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

CHAPTER 8: “Viewed as Disgraceful by Many Scholars”

C H A P T E R 8 “Viewed as Disgraceful by Many Scholars” By 1969 most members of the university were angry and exhausted, almost shell shocked. Radical graffiti, spilled garbage cans, false fire alarms, and stink bombs formed a tedious routine punctuated only by an occasional sit-in, disrupted class, or sound of a rock breaking a window . . . Cautious professors put masking tape on the glass in their office doors . . . [and] the senseless, random nature of the violent attacks pained and puzzled the faculty who increasingly came to see the protestors in pathological terms. Rorabaugh 1989, 161. It was not just the protestors who were pathologized in the second half of that volatile decade at Berkeley. Students who failed the Subject A exam were, once again, submitted to a range of diagnoses. In 1965, Chancellor Kerr had proposed that the Subject A course be dissolved and these students be admitted into a “writing clinic.”₁ He had earlier proposed alternative treatments for Subject A maladies, such as recorded TV lectures and lab work with audio tapes.² In those years of generalized public outrage about the state of affairs at UC Berkeley—not to mention the state of emergency—there were, as well, many complaints about Subject A from members of the general public, from parents and students, and from high school teachers and administrators.³ One strongly critical letter from a well-placed parent prompted Vice President Angus Taylor to charge the university-wide Committee on Educational Policy with conducting a “comprehensive ex-| 105 | amination” of the Subject A requirement to see if it was “well justified,” or if it should be abolished. Taylor asked the committee to consider the Subject A exam, as well, to determine if it should be redesignated an entrance exam. Expressing President Kerr’s wish as well as his own, he wrote the committee chair: “We invite you and your committee to take a fresh and hard look at Subject A.”⁴ Among the experts taking a fresh and hard look was E. J. Knapton, supervisor of Subject A at Berkeley, who addressed himself to the proposal of making Subject A an entrance exam. One problem with the proposal , Knapton suggested, is that it would discriminate against students “from relatively poor high schools, notably, but not exclusively the rural schools.”₅ It is a debatable claim that in 1966, California’s poorer high schools were primarily in rural, and not urban areas. It is unarguable, however, that students from rural schools, less affected by the upheavals in the cities during those years of the civil rights movement,₆ would have been seen as a potentially stabilizing element of the student body in 1965, and thus not an element to be discriminated against. Knapton’s more compelling adumbration was the claim that if Subject A were an admissions exam, the freshman class would be 75 percent female , and that some departments would have no new enrollments.⁷ The Committee on Educational Policy took this dire warning to heart, as had their predecessors in 1958, and reported to Vice President Taylor: “Passing the Subject A examination cannot be made an admissions requirement without changing the composition of the student body, very possibly not for the better.”⁸ The following year, the complaint about Subject A came from less exalted offices, but with rather more rhetorical force. Professor Samuel Markowitz, of the Chemistry Department, took a juridical turn, insisting that “the CEP show cause why the exam in Subject A and the course in Subject A should not be abolished.”⁹ Markowitz asked, “What other University has such an exam and course?” Arguing that the proficiency level certified by Subject A was wholly the responsibility of the high schools, he professed that venerable—if not outright shopworn—conviction that “with reasonable lead time” the high schools would shoulder their rightful burden. “Here,” pointed Markowitz, “is an opportunity to assert our standards.”₁⁰ “Viewed as Disgraceful by Many Scholars”| 106 | The Committee on Educational Policy chose not to seize that opportunity . Rather, they referred in their letter of response to the spotty record of the high schools in producing graduates with Subject A proficiency. Professor Wayne Shumaker, for example, detailed his impressions of English instruction at McClymonds High in Oakland. He observed that students’ learning activities centered about reading a Clorox bleach pamphlet on cleaning clothing, and reading a set of instructions on tooth brushing...