape our pedagogies according to our social goals may run against the

grain of many teachers who believe our job is to teach writing in a relatively neutral manner, leaving our

personal political agendas outside the classroom. At the same time, the notion that education should

serve the welfare and betterment of society has been a constant in American public discourse since the

country's founding. Thomas Jefferson argued that an educated citizenry would be an essential

safeguard against governmental tyranny and, in Jefferson's elitist terms, would produce "a national

56

aristocracy of talent" to assume the nation's leadership. The Jacksonian democrats would later

propound a more egalitarian conception wherein universal free schooling would be "an equalizer rather

than a selector." For Jacksonians, the school had the task of "eliminating all privilege and destroying all

elites by giving to all men the same good common education" (Perkinson 11-12). Andrew Carnegie

saw the "true panacea for all the ills of the body politic" bubbling forth through "education, education,

education," and Lyndon B. Johnson agreed that "the answer for all our national problems comes down

to one single word: education" (qtd. in Perkinson, front matter). Education's social-cure potential has

been often exaggerated, and radical critics argue that education's makers and shapers have actually

been more interested in social control than social solutions (Bowles and Gintis; Apple; Apple and Weis;

Sharp and Green; Giroux and Purpel). But if we only see in education, as Henry Giroux proposes

(1983), one "contested terrain" among many terrains, it is certainly one major institution where

ideological power is wielded and social purposes pursued.

The widespread objection to teachers bringing their social-political goals to the classroom derives

in part from the positivist belief that educators are passing along objective, neutral knowledge--a belief

that has been widely challenged by proponents of knowledge as a social construct (Kuhn; Bizzell 1979;

LeFevre; Popkewitz 1978, 1980), and also challenged by critics who see the "reification of knowledge"

as a means by which knowledge that serves elite social control is protected from criticism (Popkewitz

1987b; Giroux 1980; Apple). Yet, the objection to teachers introducing social goals may also reflect

schooling's division of labor between the few top administrators who retain the right to determine larger

goals and purposes, and the mass of teacher-workers who are expected to carry out the agenda set by

administrators. Most teachers--especially, though not exclusively, at the elementary-secondary level--

have internalized the roles assigned them within this undemocratic framework: they do not see

themselves as having the right or the expertise to determine, with others, the social purposes of

education (Densmore).

Whatever neutrality teachers may claim, I believe that people who work in education are very

much motivated by social visions, or by sets of values that imply visions. Peter Elbow calls writing

teachers "closet preachers" who "feign modest goals" but "deep down, want the moon." "People who

57

end up as writing teachers were often most compelled, when going to school, by questions like 'what is

good and bad?' and 'why do people do what they do?' and 'how can I make the world

better?' " (1978: 57). For teachers to take their visions out of the closet may constitute not only a

challenge to administrators, but a challenge to teachers' defined social role as neutral conveyers of

official knowledge (Althusser). If, at the same time, students are invited and given the confidence to

criticize teacherly visions and to develop and promote their own visions in the classroom and beyond,

traditional education is undermined further. Restrictive institutional contexts may allow us to pursue

such visionary education in only piecemeal fashion, or may require collective teacher endeavors to alter

the institutional context. But our notions of how the world should be deserve sharing. By submitting

them to the critical scrutiny of our community of colleagues and students, we allow our visions to

become more coherent and mature. And we are more apt to find fellow travelers with whom to work to

achieve the visions. The profession of composition provides the open forum we need for sharing and

arguing out our social proposals. Our journals and conferences should help us to clarify visions, and

help us to work out strategies for putting our social purposes into teaching practice in local contexts.

Many composition teachers do design pedagogies to accord with their social aims--though the

process tends to be a covert one that does not allow the larger aims to be questioned or scrutinized by

students or colleagues. On the other hand, even when we attempt to keep our social agenda separate

from our teaching--or believe we have no social agenda--what we do in the classroom unavoidably has

social-political implications (on the value-laden nature of any teaching, see Kohlberg and Mayer, and

Boehm; as applied to educational research, see Popkewitz 1978). I believe that the composition

profession could benefit enormously by becoming more aware of the social purposes implicit in our

work. An exposition and critique of those purposes constitutes an essential starting point in planning

how to educate for a better world. I have culled from the composition literature various purposes given

for the learning and/or teaching of writing. I have also looked for indications of social vision that the

teaching goals are intended to serve. Since social aims are rarely made very clear, however, I have

often looked instead for the social purposes that the teaching goals seem to imply. I will represent the

teaching goals and social visions current in the field through five models: utility, individual growth,

58

individual mobility, collaborative growth, and collective empowerment. I will critique the first four

models, and call for further development of the fifth model.

Model I: Utility

The goal of this book is to help you gain more control of your own composing process: to

become more efficient as a writer and more effective with your readers.

--Linda Flower, Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing (2)

In this book we propose to introduce you to the many types of writing assignments that you

may confront in college and to prepare you to do these assignments successfully.

--Elaine Maimon et al., Writing in the Arts and Sciences (7)

The utility model represents the narrowest and predominant conception of the purposes for

teaching composition. The aim is to help students "write effectively" or "write well" for school, careers,

life in general. As defined in current-traditional instruction, effective writing is clear, editorially correct,

and in conformity with the five-paragraph model or other formulaic demands. In the contemporary view,

however, effective writing is more adequately defined as achieving the writer's communicative purpose

in the specific rhetorical situation, and this writing ability is integrally linked to critical thinking ability. But

toward what social ends shall we teach students to write better? In the utility model, larger social ends

are not at issue: our job is simply to teach good writing. Linda Flower implies that the larger purposes

be left up to the students: "Whatever your goals are, you are interested in discovering better ways to

achieve them" (1). This sounds fair, doesn't it? Yet, in the context of an unfair society, such apparently

neutral pedagogies may not be neutral and may not be fair. If our purpose is only to help students

better achieve their goals, whatever their goals are, without our attempting to challenge, influence, or

prompt reflection upon those goals, then we are practicing a pedagogy of the status quo. The utility

model implies a social reform strategy which seeks to help society do better whatever it is now doing.

Unfortunately, some of the things our society now does leaves many people hungry and homeless, and

renders our planet decreasingly habitable. Do we want our colleges to produce effective

59

communicators who help employers become "better" at busting unions? "better" at designing the

means for nuclear annihilation?

If our teaching purposes do not extend beyond the utilitarian, we have no pressing reason for

raising such questions. In fact, some utility-oriented writing teachers seem bent on turning students

away from larger issues. This is most notable among those who see writing as problem solving, where

the requirement for a specific, "operational" solution tends to keep in line students interested in social

criticism. If a student writer asks, "What can be done about our oppressive administration?" the

question would be too vague and emotion-laden, according to Young, Becker, and Pike's Rhetoric:

Discovery and Change. The writer should instead focus on specific acts: how can we induce the

administration to extend library hours, or eliminate student driving restrictions, or abolish its requirement

that all freshmen live in dormitories (96). The authors' alternatives may be easier to solve, but what if

the student wants to do something about the administration's general oppressiveness? The authors

consider oppression too "vague" a problem for a writing assignment. But there are plenty of writers in

the world who purport to discuss oppression in quite definite terms as, for example, Simone De

Beauvoir discussed the oppression of women, and Martin Luther King the oppression of blacks. The

Rhetoric authors secondly object that discussing oppression would be too emotional, but they offer no

reason why emotional terms or topics should be avoided. The desire to avoid emotionality could lead

to the exclusion of any number of important issues from the writing classroom. Young, Becker, and

Pike offer that a well-asked question "defines what is sought and guides but does not constrict inquiry"

(96). Their claim is ironic, since turning students away from the large problem of administrative

oppressiveness and to a smaller problem of extending library hours is certainly to constrict inquiry.

Flower also prefers that her students stay "specific." When students fail to establish realistic goals for

their writing assignments, Flower warns, "they often produce essays on enormous topics such as the

problem of nuclear disarmament--problems on which they have limited inside information and limited

reason to write. . . . In two pages what can you say on such topics that anyone would really want to

read?" (19) Yet, students may have very good reason to write on such topics as nuclear disarmament,

and if we allow such topics to be discussed only by authorities with the "inside information," we limit the

60

capacity of students and the general public to intervene in global issues. Reductionist problem solving

often does not encourage democratic modes of thought (see Berthoff and Ohmann for further critique of

problem solving).

Constraints on Utility: Social Inequalities

The key unfairness of utilitarian pedagogy, however, lies not in its failure to address the big

issues "out there," but in its general neglect of the histories and socially imposed inequalities that affect

students' own fortunes in the writing classroom, in college, in their career pursuits. Shirley Brice

Heath's pioneering ethnography Ways with Words shows how children from their day of birth begin to

acquire different endowments of "cultural capital" (Bordieu's term) that weigh heavily upon their

success in school. Heath researched the ways of language and life in two small working-class

communities, one black and one white, in the Carolina Piedmont, and compared these with the cultural

ways of the black and white middle-class residents of a nearby larger town. She found that the

language and values, the concepts of time, space, and order, and the sense of self-importance learned

in infancy and early childhood made the middle-class children (of both races) better equipped than the

working-class children for the kinds of thinking, work, and literacy demanded at school. Rather than

working to counter such class differentials--which, in the school projects developed by Heath, was

sought by valuing and building upon the ways and resources that working-class children bring with

them to school--most schools tend to reinforce and strengthen class and other differentials. One of the

seminal studies on the class bias in school tracking was the 1970 work of Ray Rist, who found that a

class of ghetto children was divided into ability groups during the second week of kindergarten, and that

the teacher's decision to place children in "fast," "average," or "slow" groups appeared to be based

primarily on students' socioeconomic status, rather than on any demonstrated ability differences. The

teacher's differential academic expectations became self-fulfilling prophecies, and students were

directed into relatively rigid learning tracks in subsequent years.

In a 1980 study, Jean Anyon observed the occupational channeling in a comparison of five

schools--two "working-class" schools, one "middle-class," one "affluent professional," and one

61

"executive elite" school. In each setting, the work patterns, school knowledge, and teacher-student

roles helped prepare students to assume their expected places in the occupational/class hierarchy.

Learning in the working class schools meant following the steps of a usually mechanical procedure,

involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. In the middle-class school, students

looked for the "right answer" by following directions, but the directions often called for some figuring and

making of choices. The affluent professional school emphasized more creative, independent kinds of

learning; students were continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts. The executive

elite school was even more geared to developing students' analytical powers. Students were expected

to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in

solving problems. One example of the relative power enjoyed by the executive elite students was a

series of language arts assignments where each student had to plan and present a lesson, including a

worksheet or game and a homework assignment, for the whole class; afterwards, the class would

critically appraise the presentation. Such an assignment would be unthinkable within the narrow

obedience routines of the working-class schools. In general, the higher the students' social class, the

more their learning shifted away from the memorization of facts and getting right answers, and moved

toward the conceptualizing of science, math, and social frameworks. The executive elite students were

explicitly taught to think not in terms of right or wrong answers, but in terms of whether they agreed or

disagreed with given answers. Hence, in terms of William Perry's scheme for intellectual and ethical

development during the college years, the elite children were advancing fruitfully along toward a

position of committed relativism, while the working-class and middle-class children were being trained

in dualistic absolutes.

Processes of class channeling continue up through the college years. Donald Lazere describes

California's three-tiered state college system--a model widely emulated throughout the U.S.--which

consists of the elite Universities of California for the best academic achievers, the non-elite California

State Universities for the middle achievers, and the bottom-track two-year community colleges, which

have open admissions. Although, according to a 1960 Master Plan, the three tiers were supposed to

serve their students equally well, different funding bases soon led to inequities. A 1969 study cited by

62

Lazere found that, of every $100 the state spent for higher education, an average of $60 was spent for

each UC student, $30 for each CSU student, and $10 for each community college student. A later

study held that

the unequal funding per student takes place not only on the level of graduate education and

research at UC, where it might be justified, but in undergraduate and especially lower-division

programs, such as Freshman English, that are comparable in the three systems and are

supposed to be the strong points of the CSU and community colleges relative to UC. (Lazere

383)

The inequitable funding--which undoubtedly contributes to the budget shortages observed in my CSUN

study--impacts not only on the instruction and services available to students but, Lazere points out,

leads to differences in the physical environment. Spacious grounds and expressive, imaginative

buildings at the UCs versus the no-frills landscapes at the community colleges translates into less self-

esteem and less enthusiasm for studies at the latter institutions. Of course, the lower-income students,

who are most often in need of the best instruction and services and motivating environment, are the

least likely to have access to these. A 1982 state-commissioned report tabulated the numbers of

dependent undergraduates in the three college systems who came from families with annual incomes

of $30,000 or more: 64 percent of UC students, 55 percent of CSU students, and 31 percent of

community college students fit this category (Lazere 383).

The impact of educational channeling, combined with other institutional and historic inequities,

upon minorities has been well-documented. Blacks and Hispanics, the two largest nonwhite minorities,

are less likely to be graduated from high school than are whites. Blacks and Hispanics who do

graduate high school are less likely than whites to enter college (Astin 51). Blacks and Hispanics who

do enter college are overrepresented in the two-year institutions (i.e., the college low track), and are

also overrepresented among those who leave college before completing their bachelor's degrees

(Wilson 125, Astin 51). While women do enjoy parity with men in educational attainment, gender

disparity in the job market is even greater than racial disparity. Among college graduates who worked

63

full-time year-round in 1987, black males earned 80 percent, black females earned 67 percent, and

white females earned 68 percent of what white males earned (U.S. Bureau 137-44).

A cherished American ideal, alive and well in the composition field, sees education as the key to

eliminating such inequities. We have seen, however, that education widely supports and reinforces

social inequalities. This is evidenced not only in the tracking systems, with their differential pedagogies

and environments, but in textbooks that underrepresent and misrepresent the histories and present

realities of minorities, women, workers, and other groups (Anyon 1979; Hahn and Blankenship;

Ellington). The Council on Interracial Books for Children believes that textbooks' characterizations of

U.S. society as a "true democracy," along with avoidance of our society's structural injustices, leaves

students from less privileged groups with only themselves to blame for their failures. Students reading

the widely used secondary level history texts assessed by the Council in 1977 "might well conclude that

women and third world people are unsuccessful by nature, heredity, or inclination":

Native Americans were dispossessed of their land because they "did not understand the

concept of private land ownership"; Asian workers received low wages because they were

"willing to work for very little"; Blacks could not find good urban jobs because they were

"unskilled and uneducated"; Chicanos face problems because they are "not fluent in English";

Filipinos and Puerto Ricans were colonized because they were "not ready for self-government";

and women "lack sufficient strength" and are "too frequently pregnant" to be an important part

of the workforce. (90, 91)

That such messages may effectively shape young people's thinking is suggested in Michelle Fine's

1983 study of New York City youths, mostly black and Hispanic, who resided at or attended juvenile

residential facilities because of academic, family, or other problems. The surveyed youths widely

agreed with the statement, "My problems are my own fault," and were more likely to attribute their

failures to their personality than to situational factors such as poverty, race, family, or neighborhood

(228). Fine believes that the individualistic perspectives offered at school tend to reinforce students'

sense of powerlessness when they fail academically. "Not that these adolescents have no role in

creating their own problems, but the economic and social realities of their lives do create the conditions

64

in which these youths exist, get into trouble, and survive" (233). She argues that effective schooling

must encourage social criticism and social advocacy: "For schools not to reproduce self-blaming

youths, schools need to create contexts in which economic and social inequities are examined

meaningfully and in which education itself is analyzed critically. Schools also need to be leaders in

agitating for economic and social conditions in which human needs can be nurtured" (233). The

Council on Interracial Books concurs: "Young people should learn of the societal roadblocks that must

be surmounted before equity is achieved. They should learn why and how to create the social changes

necessary to achieve equity" (29).

