cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

This is part 2 of a short piece forthcoming in the tenth anniversary issue of Pedagogy (Duke UP).

Secession, Fusion and Compromise

There is a substantial tradition of thinking about this problem from below—especially from the most subordinated position, of writing. Most of the more prescient and convincing accounts come from scholars attempting to re-imagine English studies from the disciplinary location of rhetoric and composition.

The most circulated analysis in this vein is Stephen North’s account of a mid-nineties reform of the doctoral program at SUNY Albany, which presents a taxonomy of prescriptions for disciplinary change (principally by way of reorganizing graduate study) going back to a 1984 summit meeting at Wayzata, Minnesota.

As the accounts by North and others have it, discussants representing the major disciplinary associations in English studies made three sorts of proposal for the future: secession, in which disaffected faculty would establish programs and departments of their own (or else join established departments and programs that would treat them better); compromise, in which the discipline and individual departments would seek a unifying term for tactical and pragmatic purposes (“rhetoric” was especially favored in the eighties); and fusion, in which departments and possibly the profession would go beyond a merely rhetorical unification and transform themselves “into a single new entity, one quite distinct from any of the original components” (73). The result of the “fusion” effort at Albany was the department’s much-reported PhD Program in “Writing, Teaching and Criticism.”

One of the more useful subsequent commentaries on North is Bruce McComiskey’s immensely approachable introductory essay to English Studies: An Introduction to the Disciplines. McComiskey updates North by discussing additional fields and adding a fourth possible prescription, integration, by which he means a strategy of acknowledging that the various fields have increasingly developed different methods and interests—different disciplinary or proto-disciplinary discourses, hence the plural disciplines——but nonetheless may have a mutual interest in the health of an umbrella field, ie, “reimagining English studies as a coherent community of disciplines”(41).

Rather than fusion, McComiskey proposes something more like a federation, in which the different fields recognize methodological and intellectual autonomy but in a relationship of rough equality—which might mean, he points out, rearticulating the relationship between the disciplines in the many departments where literary studies holds most of the power.

What’s most attractive about McComiskey’s proposal is the unifying rubric he offers: “the goal of this integrated English studies should be the analysis, critique and production of discourse in social context”(43).

What’s missing from McComiskey’s account, on the other hand, is the critical analysis of disciplinarity itself offered by David Downing, by Stephen North, by James Berlin, and many others, including myself, especially with attention to labor practice.

I personally prefer to read both McComiskey and North’s taxonomy not as prescriptions for the future, but as reasonably good descriptions of four different tactics that have been utilized by many departments over the past three decades, often in very different flavors and combinations, sometimes as the result of reflection and planning, sometimes organically, frequently in a series of ad hoc decisions arising out of externally -framed opportunities, strictures and imperatives.

McComiskey’s federated model of English studies, for instance, turns out to be a decent description of where North’s SUNY Albany PhD ended up. The fusion represented by North and Knoblauch’s doctoral program in “Writing, Teaching and Criticism” lasted over a decade, but in recent years gave way to a more conventional “PhD in English” with four tracks or concentrations, roughly: literature, theory, writing, and cultural studies. Some of the fusion language of the 1992 effort survives in the program and university documents.

Discipline-wide, however, probably the most important form of “fusion” has taken place in the research and teaching of individual faculty, where cultural studies, theory, women’s studies, and ethnic studies easily pass across the border that “writing” and “literature” have fortified against each other.

These four tactics have been used in different mixes at institutions of all types, not merely at doctoral institutions. Among the most common iterations of McComiskey’s federation or integration strategy, for instance, is the rapid proliferation of writing tracks, minors, and concentrations at undergraduate institutions, even undergraduate-only liberal arts colleges.

The 2100 students of Allegheny College (Meadville, Pa), for instance, can choose from four separate writing tracks in the English major—technical and professional, journalism, creative—even a new environmental writing track.

Similarly, though by way of a secession from English of a stand-alone writing program, any of the 18,000 students at the University of California Santa Barbara can elect a minor in professional writing offering distinct tracks in multimedia, editing, and business communication. Brown’s undergraduate English department has a concentration and honors program in nonfiction writing.

There are literally hundreds of such “integrations,” some of them involving elements of secession—many of the growing number of stand-alone writing programs remain functionally integrated with English departments on multiple levels, from joint appointments and initiatives, to administering teaching fellowships for English graduate study.

There is just as much diversity in the forms of secession. Some of the secessions are of the deplorable sort that feature a wholly untenurable labor force, as at Duke, Princeton, and Stanford, though these too can be integrated with English departments at a variety of levels—eg, Stanford, where the English department hosts the tenure of the “stand-alone” program’s administrator (but no one else with a research profile in rhet-comp).

In stark contrast, the secession of the Syracuse writing program led to department status, a substantially tenured faculty, an exceptionally well-conceived writing major and minor, and a respected doctorate.

It’s not at all clear that the English department at Syracuse has done well from this secession. While the department features a string of notable scholars in literature and cultural studies, it has just over a dozen doctoral candidates and somewhat fewer students in its master’s program; the departmental self description is an object lesson in how difficult it is to describe English without the frame of writing, and gives the sense of manning the barricades “We are a dedicated group of faculty and students who represent the complex discipline that “English” has become in the contemporary university and in today’s society.”

