"Why the Wyoming Resolution Had to Be Emasculated: A History and a Quixotism" (article)

Why the Wyoming Resolution Had to Be Emasculated: A History and a Quixotism

James Sledd

This essay is a revision of a paper I read in Portland in the summer of 1990 at the annual conference of writing program administrators. Its aim, in antique terms, is less to persuade than to bear witness by answering two questions. First, in the five years after the once-so-promising Wyoming Resolution, why has so much talk produced so little action to check the exploitation of composition teachers? Second, what can be done, if anything, to right this wrong? To the first question, a long history answers that administrators, literati, and eminent compositionists have been led by misconceived self-interest to perpetuate old injustice. To the second question, a short quixotism answers that emancipation proclamations unsupported by determined power are in fact obstructive. In the foreseeable future, public opinion will not allow the abolition of the postsecondary teaching of writing, and intelligent self-interest forbids the maintenance of a permanent academic ghetto. But the exploited themselves must use the power of organized agitation if there is to be any real reform.

A History of Iniquity

I begin my history with old, unhappy, far-off things, iniquity long ago. "Poor Mr. Doe!" my unctuous professor said as we stepped out of the elevator which Mr. Doe's daughter was operating. "Poor Mr. Doe! If he had only lived till springtime, he would have learned that we had voted him a two-hundred-dollar raise."

That was the obituary of a composition bum, spoken in the 1930s by a member of his budget council, overflowing with putrid feeling. Mr. Doe had belonged to the academic underclass which O. J. Campbell described in 1939 when he called for the abolition of freshman English. Staffing the freshman course required the recruitment of crowds of young people who then languished, Campbell said, at the foot of the departmental totem pole. They were the perpetual instructors, happy if they were granted trifling raises, ecstatic if at last they made assistant professor; but too often, in Campbell's view from above, they became infected with contagious disappointment and rebelliousness. They were also prerequisite to the existence of a professoriate glorying in autotelic research and unread publication.

Laboring beside the composition bums, already in the 1930s, were teaching assistants--graduate students who were supported by their spouses, if they were lucky, or who supported themselves in their common task of hunting down comma faults and berating faulty diction. After World War II, when every crossroads college set out to become a graduate research institution of international repute, composition bums grew rarer while teaching assistants multiplied. In 1959, however, an authoritative bureaucratic manifesto, "The Basic Issues in the Teaching of English," sadly reported that the state of the indispensable composition teacher was still not good. English departments, their spokespersons insisted, were the home of a "fundamental liberal discipline," to which literature was central; but devotees of the supposed discipline faced the general complaint "that students do not know how to read or write" (7, 5). The blind were leading the blind. "Our teaching-assistant graduate students and young Ph.D.'s," the report went on, "may expect ninety per cent of their first six years of teaching to be in freshman and sophomore composition. Yet the typical Ph.D. program is almost completely void of courses dealing primarily with language and rhetoric" (12). Nor did acquisition of the degree bring prompt emancipation, for "the teaching of composition [was] regarded as drudgery, [was] paid badly, and [offered] little opportunity for advancement in rank" (12).

Those who regarded composition-teaching as drudgery and paid it badly were of course the professorial literati themselves. At Allerton Park in 1962, in a conference on research, John Fisher of the MLA quite clearly stated their dilemma. "Belief in the value of literary study for all," Fisher said, "is the creed we live by," but "by continuing to staff freshman English courses we acknowledge that part of our task is to train students to read and write." How could those two undertakings be reconciled? For Fisher, it was unthinkable that English departments should turn themselves "into enormous service departments of composition and the language arts," yet abandoning the cultivation of literacy "would only leave a vacuum to be filled by someone else who [was] quite willing to be of service" (21-22). Though Fisher did not say so, the abandonment of freshman English would also have left the literati without graduate students and their departments with much reduced budgets.

Since 1962, the history of big English departments, especially in the pattern-setting state universities, has been largely a history of varying attempts to solve the problem that Fisher saw: How can the literati maintain their dominance, avoid the teaching of composition, yet use the freshman English course to keep up their budgets and to guarantee enrollment for the seminars that profit from their research (and sometimes do it)?

