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28 COLLEGE WRITING AND BEYOND 2 T H E D I L E M M A S O F F R E S H M A N W R I T I N G Like the playwright who gives stage directions so that the reader can imagine a living, breathing experience, or the composer who begins an opus with a prelude, I begin this chapter with excerpts of field notes and other documents gathered at the site of this case study—an English department at a prestigious private university in the South. These bits and pieces, together, form a backdrop to the discussion that follows. The heavy wood door to English, in the middle of the quad, is like all the other nondescript doors on the quad—dark brown, with the department name in white lettering. Opening the door, one’s eye is drawn to a wide, thickly-carpeted stairway with curling wrought-iron and wood railing leading to the second floor, where the department chair, his secretary, and the senior faculty have their offices. In the first floor wood-paneled vestibule is a lighted glass case housing book jackets—those of books faculty have written. Next to the vestibule is a small anteroom that houses the faculty mailboxes, a love seat, and a coffee table. On it is a copy of The New York Times Book Review. On a Wednesday morning, between 10 and 10:30, five men and one woman pick up mail. One catches snippets of conversation: “Did you attend the meeting on language and culture . . . . The way she situates the relationship of language to consciousness . . . models for a cultural context of violence and power.” . . . Beside the mailboxes is a poster announcing a poetry reading in the afternoon. Next door, without carpeting or paneling or a lighted showcase, are the offices of creative writing (upstairs) and freshman writing (downstairs). —researcher’s field notes *** Department chair: . . . it’s very hard to get people to volunteer to teach Freshman Writing. It used to be routine, but there was a major change in the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1970s research has been valued more . . . Over the years there’s been involvement of the faculty in Freshman Writing. We want to reestablish it (emphasis mine). Anne: Why is that important? Department chair: The deans have demanded it. It’s not the best use of The Dilemmas of Freshman Writing 29 faculty time and course distributions and they won’t do as well as the lecturers because they’ve been out of the field. But here power flows from above. The penalty is no bucks. But on the positive side, some faculty involvement will show how good the program is. After the tape recorder is turned off, the chair points to several textbooks authored by freshman writing lecturers on his desk and says. “These don’t carry any status. They’re not the books that get written up in The New York Times Book Review.” —researcher’s interview notes, January 24, 1995 *** The freshman writing courses serve two educational functions. First . . . is to improve the skills of freshmen in writing, argumentation, and library research. The second is to give graduate students in English an opportunity to develop skills in teaching an undergraduate composition course. (A third function is to provide financial support for graduate students in English.) We have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant fraction of students do not receive sufficient instruction in writing, especially of analytical essays that are widely required in various courses in humanities and the social sciences . . . For the two-term course, students are required to write a personal essay and to complete a series of rhetorical exercises in the first quarter, and to write a research paper in the second . . . A large fraction (more than two-thirds) of the freshman writing courses are literature. . . . the 5000 word writing requirement per quarter we regard as remarkably small . . . Indeed, several members of the review committee teach writing-intensive courses that require substantially more writing than this . . . The key underlying policy issue is whether it makes sense to have a university requirement of this magnitude that is essentially ignored by the tenure track faculty . . . —report of the ad hoc review committee for the freshman writing requirement, Committee on Undergraduate Studies, May 1995 *** Despite the objections of some English professors, an “experiment” using graduate students from departments other than English as Freshman Writing instructors will begin next year . . . If the three-student pilot program succeeds, it may be...

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