Everything Old Is New Again

Read the following reform-minded complaint. When was the quoted section, taken from Thomas P. Miller's latest book, written?

Graduate education is failing doctoral students because they are being "trained as if they were to lecture on obscure problems of English literature to small groups of graduate students" rather than to teach introductory writing (136).

1. a. 1913

2. b. 1962

3. c. 2011

Give up? It's a. 1913. How about this one? Look at the excerpted quotations below. When were they written?

The "flight of students from English" is a "healthy correction" because "selectivity" is more important than "popularity," given the disorienting "Demand for Vocationalism" (213).¹

1. a. 1865

2. b. 1930

3. c. 2002

This time the answer is c. 2002. These excerpts, written nearly a century apart — exemplify a troubling theme in The Evolution of College English: that not much has evolved. Reading Miller's history of the teaching of English and related subjects in American higher education, I was surprised and saddened to learn that, despite the changes in curricular emphasis wrought by technological advance, the debates that define the field — over the cultural relevance of higher learning in the humanities, over the rankings and titles of the professoriate, and over the workload of the ceaselessly grading composition instructor, who seems not to have had a weekend off in more than three hundred years — have not changed since the professors squabbled with the tutors over the latter's social standing at Yale in 1717.

A summary of Miller's argument about the general trend in higher education, stripped of its disciplinary and historical particulars, reads like this: The top universities have always asserted elitism as one of their core values, even if this assertion has been tacit. After a while, the excluded nonelites storm the ivory towers, demanding accountability and practicality in education, so that a new pedagogy is born that claims to be pragmatic and inclusive. Eventually, in good old dialectical fashion, the new, progressive pedagogy becomes staid, convinced of the rightness of its agenda, and elitist and is overturned by still newer pedagogy. Miller's focus is on college English, however, and what he adds to this sometimes amusing, sometimes depressing march through centuries of human and institutional folly is an understanding of how education in English is and has always been particularly vulnerable to the shifting definitions of literacy shaped by specific economic and cultural moments, for an obvious reason. Because college English exists in the peculiar position of educating users who are in many ways already experts in the language, education in English that ignores its relevance to those users risks becoming obsolete. This is a risk English has faced at critical junctures in its past. A good example is the indifference of English to the "trades" of journalism and public speaking in the late nineteenth century, which led these two subject areas to split off from English to join other departments or form their own, while English kept the more "intellectually important" (but, as Miller argues, professionally irrelevant) subjects of creative writing and literary criticism.

But if English has faced obsolescence in its past — and faces it now as a result of decreased government spending on higher education, increased national hostility to labor unions, and the plummeting of tenure-track positions in English — it still casts a wide educational net. Miller's term of choice to cover all the things that college English is and that education in English and English departments have almost always done is "literacy studies." For Miller, these studies, the "four corners" of the field, are literature, English education, writing studies, and linguistics, the last one, as Miller points out, existing "as a separate institutionalized discipline only in larger research universities."² The same quality that makes English vulnerable to shifting public opinion — the ubiquity of the practitioners of the language — makes it especially valuable to the same public, who use and need to learn to use the language in different ways...