Utilitarian writing classrooms that seek to help students "achieve their goals," without

encouraging students to explore the social context in which they pursue their goals, leave students ill-

equipped for their trials in academe and beyond. As Patricia Bizzell points out, our pedagogical

choices affect a heterogenous student population unequally (1982a: 237). Working-class college

students who flounder in their attempts at "academic discourse," when it seems to come so readily to

their more affluent classmates, need more than prescriptions for individual success which lend

themselves to rationales of self-doubt and self-blame. They need "the critical training to trace their

victimage to social forces," including the channeling processes just described, and "hence to work

toward control of their own destinies," such as through recognition of the non-fixed nature of existing

social arrangements (Bizzell 1982b: 196). They also need pedagogies that affirm and make active use

of working-class students' own knowledge, cultural resources, and histories (Heath; Shor 1987a,

1987b). In fact, all kinds of students--middle class and working class, majority and minority, men and

women--need legitimated their sense of alienation with authoritarian classrooms and dull, life-irrelevant

curricula that schools and colleges impose upon them. They need teachers who model alternative,

egalitarian pedagogies, and who offer students frameworks not only for mastering the intellectual tools

of academe, but for critiquing academe, critiquing society, and struggling for democratic power in our

social institutions. In short, the writing classroom needs purposes and visions that are far broader than

the teaching of "effective writing."

65

The better-world vision implied in the utility model is one in which individuals more effectively

pursue their goals; that is, it represents the capitalist ideal. As Adam Smith proposed, "the natural effort

of every individual to better his own condition" would carry capitalist society to wealth and prosperity

(540). Smith recognized that this competitive system involves human costs: "Wherever there is great

property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor. . . ."

(709-10) But, regretfully, human nature makes such costs inevitable. "The violence and injustice of the

rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit

of a remedy" (493). This is not to suggest that Flower, Maimon et al., and others who indicate narrowly

utilitarian purposes for the writing classroom necessarily share the views of Adam Smith. I wish only to

point out what their indicated purposes seem to socially imply. There may be legitimate reasons for

describing our purposes more narrowly than we actually conceive them--e.g., keeping one's job, the

constraints of publishing--and the purposes described here and in the pages ahead may tell as much

about the institutional objectives with which we make compromises as about the views of the authors

themselves. Yet, I think that utilitarian notions of education and corporate-efficiency ideals are a

genuine influence, perhaps the most powerful influence, among theorists of composition; such certainly

holds true for American educational thinkers historically (Callahan; Shannon; Popkewitz 1987a). I

believe it important that we share our larger purposes in textbooks and professional articles, insofar as

the context permits. In the classroom, sharing our purposes and visions demystifies education for our

students. And, if we are open to students' challenges, to hearing their purposes, to negotiating among

our differing agendas--the teacher's, the students', the institution's--the writing classroom becomes a

more humane and democratic place.

Model II: Individual Growth

Writing does not serve merely a utilitarian function. That is why we encourage students to

appreciate writing that discovers meaning, form, and self.

--Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (7)

66

I'm not saying people are wicked if they keep their real voice a secret, but they are neglecting a

great source of power.

--Peter Elbow, Writing with Power (294)

We need to design a college writing curriculum that will systematically confront students with

tasks to develop their discursive and cognitive maturity.

--Janice Hays, "The Development of Discursive Maturity in College Writers" (1983: 141)

I will discuss four aims that seem to fall under the rubric of individual growth: self-awareness,

honesty, intellectual growth, and power to influence others. Proponents of individual growth rarely

indicate their larger visions, and each of the four aims might be read along utilitarian lines. For

example, Anne Ruggles Gere in The "Why's" of Teaching Composition sees "integrity and self-

knowledge" as having "internal value" for writing students, but she also stresses how these qualities

enhance students' "political power," meaning their ability to persuade an audience. "I use the word

'political' in its broadest sense--to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people's ideas and

ideals" (28). Toward which direction does Gere wish students to push the world? Which ideas and

ideals does she believe need altering? That students should push the world toward "integrity" can be

read in Gere, but is not explicitly stated, and we can as readily construe a utilitarian call to help students

push the world wherever they wish to push it. In fact, the pursuit of personal or intellectual growth

toward unexamined social ends is an overwhelming trend in composition. However, as we have

already addressed general problems in the utility model, we will now consider the literature as

expressing social visions beyond mere utility.

Self-Awareness

Self-discovery or self-awareness is a key project of the "expressionist" school of composition

(see Berlin's typology, 1982). What students are supposed to discover about themselves, and toward

what end, is not discussed much in the literature--assumably, expressionists wish their students to find

these answers for themselves. Yet, expressionism does seem to favor certain kinds of discoveries

67

more than others. Writing teachers "must recognize and use as the psychologists do in therapy, a

person's desire to actualize himself," says pioneering expressionist Gordon Rohman (1965: 108). Self-

actualization is identified with an inner "sense of power, of self-fulfillment," and with becoming "more of

the person we potentially can be" (Rohman 1965: 112; 1972: 374). Expressionists believe student

writers self-actualize by approaching their subject with integrity, freshness, a growing sense of their

uniqueness--by discovering what Ken Macrorie calls one's "authentic voice" (1970a: 149), and Peter

Elbow, "what your inner self sounds like" (1981: 306).

The self that the expressionists wish us to discover is thus characterized by its authenticity

(discussed below under "honesty") and its uniqueness. Expressionist uniqueness, or individuality, is

tempered somewhat with references to commonality--Rohman offers that when a writer reveals his/her

unique experience, "we recognize the experience as our own too" (1965: 108)--and this individuality-

versus-commonality creates a theoretical tension that begs to be sorted through by proponents of

expressionism. But, in general terms, expressionism regards the writer more as an individual than a

social being. Donald Murray likens our students to "fingerprints and voiceprints, each different from the

other," and advises the teacher, "If you are able to accept your loneliness, your individuality, then you

are on the way to accepting theirs and helping them to accept it too" (132, 145). Expressionist students

help each other in the search for their unique truth by responding to drafts. But, as Elbow explains,

students are not to theorize or argue about responses, nor discuss or theorize about the subject matter

addressed by the writer (1973: 85-106). Afterwards, the writer uses the peer responses "for his own

private purposes" (1973: 140). Likewise, Murray's students have no discussion before writing since this

"may get in the way of the students' writing the way they write" (75). If, while responding to drafts,

students begin talking about the subject rather than what the writer has said about the subject, the

teacher should "let that run for a short while, but then bring the discussion back to the treatment of the

subject, not the subject itself" (201). This emphasis on uniqueness and individual truths has political

and social ramifications. Murray observes in the writing classroom a range of experiences and

backgrounds, with "welfare mothers sitting beside children of the corporate rich" (133). For Murray,

such differences of life fortune are part of a "diversity" to be "gloried in," but he does not discuss them

68

as opportunities for students to explore the impact of social inequalities in our lives, or as opportunities

to make critical judgments or moral commitments. Whether the student is rich or poor, has higher or

lower aspirations, is academically successful or unsuccessful, they are encouraged to see their

condition as an individual matter, rather than a social and political matter. Hence, while the assumed

goal is self-affirmation, expressionist individualism becomes a prescription for self-blame.

The expressionist's better world is one in which we pursue our individual purposes, and it is not

incompatible with Adam Smith's capitalist scheme. But the concern is less with economic structure

than with internal life--a vision well attuned to Eastern philosophies, which are regularly cited in

expressionist literature. Whatever we do in the world, it should be done with a clear sense of who we

are inside. In the face of unjust authority or unjust institutions, this often means a preference for the

bending-reed approach, for creatively adapting to--rather than collectively challenging--dislikeable

conditions. Consider Elbow's advice to a student or worker who is unhappy with the writing assignment

required by a teacher or boss:

Perhaps you must write an essay for a teacher who never seems to understand you; or a report

for a supervisor who never seems able to see things the way you do; or a research report on a

topic that has always scared and confused you. If you try to write in the most useful voice for

this situation--perhaps cheerful politeness or down-to-business impersonality--the anger will

probably show through anyway. . . .

In a situation like this it helps to take a roundabout approach. First do lots of freewriting

where you are angry and tell your reader all your feelings in whatever voices come. Then get

back to the real topic.

After doing lots more writing and exploration of the topic without worrying about the tone, the student will

find it "relatively easy to revise and rewrite something powerful and effective for that reader" (1981: 307-

8). Elbow's advice is sound in the sense that we are often caught in circumstances that forbid open

complaint or expression of anger, and that blowing off steam elsewhere is often necessary to perform

well the work required of us. Yet, because Elbow does not even consider the possibility of turning anger

69

into positive resistance, nor consider the need for larger political strategies to undo the hierarchal

structures that make us angry in the first place, he offers us only a vision of perpetual surrender to

authority. The expressionist focus is less toward the transformation of oppressive social structures, and

more toward techniques to help people feel better within alienating circumstances.

Some interesting calls for self-actualizing pedagogy have been coming from observers of the

labor market. Notably since the late 1960s, the number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs has not kept

pace with our country's increasing population of college graduates. Russell Rumberger, whose 1981

book Overeducation in the U.S. Labor Market substantiated several earlier studies (Berg, Freeman,

Carnegie), points to a "growing disparity between the higher expectations of young people and the lack

of opportunity to satisfy them" (15). Rumberger estimates that 40 percent of all U.S. workers with some

college education were overeducated for their jobs in 1976, that 56 percent of younger workers faced

this circumstance, and that projections to 1985 indicate a deepening

overeducation (or under-utilization) trend (86-96). (National and state education commissions have

widely claimed that technology is upgrading general skill requirements in the job market; this claim is

challenged by Rumberger [1987] and by other contributors in Burke and Rumberger's The Future

Impact of Technology on Work and Education.) James O'Toole, supervisor of the 1973 federally-

sponsored study Work in America, worries that the disjunction between education and employment is

creating frustration and low morale among younger workers--"workers who, ironically, have the

educational backgrounds to articulate their dissatisfactions":

A situation in which taxi drivers have college degrees is not necessarily benign. . . . College-

educated taxi drivers in New York City have formed a radical socialist Taxi Rank and File

Coalition and control fifteen of fifty garages in the city. The coalition garnered 20 percent of the

vote in a 1974 union election. (1977: 59)

O'Toole comforts non-socialist readers that this is not to alarm or forecast revolution. He believes,

however, that the situation demands a new approach to education, instilling career expectations that

are not "lower," but "realistic." The approach would look to John Dewey's education for "human

70

growth," which is based on the notion that "most people find life rewarding and satisfying when it is

experienced as a continuous course toward fulfilling one's individual potential--both on and off the job"

(140). O'Toole explains: "Dewey wanted to equip youth to find educative experience even in the worst

jobs. He felt that each worker should have 'the education which enables him to see within his daily

work all there is in it of large and human significance' " (141). Apparently, a data entry clerk typing

numbers into a computer for eight hours a day may find her work illuminating and enriching if she has

"discovered herself." The key for O'Toole, though, is that the depressant conditions of the labor market

require that we offer youth a broad, growth-oriented schooling that permits "adaptability and coping with

change in an unpredictable environment. . . . Historically, the people most able to adapt to the

vicissitudes of social life have been the liberally educated, for whom learning has always been a way of

life" (145, 147).

Similar advice is offered by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Their 1973 report on

College Graduates and Jobs, significantly subtitled Adjusting to a New Labor Market Situation,

suggests that "the prospects of grave political repercussions" can be diminished if college students

learn to "adjust" to new circumstances by "developing realistic expectations about jobs," and by looking

on higher education as personal growth. College should be seen as "much more than preparation for

an occupation," but rather as an opportunity to "broaden interests that can enrich all of subsequent life":

"Higher education was once most helpful in entering a higher class status; subsequently, in entering

into a better job; and increasingly now, in entering into a better life" (10). So, students should not

expect a better job, but they should expect a better life! Expressionists and others who teach

composition for growth and self-discovery must develop a clear conception of their social goals. Do we

want self-aware students who are forever adapting to the "vicissitudes of social life?" Or do we

envision ourselves and our students democratically directing our social course?

Honesty

Honesty, integrity, and authenticity are terms that hold mystery for expressionists, a mystery tied

to their belief in a magical Truth to be discovered deep inside of us. This belief is often only put to us

71

implicitly, but Elbow is straightforward: the writer's agenda is to "put magic into words," "the entrance

into magic is through the truth," and "the best advice is simply to believe in magic and find where your

magic lies" (1981: 370). A magical Truth is linked to a magical Unity. Again, the linkage is often only

hinted toward, as in Gere's "wholistic" view of integrity. Moral honesty is "only part, and a lesser part,"

of the full meaning of integrity, says Gere. "Derived from the Latin integritas--defined as wholeness,

entireness, completeness--the word integrity means no element is missing, nothing is divided or

broken" (19). Hence, to write with integrity means to produce a composition that is whole and

complete. But the implications are more global: "Written composition exemplifies integrity to students

who face a fragmented world. Writing provides a means of uniting, of making whole. Students who

experience integrity in written composition may be able to extend that integrity to other areas of their

lives" (27). Gere seems to intend a wholeness in student writing that will promote wholeness in the

world. Were Gere looking only for wholeness, however, she would not use the word integrity, which

connotes honesty as well as wholeness. What may be informing Gere's notion of integrity is a

communion-like vision of humanity searching for the Truth that will unite us all--a notion that guides

many of our religions. The Quakers, for example, regard God as "the source of unity among conflicting

forces" (Brinton 166). "In withdrawing into the presence of God," say the Quakers, "man seeks to

perceive the whole as it is seen by God. Adherence to the part--to a particular individual, nation, race

or class--may be overcome by communion with the Father of all being" (Brinton 62). The vision finds its

modern political expression among radical pacifists, for whom nonviolence "relies on the power of truth

rather than force of arms and flows from a sense of the underlying unity of all human beings" (Cooney

and Michalowski 11). There are problems in this vision, which I will take up in my section on

collaborative growth. But those advocating wholeness as a pedagogical aim should make their

wholeness vision clear, so we can frankly assess it.

For now, let us consider the more ordinary idea of honesty in writing, as suggested by Erika

Lindemann: "Because other media threaten to re-create us as plastic people, Disney delusions, and

Madison Avenue stereotypes, we want students to write honestly, with a kind of tough sensitivity, about

subjects that matter to them" (7). If we link this composition aim to a vision, it might propose that a

72

better world is one in which people conduct their lives and affairs honestly, without corruption, and that

we begin to approach that better world by practicing honest writing and honest living ourselves, and

encouraging the same in others. While I want to make clear that I do value honesty and openness, and

I encourage this in the freshman writing classes that I teach, I want to point how honesty is insufficient

as a non-utilitarian teaching or social goal.

