The Idea of a Writing Laboratory

4. The Two Poles of Writing Lab History: Minnesota and Dartmouth

76 4 The Two Poles of Writing Lab History: Minnesota and Dartmouth As I described in chapters 1 and 2, an experimental approach to educational reform took place in both writing and science starting in the 1890s and has held grips of varying strength until now. That grip has been weakened at times by an easy retreat to the status quo, by pressures of rising enrollments and underprepared students, by an obsession with testing and efficiency, and by a lack of vision. As I show in the case studies in this chapter, these influences have strongly shaped reform of teaching practices in writing classes and writing laboratories. What starts off as an experiment can easily become a convenient means of sorting out and marking underprepared students, quarantining them in a clinic until they’re cured of the disease of bad writing. This process in the teaching of writing was particularly evident in the 1930s when higher education, in particular, was called on to meet unprecedented demands to be inclusive of students who previously were not inclined to go to college, the children of the great immigrant waves of the turn of the twentieth century. By the time of the Great Depression, ensuring enrollments wasn’t merely an ideal but a necessity in a time of economic crisis. The new students attracted by these efforts were far more diverse and far more practically minded than previous generations and presented reformers with an opportunity to experiment with curriculum and instruction. Embodying this spirit of experimentation, the University of Minnesota General College was created in 1932 as a twoyear alternative for students who either were not accepted or who failed out of Minnesota’s four-year system, and is the subject of the first part of this chapter. The focus of the second part, Dartmouth College, one of the founding colleges in the United States and an elite institution, started its writing clinic in 1939. That both Minnesota and Dartmouth felt the need to embrace individual solutions to the problem of inadequate student writing attests to the equal-opportunity difficulties of learning to write in college and the power of individual or laboratory methods. The similarities of the stories from Minnesota and Dartmouth are many: a belief in the effectiveness of laboratory methods of teaching writing, a struggle for adequate resources to fulfill this belief, and an easy The Two Poles of Writing Lab History 77 retreat to whole-class solutions when new resources were not forthcoming . It is a story repeated on many campuses, two year and four year, open admissions and highly select. It is the promise of laboratory methods versus the perils of actually implementing such ideas. The Minnesota General College Writing Laboratory The creation of University of Minnesota General College was the result of a confluence of tumultuous events in the 1920s and 1930s. First was the pressure of unprecedented numbers of students as higher education enrollments increased from a little more than 150,000 in 1890 to over 1,100,000 students by 1930 (Willey 221). There were several reasons for this rapid rise: One was simply the identity and prestige that was conferred by having graduated from college. As Malcolm Willey put it, writing in 1937, “The urge to be a ‘college graduate’ is a potent one in this country” (224). By the 1930s and the grim economic possibilities for high school graduates during the Great Depression, higher education also took on a role as a holding tank of sorts, keeping students out of the job market while they prepared for hopeful careers (Willey 224). Finally, the political and social climate of a time opened opportunities for reform. As described by historian Gary Miller, “The rise of fascism in Europe engendered a sense of crisis that pervaded American society. People again sought answers to the broad social questions that had been set aside in the 1920s. The social consciousness that had been the hallmark of the progressive period prior to and immediately after World War I now reasserted itself, both in society generally and in education specifically” (73). Some writers at the time described the situation in stark terms, as a loss of faith in what used to be and an uncertainty about what would come next. Frank Baker offered the following description of the challenges educators faced in his address at the opening of the University of Chicago Graduate Education Building: In the midst of all this...