An early attempt at a solution got little further than a plea that the schools should do what the universities wouldn't. The committee representing the MLA, in the 1964 Report of the Commission on the Humanities, joined the perennial lament of a literacy crisis yet coolly assigned the cultivation of literacy to the schools while simply assuming that in the universities teaching assistants would continue to populate the seminars in literature. "A majority of college students," the association's representatives complained, do not speak, write, or read their own language well. Graduate instructors who direct master's essays and doctoral dissertations are shocked at the extent to which they must become teachers of `hospital' English. Yet we are aware that many of these candidates are already engaged in part-time teaching of freshman English. If they cannot recognize and correct their own egregious errors, what is happening to the end-products of their teaching? (138)

The cap to this mass of evasions was not today's demand for more research in advanced composition but the time-worn proposal to pass the buck of elementary composition to the schools. "Whatever the causes" of students' ineptitude, the committee said, "correction must come at the lower levels, since by the time students enter college, any bad habits in speaking, writing, and reading have become so fixed and ingrained that colleges can do little more than stress `remedial work'" (138).

When enrollments have been high and when elementary courses in literature have been available to support teaching assistants, denigrators of composition and its teaching have often repeated the pretense that freshman English is indeed remedial, unnecessary for most college entrants, and therefore unfit for a college curriculum; but the pretense is dangerous, less because it is untrue (which it is) than because it invites the more exalted administrators to abolish the one course on which departments of English most depend for their existence. For the professoriate, the apparently safer argument, despite its own internal contradictions, is insistence both on the maintenance of the freshman course and on the wisdom of staffing it with the least experienced, least prepared, most poorly paid of teachers: the teaching assistants, who are essential if the research machine is to be kept rolling.

Perennial Exploitation

One constant within the incessant changes of the supposedly fundamental liberal discipline of English has been the fundamentally illiberal exploitation of teaching assistants. For example, the Teaching Assistants Association at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) estimated in 1970 that overworked and underpaid teaching assistants taught sixty-eight percent of all lower-division courses (not just English courses) and fifty-six percent of all undergraduate courses (Hamilton 346). At the University of Texas in 1975, according to George Nash, 157 teaching assistants taught ninety percent of the sections of freshman English, and the existence of the English Department "in its present form [depended] on (a) keeping the required lower-division courses and (b) using these courses to support an army of TAs who [served] the double function of sparing full-time faculty the drudge work and supplying warm bodies for the faculty's graduate seminars" (125). According to Carol Hartzog, at the University of Southern California in 1984-85, departments viewed "the Freshman Writing Program as a means of supporting their graduate students," who taught all the courses in the program (11). Hartzog provides a roll call of comparable situations in other big universities, fully justifying the conclusion of Stephen North in 1987 that "the tradition in most large writing programs is to have teaching assistants do most of the teaching" (35).

The motives for such extensive use of teaching assistants in elementary courses have been bluntly stated by Dean Jaros of the Graduate School at Colorado State. The TA system, Jaros has said in defending it, provides cheap teachers, saves "regular" faculty from teaching undergraduates, and still supports the graduate students who fill the graduate seminars and do the undergraduate teaching (Chism 369). Less damaging defenses have of course been offered, notably by William F. Irmscher of the University of Washington and O. Jane Allen of New Mexico State. According to Allen, many of the graduate students of literature whom in 1964 the MLA's committee found so incompetent are in fact accomplished researchers, skilled readers and writers, and lovers of language equipped to deal with special stylistic problems (169); and Irmscher asserts that "teaching assistants, if properly trained, can bring new vitality to the study of English" (27).

Clearly, it is possible that assistants appointed for bad reasons may still be good teachers, and no one denies that limited teaching, after careful training and under intelligent supervision, would use a useful part of a professional apprenticeship; but the facts of exploitation seem overwhelmingly against the defenders of the present system, who themselves do not accept the logical consequences of their argument. Most graduate students in English have done their undergraduate work in fiction, poetry, and drama, with little or no training in grammar, rhetoric, or logic; and graduate students from other departments may not have had even the exposure to "literature." The students' further training as teaching assistants is often surveillance, rather than instruction. As Charles Bridges and his coauthors say (citing Gibaldi and Mirollo's Current State of Teaching Apprentice Activities), preparing assistants for their teaching "remains an isolated and often thankless task," which "departments often undertake grudgingly and only out of necessity" (vii, viii).

