The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education

CHAPTER 10: “Bonehead English”

C H A P T E R 1 0 “Bonehead English” Clearly something must be wrong with our definition of remedial work, or with our assessment of these [Berkeley] students. D. Bartholomae, Ad Hoc Committee to Review Subject A and SANSE, Report (“Faulhaber Report ”), 1989, 3. UC Berkeley Library Archives. In June of 1989, on the Berkeley campus, yet another task force was assembled to review Subject A. It was chaired by Professor Charles Faulhaber, of the Spanish and Portuguese Department. Predictably, the task force was charged with considering whether Subject A and SANSE were “optimally conceived . . . to bring students up to the level of competence [necessary for] entering the freshman composition sequence.”₁ The committee was also asked whether either Subject A or SANSE instruction could be outsourced to a community college or to University Extension. Unlike its predecessors, the 1989 committee was asked to address matters of racial justice. Their broad portfolio included the charge of gauging whether the Subject A and SANSE faculty and administrations were “adequately addressing the particular needs of the minority students enrolled,” of considering whether the faculty members were “well chosen and supervised ,” and of determining whether Affirmative Action hiring procedures were being observed.²| 125 | The sequence of events that precipitated this review of Subject A had begun unfolding five years earlier, in 1984. That year, according to the Office of Student Research, UC Berkeley accepted 4171 freshmen, onefourth of them of Asian ancestry.³ To its swift and considerable regret, the administration redirected all nonblack Educational Opportunity Program applicants to other University of California campuses. Some 90 percent of these redirected students were of Asian ancestry. This decision, not surprisingly , generated great controversy and ill will, particularly among the Bay Area’s large Asian-ancestry population.⁴ It also generated a legislative hearing. An Asian American Task Force on University Admissions was formed, as well as a community-based Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Asian American Affairs, whose membership included two prominent Asian American jurists. The ill-conceived admissions decision of 1984 and the attendant controversy in the press and on the Berkeley campus resulted—quite reasonably —in an atmosphere of heightened awareness of attitudes toward Asianancestry students. In a poll taken that year, many Asian-ancestry students reported that attitudes toward them ranged from “open hostility to subtle racism to ethnic and cultural insensitivity.”₅ In the mid-1980s, half of UC Berkeley’s undergraduate Asian-ancestry population was foreign born, and a very great proportion of them had taken the course in Subject A or coursework in the SANSE program. In 1988, a student member of the Committee on Undergraduate Preparation and Remediation wrote to her committee chair urging him to investigate allegations of racism in the Subject A and SANSE programs. The allegations were serious, and, while they would have been taken very seriously in any case, the climate of heightened awareness toward racism conferred upon the allegations additional gravity. In the preamble to its lengthy final report, colloquially known as the Faulhaber Report, the committee averred that “a single complaint lodged—or a perception of insensitivity expressed— by a student is ipso facto sufficient cause for concern.”₆ In this way the 1989 task force on Subject A took on a more far-reaching mandate than had been carried by all the ancestor committees to examine the efficacy of Subject A. The committee executed a meticulous review, peering more deeply into the workings of Subject A (and SANSE) than any other committee “Bonehead English”| 126 | had done. The administrators of both programs were said to “vigorously object to what they regard as inaccurate perceptions” of their programs and they complied readily with the committee’s requests for information, as well as with those of the two outside reviewers who had been brought to Berkeley to assess the efficacy of Subject A (Professor David Bartholomae of the University of Pittsburgh) and SANSE (Professor Nancy Duke Lay of the City College of New York).⁷ After an extensive review, the committee found no evidence to support the claim that Subject A and SANSE faculty or administrators were guilty of discriminatory or prejudicial behavior toward students from particular racial or ethnic groups. The committee also found no evidence of “systematic or willful problems of racial insensitivity,” as had been alleged (emphasis added). The administrators and faculty of both offices, although bruised by the allegations, felt that their...