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

CHAPTER 3: “They Can Neither Read Nor Write”

C H A P T E R 3 “They Can Neither Read Nor Write” [California and the Far West] is a rich and inexhaustible field over which the dawn of future commercial and industrial importance is just breaking. Sunset Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, 1898 (Jaehn 1998, 82). [California and the Far West] was a region without precedent and with few certainties, struggling for idea and metaphor. Kevin Starr (1998) on Sunset’s influence. If Hubert Howe Bancroft (188?) inaugurated California’s image industry with his Annals of the California Gold Era: 1848–1859 in the heady, brutal days of the gold rush, Southern Pacific’s Sunset Magazine surely inherited the mantle of leadership in self-promotion, and set about praising rural life in California. Established in 1898 as an organ of the Southern Pacific Railroad , Sunset wordsmithed tirelessly to represent California as a desirable place for tourists, and “to encourage some passengers to settle down out West” (Starr 1998, 79). Sunset’s inducements may have been enough for the average settler, but Benjamin Ide Wheeler needed more reason to leave Cornell for the University of California, characterized in New York’s Utica Observer in 1901 as “a weak institution, with plenty of land, a collection of broken-down buildings, beggarly endowments, and few students” (Douglass 2000, 100). Wheeler’s acceptance of the presidency of the University of California in| 34 | 1899 was contingent upon the regents’ capitulation to three demands: that he alone be the means of communication between faculty and regents; that he alone have the authority to hire and fire faculty, and to set their salaries; and that the regents present to the faculty, and the public, a united front of support for Wheeler’s decisions, regardless of their individual objections (Stadtman 1970, 181). These stiff conditions bespeak a candidate very sure of his qualifications for the job. The regents’ acceptance of them bespeaks a university weary of a succession of presidents and a run of ineffectual administrations .₁ The University of California was in fact something of a banana republic in those days, the regents having ushered in—and out—some eight presidents in thirty years, in contrast to Harvard’s one president, Charles William Eliot, during that period, and Michigan’s two (James Angell for twenty-eight of those thirty years). Readers of the Dial in 1894 may have been urged to study carefully the University of California’s scheme of instruction, so different from the common eastern type, but had they looked very closely, they would have seen that much of that instruction offered at this westernmost outpost of culture was taking place in tents. In the late 1890s, Regent Phoebe Apperson Hearst, chagrined that this city on a hill was something of a tent city, embarked upon her famous philanthropic project to erect some decent buildings, commission some civilizing statuary, and impart a little dignity to a university which, after all, bore Bishop Berkeley’s burdensome exhortation “Westward the course of empire makes its way” (Stadtman 1970). President Wheeler was well suited to make the University of California live up to this most imperial of expectations; he had an international reputation as a Heidelberg-trained scholar of classical philology (“a philologist who outgrew philology” [Slosson 1910, 155]), and an impressive network of friends, including then-former President Grover Cleveland and then-future President Theodore Roosevelt. And—no insignificant detail for rugged Californians—he’d been a star athlete in his undergraduate days at Brown. Wheeler was known for his decisiveness, if not for his tact, and he spoke unhesitatingly of the “promise and backwardness of California” (Starr 1985, 66). He demanded that the University of California abandon its insularity and become a “world university.” California’s university, insisted Wheeler, “dare not be in any sense provincial” (Ferrier 1930, 398). “They Can Neither Read Nor Write”| 35 | Speaking at Wheeler’s inauguration, Stanford President David Starr Jordan insisted that it was the duty of a university president to “set the university’s pace, frame its ideals, and choose its men in whom his ideals can be realized” (Miller 1979, 32). One of the men Wheeler chose to realize his ideals was Chauncey Wetmore Wells. A Yale man,² Wells joined the English Department as professor of English Composition. Like Professor Bradley, Wells found his students disappointing. In his introduction to A Book of Prose Narratives, an...