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Preface

Looking back at 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition, our minds entertained the sticky-soft strains of Debby Boone, the sinister visage of Darth Vader—and a few important questions our readers might have about how we came to and carried out our research for this book. While our “Introduction” provides a scholarly context for this project and explains its position within the larger field of composition studies, here we wish to explain briefly the project’s genesis and to reflect a bit on our own positions as researchers and historiographers.

Why Penn State?

This text originated in a graduate seminar that we shared on the history of composition at Penn State University half a dozen years ago. Yet our decision to focus on Penn State’s writing program as a way of deepening our engagement with the history of composition was not merely one of convenience. Our primary aims in the seminar were to expand our knowledge of composition history and to gain experience with research methodologies that pay attention to situated practices within that history. We began with the intention that each of us would study the local history of a particular writing program at a different college or university in Pennsylvania and would then produce a series of fairly traditional, individually authored seminar papers. We quickly discovered, though, that these individual endeavors would inevitably be incomplete and superficial because we lacked institutional and collegial familiarity with the programs and people at other schools; we just could not gain adequate familiarity with the histories of various programs in one short semester. Moreover, few of the many sources we needed in order to tell a recent history of writing program development—interviews, memos, handouts, lesson plans, student papers—were preserved in the various university archives. Program records charting institutional responses to open admissions, the “literacy crisis” of the 1970s, the process movement, and other social and scholarly developments were not readily accessible in department or university archives; they were more likely to be found in faculty offices and memories, two areas we would have difficulty accessing as relative strangers.

At Penn State, however, we not only knew the current curriculum and its recent past, but we had already developed working relationships with many of the people who had participated in that past. This institutional and personal familiarity enabled us to access the “hidden” archives—the old file boxes in the attic; the yellowed, hand-written essays in the bottom drawers; the textbooks thankfully overlooked during the last office cleanings; the records of forgotten meetings; and the indispensable memories of departmental personalities upon which this history could be built. As at the other institutions we had considered studying, we were not able to consult finding aids or engage the help of a university archivist, for the records that we sought were not generally archived. But at Penn State we could draw on the extensive memories of our pack-rat colleagues, and these proved to be invaluable resources. In short, we discovered that we could tell the most complex and richest history about composition by focusing on our local site.

As we read more about the history of Penn State during the 1970s and early 1980s, we came to realize the magnitude of Penn State’s impact during this era in composition history. The sheer number of students who passed through the writing curriculum at Penn State during this period suggests that the program influenced how composition was—and continues to be—viewed both in the state of Pennsylvania and across the nation. Penn State historian Michael Bezilla explains that the influence of the university’s curriculum was far reaching—statewide and nationally—by the mid 1980s:

One Pennsylvanian in eight who chose to enter college immediately after high school in the 1970s enrolled at University Park or one of the Commonwealth Campuses. More than 110,000 baccalaureate degrees were awarded between 1970 and 1983, along with 21,000 associate and 27,000 graduate degrees. By 1982, one in every thousand college graduates in the United States had earned his or her degree from The Pennsylvania State University.

Many people were influenced by the curriculum at Penn State during this time period—a fact that suggested to us that the history of the Penn State curriculum deserved greater attention.

Additionally, each of us wanted to know—indeed we felt ethically obligated to take up the opportunity to know—the historical conditions that influenced the composition program in which we were participating as teachers and administrators. By writing a collaborative history of our local site, we could work together to understand the multivalent strands—scholarship, culture, politics, economics, personalities, and institutional dynamics to name but a few—that entwined to form the complex and conflicted foundation upon which the current writing program at Penn State was built. We also hoped that this historical investigation might even enable us to see where curricular change was needed. In looking for these areas of change, however, we did not simply look for ways that the program “progressed” to its current state from a flawed past. As Ruth Mirtz, drawing on Robert Connors, warns in her work on the history of writing programs, “our downfall as historians [. . .] is assuming that anything that happened in the past was less effective than what we do in the present and viewing the past as the mistake that the present corrects” (122). Thus, we looked for ways in which the current program might usefully incorporate previous administrative and curricular structures. We asked both “which current program and curricular structures were the result of old battles or outworn tradition?” and “what promising administrative and curricular models from the program’s past were lost along the way?”

Our ultimate hope is that the historical details of Penn State’s writing program presented here will help other scholars, teachers, and administrators understand the recent past of their own writing curricula. Many of the struggles we recount here have been enacted at many other sites: budgetary constraints, institutional pressure, and personality conflicts are common sources of distress and motivators of change in almost every English department. We therefore offer this study as a point of comparison and contrast for those who are working at other institutions to historicize the development of their local writing programs.

