Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave

3. The Possibility of Failure

DOI: 10.7330/9780874219319.c003 3 T h e P o s s i b i l i t y o f Fa i l ur e If you do a search in Amazon for books with the keyword failure, the vast majority of titles are about success: The Power of Failure: 27 Ways to Turn Life’s Setbacks into Success; Famous Failures: Hundreds of Hot Shots Who Got Rejected, Flunked Out, Worked Lousy Jobs, Goofed Up, or Did Time in Jail Before Becoming a Phenomenal Success; Success Through Failure; Great Failures of the Extremely Successful; Failure: The Back Door to Success. In other words, if you went by nothing other than these titles, you would think it a great stroke of luck if you failed tremendously at something. And we love the stories of people like Bill Gates, who dropped out of college, or Albert Einstein, who failed his entrance exams to the Zurich Polytechnic, because we know these stories end with phenomenal success (Gladwell 2008, 50; Isaacson 2007, 25). We want to imagine similar endings to the stories of Cesar and Helen, who left the college where I met them after just a semester or two. But no matter how many self-help books tell us that, in the words of another title listed on Amazon, The Road to Success is Paved with Failure, the fact of the matter is that failure is much more complicated and a lot less auspicious than we’d like to believe. The problem of failure is at the murky center of the issue of student retention at American colleges and universities. Both in retention literature and in the literature of composition studies, when we talk about students who are “at risk,” we are talking about students who are at risk for failure. As the omission of failure in the phrase at risk suggests, rarely is failure openly or easily discussed; rather, failure occurs in the shadows of our professional discourse. The shadows sometimes lead us to see things that aren’t there and prevent us from seeing things that are. When students leave, our retention discourse tends to ascribe failure to the students, regardless of the circumstances of their 84   pegeen reichert p owell leaving. Some students transfer to another institution, some “stop out” (leave for a couple of semesters or years, but return to earn the degree), and some do in fact leave for good—and for many students, these are not necessarily failure situations. However, while students may not experience leaving as failure , a student who leaves is always an indication of failure for the institution. And even though students’ leaving is typically understood as a financial failure in the form of lost revenue, when students leave, teachers and institutions must confront our own failures at a deeper level, too: it is impossible to educate students who are not there. We simply cannot achieve our pedagogical goals or institutional missions when students leave. As I argue in the previous chapters, despite the increasing intensity of the discourse of retention on our college campuses, we may never be able to solve the problem of student dropouts, or attrition more generally; however, this discourse can still be useful to us if we come closer to defining for ourselves what our goals as teachers and as institutions ought to be—and this, I argue, should be at the center of our focus on retention. Thus, this chapter is about failure, but my aim is to deflect the issue of retention away from student failure to a reconsideration of our own failures as faculty and institutions and our own complicity in the rhetoric of failure that surrounds the individual student’s decision to leave an institution before graduation. First, the etymology of failure, the history of the concept of failure in the financial world that I discuss in the next couple of sections, connects the issue of retention to the problem of student debt and also begins to explain why we tend to ascribe failure to an individual rather than to an institution or society as a whole. Then I return to the discourse of retention to discuss how the seminal work of retention scholar Vincent Tinto reinforces the emphasis on the individual, effectively impeding the development of more sustaining and systemic means of addressing attrition. Finally, I make connections between retention scholarship and scholarship in the fields of basic writing and disability studies in order to make the argument that the real failure...