The achievement of an honest society must take into account the forces that lead people to

dishonesty and, in particular, must conceive of social and economic structures that will favor honest

conduct. A society that allocates inordinate power to small groups and individuals (such as corporate

owners), and then asks those individuals to not abuse that power, is trusting the wolves with the

chickens. When the power holders establish dishonest or plastic or Madison Avenue institutional

priorities, those of us who, as a matter of survival, must work in those institutions are often forced to

serve dishonest priorities. A plain case are workers in the news media. A 1983 study by Dan Hallin

tells of New York Times' El Salvador correspondent Ray Bonner, whose reportage was seen by

influential conservative critics as too sympathetic to the Salvadoran rebels. In what many observers

believe was a response to political pressures, the Times pulled Bonner out of El Salvador and later

assigned him to the financial pages (18-19). One reporter wrote to Hallin of the pressures against

expressing a left-of-center perspective in the news:

A reporter will often hold back on following the logic of his own opinion if other reporters . . . are

beginning to jokingly refer to him as a "Com/symp." Not only is he afraid some right-wing

informer lurking in the bar might overhear . . . he is even more afraid that his reputation might

get back to his desk. (qtd. in Hallin 18)

The quoted reporter's concerns are supported by case after case of firings, demotions, transfers, and

suppressed stories described in Ben Bagdikian's authoritative critique The Media Monopoly. Any overt

punishment of a reporter delivers a lasting lesson to everyone in the news organization, until

avoidance of the prohibited news subject becomes unconscious, an "internalized bias," says Bagdikian

(217-18). One of the most widely prohibited subjects is anti-corporate news. Of the 1,110 members of

the professional organization, Investigative Reporters and Editors, only 6 have corporate life as their

73

beat (56). The problem is exacerbated by the rapidly centralizing corporate ownership of the media,

and by the media's increasing obligations to corporate advertisers. The bulk of the output from our

country's 25,000 media outlets was controlled, in 1981, by 46 corporations; in 1986, by 29 corporations;

in the early nineties, media leaders predict, by a half-dozen corporations (21, 235). Bagdikian

concludes that the heads of these corporations constitute a "new Private Ministry of Information and

Culture" (xx). The media problem may be seen as the tip of the iceberg as far as constraints on honest

expression in our society. Particularly when people are dissatisfied with institutional conditions, how

often can students be honest with teachers? teachers be honest with administrators? any subordinate

be honest with any superior? All dangerous undertakings. Writing teachers should certainly strive to

create a classroom environment where students feel safe to say what they really think. But teachers

interested in an honest world should not give favor to naiveté. Students need opportunities to explore

and make judgments about the stifling of free expression in our lives, and need opportunities to imagine

alternative worlds.

Intellectual Growth

Intellectual or cognitive growth--under such terms as critical thinking, problem solving, discursive

maturity, liberal education--represents one of the most cited objectives in modern composition. When

we scan the literature for the purposes of such growth, we primarily find the silence that seems to imply

utilitarian ends (see, for example, the collection gathered by Hays et al., The Writer's Mind). But, again,

for our discussion, let us assume non-utilitarian visions on the part of our writers. An intellectual

objective with growing currency in composition is that of initiating students into the "academic discourse

community" (see discussions in Bizzell 1982a, 1982b; Bruffee 1982a, 1984; Bartholomae; see

applications in Bartholomae and Petrosky; Mike Rose; Maimon et al.). As Kenneth Bruffee proposes,

"we would see ourselves as people appointed by the knowledge communities our students aspire to

join to induct students into the conversation of educated human beings" (1982a: 111). If viewed as

social vision, Bruffee's proposal offers that a better world is one populated by intellectuals. That some

intellectuals might oppress other intellectuals does not appear to be at issue in Bruffee's work (and the

74

issue is heavily ignored in the work of other academic discourse proponents). What is important is that

people will be able to reason together through a common code, weigh issues abstractly, entertain

multiple perspectives.

Let us accept, for present purposes, that helping students join the "educated conversation" of

academe is a desirable goal--or at least that the fostering of mass intellectuality is essential to any

democratic better world. Next we must ask whether that educated-conversation project is enough, and

what values and visions inform our approach to that project. Interesting answers are suggested in the

models of moral-cognitive growth taken up by a number of composition theorists. William Perry's

influential nine-stage scheme, presented in his Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the

College Years (1968), defines a simplistic position of right-wrong dualism, an intermediate position of

relativistic thinking, and an advanced position of commitment within relativism (discussed in Bizzell

1984, Hays 1987; applied in Hays 1983, and Rosenberg). Perry's goal is for students to take a moral

stand, but a stand that is based on thoughtful reflection rather than unexamined truths. We would look

for "considered conformity as against blind conformity, judicious revolt as against blindly reactive revolt"

(209). Perry acknowledges that his model implies particular moral preferences. "The values implied by

the word 'growth' in our scheme are inescapable" and suggest that "it is better to grow than to arrest

growth or to regress" (emphasis in original) (45, 44). He sees his model as contributing to the making

of better persons and making of a better world: "An advanced person showing a high rate of growth

becomes somehow a 'better' person. . . . We would argue . . . that the final structures of our scheme

express an optimally congruent and responsible address to the present state of man's predicament"

(44, 45). In Perry, the educated better world readable in Bruffee is more definitely asserted. Moral

betterment is defined not in terms of our specific positions on justice, equality, political systems, the Ten

Commandments, or other principled criteria, but becomes rather a question of intellectual

sophistication. Whether we favor conformity or revolt, dictatorship or democracy, our positions have

equal merit in Perry's moral scheme, provided they have been reflectively determined. Paradoxically,

Perry asks students to move beyond simple relativism to commitment, while his own model refuses to

75

make the same commitment: it is a relativist model (see Kohlberg and Turiel for a fine critique of

relativistic moral education).

Let us offer to Perry's model the example of Henry Kissinger who, like most members of our

country's corporate-political elite, is a highly educated shoo-in for Perry's ninth stage of moral

development. No public figure in our times has enjoyed wider praise for his intellect. Kissinger has

taught government at Harvard, diplomacy at Georgetown; the catalog at my local university library lists

sixty-four of his works. He served as national security advisor under Nixon and Ford, secretary of state

under Ford and Carter, and won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the agreement that ended

the Vietnam War. During his most powerful years under Nixon, our peace prize winner used his

discursive talents to co-engineer the secret invasion of Cambodia (he personally selected targets for

the B-52 raids and "seemed to enjoy playing bombadier" [Hersh 122]); to help orchestrate the

overthrow of Allende's elected left-wing government in Chile and its replacement by a brutal military

regime that was friendlier to U.S. corporate interests; to order illegal wiretapping of the Nixon

administration's political critics, and FBI/CIA spying on anti-war activists and radicals or suspected

radicals. Chronicler William Shawcross adds that Kissinger's personal qualities were less than

exemplary--self-serving, self-centered, manipulative, anti-democratic (77-79). I do agree with Perry,

Bruffee, and others that intellectuality is better than non-intellectuality, reflectiveness better than non-

reflectiveness. But educators need pedagogical models and visions that help us make the link between

intellectuality and our commitments to a just and humane world; ethically relativistic models do not

address this need.

One attempt to join intellectual growth with an explicit commitment to justice can be found in the

moral-cognitive model of Lawrence Kohlberg (see Miller for an analysis of freshman papers that uses

Kohlberg). Like Perry and many other developmentalists, Kohlberg proposes a curriculum of moral

dilemmas that stimulate students' thinking and advancement to higher stages. But, where Perry

defines moral maturity as arriving at a well-considered commitment to (seemingly) any position,

Kohlberg's highest stage involves a well-considered commitment to "principles of justice."

Unfortunately, Kohlberg's justice principles are defined vaguely as "reciprocity and equality of the

76

human rights" and "respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons," and there are

indications that what Kohlberg has in mind is capitalist justice. What is more, Kohlberg claims that his

moral stages and principles are "culturally universal" and, specifically, that they are free of any class

bias: "The moral stages do not represent an American middle-class value bias; they are universal"

(Kohlberg and Turiel 414). Kohlberg's purportedly universal, class-neutral system is reflected in the

U.S. Constitution--"The moral basis of the Constitution and the major moral values of our society are

the principles of justice which we say are the core principles of any mature morality" (Kohlberg and

Turiel 442)--and in the value postulates of "ethical liberalism" (Kohlberg and Mayer 472). On ethical

liberalism, Kohlberg and co-author Rochelle Mayer cite the works of Mill, Dewey, Locke, Kant, John

Rawls, and a "modern statement" by R.S. Peters that relates this liberal tradition to education. In

Peters, it is argued that a just society need not be an egalitarian one, since egalitarian logic would

finally force us to genetic breeding to ensure that all of us are born with similar assets; hence,

egalitarianism leads to infringements of liberty (57). In Rawls, whom Kohlberg frequently cites in his

works, we are advised that inequalities are justified if the entrepreneurial incentives afforded by the

inequalities lead to more efficient production, thereby raising the long-term prospects of society's least

advantaged members (Rawls 78, 302; Martin 66). Although Kohlberg does not speak directly to such

points, we do notice that his list of "universal values" includes "property," "economic and business

contracts," and "equality of opportunity," but does not include equal distribution of wealth (Kohlberg and

Turiel 433). We need not grapple here with the arguments about equality and justice in order to agree

that, in a world that includes millions of socialists and other egalitarians, Kohlberg's principles of justice

are far from universal.

Those who teach writing to promote intellectual growth--and perhaps all of us do share this aim--

need to define critically the growth we wish to encourage. Suppose we accept that values and visions

are implicated in any pedagogy we choose. Suppose also that we reject Perry's moral relativism, and

Kohlberg's capitalist universals. In fact, suppose we reject in general the search for universal values:

after all, the value of "justice" may be fairly universal, but the more definite our conception of justice, the

less universalist we become. We might then conclude that our responsibility as educators is to commit

77

to, and teach from within, a moral position that is not universally shared. That is, we would embrace

biased teaching, willfully shaping our pedagogies to accord with our non-universal values. The

readings, questions, and ways of thinking that we introduce and do not introduce to our students would

become, rather than half-conscious reflections of our social-political interests, fully conscious reflections

of those interests. And what shall those interests be? By what criteria ought we to select our values?

One answer is suggested by Leon Trotsky in his 1931 essay "Their Morals and Ours":

Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ, or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with

eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that

there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are

contradictory; that morality more than any form of ideology has a class character. (377-78)

The values we choose should express the social interests we support in a struggling world.

Writing as Individual Power

We turn now to the pedagogical aim as suggested by Andrea Lunsford: "As always, the power to

write, to express clearly and truly, translates into political, economic, and social power." (1987: 253).

That effective writing wields power--i.e., the power to influence others, the power to change the world--

is a fairly universal assumption in composition. It must be pointed out, however, that this power is most

often conceived as an individual, rather than collective, pursuit. As Elbow urges, we should never

conclude "that individuals are helpless to change the world and that words cannot move mountains"

(1981: 370). Hence, we learn that individuals can move mountains, but we do not learn that individuals

must typically join collectives to move mountains.

While the authors who teach writing as individual power give little indication of how they hope

such power will be used--and we may therefore read them as utilitarians--we might also read them as

pursuing a democratic vision. They are perhaps proposing that we can democratize society by helping

more individuals become articulate writers and speakers. This vision is a seductive one since it is

certainly true that a participatory democracy requires an articulate citizenry. We should note, however,

that those who offer writing as individual power are not discussing the need for radical social

transformations as prerequisite to democracy. The assumption, rather, is that ours is already a

78

democratic society, structurally speaking, and that our task remains to provide every individual the

literate tools needed to assert their voice within our democratic framework. This seems clearly the view

of Elaine Maimon et al.:

Learning how to articulate ideas for oneself and then for others prepares students for public

discourse in the society at large. . . . Historically, in Europe, a university was intended to be a

training ground for the religious and secular ruling classes. In the United States, Jeffersonian

democracy makes all citizens members of the ruling classes. Each person in a democracy has

a vote; each person should have a voice. (1984: ix)

While few put it so stoutly, similar democratic assumptions widely inform the composition and English

fields. At the 1987 English Coalition Conference, representatives of the National Council of Teachers

of English, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and other major English

associations held that language arts instruction "can and should make an indispensable contribution to

educating students for participation in democracy." Abilities to communicate, listen, think critically, and

to appreciate multiple perspectives and cultural diversity were seen as the essential requirements for

democratic participation (Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford 85). Since our social context is held to be

democratic, our educational task becomes simply a matter of preparing students to become effective

participants in the civic process. Also, since a democratic society does not deny power to its citizens,

the powerless ways that writing teachers often recognize in their students and strive to help students

overcome are seen primarily in psychological terms, or as internalized cultural messages--not as a

reflection of genuine social powerlessness. Says Elbow, "Many people are tricked into feeling more

powerless and helpless than they are because of ways in which they were brought up and because of

patterns in our culture" (1978: 63).

The goal of empowering students toward democracy deserves support, and writing can be an

essential tool in that empowerment. Also, writing teachers do need to address the psychological

dimension of powerlessness noted by Elbow: members of subordinate groups widely internalize their

social status, and this becomes a barrier to their political advancement (Sennett and Cobb).

Nevertheless, any strategy for student empowerment must begin by recognizing the realities of our

79

social status, the real powerlessness that most of us live with daily, and the fundamentally

undemocratic character of American society. From C. Wright Mills' 1956 classic The Power Elite to

more recent studies of the processes of governing circles, a substantial literature has documented the

existence of a socially cohesive American ruling class, estimated by William Domhoff at 0.5 percent of

the U.S. population. This class wields a dominant influence in both major political parties; their pro-

corporate, anti-labor, and anti-third world objectives are formulated in policy planning groups such as

the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Committee for Economic

Development, the Business Roundtable, and are consistently implemented by the world's leading

capitalist states (Domhoff; Dye; Shoup and Minter; Sklar 1980a; Parenti; Moody 127-46). The most

powerful policy planning group is the 1800-member Council on Foreign Relations. Founded in 1921,

the CFR has played a decisive role in U.S. foreign policy under every administration since at least

1940. In Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy,

Laurence Shoup and William Minter's historical case studies reveal the CFR's central role in setting the

terms for U.S. participation in World War II; in planning a post-war global-capitalist order under U.S.

economic, political, and military dominance; in inspiring the U.S.-Soviet cold war; in guiding U.S.

military intervention in Vietnam; and in prompting the renewal of U.S.-China relations under the Nixon

administration. The capitalist class is well-represented in the CFR and especially predominant in the

CFR leadership. Shoup and Minter's background studies found that 55 percent of the general

members, 84 percent of the directors, and 93 percent of the officers were members of the capitalist elite

(91). Shoup and Minter note that the CFR represents primarily the largest corporations, who have the

most interest in protecting and expanding overseas investments. The top ten of Fortune's top five

hundred industrial corporations averaged four CFR members from each corporate board of directors

(97).

In 1973, under the initiative of CFR chairman and Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David

Rockefeller, the CFR established the Trilateral Commission, in which America's ruling elite could

develop cooperative global plans with their elite counterparts in Japan and Western Europe. In a 1980

anthology exploring this 300-member planning group, editor Holly Sklar calls trilateralism "the creed of

80

an international ruling class whose locus of power is the global corporation" and who "view the entire

world as their factory, farm, supermarket, and playground" (1980b: 8-9). According to the Trilateral

Commission, "history shows that every effective international system requires a custodian" (qtd. in

1980b: 8). A global custodian may well be required. But membership on the commission--and on the

CFR--is by invitation only, and these bodies are not held democratically responsible to the world over

which they aim to preside. As an indicator of these organizations' continuing power in government,

over ninety appointees in the Carter administration were present or former members of the CFR, the

Trilateral Commission (TC), or both. Jimmy Carter, Vice-President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State

Cyrus Vance, and Defense Secretary Harold Brown each belonged to both organizations. Reagan's

first administration included over eighty appointees with present or former CFR or TC affiliation,

including George Bush (who resigned from both organizations during the 1980 campaign), Secretary of

State Alexander Haig (CFR, TC) and his successor George Shultz (CFR), Defense Secretary Caspar

Weinberger (CFR, TC) and his successor Frank Carlucci (CFR) (Perloff 158, 168-69; Dye 250-51;

Domhoff 139-40; Sklar and Everdell 91-92).