The Challenges of Doing Research at “Home”

Researching one’s home department is a tricky business. Yet it is also comforting because it protects the researcher from being lulled into a sense of objectivity—what Donna Haraway has called the “gaze from nowhere” (581). As we gathered files and conducted interviews, the institutional politics and personality conflicts that operate in the daily business of a department became painfully obvious. We discovered the roots of current friendships and professional alliances, and we came to understand the origins of some continuing rifts. Some people were hesitant to discuss issues because they involved other professionals who are still active in the department or in the field. Some of the stories we heard and the historical traces we uncovered were contradictory, and the interpretations of events in the department varied widely. Some of the stories we heard were undoubtedly colored by events of the intervening years or were simply misremembered.

Rather than tidying these disparate, filtered, and embedded traces of the past into a unified story of progress that would make Penn State’s current program seem like the culmination of a steady, always admirable, and self reflective path of progress, we have tried to retain the messy traces of these conflicts within our narrative and to highlight how very unpredictable and contingent writing program development can be. To further resist a tensionless tale of progress, we have asked colleagues who were active in composition during the 1970s to read the manuscript and offer responses. Several of these responses are included as sidebars to the text; they offer telling embellishments or counterpoints, “corrections” or alternative views, of the events chronicled in the book. The presence of these sometimes competing voices does not discredit the historical narrative of the text; rather they are integral to it. The history we tell is not seamless, nor is it a tidy tale of “good compositionists and those who oppress them.” Rather, it is an attempt to resist what Mirtz calls the “ahistorical identities and false narratives” that often circulate around the development of writing programs and departmental policies (129).

In compiling this multivocal history, we attempted to uncover as many different perspectives as possible on the writing programs at the time. In addition to attending to archival sources and covering secondary materials—we hope that our indebtedness to previous scholarship is apparent in our notes and commentaries—we gathered a variety of historical traces from administrators (WPAs, writing center administrators, department chairs, directors of undergraduate and graduate studies); program faculty (literature, basic writing, composition/rhetoric, creative writing); and students (undergraduate and graduate). Official documents, such as departmental reports, program memos, syllabi, and catalogues, were perhaps the most obvious choices for study, yet we needed the memories of colleagues to flesh out our work. After all, some of the most significant decisions about how to translate composition theory into classroom practice take place in private office conversations and undocumented discussion. As Barbara L’Eplattenier explains, few histories of writing programs have been told because “administrative negotiation often occurs in conversations in casual settings, outside of the bounds of official meetings; such discussions are not recorded or are only superficially addressed in ‘official’ documentation” (133). Interviews and correspondence with full and part-time faculty who were active in the department or the field of composition at the time thus served as crucial sources for us.

Despite our best intentions and efforts, some competing voices are undoubtedly missing from this history. As in any historical project, what we found is incomplete. While we ran advertisements in the alumni magazine and scoured the old files opened to us by our colleagues at Penn State, we did not find a wealth of sample undergraduate papers and course syllabi. (We did find some.) We also had difficulty tracking down former graduate students from the late 1970s. Yet we believe the narrative told here, as we explain in further detail in the next chapter, provides an important, localized, and necessarily complex complement to broader histories of composition that have appeared in the recent past.

Acknowledgments

We could not have explored these questions with any degree of success without the help of many colleagues. At the risk of forgetting some of them, we wish to thank them here. Our deepest appreciation goes to three fellow members of the graduate seminar on the history of composition who joined us as co-researchers during the early stages of this project: Brian Lehew, Shannon Pennefeather Gardner, and Martin Schleuse. Their contributions to our conversation about historiography invigorated our thinking about the subject, and traces of their research can still be found in these pages: Brian researched creative writing pedagogies (and interviewed Leonard Rubinstein), Shannon worked in basic writing and writing centers, and Martin researched the state of English studies in the 1970s. We are also grateful to the many people who opened their filing cabinets to us, answered our many questions over email and in person, and helped us locate countless traces of the 1970s: Judd Arnold, Thomas Bayer, Wilma Ebbitt, Richard Leo Enos, Jeanne Fahnestock, Robert Frank, Diane Greenfield, Andrea Lunsford, Edgar Knapp, Martha Kolln, Ellen Knodt, Nancy Lowe, Ron Maxwell, Susan McLeod, John Moore, Douglas Park, Thomas Rogers, S. Leonard Rubinstein, Marie Secor, James Sledd, Tilly Warnock, Harvey Wiener, Tom Wilbur, and Richard Young.

We would also like to thank those who have generously read and given us suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript, including Sharon Crowley, Lisa Ede, Lester Faigley, Michael Halloran, Janice Lauer, and Richard Young. Thanks to colleagues at our 1999 CCCC presentation whose questions and comments prompted important revisions as we developed the manuscript. David Blakesley also provided valuable suggestions and much needed encouragement. Rosalyn Collings Eves assisted in many ways with the preparation of the final manuscript. Finally, thanks to our sidebar contributors, Hugh Burns, Stephen Bernhardt, Jasper Neel, Janice Lauer, Elaine Maimon, John Warnock, Sharon Crowley, and Lester Faigley, whose voices add vital dimension to this history.