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133 61969 breakDown On the morning of September 25, 1969, Joseph Carr, a second-year teaching assistant (TA) in University of Wisconsin’s English Department who had been assigned two sections of English 102 that semester, walked into the oVice of Professor William Lenehan, director of the course, to say “that he and his students had decided that they could not proWtably conform to the texts and approach to English 102 prescribed by the Freshman English Policy Committee,” as Lenehan reported the incident later that day in a letter he wrote to his chair, Tim Heninger.1 Carr himself would put it this way in an October 13 memo written to his fellow TAs: “Like many others, I was disappointed with the selected texts for English 102 and with the seemingly total lack of any substantial changes in the structuring of the course as had been promised in the spring. I therefore informed my classes that they could sell both College Writing and The Shape of Fiction back to the bookstores as we wouldn’t be using them during the semester.”2 But when a manager at Brown’s Bookstore wouldn’t take the books back, claiming that he knew which textbooks had to be used by all sections of the course and that TAs weren’t allowed to make changes, Carr decided to meet with Lenehan personally to explain the reasons for his actions and inform him that his classes would be using the anthology Sense of the Sixties rather than the prescribed books. Lenehan, however, didn’t sympathize with Carr’s arguments and told him he would be making his actions known to the chair. The follow- 134  Breakdown ing day, Carr received word from Heninger that he wanted to meet with him; he was also told by the manager of University Book Store that he couldn’t accept his order for Sense of the Sixties, having received a letter that day from Lenehan “asking him to continue just such a policy.”3 In his letter of September 25 to Heninger, Lenehan praised Carr for “exhibiting honesty and even bravery” in coming to him, and he summarized the reasons the TA gave for thinking he could make unilateral changes in the English 102 syllabus: “that he was competent to judge the best way for him to teach composition and that it was his right—even his obligation—to teach the way he preferred.”4 Lenehan wrote that he thought Carr was an isolated case of TA disaVection but warned Heninger that if the English Department was to take responsibility for Freshman English, it must have some power to guide it: The issue is one that has been more or less obvious for the last two years: are we going to enforce the faculty responsibility clause of Chapter 10D or are we going to accept de facto individual direction in classes taught by teaching assistants? In fairness, if we are to allow Mr. Carr to follow his conscience, I must assure 101 teaching assistants in English 102 that each is free to follow his conscience. I doubt that under these predictable conditions the English Department, the Curriculum Committee, the Freshman English Policy Committee, or I will be willing to accept responsibility for this course to the University Committee.5 Two weeks later, on October 9, Joseph Carr Wnally met with Heninger to discuss his “discomfort” (Heninger’s word, according to Carr) in following the prescribed course structure and content of English 102.6 In the memo he wrote a few days later to his fellow TAs, Carr said that, at the meeting with the chair, “questions were raised concerning the extent to which a T.A. is free to determine the structure and content of a course . . . which he has been delegated with the responsibility of instructing.”7 According to Carr, Heninger said that if he couldn’t abide by the prescribed structure and content of the course, he should resign, using Chapter 10D as support for this position. “It is Mr. Heninger’s position,” Carr wrote, “that Mr. Lenehan is responsible for the instruction of English 102 and that any responsibility I feel either towards myself or my students is unfounded. I told him that insofar as I had to teach the course that the greater share of that responsibility was mine and that I felt more of an obligation to my students than I did towards the Freshman English Policy Committee.”8 According to Carr, Heninger replied...

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