By contrast, the new Writing major is framed in terms I’d call confident and clear:

The Writing and Rhetoric Major focuses on different genres and practices of writing as enacted in specific historical and cultural contexts. Students write in a wide range of genres: advanced argument, research writing, digital writing, civic writing, professional writing, technical writing, creative nonfiction, and the public essay. In the process of exploring and practicing these genres, students study and analyze the interaction of diverse rhetorical traditions and writing technologies and assess how these factors shape the nature, scope, and impact of writing in a variety of contexts. The major also asks students to examine writing and rhetoric as embedded in culture, and looks at writing identities, their emergences in cultures and subgroups, and the relations among writing, rhetoric, identity, literacy, and power. Graduates of the Writing and Rhetoric Major will be well equipped for public and private sector careers that require knowledge of advanced communication strategies and writing skills. The major is open to any SU student, and may be especially useful to students pursuing careers in teaching, the law, business, public advocacy, and editing and publishing.

I don’t mean to suggest that the Writing Program is “better” than the English department, and I think it could be easily argued that they’d be stronger as a unit—if they could ever “re-integrate” as McComiskey proposes. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that the achievements of the Syracuse writing program would have been utterly impossible in a literature-dominated department.

Other secessions offer mixed narratives—Derek Owens’ Writing Institute at St. John’s began with a wholly nontenurable (but full-time and unionized) faculty, but within three years had succeeded in a mass conversion of all of the appointments to tenure-track assistant professorships—this in 2009, a year when nearly every institution of higher education was cancelling tenure-track hires.

Secessions at some institutions produce marriages of convenience, as at the Michigan State’s 2003 shotgun merger, the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, offering one BA in American Studies and another conceptually unrelated BA in Professional Writing, as well as all “Tier 1” writing courses—while the English department holds onto English Education, most American literature faculty, including specialists in Chicana/Chicano culture, and creative writing, as well as the graduate programs (though sending many of them to WRAC to fund their studies).

Other English departments have seen multiple spin-offs, as at MIT, where linguistics long ago formed a happier partnership with philosophy; drama bunks down with music; and digital media have three homes (Henry Jenkins’ department of comparative media studies, the program in Science, Technology and Society, and the graduate studio program in Media Arts and Sciences).

Literature at MIT stands alone, but the “program in writing and humanistic studies” administers no less than three majors (science writing, creative writing, digital media), as well as three minors in the same fields, a concentration in writing that can be adapted to any field of study, the entire first-year writing program, and a graduate program in science writing.

I’ve said the least about North’s “compromise” option, which is a bit of a misnomer. As a prescription, it sounds the least appetizing, because it involves one field taking managerial responsibility for the others, but at least—when framed as a deliberate choice—it sounds like a negotiation of complex circumstances between stakeholders.

On the other hand, considered as a description, it’s probably the most accurate account of what’s taken place over the long term: after literary criticism’s ascent, as McComiskey and many others observe, it remained perpetually in control through most of the last century in most departments, with “the ‘other’ disciplines as trailers” (42).

There have been prospective discussions about choosing another unifying term—rhetoric, cultural studies, literacy, textual studies, etc—and numerous deployments of these alternatives, especially in connection with acts of secession. However, these are the exceptions, and emergence of literature into its present position as the governing term didn’t occur as an act of deliberation or negotiation.

Similarly, if some other governing term replaces literature, it will likely occur without the consent of literature faculty. Such a replacement is far from certain, of course. Literature, literary study, and the practice of criticism aren’t disappearing. In any reasonable estimation, literature will retain substantial cultural capital with large groups of disproportionately wealthy and influential people for centuries to come. For the foreseeable future, it will continue to do enormous diversity work and revisionist cultural history, and remain a centerpiece of great works, core and juvenile curricula.

It’s hard to imagine that the large and evidently growing number of students who enjoy writing won’t continue to read widely in the sort of imaginative works presently acknowledged as literary. And, already—in innumerable acts of fusion by individual faculty—what counts as literary is being changed under our feet.

There’s no reason not to expect hundreds more thoughtful, deliberate acts of integration by departments and colleges. Some of these integrations will be motivated by the achievements of secession. Other integrations will be motivated by fear of community-college style consolidation into generalist “humanities” or “liberal studies” departments.

But if literature’s continued survival is not in question, the terms under which it survives certainly are. It may well be the case, for instance, that literature survives under the sign of “teaching,” and writing becomes the figure under which research-intensive appointments are distributed.

Whether voluntary, forced, or negotiated, most of those changes will be to a balance of disciplinary power over which literature’s grip is slipping—and most will involve the figure of writing.

Works Cited
Berlin, James. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Parlor Press, 2003 (repr of 1996 NCTE edition with response essays).
Bousquet, Marc. How The University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. NYU Press, 2008.
Connors, Robert. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Downing, David. “Beyond Disciplinary English: Integrating Reading and Writing By Reforming Academic Labor.” Pp 23-38 in David B. Downing, Claude Mark Hurlbert, and Paula Mathieu, eds. Beyond English Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002.
——. The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
McComiskey, Bruce, ed. English Studies: An Introduction to the Disciplines. Urbana, NCTE, 2006.
Miller, Richard. “The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling.” College English 61.1(September 1998): 10-28.
Modern Language Association. Education in the Balance: A report on the Academic Workforce in English. Web publication, 10 December 2008. Available at: http://www.mla.org/pdf/workforce_rpt02.pdf Accessed June 1, 2009.
——. Report to the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature. Web publication, February 2009. Available at: http://www.mla.org/pdf/2008_mla_whitepaper.pdf Accessed June 1, 2009.
North, Stephen. Refiguring the PhD in English Studies: Writing, Doctoral Education and the Fusion-Based Curriculum. Urbana: NCTE, 2000.
Syracuse University English Department. “Home Page.” Available at: http://english.syr.edu/ Accessed June 1, 2009.
Syracuse University Writing Program. “Description of the Writing Major.” Available at: http://wrt.syr.edu/major/ Accessed June 1, 2009.