The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education

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T H E R H E T O R I C O F R E M E D I AT I O N Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education Jane Stanley American universities have long professed dismay at the writing proficiency levels of entrants, and the volume of this complaint has been directly correlated to social, political, and economic currents. Many universities, in their rhetoric, have defined high need for remediation as a crisis point in order to garner state funding or to manage admissions. In The Rhetoric of Remediation, Jane Stanley examines the statements and actions made regarding remediation at the University of California, Berkeley. Since its inception in 1868, university rhetoric has served to negotiate the tensions between an ethic of access and the assertion of elite status. Great care has been taken to promote the politics of public accessibility, yet in its competition for standing among other institutions, UC Berkeley has been publicly critical of the “underpreparedness” of many entrants. Early on, UC Berkeley developed programs to teach composition to the vast number of students who lacked basic writing skills. Stanley documents the evolution of the university’s “rhetoric of remediation” at key moments in its history, and through the ebb and flow of enrollments. During its early years, UC Berkeley employed an “open gate” admissions policy in order to build its student base. Sustained growth, however, was stymied by an economic panic in the late 1800s. (continued on back flap) T H E R H E T O R I C O F R E M E D I AT I O N Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr, Editors ...