Notes
209 notes Acknowledgments 1. Moran, “How the Writing Process Came to UMass/Amherst,” 142. . Introduction: Freshman Composition in the United States, –Present 1. Connors, Composition-Rhetoric, 11. See also Brereton, Origins, 13. According to Kitzhaber , Harvard’s English A course, required of all freshmen starting in 1885, was “the parent of all later courses in freshman composition” (Rhetoric in American Colleges, 61). Both Brereton and Connors endorse Kitzhaber’s claim; Brereton even titled his long chapter 2 “The First Composition Program: Harvard, 1870–1900.” Recent eVorts have sought to complicate this “Harvard narrative,” which has played such an important role in composition ’s disciplinary self-consciousness (see, e.g., the studies collected in Donahue and Moon, Local Histories). But whether or not freshman composition was “invented” at Harvard in the 1870s and ’80s, the inXuence of English A is indisputable. Also indisputable is the rapid dissemination of the idea behind it, a “curricular endeavor that has no parallel in U.S. college history” (Connors, “New Abolitionism,” 5). 2. Adelman, New College Course Map, 232. For lists of the college courses most often taken by the high school classes of 1972, 1982, and 1992, see “Contexts of Postsecondary Education,” table 30-1, “Top Thirty Postsecondary Courses, 1972, 1982, 1992,” in U.S. Department of Education, National Center of Education Statistics (USDE-NCES), Condition of Education , available at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2004/section5/table.asp? tableID=109. According to Louis Menand, “Although the average number of credit hours devoted to courses in English literature has gone down over the last 20 years, the numberone subject, measured by the credit hours that students devote to it, has remained the same. That subject is English composition” (“Ph.D. Problem,” 29). 3. Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, 85. This is often literally true; Richard Light has shown how much time and eVort college students put into their writing and how much they care about it. In one study, Light asked students about their courses in terms of time commitment, intellectual challenge, and personal engagement. The results, he argues, are “stunning”: “The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students’ level of engagement—whether engagement is measured by time spent on the course, or the intellectual challenge it presents, or students’ self-reported level of interest in it—is stronger than any relationship we found between student engagement and any other course characteristic ” (Making the Most of College, 55). 4. “It has been precisely the historical and theoretical construction of the Wrst-year course, with all of its debates about literacy, rhetoric, culture, and technology, that has laid the groundwork for a curriculum devoted to the study of writing. The achievements of the Wrstyear course have made an advanced writing curriculum thinkable precisely to the extent 210 Notes to Pages – that our knowledges of writing are too much for a single course to contain. Quantity turns into quality, and in many respects the work of theorizing and enacting the study of writing is to make transparent and teachable the social relations and bodies of knowledge that now silently underwrite the Wrst-year course—to organize the study of writing as an intellectual resource for undergraduates” (Trimbur, “Changing the Question,” 23). 5. “Contexts of Postsecondary Education,” table 30-2, “Top Thirty Postsecondary Courses by Selectivity of Institution,” in USDE-NCES, Condition of Education , available at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2004/section5/table.asp?tableID=82. 6. On this last claim, see Goggin, Authoring a Discipline, 157–60 and Wg. 5.1. Comprhet ’s geographical particularity has sometimes been narrativized through the story of the Weld’s turn, early in the twentieth century, away from Harvard, whose approach to freshman composition had by then lost its luster, and toward the “Michigan model,” which took more seriously the possibilities of college-level composition-rhetoric (see Stewart, “Two Model Teachers” and “Harvard’s InXuence”). Why did freshman composition Wnd such a receptive home in the U.S. Midwest? And why is it still so prominent in the public institutions of that region? The reason is probably partly historical accident and partly a function of rhetoric education’s traditional strength in the provinces, far away from metropolitan capitals (see, e.g., Miller, Formation of College English). But there may be another reason for the particular geographic story of composition in the United States: namely, the progressive traditions of the (especially Upper) Midwest: the long-standing antipathy to elitism one Wnds there, the historic commitment...
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