While American democracy allows the common people some voice in government, such as the

right to choose between an affluent-white-male-pro-corporate Democrat or an affluent-white-male- pro-

corporate Republican, the system does not require democratic pretensions in the economic sphere.

America's richest 1 percent can control 34 percent of all national wealth and 45 percent of financial

assets without transgressing Jeffersonian democracy (Stephen Rose 9). General Motors can deprive

30,000 workers of their livelihood at Flint, Michigan, in order to seek out cheaper labor abroad, while

democracy thrives (see Michael Moore's recent film Roger and Me). In the daily life of the American

family, classroom, and workplace, we may uncover violence, fear, and the quiet normalcy of

dictatorship, but the powerlessness of a silenced child is only a state of mind in our democratic society.

If we define democracy as having a direct voice or accountable representation in all the decisions

that affect us--most vitally, decisions regarding our social resources--it becomes clear that non-

democracy and non-power for the many are structural norms in our society. Democracy so defined

allows not only a more adequate social critique, but a more adequate vision of empowerment, than

81

does democracy defined along Jeffersonian lines. It allows us to conceive of student empowerment as

something more bold than helping students "discover their power" while they (and we) remain

institutional subordinates all of our lives.

The degree to which writing can empower students, or can be translated into social-political

power, should neither be underestimated nor overestimated. The power of any particular piece of

writing to effect change in readers or effect change in the world may be enhanced by "authentic voice"

or other qualities of its content, but the social context of the communication is what is crucial.

Bagdikian tells of two letters written in 1969 by Richard Berlin, president of the Hearst Corporation, to

President Nixon and to Nixon's assistant attorney general, asking the administration to support the

Newspaper Preservation Act. The act would exempt Hearst and other large media chains from anti-

monopoly laws that forbid price-fixing agreements between companies. After receiving Berlin's letters,

the Nixon administration reversed its previous opposition to the newspaper bill, and the bill was passed.

The media giants returned the favor in 1972. Watergate stories potentially damaging to Nixon were

widely suppressed by major media in the months before the election, and Nixon, whose prior

relationship with the media had been far from happy, received the highest percentage of newspaper

endorsements of any candidate in modern times (90-101). How many richly voiced letters from

average citizens would it have taken to persuade Nixon to maintain his original stand against the

Newspaper Preservation Act? A thousand letters? Too few. A million? Perhaps. In an historical

context where the major media outlets are controlled by a handful of giants, and where average citizens

who would like to influence others through their writing have almost no alternative press, our most

persuasive words have only limited power. Of course, we do have the capacity to create new contexts,

to build vast social movements and popular presses from neighborhood to national levels that could

allow overwhelming numbers of us to become truly influential writers. And our students today do need

writing and other intellectual talents to help them begin such a project. But Elbow, Lunsford, and others

who rightfully seek to help students find power with writing must also address directly, and involve

students in exploring, the social problematics of that empowerment. We need to envision and

strategize toward social contexts in which we can practice meaningful democratic power.

82

Model III: Individual Mobility

They looked to education for the promises their parents had so often mouthed, and they

reaffirmed a faith that schooling ought to make a difference in the job a man or woman could

expect.

--Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (28)

The men wanted to change their lives, and for all their earlier failures, they still held onto an

American dream: Education held the power to equalize things. After Vietnam, they had little

doubt about what their next step had to be: up and out of the pool of men society could call on

so easily to shoot and be shot at.

--Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary (137)

Americans widely see education as door to the better jobs and the better life. In a 1989 national

survey of college freshmen, the leading "very important" reason for going to college was "to be able to

get a better job" (cited by 76 percent of respondents), and the leading important objective in life was to

be "very well-off financially" (cited by 75 percent). Students' goals are not narrowly materialistic,

however: opportunities for challenging, interesting work, and "to be helpful to others" were cited more

often than "high anticipated earnings" as essential in career choice ("Fact File"). If there are such

things as universal human pursuits, I would think that material well-being and satisfying labor ought to

be among them. Composition teachers can widely agree that the instruction we offer should help

students in their better-job quest. But our different assessments of the world, and different hopes, lead

us to help students differently. The composition field's prevailing visionary model in terms of career and

economic advancement is that of individual mobility. The mobility ideal is linked to a conscious or

unconscious acceptance of the capitalist order. Capitalism works, or can be made to work, and those

at the social bottom--for whom the system has not worked--can reach upwards through education.

Some mobility proponents, such as Ross Winterowd, are optimistic about the upward road: "The

challenge in our capitalist democracy is convincing the have-nots, who in general are the illiterate or

83

marginally literate, that the American dream is real, attainable, and worthwhile" (204). Others, such as

Lindemann, think the lanes are closing: "The argument that writing opens doors to many satisfying,

lucrative professions no longer holds up as well as it used to." But we are advised to edge into traffic

and make the best of it. "Even though many entry-level jobs do not demand exceptional writing skills,

students applying for these positions are instantly branded as illiterate if their resumes or letters contain

misspelled words. . . . The ability to write well still creates economic power" (4). Some touters of

mobility recognize that the obstacles to advancement are not only educational but political. In a 1981

symposium on Black English and education, Michigan's state employment commission director Martin

Taylor cites three major barriers to minority success in the working world: lack of education, lack of

skills, and discrimination. Regarding the last, Taylor observes that employer discrimination continues

despite legislation and affirmative action programs. He suggests not the need for more effective

political action, however, but argues that "the best protection against chronic unemployment is still

education" (242). Discrimination is thus left as a social given; education will help minorities make do in

a society that will be unfair to them in perpetuity.

The mobility question has been central in the debates over school policies on Black English and

other non-privileged dialects. After the 1979 King court case ordered the Ann Arbor, Michigan, school

district to recognize the validity of Black English and to take students' home dialects into account in the

teaching of Standard American English, some black leaders protested the case because, as Detroit

columnist Carl Rowan asserted, the King approach would "consign millions of ghetto children to a

linguistic separation which would guarantee that they will never make it in the larger U.S. society" (qtd.

in Smitherman 1981: 53). Geneva Smitherman's reply to Rowan and other King critics takes on their

mobility assumptions and places these in global context. "Note that it is not high unemployment, or the

shifting balance in world economic power, or the crises caused by a highly advanced, technological

capitalist society in the United States but 'linguistic separation,' mind you, that will keep black children

and youth from making it in the United States." Smitherman argues that the policies proposed by black

middle-class leadership "only ensure that a few blacks slide past the gatekeepers":

84

Limited by an analysis based solely on race, without considering issues of class, they are

unable to propose solutions that address the broader structural crises that affect all groups in

United States society, but affect poor blacks with disproportionate severity. While King reminds

us that standard English is a sine qua non of survival in our complex society, the harsh reality is

that if all blacks commanded the language of textbooks and technocracy, the system, as it is

presently constructed, could not accommodate all of us. Further, if our society could solve the

problem of black unemployment--and that's a big if--it would only shift the burden to some other

group. It would do nothing to address the fundamental cause of unemployment. (53)

Implied in Smitherman's response is a proposal not simply for multilingual/multicultural education,

but for political multicultural education, and for broad analyses and political programs outside the

classroom (see Smitherman 1987). It is important to stress such political and systemic contexts

because, within a new composition trend toward linguistically and culturally sensitive pedagogy, there is

not always a willingness to link insights about "cultural capital" with the implications of such insights

regarding the need to eliminate race, class, and gender oppression. In Heath's Ways with Words we

are treated to an exquisite ethnography of working-class life, and then to a very compelling pedagogical

application in which working-class children study their own community's life and culture while making

their transition into the abstract conceptual discourse of the school. We look forward to what

conclusions Heath may draw for linking such pedagogy to struggles for transcending the working-class

poverty and powerlessness her ethnography describes. But we are offered only that the school-

acquired conceptual habits "may have . . . relevance to future vocational goals" (363), that working-

class parents should learn to help their children plan their futures as do middle-class parents in the

larger town (364), and that allowing working-class ways of life to become a more integral part of school

culture can work against the role of schools in legitimating middle-class power (369). These are valid

designs and yet politically limited. Heath's conclusion looks toward the vocational advancement of

individuals, not toward the political advancement of collectives. She rightfully challenges the school's

role in reproducing unequal class relations, but what about the larger system that makes inevitable

such class inequalities? Heath answers:

85

It is easy to claim that a radical restructuring of society or the system of education is needed for

the kind of cultural bridging reported in this book to be large scale and continuous. I have

chosen to focus on the information and bridging skills needed for teachers and students as

individuals to make changes which were for them radical, and to point to ways these cultural

brokers between communities and classrooms can perhaps be the beginning of larger

changes. (369)

What Heath doesn't say is that radical teachers (e.g., Freire and others) also work on small, local

ventures as the modest "beginning of larger changes," but that their work seeks to prefigure the larger

changes by opening up dialogues and critical studies on social-political transformation. Culturally

sensitive curricula uninformed by transformative vision can become just another strategy for individual

growth--reinforcing the very mobility myths and individualist ideologies that isolate, discourage, and

often defeat working-class youth. The pedagogies Heath introduced into the Piedmont schools, while

stirring enthusiasm and promise, were later phased out, and Heath cites as a contributing factor the

movement toward back-to-basics curricula and pressures to teach to standardized tests (356). Such

eventualities remind us that we cannot afford to put our larger political needs to the margins of

education.

Redefining Career Preparation

In recent college composition trends, career preparation has meant teaching students to work in

collaborative groups, to recognize and master various kinds of discourse, and to think critically through

technocratic problem-solving models. Students, in other words, are to learn the writing and conceptual

modes, and the cooperative working habits, required on the job in technical, professional, and

administrative fields. The approach is based upon what we might call the American-dream model of

education, which encourages students to see themselves as autonomous individuals pursuing their

private career successes in an unproblematic workplace, an unproblematic labor market, and an

unproblematic world. Meanwhile, the world beyond academe is forcing workers--including college-

educated workers--to cut back upon their dreams, lower their expectations. The cutback demands--

86

e.g., Americans' average annual income in constant dollars has declined 14 percent since 1973 (U.S.

Census 110-12)--have their source in global economic trends. The profit rate on investments, the most

important indicator of economic health, took an international decline of 30-40 percent in 1965-75 and

has never recovered. At the same time, U.S. corporations, which enjoyed happy expansion and world

dominance from the early fifties to mid-sixties, have lost the competitive advantage to Japanese and, to

a lesser extent, Western European firms. According to labor journalist Kim Moody's An Injury to All:

The Decline of American Unionism, U.S. business leaders responded to the new circumstances by

getting better organized as a class in order to pursue mutual interests, such as in cutting labor costs (by

forcing union concessions, busting unions, transferring production to third world countries or to weakly

organized regions in the U.S.); shifting the tax burden away from the wealthy and toward middle- and

low-income groups; and weakening workers' bargaining power by cutting back the social net of

unemployment benefits and poverty programs. Employers' leading political lobby, the Business

Roundtable, has successfully won labor law reforms friendly to business, while detoothing the

regulatory agencies most favorable to labor, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,

the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the National Labor Relations Board. One

manifestation of employers' aggressiveness against labor in recent decades is the growing number of

unfair labor practice charges against employers, from 3,655 in 1957 to 31,281 in 1980. Moody notes

that most unfair labor practice charges stem from the firing of workers who openly support unions (119)

(the joint employer offensive is detailed also in Slaughter and Goldfield).

College graduates entering today's labor force will encounter employer drives not only to lower

wages and reduce worker rights, but to routinize the work process itself, while placing effective control

into increasingly fewer hands. The historic efforts to rationalize labor in order to enhance profit have

traditionally been focused upon industrial workers (Braverman; Edwards; Noble). However, clerical and

service sector workers experienced similar processes as their ranks swelled during the 1950s, and

numerous studies have identified professional, technical, and administrative workers as the newest

target for labor rationalization, i.e., controlling the former controllers (Garson; Johnson; Zimbalist). Dale

87

Johnson and Christine O'Donnell observe tendencies toward "dequalification" and erosion of privilege

within many middle class occupations:

The conditions of work . . . begin to change from relative independence to dependence, from

varied, sometimes interesting, and creative activity to routine task, from superordination to

subordination, from job security to job insecurity, from employment as educated and skilled

labor to underemployment in terms of education and skill levels attained, and from economic

well-being to relatively reduced levels of income. (230)

Philip Kraft traces such changes in the field of computer programming. During the 1950s,

"programming remained very much an individual affair. Programs, including the largest and most

complex computer systems, were usually put together from start to finish by the same individual or

group that worked on every aspect of the job. . . ." The programs had distinct "personalities"--some

terse and elegant, others long and highly detailed, and some programmers "could make the machines

'do tricks' which were mysteries to the uninitiated" (56). But, in the early 1960s, idiosyncratic software

production gave way to "structured programming" and "modularization," which broke down software

systems into discrete units. Programmers found their options limited to a handful of logical procedures,

and they were expressly prohibited from asking for information not called for within the narrow tasks

allocated to them. The majority of programmers lost the independence and control they had once

enjoyed--and which had allowed them to demand high salaries--while a smaller number of systems

analysts now reserved the privilege of planning whole projects, parceling out smaller parts to the

programmers and coders under their supervision.

The routinization of teachers' labor is perhaps better known to us. According to Patrick

Shannon's Broken Promises: Reading Instruction in Twentieth-Century America, public schoolteachers

saw widespread loss of their once-held autonomy when, beginning in the late 1910s, Frederick Taylor's

industrial principles of scientific management became the leading model for designing curricula and

school operations. Over the decades, teachers' curricular planning roles would be increasingly

appropriated by administrators, local school boards or state commissions, and textbook publishers.

88

Shannon characterizes the current back-to-basics and standardizing trends in reading instruction as

scientific management gone modern:

The process of reading is segmented into discrete skills so that increments of progress can be

identified across the grades. . . . Objective tests replace teachers' judgement concerning

whether or not a student is to be considered literate because teachers' judgement is

unpredictable. . . . Next, a search is made for the most efficient instructional means to move

students through the levels of reading. . . . And finally because few teachers would originally

choose this organization for their instructional behavior, a formal hierarchy of authority is

established within reading programs. (57)

Our college graduates will face tremendous adversity in their pursuit of satisfying careers, and

the college classroom should gear students intellectually for their present and future challenges. Some

compositionists may argue that our field's growing orientation toward academic discourse and critical

thought provides the very tools students will most need in taking on their local and global problems.

Perhaps so. But there is good reason to believe that the discourses being taught at the university may

actually contribute to students' sense of political helplessness in the working world. What struck Kraft

in his interviews with computer programmers was how few of these mostly college-trained workers

understood the organizational relationships at their workplaces, or recognized the systematic nature of

the routinizing and deskilling processes to which management was subjecting them. "Relationships, for

example, between a programmer and a manager were almost always viewed as personal ones, rather

than as part of an overall structure which individuals were inserted into or removed from as the

requirements of the organization demanded" (6). Nearly all the programmers believed that their

salaries depended on individual negotiations with their managers, and were unaware that salaries and

raises were pre-plotted in narrow increments by personnel departments. The programmers' lack of

knowledge about salary derived, in part, from a professionalism promoted by their companies that

holds it "unprofessional" for programmers to discuss their salaries with one another. This same

ideology has kept unions out of virtually all programming workplaces, with management insisting that

"programmer professionalism" and unions do not mix. Programmers are thus left with deceptive

89

notions of individual advancement, Kraft observes, "while major decisions about the work they do, pay,

and about their career prospects are settled for them in an impersonal way by thoroughly organized

employers" (96). Joan Greenbaum, a veteran in the computer field, writes that many programmers did

try to fight the changing conditions of their labor during the 1960s, but "we lacked a conceptual base

from which to present our arguments" (40). As a result, she theorizes, many programmers feeling the

tide of job degradation "only too gladly clung to the belief that they were professional" (49). The

professionalism provided a modicum of self-esteem for workers who were losing their power and

control on the job but who saw no way of resisting the process. Professional ideology provides similar

solace to schoolteachers being deprived of the kind of autonomy traditionally associated with

professionals, as Kathleen Densmore found in her 1984 teacher case studies. "With its emphasis on

individualism . . . the ideology of professionalism prevents teachers from recognizing that their

problems are shared by other teachers, and other workers; consequently, they tend to view failures and

problems in personal terms, and do not seek social or institutional structural changes" (155).

