Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era

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COMPOSITION STUDIES/EDUCATION “Lamos reminds us that composition classrooms and writing programs have functioned increasingly as sites where competing values and interests have converged and diverged dynamically across the decades. He casts a critical eye toward what has constituted writing instruction and makes a compelling case for rethinking the stories we tell about this work as we go forward, recognizing that these converging and diverging challenges continue.” —Jacqueline J. Royster, Georgia Institute of Technology “Interests and Opportunities makes an important contribution to our understanding of how discourses of race have shaped the evolution of basic writing. Lamos provides a fine-grained analysis of the politics of race in higher education and challenges us to consider the ways in which racialized discourses both stymie, and occasionally enable, institutional change.” —Jennifer Trainor, San Francisco State University In the late 1960s, colleges and universities became deeply embroiled in issues of racial equality. Hundreds of new programs were introduced to address the needs of “highrisk ” minority and low-income students. In the years since, university policies have XipXopped between calls to address minority needs and arguments to maintain “Standard English.” Today, anti-aYrmative action and anti-access sentiments have put many of these programs in danger. Interests and Opportunities chronicles debates over writing programs for “high-risk” students on the national level and, locally, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Using the critical race theorist Derrick Bell’s concept of “interest convergence,” Steve Lamos shows that these programs were promoted or derailed according to how and when they Wt the interests of underrepresented minorities and mainstream whites (administrators and academics). To Lamos, understanding the past dynamics of convergence and divergence is key to formulating new strategies of local action and “story-changing” that can preserve and expand race consciousness and high-risk writing instruction, even in adverse political climates. Steve Lamos is assistant professor of English and an associate director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado at Boulder. PITTSBURGH SERIES IN COMPOSITION, LITERACY, AND CULTURE University of Pittsburgh Press www.upress.pitt.edu Cover art: iStockPhoto Cover design: Chiquita Babb Interests and Opportunities Steve Lamos Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era Interests and Opportunities ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6173-4 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6173-3 LAMOS Interests and Opportunities PITTSBURGH ...