Thus, insecure, inexperienced, poorly prepared transients are called upon to teach courses which their professorial masters disdain. The conditions in which they teach do not improve their morale. Though they are normally paid (and rather poorly at that) for a twenty-hour week, their actual time on task is likely to be more nearly thirty hours; and commonly they are treated not as junior colleagues but as a kind of house-servant, assigned at the last minute to courses over which they have little control and denied the amenities which "regular" faculty enjoy. Worst of all, they are expected to teach rhetoric well while studying literature diligently with professors who dislike teaching. Wayne Booth Booth is only a bit too vehement when he sums up the situation in one sharp sentence: "Ignorant high school graduates enter college and are taught by ignorant . . . graduate assistants working for slave wages in appallingly unprofessional conditions" (7). Defenders of the system, it should be added, have never explained why the assistants whose abilities they praise are overworked, underpaid, and regularly assigned to courses which the professors shun, not to the juicy plum courses which the professors monopolize.

Teaching assistants are not the only victims of the autocratic behavior with which we allegedly inspire students to live freely in an alleged democracy. Though the exploitation of teaching assistants has remained a constant whenever there are assistants to exploit, in the lean 1970s the supply ran short. A decline in the number of college-age students was projected, and in fact the number of undergraduate majors and graduate students in English fell off, sometimes sharply, partly because new Ph.D.'s found few job openings in the traditional literary fields. At the same time, however, the demand for writing courses, including freshman composition, remained high. The freshman English which Campbell had hoped to abolish now kept many departments afloat, and just ten years after John Fisher had spoken disdainfully of "service departments," the Delegate Assembly of the MLA was invited to resist an alleged trend "toward abolition of basic requirements in English composition."¹

Two related developments helped English departments to maintain their primary functions of survival and reproduction. The professional compositionist emerged, supported in the push for status and privilege by the less lemming-like among the graduate students and the newly bedoctored; and at the same time, administrators aped business executives in appointing large numbers of contingent workers, the now-familiar part-timers, temporaries, hourlies, or freeway fliers. Franklin, Laurence, and Denham report that from 1972 to 1983 the number of part-timers in four-year institutions increased more than three times as fast as the number of full-timers, while the rate of increase in community colleges was even greater (16). In the mid 1980s, the number of full-timers in two-year and four-year colleges actually declined, while the number of part-timers continued to rise. Part-timers and temporaries together now constitute about one-half of all faculty in postsecondary education. Ray Kytle's remarks in 1971 deserve to be repeated. "At Southern Illinois University where I did my graduate work," Kytle wrote, "composition was taught almost exclusively by `slaves'"--that is, by teaching assistants. "At Central Michigan University where I am now," Kytle went on, "composition is taught primarily by `serfs'--untenured and, by present criteria, untenurable instructors" (339).²

Like the motives for the use of teaching assistants, the motives for the employment of contingent workers are crass. Both professors and administrators are aware that they cannot easily abolish the writing courses which public demand requires and which allow the continued existence of departments of English literature, but both administrators and professors welcome the opportunity to hire and fire cheap labor as professorial and administrative interests may demand. Concerning the use of the dollars which cheap labor saves, however, the literati and the decision-makers may disagree. The literati want to preserve their sinecures in the greatest possible comfort by continuing to evade the social duty of cultivating literacy; but administrators eager for the favor of governments, business, and the military do not consider the comfort of English professors essential to educational excellence. Star Wars excite administrators more than the wars of critical theorists. Though the literati may actually share the administrative desire to discourage unionization by dividing the faculty into opposing factions, in the long run the use of contingent labor weakens the professoriate. It is hard to argue that tenure is essential to academic freedom when half the faculty will never be tenured.

But reason rarely overcomes immediate self-interest, narrowly conceived. Departments of English literature continue to use contingent workers as well as teaching assistants to staff the freshman English course. Excuses for the abuses are feeble--for example, the plea that because the supposed literacy crisis which creates the need for elementary composition is only temporary, the staff to meet that need should be temporary as well ( Lanham Literacy 155). Makers of that plea ignore the facts that some temporaries have now had to be reappointed periodically for a dozen years or so and that complaints of literacy crises are the hardiest of perennials, signifying the constant changes in the demands of bosses on the bossed.

