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n oT e s o n T h e o R i g i n s o f The Making Of knOwledge in COMpOsiTiOn Stephen M. North Reading the essays Lance Massey and Rick Gebhardt have assembled here has led me to reflect—not, to be sure, for the first time—on why a debut book by an untenured writing center director should have caused the kind of stir MKC unquestionably did, or enough of one that we are still discussing it. One part of the answer, I think, is that my professional concerns and anxieties, which account for so much of what the book is about, resonated with a great many other people in composition. The other— a minor but crucial corollary, and not as tongue-in-cheek as it probably sounds—is that unlike most other people in composition, I had to write a book early in my career, and it couldn’t be about writing centers. I don’t think there’s anything particularly contentious about the first claim. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, composition underwent what passes in U.S. higher education for amazingly rapid change, a veritable overnight process of professionalization: upgrades of existing and the emergence of new refereed journals; serious access to public and private funding for both research and pedagogical innovation; the beginnings of graduate education beyond the traditional practicum; and, most materially significant, a substantial increase in the number of full-time, tenure-track positions. Inevitably, though, these changes— these unprecedented opportunities—provoked parallel and unprecedented anxieties. What would it take to publish in these new venues, or to compete for these grants? What was a graduate course in composition supposed to look like? What would these new tenure-track positions entail, exactly, and what would it take to land one . . . and keep it? And the big question, in some sense lurking beneath all the others: What exactly was composition, and did it—did we—really constitute a legitimate professional and disciplinary enterprise? Did we, in short, really belong in the academy? 12 T H E C H A N G I N G OF KN OWLED G E I N C OM P OSI T I ON And my own professional trajectory was very much of a piece with these developments. Certainly I benefited enormously from the opportunities . Consider: when I enrolled as a doctoral student at Albany for the 1975–1976 academic year, the English department had never hired a faculty member in composition. Its forty-section-per-term composition course was overseen by a director, but that was an assigned duty, not an academic specialization. However—fatefully, I daresay—at the end of that year, the university brought in John Gerber, longtime chair of English at Iowa and first chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), to lead the department in rebuilding after a series of setbacks. By fall 1977, Gerber had hired the department’s firstever director of writing, a fiction writer with a strong interest in composition (who would direct my dissertation), followed in fall 1978 by its first tenured associate professor of composition (Lee Odell). And shortly after that, in 1980, the department conducted its first-ever search for a junior hire in composition, which led to my appointment as assistant professor and director of the writing center. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the first time in the history of U.S. higher education that a doctoral-granting English department had devoted a tenure-track line to hiring a writing center director; and it may still be the only time when such a department did all that and hired one of its own graduates. All that good fortune notwithstanding, though, the position also came with a full share of the aforementioned anxieties. Certainly I understood—and felt acutely—the pressure for grants and publications: I had been at Albany long enough, in fact, to see more than a couple of candidates, including highly regarded teachers, denied tenure for having too little of both. I also learned immediately the challenges that making composition a subject for formal graduate education posed: from 1981 to 1986, the department never had more than two composition faculty, so there was never a time when I wasn’t engaged with the attendant duties: offering graduate courses, serving on dissertation committees , and so on. Last but far from least, I understood—especially as the local candidate—how many other departmental priorities had been...

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