Of course, teachers have been much more successful than have programmers at rising above

this debilitating professionalism, recognizing their worker status, and getting organized. At the same

time, the ideology remains perhaps the leading obstacle to teachers' further political advancement, as it

has also among college faculty (Meisenhelder). Teachers learn their "professionalism," just as they

learn to fatalistically accept existing educational systems and methods as "just the way things are," at

the university (Shannon 52-60; Popkewitz 1987a). Students need intellectual training that allows them

to move beyond a personal view of their problems in a fragmented world, and toward a social view of

our problems in a connected world. They need discourses that address existing conditions not as

reified givens to which we must unavoidably adapt, but as historically contingent phenomena waiting for

our collective intervention.

Model IV: Collaborative Growth

In business and industry . . . and in professions such as medicine, law, engineering, and

architecture . . . collaboration is the norm. All that is new in collaborative learning, it seems, is

90

the systematic application of collaborative principles to that last bastion of hierarchy and

individualism, the American college classroom.

--Kenneth Bruffee, "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind' " (647)

Leaning to invent in communities will do more than enable success in classrooms and careers.

It is absolutely essential to achieving peace and, indeed, maintaining life on this planet in the

twentieth century and beyond.

--Karen Burke LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act (129)

In the growing composition trends toward collaborative learning and collaborative writing,

collaboration normally refers to more than simply having students meet in groups to respond to

individual papers; rather, it entails group decision making and group projects. As with other trends, the

collaborative literature emphasizes utilitarian ends--that working in groups leads to better ideas, that it

teaches the cooperative skills needed for academic and career success. Yet, we may also read the

literature as implying a particular social vision, and occasionally we find explicit references to such

larger aspirations. The collaborative better world is one in which people have learned to get along,

where we either accept our differences or strive to work them out through cooperative and peaceful

means. Oppressive gender, race, or class structures need not lead to divisive political battles in the

collaborative better world: cooperative conflict resolution is the key. This vision, which we will call

social harmonist, is not limited to advocates of collaborative learning; in fact, we may see it as implied

in any pedagogy that encourages a strategy of adjustment or accommodation, rather than challenge or

confrontation, with the existing world order. The harmonist ideal is strongly suggested in Elbow's non-

adversarial "believing game" (where we share perceptions and experiences), which Elbow says is more

likely than the "doubting game" (where we try to find holes in the other person's view) to "keep people

willing to talk to each other if the game breaks down" (1973: 175). The style of the doubting game is

"closing, clenching," "competitive," "aggressive: meeting threat by beating it down," while the believing

game is "opening, loosening," "cooperative," "nonaggressive: meeting threat by bending, incorporating;

nonviolent" (178-79). We also see the harmonist vision in Edward Corbett's "rhetoric of the open

91

hand," which Corbett favors over the "rhetoric of the closed fist." Writing in 1969, Corbett identifies

close-fisted rhetoric with the sixties' movements, whose angry mass demonstrations represent a

"retreat from reason," whereas open-handed rhetoric would emphasize logical persuasion through

"normal channels of communication." Corbett considers coercion and violence as expressions of

irrationality, and cites the modern father of nonviolence: "Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'Violence is

essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken

down. Any society which is geared for violent action is by that fact systematically unreasonable' "

(293).

What kind of social harmony are Corbett and others proposing? Will our better world operate

peacefully because the gross inequities and expansionist economic systems that undergird war

between classes and between states have been replaced by egalitarian, cooperative systems? Or will

peace come because subordinates have learned to cooperate with subordinators, and superpower

elites have learned to rule the globe collaboratively through East-West détente and Trilateral

Commissions? Corbett acknowledges such concerns:

The younger generation may regard the open hand as bearing too much of a resemblance to

the glad hand; they may see the civility, decorum, and orderliness of the older mode of

discourse as a facade behind which the establishment in all ages has perpetrated injustices on

the have-nots. (296)

Corbett answers, however, that if there has been hypocrisy in the older rhetoric, it has been "the result

of human frailty, not of an inherent weakness" in the ancient art of civil persuasion (296). Corbett's

subtle defense seems to argue that promoting harmony in an unequal order is not necessarily

hypocritical, and that through peaceful, open-handed persuasion we might convince the elites to rule

more benignly, to rise above the "human frailty" that had led them to tyrannical action.

Gandhi's Social Harmony

Harmonist ideologies are traditional means by which ruling groups encourage acceptance of their

rule--or have been means for directing lower-class resistance into relatively safe channels that leave

92

intact ruling class power. Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolence represented one such safe channel; his

political thought and practice provide one of our richest sources for the study of harmonious social

theory. Behind the Indian leader's politics lay a social vision that is far from egalitarian, or far from what

most of us would consider egalitarian. Gandhi was a firm believer in the Hindu caste system, which

holds that each person's life occupation is determined by heredity. Critical of modern corruptions of the

system which have produced innumerable castes and subcastes, each associated with gradations of

superiority and inferiority, Gandhi called for a return to the four original caste divisions, called varnas:

"The law of Varna prescribes that a person should, for his living, follow the occupation of his

forefathers. I hold this to be a universal law governing the human family" (1965: 47). If all accepted

their heredity occupation--whether teacher, warrior, merchant, or laborer--with no sense of superiority

or inferiority, then social peace could be had, Gandhi proposed.

If [the four Varnas] are members of one body, how can one be superior or inferior to one

another? . . . It is this canker [of superiority and inferiority] that is at the root of the various ills of

our time, especially class wars and civil strife. . . . These wars and strife could not be ended

except by the observance of the law of Varna. For it ordains that every one shall fulfill the law

of one's being by doing in a spirit of duty and service that to which one is born. (1965: 8-9)

There was nothing unequal in allotting one group power and authority over other groups, in Gandhi's

caste conception. This same principle applied to class relationships as well as caste. His theory of

trusteeship forbade tenant farmers from seizing and distributing the rich landlords' property; rather, the

rich would administer their wealth for the benefit of all.

We may not forcibly dispossess the Zamindars [landlords]. . . . They only need a change of the

heart. When that is done, and when they learn to melt at their tenants' woe, they will hold their

lands in trust for them, will give them a major part of the produce, keeping only sufficient for

themselves. (1970: 23-24)

Again, the existence of rulers and ruled would imply no inequality, Gandhi imagined, and no

disharmony:

93

What is needed is not the extinction of landlords and capitalists, but a transformation of the

existing relationship between them and the masses into something healthier and purer. (1970:

41)

Everybody would regard all as equal with oneself and hold them together in the silken net

of love. . . . We would hold as equal the toiling labourer and the rich capitalist. (1962, vol 2:

335)

Relations between the sexes involved a similar standard.

I do not envisage the wife, as a rule, following an avocation independently of her husband. The

care of the children and the upkeep of the household are quite enough to fully engage all her

energy. . . . The man should look to the maintenance of the family, the woman to household

management; the two thus supplementing and complementing each other's labours. (1965:

32)

As with class and caste, the sexual division of labor implied no inequality: "Nor do I see in this any

invasion of woman's rights or suppression of her freedom. . . . The woman who knows and fulfills her

duty realizes her dignified status. She is the queen, not the slave, of the household over which she

presides" (1965: 33). It should be noted that such questions of equality were widely debated among

Indian activists and intellectuals during Gandhi's time (though more so on caste and class than gender

questions), and that Gandhi was making choices between available alternatives. Gandhi's

organization, the Indian National Congress, became notably split during the 1930s between left and

right political camps, with Gandhi the most influential conservative voice (Bose; Ambedkar; Rao;

Mukerjee; Namboodiripad; Sarkar).

Despite his elitist visions, Gandhi genuinely sympathized with oppressed people and devoted his

life to their uplift. But because he could never break his sense of loyalty to the Indian upper class,

Gandhi's politics were haunted by contradiction. On the one hand, his ability as a spiritual leader to

move the Indian masses into political action was unequaled; on the other hand, he carefully controlled

that action, narrowing its political scope, ensuring that the thrust of resistance would be directed against

British colonial interests, not against wealthy Indian interests. Thus, when Indian workers and

94

peasants repeatedly read Gandhi's anti-colonial non-cooperation campaigns as a signal to rise up

against all authority, Gandhi fought to restrain them. In a February 1921 response to spreading

industrial strikes that were partly inspired by the Gandhi-led nationalist protests, Gandhi warned:

"Strikes are the order of the day. They are a symptom of the existing unrest. . . . There are not wanting

labour leaders who consider that strikes may be engineered for political purposes. In my opinion it will

be a most serious mistake to make use of labour strikes for such a purpose. I don't deny that such

strikes can serve political ends. But they do not fall within the plan of non-violent non-co-operation"

(1958-82, vol. 19: 365-66). In May 1921, Gandhi delivered a similar message to tenant farmers who

had launched rent strikes and other protests in northern India's United Provinces: "The Kisan [tenant]

movement has received impetus from Non-co-operation but it is anterior to and independent of it.

Whilst we will not hesitate to advise the Kisans when the moment comes, to suspend payment of taxes

to the government, it is not contemplated that at any stage of Non-co-operation we would seek to

deprive the Zamindars [landlords] of their rent" (1958-82, vol. 20: 106).

Gandhi's nonviolent politics cannot be understood apart from his historic role in containing lower

class militancy, in ensuring that India's bourgeois leaders would retain firm control of both the

nationalist movement and a future independent India. Nonviolent civil disobedience was a means of

waging struggle that attempted to affirm the "underlying unity" between adversaries. Informing it,

however, was a moral code with a double standard. While Gandhi's spiritual ethics strictly forbade the

use of political violence by the lower classes, the same ethics allowed exceptions for state violence. In

1918, Gandhi led a recruiting campaign, marching from village to village, attempting to raise a volunteer

Indian army to help Britain's war effort; he believed such work would make British rulers more favorable

to Indian independence (Gandhi 1957: 444-49). In 1944, Gandhi again offered the Indian National

Congress's "full co-operation" in Britain's military struggle as a bargain for independence; the British

rejected the plan (Tendulkar, 6: 263). A 1938 episode demonstrates even more clearly Gandhi's class

loyalties and the class bias in his nonviolent philosophy. Under a temporary system of dual rule, the

British had allowed Indian leaders to hold limited power in the provinces during the late 1930s, and

Gandhi's Congress party had won elections in seven provinces. At the same time, a rising labor

95

movement had launched a wave of industrial strikes, and picketing workers (some supported by

Congress activists) were being met with police batons and sometimes bullets, in Congress provinces.

In his Harijan magazine, Gandhi criticized obstructionist picketers and endorsed police action. "To

prevent the workers from going to their work by standing in front of them is pure violence and must be

given up. The owners of mills or of other factories would be justified in invoking the assistance of the

police, and a Congress Government would be bound to provide it if the Congressmen concerned would

not desist" (qtd. in Tendulkar, 4: 269). Critics accused Gandhi of contradicting his nonviolent code.

"Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," was Gandhi's Emersonian reply. "I have deplored

the necessity for it. . . . But till the Congress has developed a peaceful method of dealing with violent

crimes, its ministers must use police and, I fear, even the military, if they are to undertake the

administration of the affairs of the country in the present stage of its career" (qtd. in Tendulkar, 4: 270).

Corbett has argued that Gandhi saw "violence" as irrational. Actually, it was the violence of workers in

revolt that Gandhi considered irrational; the violence of state repression or of inter-state warfare was

"rational" or "necessary." Gandhi's dual morality meant that protesters must plead with the open hand,

even while the state bludgeons them with the closed fist. A critique of Gandhi does not of itself

disconfirm nonviolent philosophy or similar harmonious theories (on nonviolent theory in the U.S. anti-

nuclear movement, see Ryan 1986). But I am hoping to raise questions, and also to suggest the value

of studying the purposes that have historically been served by our theories.

Clarifying Our Collaborative Values

Composition teachers whose work is inspired by visions of a cooperative world--and my own

teaching is inspired by such--must conceive as clearly as possible the terms of that cooperation. This

would involve not only identifying our basic scheme for the future society, but determining the kind of

cooperative values we wish to promote in the here and now. Some collaborative advocates seem to

propose cooperating indiscriminately, as if all humanity shared the same interests and can now join

together. Bruffee, for example, describes academe and the workplace beyond as "communities of

knowledgeable peers," where "status equals" engage in agreed-upon discourses. He does

96

acknowledge that we sometimes write to please superiors in the corporate or department hierarchy, but

he stresses that, "In most cases people write in business, government, and the professions mainly to

inform and convince other people within the writer's own community, people whose status and

assumptions approximate the writer's own" (1984: 642). Hence, that which is egalitarian and

harmonious in our institutions seems to merit greater attention than that which is hierarchal and

conflictive. Bruffee's conception of peership, whether in the classroom or workplace, urges us to forget

our socioeconomic and other status differentials:

Outside the learning group . . . people may have widely different positions in the management

hierarchy of a union or corporation, in the professional or student hierarchy of an educational

institution, or in a system of social or economic class. But as collaborative learners all these

people are peers. With regard to a course in ethnography or in elementary Chinese, the vice-

president of a corporation, the janitor, the English professor, the freshman, the society matron,

and the shoe salesman must leave their social differences behind. (1982b: 38)

An alternative to Bruffee's version of collaborative learning would encourage students to bring

their social differences into the classroom, and would make the study of our differences and

commonalities integral to the curriculum (Trimbur, for example, has proposed that the classroom should

look for "dissensus" as well as consensus). Rather than teach a value of blanket cooperativeness, our

classroom would ask critical questions about collaboration: With whom must we collaborate to make

our lives better and our world better? Are some collaborations unwise? Do our literary texts, or texts in

various disciplines, or articles of mass media seem to suggest that we collaborate with some groups

but not with others? If we consider how today's employers are widely using the cooperative ethic, the

importance of such critical preparation for our students becomes apparent. Since the 1970s,

hundreds of companies have turned to what Business Week calls "The New Industrial Relations":

"A fundamentally different way of managing people is taking shape in the U.S. Its goal is to end the

adversarial relationship that has grown between management and labor. . . ." Based on "a more

enlightened view of worker psychology," the new approach stresses "labor-management trust" and "a

participatory process in which workers gain a voice in decision-making on the shop floor" ("New

97

Industrial" 85). In a 1987 series of ads in Business Week, General Motors declares: "The symbols of

confrontation have been replaced by the symbols of cooperation. Everyone eats together, parks

together, and works together" (qtd. in Parker and Slaughter 3).

