Composition in the Age of Austerity eds. by Nancy Welch and Tony Scott (review)

If you work at a university in the U.S., you will have noticed the jargon of austerity trickling down. Maybe people are using mission statement terminology in their spoken discourse. Maybe you've noticed institutional insistence on the word "success," as though the word itself conveyed the ingredients for enacting its meaning. Or perhaps you yourself are spearheading a collaborative assessment project to improve teaching and learning at your institution. Whether on the horizon of your concerns, or as its conscious instrument, if you are involved in teaching or administering college-level composition, neoliberalism is on the scene and you have a part to play in navigating its managerial influence on writing programs. Because literacy is a lynchpin of students' chances in college, and writing courses constitute a large chunk of universities' core requirements, composition bears the weight of a great number of administrative initiatives. It therefore enacts and is subject to encroaching logics of economic efficiency, which increasingly govern the contemporary university. As Nancy Welch and Tony Scott, authors of Composition in the Age of Austerity suggest, composition serves as a "canary in the coalmine for a wide-scale restructuring of higher education as a whole" (5). Through the economic imperative that we all do more with less, the engines of educational reform demand streamlining, standardization, quantifiable results, and at the college-level, more contingent labor. Yet despite the wholesale incursion of such imperatives, the collection argues, composition has yet to develop an economic consciousness adequate to confront the impacts of neoliberalism upon the field.

The question for composition professionals is how to proceed in the context of austerity: what to affirm and what to resist in this transforming landscape? Should we refuse to participate in any project requiring the hiring of yet another adjunct? Should we boycott all assessment projects and course redesigns on the grounds of their complicity with encroaching neoliberal processes? The analysis offered in Composition in the Age of Austerity declines to offer such potentially absurd specifics, placing more emphasis upon coming to terms with what has happened.

Coming to terms with what has happened remains an urgent concern. Its urgency comes from the fact that we have found through experience that we are vulnerable to conning ourselves, and the language of neoliberalism is especially capable of helping us do so. Couched in the lingo of equal opportunity and generating its own rationalities of consent, neoliberal logics have taken hold in writing programs, partly through the desire of composition professionals to act as agents of equality. In touting composition as a pathway to the middle class, as a "ladder of opportunity," we perpetuate a self-serving myth, namely that literacy at the college level substantively answers the structural inequality that conditions students' advantages well before they enter college. Ann Larson's chapter in the collection, "Composition's Dead," makes a related point, describing composition's familiar narrative of marginalization in the academy as having been co-opted by "relatively privileged composition scholars" who harnessed "popular anger against labor exploitation" and applied it to the field of composition as a whole. Though there is some justice in the narrative of composition's marginalization, its framing as "disciplinary discrimination" diverted attention from advancing adjunctification, which has created actual marginalization within composition's ranks.

Neoliberalism can be hard to see because it naturalizes itself. Neoliberalism and the cure it offers for its own harms, namely austerity, persuades us through intuitive coercion. As Margaret Thatcher famously asserted, There Is No Alternative. It is therefore particularly fitting that the collection touches upon incarceration. In "Austerity Behind Bars: The 'Cost' of Prison College Programs," Tobi Jacobi not only describes the logic of economic triage whittling away at prison education, (the same logic which eventually also came for publicly funded schools) but she also registers the role of recidivism, the lack of prison education programs, and the devastation of incarceration itself as a conditioning force in the landscape of austerity and neoliberalism...