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5 waC ’ s d i s a p p E a r i n g aC t Rita Malenczyk In their contribution to this volume, “Creation Myths and Flash Points,” Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington invite us to view the field of basic writing through the conflicting narratives of its history. In this chapter, I similarly recount the narrative of writing across the curriculum (WAC). I argue that instead of conflicting stories, however, what WAC presents us with is essentially one master narrative, one of revelation, community building, and continued conversion. In a perfect storm–like convergence of forces spanning the last three decades (the emergence of composition as a field, the National Writing Project, the federal government), English teachers interested in writing met each other, spread the gospel of WAC to their faculty, and started programs that, taken together, became a curricular movement—one that was successful largely because it appealed to the interests of faculty and the concerns of administrators alike. These shared interests, and the willingness of WPAs to build on them, transformed the way writing programs are institutionalized on campuses. Many colleges and universities now have some version of a writing-in-the disciplines program, with writing not confined solely to the first-year composition course but seen, rather, as the shared responsibility of faculty in all departments, at all levels.1 I argue here, however, that we may be reaching the end of that story as WAC begins to look in various ways at its disappearance, a disappearance actually predicted by one of WAC’s founders, Barbara Walvoord, in 1996 and by another WAC pioneer, Susan McLeod, shortly thereafter. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of WAC,2 Walvoord speculated in the 1. It could be argued that the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition takes the presence of WAC on most campuses for granted: see . 2. It is a truth universally acknowledged that what we think of today as WAC began at Central College in Pella, Iowa, when Walvoord faced a scheduling conundrum. See McLeod, “The Future.” 90 Ex P LORI N G C OM P OSI T I ON ST U D I ES pages of College English on what the future of the movement might be; she suggested—in an argument that seems eerily prescient sixteen years later—that, without careful and consistent attention to the changing landscapes of academia, WAC was in danger of dying. WAC, she said, had to find ways of surviving within new realities, as colleges and universities (as they are wont to do) shifted their priorities: WAC must decide how to relate to other movement organizations. It cannot ignore them, and on most campuses, I believe, WAC cannot survive as Switzerland; it simply does not have the funding base, the powerful national engines, the “new” look that will attract funding, or the ability to retain followers to itself alone. . . .Those followers themselves often want to, and must, combine WAC with assessment, critical thinking, and other movements. WAC, I believe, must dive in or die. (“The Future of WAC” 69–70) A year after Walvoord’s essay appeared, McLeod reiterated some of her points, but with more trepidation, referring pointedly to an incontrovertible fact of academic life—the need for departmental identification: [T]here are two clouds I see on the horizon with regard to the future of WAC programs, both of which are danger signs in terms of program survival. The first has to do with the way many WAC programs are structured. Because they are by definition cross-curricular, such programs do not fit into a recognizable academic compartment . . . they are often located, administratively and physically, outside the usual departmental structures. . . . Any program that lies outside the hierarchical structure of the academy or that goes against the usual way of doing business is always in danger of being absorbed into a more recognizable structure. (“WAC” 68) I propose that what Walvoord and McLeod predicted is, in fact, coming true, but with a twist: that despite WAC’s “followers” having done what Walvoord suggested they do, i.e., “combine WAC . . . with other movements,” nevertheless WAC, if not dying, is gradually being subsumed or dispersed into other disciplines or programmatic structures, and therefore being transformed into something other than what it was before, something perhaps less obviously about writing alone (what that “something” is remains to be seen). I submit, however, that this transformation does not equal death, and that far from being a sign of the...

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