At the center of the new approach are the "quality circles," work teams, and problem-solving

groups that have long been linked to the success of Japanese industries. But the glowing pictures

offered us by business and media are challenged by Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, both former auto

workers, who name the new team concept management-by-stress:

Management-by-stress uses stress of all kinds--physical, social, and psychological--to regulate

and boost production. It combines a systematic speedup, "just-in-time" parts delivery, and

strict control over how jobs are to be done, to create a production system which has no leeway

for errors--and very little breathing room. (14)

The sense of fear in MBS plants is striking. The power exercised by supervisors, combined

with little sense of either union presence or individual rights, chills the desire to criticize a plant

where company loyalty is a priority. (21)

By appealing to workers' genuine desire for a democratic voice on the job, the team concept allows

management unprecedented access to workers' knowledge. Work teams strive toward kaizen, a

Japanese word meaning continuous improvement, and offer up their suggestions to management. But

management, of course, prefers those suggestions that increase output. "Changes in a job can never

result in more breathing space for team members. Any improvements become the impetus for

management to find even more ways to speed up the team" (Parker and Slaughter 19). The team

concept relies heavily on worker peer pressure. The team leader--who is a member of the union, not

management--comes to see himself as a supervisor and is essentially a straw boss for management.

There is strong peer pressure against absenteeism because, rather than provide substitutes, the

company expects the team to cover for their missing member. "Workers are expected to believe that

personal illness or family needs must take second place to perfect attendance" (29).

Most team programs have a strong ideological component. GM, for example, sends thousands

of employees from its Hydra-matic Division to week-long "Family Awareness Training" sessions with

98

the stated aim of "establishing a family atmosphere within the division" (qtd. in Parker 19). The first

ground rule at the training is that no one tells whether they are hourly or salary (union or management).

Identities stripped away, conference participants spend an emotionally intense week in group sensitivity

exercises, developing interpersonal skills, disclosing their joys and fears. The final stage, according to

the training facilitators' handbook, "is one of unity, high spirits, mutual acceptance, and high

cohesiveness. It is the esprit stage" (qtd. in Parker 20). Parker comments:

A primary goal of most of these sophisticated exercises is to break down a person's

psychological defenses and develop openness. . . . But defenses serve a purpose. In the

unreal atmosphere of Family Awareness Week, it may be easy to let them down. But back

home, some "family members" have the power to assign jobs, grant exceptions, and even

destroy the livelihoods of others. Does naive openness in the work situation always make

sense? (20)

Parker believes that the trainings manipulate workers' needs for belonging and intimacy, in an attempt

to redefine their identity not as union people but as company people.

In the new industrial relations, collaboration means persuading workers to accept wage cuts,

speedups, tighter managerial control, and other manifestations of the general employer offensive--all

for the profitability of our family, the company. Workers urged to identify with the company are also

urged to non-identify with fellow workers and, notably, to see themselves in competition with workers in

other countries, in other firms, or even in other plants within the same company. As the chief negotiator

for B.F. Goodrich Co. puts it, "Union leaders to one degree or another are realizing that it's not 'us

against them' but 'we against the world' (qtd. in "Concessionary Bargaining" 68).

In the composition literature, collaborative learning is heavily geared to preparing students for

collaborative writing and working situations they will face "as professionals." No doubt many of our

students will make good use of such cooperative training. But Kraft, Densmore, and others (Johnson;

Popkewitz 1987a) suggest that the concept of professional is itself problematic and ideological, while

Peter Meiksins argues that the deskilling in many middle class occupations indicates the lack of control

over the labor process within--and hence the working class nature of--these occupations in the first

99

place. Composition teachers should be asking what kinds of collaborative skills and collaborative

values our students will be needing as workers, in the context of widespread employer aggressiveness

against workers. In their new book, Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative

Writing, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford wonder what will be the result "when the professional work

scene is populated much more by women and people of color," and they ask whether collaborative

pedagogy can empower women and students of color "so they can function as full participating

members of collaborative writing groups" in workplace settings (138, 122). While race and gender

equality in writing groups should absolutely be sought, Ede and Lunsford are taking too much as given

in terms of students' professional prospects, and they do not make sufficiently problematic the larger

institutional context and labor-management struggles within which the writing group is situated. My fear

is that, without such wider scope, we may end up sending into the work world students who, like the

computer programmers described by Kraft, are unable to penetrate management's glossy ideologies

and recognize the larger organizational relationships and structures that are geared to their

exploitation. Ede and Lunsford discuss their "growing awareness of and sensitivity to" issues of "power

and authority, of consensus and conflict, of gender, race, and class" (13), and they bring such concerns

to bear upon the field of collaborative writing (more so with gender than with race and class). Yet, the

authors seem reluctant to turn their sensitivity into concrete political commitments as educators. They

ask appropriate and pointed questions:

How does--and should--collaboration challenge or re-situate the attitudes, values, beliefs, and

ideological assumptions students and teachers bring to the writing class? . . .

To what extent can--or should--collaborative activities attempt to highlight or address

inequities of gender, race, and class? (125)

But these remain "unanswered questions" for Ede and Lunsford, and I am left wondering what keeps

them from attempting at least initial answers. If nothing more, it would help to know what moves them

to favor the radical pedagogy implied in their questions, and what holds them back from such

pedagogy. As it stands, the authors offer the less risky assertion that collaborative pedagogy is worth

our efforts because "it holds the potential for allowing, finally and fully, for the presence of others" (126)-

100

-here suggesting the very "sweeping and vague" notion of community which the authors later note has

been challenged by Myers, Trimbur, and Harris (136). I think, still, that Ede and Lunsford's "polyphonic

chorus of voices" (126) is not the same as Bruffee's "community of knowledgeable peers," and that the

former's emphasis on gender, race, class, and other differences will positively confront collaborative

teachers with questions of political commitment.

Model V: Collective Empowerment

Many students are in college because they still believe in the American dream; they must learn

to challenge it before they can write good history.

--Richard Ohmann and Jack Weston, "A Guide to Marxist Teaching: Freshman English"

(29)

As an overall objective, I set for my curriculum the goal of jointly presenting literacy and life as a

means of transcending the mental and ideological limits imposed by institutions and mass

culture. For me, this meant that my worker-students would become literate, conceptual in

habits of mind, confident in their approach to intellectual study, and more articulate and

assertive in understanding why things are as they are.

--Ira Shor, "Reinventing Daily Life" (502-3)

Proponents of what I have called the collective empowerment model--better known as radical,

critical, emancipatory, or liberatory pedagogy--do share many goals in common with their non-radical

composition colleagues. Any teacher versed in contemporary "process" pedagogy wants students to

become "conceptual in habits of mind" and "confident in their approach to intellectual study," as does

Ira Shor. Any contemporary teacher hopes that students will develop penetrating analyses and

insights, as do Ohmann and Weston in their proposed course based on a family history project. The

moderns will widely support Ohmann and Weston's injunctions favoring student-centered, collaborative

learning over the teacher-lecture format: "[Assign] a project that can't get done unless the students

write both individually and in groups. . . . Have students take control of their learning. Don't prepackage

101

all the assignments; get students to help frame them" (26). Moderns will likewise appreciate Shor's

conception of the teacher "withering away," which he describes as "a metaphor for the teacher's

balance between saying too much and saying too little; enough withdrawal to create a vacuum for

student assertion, enough direction to structure a critical inquiry." Shor's withering teacher replaces

authority-dependence with "a camaraderie not yet of equals but moving in that democratic direction."

The teacher as organizer fades as the students emerge; the liberatory goal is for the teacher to become

expendable (1987a: xii, 98). Yet, what distinguishes these radical teachers' objectives from that of

many composition colleagues is an explicit view of the teacher as social change agent. Ohmann and

Weston's version of freshman English seeks to help students "in unveiling capitalist social relations,

and seeing their own place within these relations" (27). Shor's purposes include "preparing students for

their history-making roles," and setting the foundations for "purging sexism and racism, evoking class

solidarity, and initiating social reconstruction" (1987a: 269-70).

Composition teachers whose pedagogy aims toward collective empowerment are primarily socialists

and Marxists or neo-Marxists; the Progressive Composition Caucus that meets at the annual

Conference on College Composition and Communication describes itself as "socialist-feminist" in its

newsletter Progressive Composition. However, I have seen no explicit discussion of socialist vision or

strategy in the composition literature, and an adequate rendering would run beyond the scope of this

paper. Those interested in exploring socialist visions should be aware that the socialist and

Marxist umbrellas encompass widely divergent traditions. Most importantly, the view of

socialism that has become world-dominant, and that has its sources in the Stalinist and social-

democratic traditions, equates socialism with state ownership of production. An alternative tradition,

stressing socialism as a system of democratic workers' control, finds Marx and Engels as its pioneering

exponents (Marx's democratic conception of socialism is made lucid in his treatment of the 1871 Paris

Commune in "The Civil War in France"; see helpful discussions by Draper 1986, 1987). One of the

best short introductions to these differing traditions is Hal Draper's 1966 essay The Two Souls of

Socialism which identifies two historic tendencies--a socialism-from-above and a socialism-from-below-

-and observes: "Socialism's crisis today is a crisis in the meaning of socialism. For the first time in the

102

history of the world, very likely a majority of its people label themselves 'socialist' in one sense or

another; but there has never been a time when the label was less informative" (1). Of the existing

socialist states, Draper writes:

The socio-economic system which has replaced capitalism [in the Communist states] would not

be recognizable to Karl Marx. The state owns the means of production--but who "owns" the

state? Certainly not the mass of workers, who are exploited, unfree, and alienated from all

levers of social and political control. A new class rules, the bureaucratic bosses; it rules over a

collectivist system--a bureaucratic collectivism. Unless statification is mechanically equated

with "socialism," in what sense are these societies "socialist?" (1)

Socialism-from-above, for Draper, is "the conception that socialism . . . must be handed down to the

grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control in fact,"

while socialism-from-below "can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses in

motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands. . . ." (2)

Any assessment of the successes and failures of twentieth-century socialism, and of the

prospects for a future socialism of a from-below variety, must begin first of all with some criteria for

making judgments--a definition, a vision. In my own broad conception, a socialist society is based on a

system of production for human needs, not private profit, and is characterized by a rigorous democracy

that leaves no aspect of human relationships outside the realm of democratic scrutiny. For more

specific proposals, I recommend a 1983 collection Socialist Visions, edited by Stephen Rosskam

Shalom, which includes visionary debates on socialist political democracy, socialism and the

environment, race and nationalism, division of labor, family and sex roles, economic planning, and

concludes with a bibliography. I also recommend more pleasurable excursions through utopian fiction,

including Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed. For

historical considerations of why working-class and socialist movements have fared poorly in the U.S.,

see Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of

American Working Class Consciousness; and Kim Moody, An Injury to All.

103

The potential contribution of the writing classroom toward a socialist project--or toward

encouraging the kind of political participation and movements for change that creates a basis for

socialist departures--depends on historic circumstances and the level of general activity outside the

classroom. Shor writes: "In a time of insurgent movements, the impact of critical classrooms is visible

and immediate. In periods of diffused radicalism or conservative reaction, the influence of critical

learning is low-profile and long-term" (1987a: 270). The classroom is not a place where the social

structure is changed, according to Shor, but where "knowledge, perception, ideology, and socialization

are challenged," and where people can be "mentally armed against domination" (1987a: xi, 99). In

Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, Shor describes some of his more successful collaborative class

projects--the rewriting of the U.S. Constitution, focusing on the practice of freedom in work and sexual

life; the writing of non-sexist marriage contracts; the design of democratic by-laws for the operation of

the classroom. The models for problem solving and conceptual thinking that Shor has developed

contrast interestingly with conventional approaches. Consider first how one influential mainstream

model tends to narrow student aspirations. John Chaffee's Thinking Critically grows out of a nationally

recognized interdisciplinary program in critical thinking that Chaffee directs at LaGuardia Community

College in New York City. Chaffee's approach emphasizes relevancy to students' lives, and his chapter

on solving problems presents a situation that is undoubtedly real for many working-class students. We

are asked to imagine ourselves a single parent with one four-year-old child, holding down a boring

supermarket cashier job that barely pays the bills, and attending our first year of college which, we

hope, will lead to a well-paying, satisfying career. Although we enjoy school, we're physically

exhausted and depressed, due to the time demands of school, job, and child. What do we do?

After stating the problem in "specific terms" rather than "general terms," and identifying the

"specific results" we seek, we are asked to list our alternatives. Before listing alternatives, however, "it

makes sense for us to determine which actions are possible and which are impossible. We can do this

by exploring the boundaries of the problem situation" (emphasis in original). Boundaries, we are told,

are "the limitations in the problem situation that we simply cannot change." Chaffee mentions two

sample limitations--time constraints; vocational qualifications limiting how much we can earn at the

104

present time--and then asks us to think of others. "After we have established a general idea of the

boundaries of the problem situation, we can then proceed to identify the possible courses of action that

can take place within these boundaries." Chaffee suggests brainstorming and discussing the problem

with others as potential means for looking at the problem afresh, then offers two sample courses of

action--take fewer classes; find additional sources of income--and invites us to think of others (69-70).

Chaffee's critical thinking program unambiguously favors the status quo: students do not question their

social-political boundaries or the narrow courses of action that those boundaries impose upon us as

individuals; they do not ask what kind of society would trap single parent worker-students in such

depressing circumstances, nor picture new social possibilities.

Shor's aim is precisely the opposite: "The critical study of themes from everyday life needs to be

carried out in the broadest terms possible. . . ." (1987a: 114). Borrowing from Paulo Freire's method of

codification-- abstracting familiar objects or issues away from their everyday contexts to allow for

"unfamiliar" systematic scrutiny--Shor teaches a problem-solving method that encourages both

conceptual habits of mind and utopian imagination. He represents the method through a series of

visual forms, starting with this one:

A PROBLEM SOLVING METHOD Life Description Step one Observation

Diagnosis Step two Investigation

Reconstruction Step three Resolution

In the first "description" step, students observe and describe in careful detail a familiar object, such as a

classroom desk-chair or a hamburger that Shor brings to class, and they also begin some value judgments-

-the chair is hard, uncomfortable, and all chairs face toward the teacher in front; the hamburger is greasy

and rubbery. In "diagnosis," students place the object in its social context. The chair becomes part of

students' larger experiences in alienating schools. The hamburger represents Americans' fixation with non-

nutritious fast food; and one class recreates the entire production and distribution process that delivers us

the burger. In the third step, students "reconstruct" or "negate" the problem with specific proposals for

105

humanized chairs, humanized schools, or systems that deliver healthy food. A second visual form teaches

students further means of abstraction and generalizing of their experiences:

NAME GENERAL DEFINITION LIFE EXAMPLES Junk Food Mass produced food that

is cooked quickly in fast-food places, or bought, packaged and processed in supermarkets.Usually, it’s low in nutrition.

burgers fries canned fruits/vegetables packaged cereals cookies, cake donuts candy

"Junk food," "lost cause," "racism," "democracy," "common sense," and any other number of concepts

or life problems are systematically broken down; or, a series of life examples are grouped together,

defined and named; afterwards, the negation of each concept is envisioned by the students and

systematically described. As students' analytic facility grows, they can combine the first two visual

forms into a more elaborate model through which they can diagnose school, work, or community

problems and reconstruct social alternatives:

106

NAME

example: authoritarianism

GENERAL DEFINITION

LIFE EXAMPLES

1.

NEGATIONS

2. “peer discipline”

or “peer democracy

NAME

GENERAL

DEFINTION

3.

A final representation, that of concentric circles, is offered to represent developmental phases in a

process of social change, where the inner circle represents the present society and the outer rim,

utopia.

Rather than leave students with an either/or view of utopia that would likely only reinforce their sense

that things can't really be changed, Shor encourages students to consider and discuss the personal or

social changes that would be realistic, and yet carry us closer to the world we would like to see (1987a:

155-80).

Red Indoctrination?

While teaching freshman English as a graduate assistant at The University of Texas at Arlington,

I have experimented in small ways with radical pedagogy (programmatic constraints have not permitted

107

experimenting in large ways). I have been open with students about my radical intentions, and have

also discussed my political classroom aims with fellow graduate teachers and with program directors.

The response of my students to an openly radical teacher on this conservative Texas campus is plainly

enthusiastic, i.e., "great, something different." But questions are posed: "Do you expect us to agree

with you?" "How do you grade papers?" I assure students that they need not agree with me, and that I

grade papers according to my sense of general college writing standards. I acknowledge, however,

that I do have biases which affect my evaluation of a paper's argument. I point out that I am watchful of

my biases as I grade, that I try to be as fair as I can--such as by giving papers whose positions are

sharply opposed to mine slightly higher grades than I think they deserve. I then suggest that every

teacher has biases of one kind or another which affect how we grade, and I ask if anyone has ever

experienced such teacher biases. My question gets lots of nods and knowing smiles. I ask more: Has

anyone had a teacher who claimed to be open to all points of view but really wasn't? Do you ever give

teachers the bullshit you know they want to hear? Have you ever challenged a teacher and paid for it?

Depending on the class's temperament and the level of rapport already established, the stories are

shared and the question of freedom of expression in the classroom gains status as a permissible and

important topic in the course. The ability of an openly biased teacher--or of a covertly biased teacher--

to maintain free expression depends on the degree of trust we establish with our students. I have been

able to establish what I consider relatively high trust in my classes through critical discussions of the

teacher-student relationship; through a non-authoritarian teacherly posture and peer rapport with

students; through a willingness and enjoyment of being challenged on all class issues, all class

processes; and through being helpful as a writing teacher to students of all political persuasions. I am

widely challenged by my students, and I rarely sense that students are mimicking my views in class or

in their papers--though undoubtedly some of this goes on, as it will in all classes where teachers are

allocated power over students.

In sharing my radical-educator agenda with other teachers in my program, the common criticism I

receive is that I am "indoctrinating" students, using my teacherly power to push my views upon them.

My critics argue that openly biased teaching, regardless of fair intentions, will prompt students to bend

108

their views toward that of the teacher-grader, and that we can mitigate such coercion by keeping

students second-guessing as to our own opinions on issues. My critics also emphasize, of course, the

educator's responsibility to approximate a neutral stance as best we can, rather than attempt to

propagate our personal beliefs. My experience does not support the view that a frank teacherly bias

stifles free expression. At least where the discussive atmosphere is egalitarian and away from teacher

dominance, I have found that my far-left opinions, when I choose to assert them, help stimulate open

expression, including in graded papers. I should add, however, that my political educator strategy does

not look toward persuading students of my specific positions per se; in fact, I feel I am most successful

as a teacher when my mouth is shut and my students are talking. At the same time, I do introduce a

political agenda, and this is done through the syllabus itself--through the kinds of critical inquiry

encouraged, through the reading materials assigned, through the questions asked in the course. My

struggle to democratize the classroom, to win students' assertive participation, also expresses my

political agenda.

I do concede that my open bias will give clearer direction to students who are bent on pleasing

the teacher by echoing teacher opinions, and that such students might derive certain benefit from a

teacher who leaves her opinions more in question. But I do not think such students are numerous;

many more prefer saying what they believe, and want teachers who they can trust to listen caringly,

respond honestly, grade fairly. I would propose, moreover, that teachers who do not make clear the

biases they bring to the classroom, or who are unaware of those biases, pose much greater and subtler

problems for students than any that might be posed by the teacher whose views are made candid.

Students do not come to freshman English prepared to recognize the political implications of our

pedagogies, of how we ask them to think, of the questions our course asks and does not ask. When

we ask students to read a text through the lenses of New Criticism rather than critical Marxism, to solve

problems Chaffee's way or Flower's way instead of Shor's way, to discover themselves as individuals

rather than as members of an historically situated social group, and we do not indicate to students the

non-universal values that inform these activities, they will tend to regard our concepts as neutral tools.

Many will internalize, to varying degree, the supposedly impartial concepts of reading, writing, and

109

thinking taught in composition. Our pedagogies unavoidably express biases, express ideologies.

Teachers who do not indicate their biases or the biases that inform their course are teaching ideology

as though it were objective knowledge. Given the unfortunate power differentials that characterize our

classrooms, when the teacher hands out the class syllabus he or she launches an ideological offensive.

Teachers who sympathize with students, and who seek ways of giving up the power we hold over them,

would do well to help students understand the nature of our offensive so they can mentally defend

themselves. In less military terms, we want to enable students to make critical judgments about

everything we do in the classroom, to make informed decisions about their participation in and/or

challenge of the class process, and to make politically conscious choices about the concepts they do

and do not embrace. In my view, our political honesty with students helps open the door to non-

manipulative, non-authoritarian teaching. I personally feel that my honesty increases my accessibility

with students; by laying out my cards and letting students place me as they will, I step down from the

teacher's false-neutral pedestal and move closer toward the peerhood that I prefer.

Let us acknowledge, still, that however honest we are with students, a coerciveness is built into

our jobs, and any democratic forms we establish in the classroom will remain skewed ones. Students

do not decide if their teacher passes the course; students do not give us grades that may affect our

access to scholarships, graduate programs, or gainful employment. Students do widely fill out teacher

evaluation forms at the end of courses. But an individual student's negative evaluation of a teacher

carries little weight, unless supported by many similar complaints from other students; and even then,

sanctions against the teacher are relatively rare. On the other hand, the teacher-grader places an

effective mark on the permanent record of each student. The sanctioning power of a dissatisfied

student rarely matches that of a dissatisfied teacher-grader, and this differential provides a material

basis for undemocratic classroom relations. In the liberatory classroom, according to Shor,

"democratic relations . . . legitimize the critique of oppression; students experience freedom while

examining the forces which impede freedom" (1987a: 96). If this is true, then the kind of liberatory

pedagogy that Shor proposes is not really possible in our school institutions as constituted. This should

not deter us from searching out the most democratic, humanizing, and politically progressive modes

110

that our institutional contexts allow. But it should remind us--and here I agree fully with Shor--that

"political opposition on campus, in schools, and in society is needed to protect the right of teachers and

students to invent the critical pedagogy we need" (1987a: viii-ix).

On Pursuing Liberatory Goals

Chapter 4 proposed that composition teachers begin the project of writing program reform

through professional involvement, informal rap/study sessions with co-workers, union participation, and

then moving on to effect institutional changes as faculty develop cohesion and organizational strength.

The present chapter makes our local organizing tasks more complex and even more ambitious. Now

program reformers would be calling, not just for modern composition methods, but also for liberatory

methods, not just for larger education and social budgets, but also for a new social-political order. In

lieu of a fresh set of program proposals for the liberatory reformer--which I'm afraid is beyond my

present means--I would like to close with some general thoughts.

Certainly, our most challenging task is that of winning the majority of our colleagues to liberatory

pedagogy and social visions. While such may not be realizable apart from a much wider political

mobilization in the society, we may in our more immediate teaching and reform projects aspire to

values consistent with the egalitarian world we envision (e.g., values that counter sexism, racism, and

elitism with their democratic opposites). In addition, with particular respect to composition, liberatory

reformers may pursue a number of theoretical points which, if not immediately radical in content, do

open doors for rich discussion. As the contemporary field increasingly emphasizes writing as a

process of critical reflection, it may be pointed out that what is good for the student is good for the

teacher. To begin reflecting on educational purpose and the values that inform our purposes is to begin

breaking free of the prevailing technocratism that delimits and demeans our work as writing teachers.

We become less the social functionary, more the self-conscious social actor. To recognize the value-

laden nature of our work--that we are never teaching "effective writing" pure and simple--is to challenge

the false-neutral scientism that quietly binds us to politically conservative institutional objectives. As

teachers more willfully articulate their purposes and values, they may in turn be challenged by other

111

sets of values. Formerly covert political partisanships become overt and self-conscious partisanships.

This does not mean that radical partisans will necessarily prevail in the ensuing discussions. But the

existence of wider candid political discussion would itself represent tremendous advance for modern

composition and, I think, hopeful prospects for liberatory writing teachers.

112

NOTES 1 This was passed to me by WPE counselor Marlene Pearson.

2 Table 1.--CSUN Faculty Opinion of Student Writinga

dept. or school (no. of responses): average response

Art (3): 20.0% Home Ecomomics (2): 47.5%

Biology (5): 15.6 Journalism (2): 65.0

Business, School ofb (20): 49.5 Liberal Studiesd (2): 40.5

Child Development (2): 50.0 Music (2): 40.0

Computer Science (4): 41.3 Physics (1): 45.0

Economics (3): 13.3 Political Science (3): 41.0

Engineering, School ofc (8): 43.0 Psychology (6): 42.3

English (3): 68.7 Radio-TV-Film (3): 36.0

Geology (1): 60.0 Sociology (1): 50.0

Health Science (5): 29.6 Speech Communication (3): 49.3

History (1): 100.0 Theater (1): 60.0

Total responses: 81 Average response: 42.8%

a Survey taken in May 1988: "How many of your students are writing as college students should be writing? Restrict your estimate to undergraduate courses, and exclude general education courses with primary enrollment from students outside your department." b Except economics, which is listed separately. c Except computer science, which is listed separately. d Liberal studies does not have its own department courses. However, I polled two instructors of specific courses--one in humanities, one in music--in which liberal studies majors are heavily enrolled.

3 Influential works on modern composition classroom methods include those of Elbow, Graves,

Macrorie, Murray. For theoretical perspectives, see Cooper and Odell, Knoblauch and Brannon,

North. Major journals include College Composition and Communication, College English, Research in

the Teaching of English. Major annual conferences are held by the National Council of Teachers of

English, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. One of the leading

113

organizations training teachers in modern composition methods is the National Writing Project, 5635

Tolman Hall, School of Education, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720.

4 Table 2.--Required Writing Preparation of Future Teachersa

% required to take % required to take intermediate or advanced a course in teaching writing course composition English majors 15 0 English education majors 29 10 Other education majors 6 0

a Based on 263 college catalogs. Source: Burhans, p. 647.

5 The 127 respondents consisted of 14 from 2-year colleges, 67 from "four-year institutions," and

46 from "universities." The "universities" are distinguished from "4-year institutions" in that the former

have professional schools--law, medical, dental--or substantial graduate programs. CSUN, with its

small graduate offerings, would be considered a 4-year institution.

6 See note 3 for National Writing Project address.

7 A fine anthology on bringing critical awareness into the classroom is Shor, 1987b.

8 Table 3.--WPE Failure Rates

1980-1 22.0%

1981-2 22.9

1982-3 24.5

1983-4 26.5

1984-5 27.1

1985-6 30.1

1986-7 32.5

Source: Larson, 1987.

114

WORKS CITED

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and Other

Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. 127-86.

Ambedkar, B.R. What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. Lahore, Pakistan:

Classic, 1977.

Anyon, Jean. "Workers, Labor and Economic History, and Textbook Content." Harvard Educational

Review 49 (Aug 1979) 361-86.

---. "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work." Journal of Education 162 (win 1980) 67-92.

Apple, Michael W. Ideology and Curriculum. London: Routledge, 1979.

Apple, Michael W., and Lois Weis, eds. Ideology and Practice in Schooling. Philadelphia: Temple

Press, 1983.

Applebee, Arthur N. Contexts for Learning to Write: Studies of Secondary School Instruction.

Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984.

Applebee, Arthur N., Judith A. Langer, and Ina V.S. Mullis. The Writing Report Card: Writing

Achievement in American Schools. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, 1986.

Armstrong, Cherryl. Personal interview, May 1988.

Aronowitz, Stanley. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. New

York: McGraw, 1973.

Astin, Alexander W. Minorities in American Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982.

Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon, 1987.

Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." When a Writer Can't Write: Studies in Writer's Block

and Other Composing Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: Guilford, 1985. 134-65.

Bartholomae, David, and Anthony Petrosky. Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for

a Reading and Writing Course. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton, 1986.

Berg, Ivar. Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery. New York: Praeger, 1970.

Berlin, James A. "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories." College English 44

(Dec 1982) 765-77.

115

---. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale, IL:

Southern llinois UP, 1987.

---. "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class." College English 50 (Sep 1988) 477-94.

Berthoff, Ann E. "From Problem-Solving to a Theory of Imagination." College English 33 (Mar 1972)

636-49.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Thomas Kuhn, Scientism, and English Studies." College English 40 (Mar 1979)

764-71.

---. "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing." PRE/TEXT 3 (fall

1982a) 213-43.

---. "College Composition: Initiation into the Academic Discourse Community." Curriculum Inquiry 12

(1982b) 191-207.

---. "William Perry and Liberal Education." College English 46 (Sep 1984) 447-54.

Boehm, Lorenz. "Human Values and the Basics: Is There Any Choice?" College English 40 (Jan

1979) 505-11.

Boles, Pat. Personal interview, May 1988.

Bose, Subhas Chandra. The Indian Struggle, 1920-1942. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967.

Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the

Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic, 1976.

Brady, Philip L. Introduction. The "Why's" of Teaching Composition. Ed. by Brady. N.p.: Washington

State Council of Teachers of English, 1978, 1978. v-viii.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.

New York: Monthly Review, 1974.

Brinton, Howard H. Friends for 300 Years: The History and Beliefs of the Society of Friends since

George Fox Started the Quaker Movement. Wallington, PA: Pendle Hill, 1976.

Brodinsky, Ben. "Back to the Basics: The Movement and Its Meaning." Phi Delta Kappan 58 (Mar

1977) 522-27.

116

Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Liberal Education and the Social Justification of Belief." Liberal Education 68

(sum 1982a) 95-114.

---. "CLTV: Collaborative Learning Television." Educational Communication and Technology Journal

30 (Spr 1982b) 26-40.

---. "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.' " College English 46 (Nov 1984) 635-

52.

Bryant, Verne. Personal interview, May 1988.

Burhans, Clinton S., Jr. "The Teaching of Writing and the Knowledge Gap." College English 45 (Nov

1983) 639-56.

Burke, Gerald, and Russell W. Rumberger, eds. The Future Impact of Technology on Work and

Education. London: Falmer Press, 1987.

Callahan, Raymond E. Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962.

Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. College Graduates and Jobs: Adjusting to a New Labor

Market Situation. New York: McGraw, 1973.

Chaffee, John. Thinking Critically. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1988.

Cole, Charlene R. "Students Grade Educational Quality at CSUN." Daily Sundial. California State

University Northridge (11 May 1988): 11-12.

"Concessionary Bargaining: Will the New Cooperation Last?" Business Week 14 Jun 1982: 66+.

Cooney, Robert, and Helen Michalowski, eds. The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the

United States. Culver City, CA: Peace Press, 1977.

Cooper, Charles R., and Lee Odell, eds. Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Urbana, IL:

NCTE, 1978.

Corbett, Edward P.J. "The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist." College

Composition and Communication 20 (Dec 1969) 288-96.

Council on Interracial Books for Children. Guidelines for Selecting Bias-Free Textbooks and

Storybooks. New York: Council on Interracial Books, 1980.

117

Davis, Mike. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working

Class. London: Verso, 1986.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1952.

Densmore, Kathleen. "Professionalism, Proletarianization and Teacher Work."Critical Studies in

Teacher Education: Its Folklore, Theory and Practice. Ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz. London: Falmer

Press, 1987. 130-60.

Domhoff, G. William. Who Rules America Now? A View for the '80s. New York: Touchstone-Simon,

1986.

Draper, Hal. The Two Souls of Socialism. 1966. Reprints of the 1968 pamphlet edition, published by

the Independent Socialist Clubs of America, are available from Solidarity, 7012 Michigan Av, Detroit

MI 48210.

---. Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vol. 3: The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat." New York: Monthly

Review, 1986.

---. The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" from Marx to Lenin. New York: Monthly Review, 1987.

Dye, Thomas R. Who's Running America? The Conservative Years. 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice, 1986.

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing.

Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.

Edwards, Richard. Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century.

New York: Basic, 1979.

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

---. "Why Teach Writing?" The "Why's" of Teaching Composition. Ed. Philip L. Brady. N.p.:

Washington State Council of Teachers of English, 1978. 57-69.

---. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.

Ellington, Lucien. "Blacks and Hispanics in High School Economics Texts." Social Education 50 (Jan

1986) 64-67.

118

"Fact File: Attitudes and Characteristics of This Year's Freshmen." Chronicle of Higher Education 14

Jan 1990: A33-34.

Fine, Michelle. "Perspectives on Inequity: Voices from Urban Schools." Applied Social Psychology

Annual. vol. 4. Ed. Leonard Bickman. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1983.

Flower, Linda. Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1985.

Freeman, Richard B. The Overeducated American. New York: Academic Pr., 1976.

Friedlander, Jack. "Instructional Practices of Part-Time Faculty." New Directions for Community

Colleges 30 (1980) 27-36.

Gandhi, M.K. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 86 vols. Delhi: Ministry of Information and

Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1958-82.

---. Non-Violence in Peace and War. 2 vols. Ahmedabad, India: Navijan Press, 1962.

---. My Varnashrama Dharma. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 1965.

---. My Theory of Trusteeship. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 1970.

Gandhi, Mohandas K. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Boston: Beacon,

1957.

Garson, Barbara. The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the

Future into the Factory of the Past. New York: Simon, 1988.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. "Writing: Why and What?" The "Why's" of Teaching Composition. Ed. Philip L.

Brady. N.p.: Washington State Council of Teachers of English, 1978. 17-32.

Gillespie, Kim. Personal interview on three occasions, April 1988.

Giroux, Henry A. "Teacher Education and the Ideology of Social Control." Journal of Education 162

(win 1980) 5-27.

---. Theory and Resistance in Education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin, 1983.

Giroux, Henry A., and David Purpel, eds. The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education: Deception or

Discovery? Berkeley, CA: McCutchan, 1983.

Goldfield, Michael. The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States. Chicago: U of Chicago P,

1987.

119

Graves, Donald H. Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1983.

Greenbaum, Joan. "Division of Labor in the Computer Field." Monthly Review 28: 3 (Jul/Aug 1976) 40-

55.

Hahn, Carole L., and Glen Blankenship. "Women and Economics Textbooks." Theory and Research

in Social Education 11 (fall 1983) 67-76.

Hairston, Maxine. "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of

Writing." College Composition and Communication 33 (Feb 1982) 76-86.

Hallcom, Francine. Personal interview, April 1988.

Hallin, Dan. "White Paper, Red Scare." NACLA Report on the Americas 17: 4 (Jul/Aug 1983) 2-35.

Harris, Joseph. "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing." College Composition and

Communication 40 (Feb 1989) 11-22.

Hays, Janice N. "The Development of Discursive Maturity in College Writers." The Writer's Mind:

Writing as a Mode of Thinking. Ed. by Hays et al. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1983. 127-44.

---. "Models of Intellectual Development and Writing: A Response to Myra Kogen, et al." Journal of

Basic Writing 6: 1 (spr 1987) 11-27.

Hays, Janice N., et al., eds. The Writer's Mind: Writing as a Mode of Thinking. Urbana, IL: NCTE,

1983.

Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms.

Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1983.

Hersh, Seymour M. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit,

1983.

Howard, C. Jeriel. The Politics of Basic Writing: Program Administration. Paper presented at the

Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, March 1983.

ERIC ED 229 784.

Howe, Harold III. "Let's Have Another SAT Score Decline." Phi Delta Kappan 66 (May 1985) 522-27.

Johnson, Dale, L. ed. Class and Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle Class. Beverly

Hills, CA: Sage, 1982.

120

Johnson, Dale L., and Christine O'Donnell. "The Dequalification of Technical, Administrative, and

Professional Labor." Class and Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle Class. Ed. by

Johnson. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982. 225-44.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Why We Can't Wait. New York: Harper, 1964.

Kohlberg, Lawrence, and Rochelle Mayer. "Development as the Aim of Education." Harvard

Educational Review 42 (Nov 1972) 449-96.

Kohlberg, Lawrence, and Elliot Turiel. "Moral Development and Moral Education." Psychology and

Educational Practice. Ed. Gerald S. Lesser. Glenview, IL: Foresman, 1971. 410-65.

Kraft, Philip. Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United

States. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.

Kytle, Ray. "Slaves, Serfs, or Colleagues--Who Shall Teach College Composition?" College

Composition and Communication 22 (Dec 1971) 339-41.

Larson, Gale K. "1986-87 Annual Report of the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Examination."

California State University Northridge, 14 Sep 1987.

---. Personal interview, April 1988.

Lazere, Donald. "Stratification in the Academic Profession and in the Teaching of Composition."

Humanities in Society 4 (fall 1981) 379-94.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illionois UP, 1987.

LeGuin, Ursula. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper, 1974.

Lindemann, Erika. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Lloyd-Jones, Richard, and Andrea A. Lunsford, eds. The English Coalition Conference: Democracy

through Language. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989.

Lunsford, Andrea A. "Politics and Practices in Basic Writing." A Sourcebook for Basic Writing

Teachers. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Random, 1987. 246-58.

Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1970a.

---. Uptaught. New York: Hayden, 1970b.

121

Maimon, Elaine P., et al. Writing in the Arts and Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1981.

---. Readings in the Arts and Sciences. Boston: Little, 1984.

Martin, Rex. Rawls and Rights. Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 1985.

Marx, Karl. "The Civil War in France." The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New

York: Norton, 1978. 618-52.

Meiksins, Peter. "New Middle Class or Working Class?" Against the Current 2: 4 (win 1984) 42-48.

Meisenhelder, Tom. "The Ideology of Professionalism in Higher Education." Journal of Education 165

(sum 1983) 295-307.

Miller, Susan. "Rhetorical Maturity: Definition and Development." Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition.

Ed. Aviva Freedman and Ian Pringle. Conway, AR: L and S Books, 1980. 119-27.

Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford UP, 1956.

Moody, Kim. An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism. London: Verso, 1988.

Mukerjee, Hirendranath. Gandhiji: A Study. 2nd ed. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1960.

Murray, Donald M. A Writer Teaches Writing. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1985.

Myers, Greg. "Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching." College

English 48 (Feb 1986) 154-74.

Namboodiripad, E.M.S. The Mahatma and the Ism. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1958.

Nash, George. "Who's Minding Freshman English at U.T. Austin?" College English 38 (Oct 1976) 125-

31.

"The New Industrial Relations." Business Week 11 May 1981: 84+.

Nicholson, Pat. Personal interviews on two occasions, April and May 1988.

Noble, David F. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New

York: Knopf, 1977.

North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper

Montclair, NJ: Boynton, 1987.

Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.

122

Ohmann, Richard, and Jack Weston. "A Guide to Marxist Teaching: Freshman English." Radical

Teacher 9 (Sep 1978) 26-29.

O'Toole, James. Work, Learning, and the American Future. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977.

Parenti, Michael. Democracy for the Few. 5th ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.

Parker, Mike. Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL. Boston: South End, 1985.

Parker, Mike, and Jane Slaughter. Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept. Boston: South

End, 1988.

Pearson, Marlene. Personal interview, April 1988.

Penfield, Elizabeth F. "Process, Product, and the Administration of the English Department." ADE

Bulletin 84 (fall 1986) 11-15.

Perkinson, Henry J. The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education, 1865-1976. 2nd ed. New

York: Random, 1977.

Perloff, James. The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline.

Appleton, WI: Western Islands, 1988.

Perry, William G., Jr. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme.

New York: Holt, 1968.

Peters, R.S. Ethics and Education. Atlanta: Foresman, 1967.

Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett, 1978.

Popkewitz, Thomas S. "Educational Research: Values and Visions of Social Order." Theory and

Research in Social Education 6 (Dec 1978) 20-39.

---. "Paradigms in Educational Science: Different Meanings and Purpose to Theory." Journal of

Education 162 (win 1980) 28-46.

---, ed. Critical Studies in Teacher Education: Its Folklore, Theory and Practice. London: Falmer Press,

1987a.

---. "Ideology and Social Formation in Teacher Education." Critical Studies in Teacher Education: Its

Folklore, Theory and Practice. Ed. by Popkewitz. London: Falmer Press, 1987b. 2-33.

123

Progressive Composition. Newsletter of the Progressive Composition Caucus. Address: Progressive

Composition, Dept. of English, Univ. of Houston, Houston TX 77204-3012.

Purnell, Rosentene B. "A Survey of the Tesing of Writing Proficiency in College: A Progress Report."

College Composition and Communication 33 (Dec 1982) 407-10.

Rao, M.B., ed. The Mahatma: A Marxist Symposium. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1969.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1971.

Rist, Ray C. "Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto

Education." Harvard Educational Review 40 (Aug 1970) 411-51.

Robertson, Linda R., Sharon Crowley, and Frank Lentricchia. "The Wyoming Conference Resolution

Opposing Unfair Salaries and Working Conditions for Post-Secondary Teachers of Writing."

College English 49 (Mar 1987) 274-80.

Robinson, Jay L. "Literacy in the Department of English." College English 47 (Sep 1985) 482-98.

Rohman, D. Gordan. "Pre-Writing: The Stage of Discovery in the Writing Process." College

Composition and Communication. 16 (May 1965) 106-12.

---. "My Friend Henry." College Composition and Communication 23 (Dec 1972) 373-77.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared.

New York: Free Press-Macmillan, 1989.

Rose, Stephen J. The American Economy Poster and Fact Book. New York: Pantheon, 1987.

Rosenberg, Vivian M. Reading, Writing, and Thinking: Critical Connections. New York: McGraw,

1990.

Rumberger, Russell W. Overeducation in the U.S. Labor Market. New York: Praeger, 1981.

---. "The Potential Impact of Technology on Work and Education." The Future Impact of Technology

on Work and Education. Ed. Gerald Burke and Russell W. Rumberger. London: Falmer Press,

1987. 74-95.

Ryan, Howard. "Nonviolent Theory and Anti-Nuclear Politics." Deadly Connections: An Against the

Current Anti-Militarist Pamphlet. 1986. Available from Against the Current, 7012 Michigan Av,

Detroit MI 48210.

124

Sarkar, Sumit. Modern India 1885-1947. Delhi: Macmillan, 1983.

Scott, Johnnie. Personal interview, May 1988.

Sennett, Richard, and Jonathan Cobb. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Vintage, 1972.

Shalom, Stephen Rosskam,ed. Socialist Visions. Boston: South End, 1983.

Shannon, Patrick. Broken Promises: Reading Instruction in Twentieth-Century America. Granby, MA:

Bergin, 1989.

Sharp, Rachel, and Anthony Green. Education and Social Control: A Study in Progressive Primary

Education. London: Routledge, 1975.

Shawcross, William. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. Rev. ed. New

York: Simon, 1987.

Shor, Ira. "Reinventing Daily Life: Self-Study and the Theme of 'Work.' " College English 39 (Dec

1977) 502-6.

---. Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984. Boston:

Routledge, 1986.

---. Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987a.

---, ed. Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Portsmouth, NH:

Heinemann, 1987b.

Shoup, Laurence H., and William Minter. Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and

United States Foreign Policy. New York: Monthly Review, 1977.

Sklar, Holly, ed. Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management.

Boston: South End, 1980a.

---. "Trilateralism: Managing Dependence and Democracy." Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission

and Elite Planning for World Management. Ed. by Sklar. Boston: South End, 1980b. 1-57.

Sklar, Holly, and Ros Everdell. "Who's Who on the Trilateral Commission." Trilateralism: The

Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management. Ed. by Sklar. Boston: South

End, 1980. 90-131.

Slaughter, Jane. Concessions and How to Beat Them. Detroit: Labor Notes, 1983.

125

Slevin, James F. "A Note on the Wyoming Resolution and ADE." ADE Bulletin 87 (fall 1987) 50.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Eds. R.H. Campbell,

A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd. 2 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.

Smitherman, Geneva. " 'What Go Round Come Round': King in Perspective." Harvard Educational

Review 51 (Feb 1981) 40-56.

Smitherman-Donaldson, Geneva. "Toward a National Public Policy on Language." College English 49

(Jan 1987) 29-36.

Staples, Katherine. Money, Status, and Composition: Assumptions Underlying the Crisis of Part-Time

Instruction. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and

Communication, March 1984. ERIC ED 243 118.

Steadman, Michael. Personal interview, April 1988.

Steelman, Lala Carr, and Brian Powell. "Appraising the Implications of the SAT for Educational Policy."

Phi Delta Kappan 66 (Mar 1985) 603-7.

Stewart, Donald C. "Composition Textbooks and the Assault on Tradition." College Composition and

Communication 29 (May 1978) 171-76.

Szilak, Dennis. "Teachers of Composition: A Re-Niggering." College English 39 (Sep 1977) 25-32.

Taylor, S. Martin. "Education and Employment." Black English and the Education of Black Children

and Youth: Proceedings of the National Invitational Symposium on the King Decision. Ed. Geneva

Smitherman. Detroit: Center for Black Studies, 1981. 241-58.

Tendulkar, D.G. Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. rev. ed. 8 vols. Delhi: Ministry of

Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1960-63.

Therborn, Göran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: Verso, 1980.

Trimbur, John. "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning." College English 51 (Oct 1989)

602-16.

Trotsky, Leon. "Their Morals and Ours." The Basic Writings of Trotsky. Ed. Irving Howe. New York:

Random, 1963. 370-99.

126

U.S. Bureau of the Census. Money Income of Households, Families, and Persons in the United States:

1987. Current Population Reports, Series P-60, No. 162. Wash DC: GPO, 1989.

Uba, George. Personal interview, May 1988.

Vitanza, Victor J. " 'Notes' Towards Historiographies of Rhetorics; or, Rhetorics of the Histories of

Rhetorics: Traditional, Revisionary, and Sub/Versive." PRE/TEXT 8 (spr/sum 1987) 63-125.

Walters, Tom Spencer. Personal interviews on two occasions, April and May 1988.

Wilson, Reginald. "The State of Black Higher Education: Crisis and Promise." The State of Black

America 1989. Ed. Janet Dewart. New York: National Urban League, 1989. 121-35.

Winterowd, W. Ross. The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Witte, Stephen P., et al. A National survey of College and University Writing Program Directors.

Technical Report No. 2. Texas Univ., Austin. August 1981. ERIC ED 210 709.

Wolf, Thia. Personal interviews on four occasions, March through May 1988.

Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973.

WPE test-takers, names withheld. Personal interviews on six occasions, April 1988.

Young, Art, Mike Gorman, and Margaret Gorman. "The 1982-83 Writing and Literature Survey:

Courses and Programs." ADE Bulletin 76 (win 1983) 52-59.

Young, Richard E. "Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention." Research

on Composing: Points of Departure. Eds. Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell. Urbana, IL: NCTE,

1978. 29-47.

Young, Richard E., Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike. Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. New

York: Harcourt, 1970.

Zimbalist, Andrew, ed. Case Studies on the Labor Process. New York: Monthly Review, 1979.