The indifference of moralistic professors of literature to the exploitation of their supposed inferiors is also perennial. Part-timers and temporaries, as a group, are better educated and more experienced writers and teachers of writing than most teaching assistants and some professors; yet the part-timers and temporaries are exploited even more viciously than the teaching assistants. The contingent workers generally get low pay, few if any fringe benefits, and none of the usual academic perks. Without security in their work or a strong voice in controlling it, they are assigned to elementary courses, casually and without adequate orientation, but under capricious evaluation. No matter how well they do their jobs, they get scant recognition and are not accepted as integral members of the academic community. Their consequent bitterness is not lessened by the fact that many of them, as women, are expected to be content with "women's work" or by the knowledge that in a pinch their employers will violate an inconvenient contract rather than enforce it.

The Newly Risen Compositionists

A further irritant is the arrogance of the newly risen compositionists, who are full of praise for themselves and their freshly bedoctored students but contemptuous of mere "practitioners," the teachers who do the work that the compositionists theorize about. The current attempt to solve John Fisher's old problem is to keep composition in departments devoted primarily to literature, to placate the boss compositionists by admitting them to the worshipful company of privileged researchers, but still to assign the actual teaching of writing to the contingent workers and teaching assistants. With that solution the compositionists are apparently content, since it marks the literary establishment's acceptance of their claims to share the glory.

And the busily researching compositionists are anything but restrained in blowing their own horns. They talk glibly of old and new paradigms, though what they label with the presumptuous term of paradigm is only an ill-defined conglomerate of practice and belief, not a coherent set of interdependent propositions, susceptible of precise statement. They proudly maintain that they have opened a new field which "has clearly arrived at disciplinary status, complete with graduate programs, undergraduate majors, major conferences, and journals" (Berlin 217); but the content itself of that boast reveals that they have confused the externals of academic entrepreneurship with the intellectual elaboration of theory and method. Much of their research is piddling, much wildly over-ambitious. So Richard L. Larson, on the piddling hand, solemnly reports a method of "topical structure analysis":

In analyzing a paragraph, one determines which "topic" is discussed in the greatest number of sentences, counts the number of sentences in which it appears, identifies the topics of other sentences, counts the number of different sentence topics, and counts the number of sentences with different topics that intervene between any two of those sentences that develop the topic most frequently mentioned. (80)

On the over-ambitious hand, Stephen North characterizes "the Experimentalists: in broad terms, those who seek to discover generalizable `laws' which can account for--and, ideally, predict--the ways in which people do, teach, and learn writing" (137). Half a moment's thought should convince anyone that crutch-phrases like "the ways in which writing is done, taught, and learned" do not delimit a workable field of study but invite researchers to busy themselves with the universe--with everything from Germanic formulaic verse to Navy letter forms, from wax tablets to word processors, from blind Milton to the Beatles. Richard Lanham is restrained when he writes that "much research in composition has been trivial and jejune" (26).

But the most irritating characteristic of the boss compositionists is their contempt for the real teachers of composition. When compositionists brag about "the new professionalism" in their "discipline," they are thinking of themselves and the disciples who have sat at their feet, supposedly absorbing the principles of theory and the methods of research. According to Joseph J. Comprone, "This research and theory has [sic] yet, however, to influence the majority of English teachers, who often demonstrate superficial comprehension of the deeper relationships among literary, academic, and professional discourses" (299). Maxine Hairston, in her professional discourse, is even more roundly condemnatory of the pedagogues who have not joined her "in the vanguard of the profession." "The overwhelming majority of college writing teachers in the United States," Hairston declares, "are not professional writing teachers. They do not do research or publish on rhetoric or composition, and they do not know the scholarship in the field; they do not read the professional journals and they do not attend professional meetings such as the annual Conference on College Communication and Composition [sic]; they do not participate in faculty development workshops for writing teachers" ("Winds" 78-79). "Until very recently," Hairston says in another place, "most college composition teachers have not known what they were doing" ("Slave" 117). As Clinton Burhans puts it, they are the victims of the "knowledge gap" which separates them from the true professionals.

Such effusions are reminiscent of the scorn which now-forgotten pop linguists poured on "traditional grammar" thirty and forty years ago, and they leave one wondering how an apostle of enlightenment like Hairston can speak in the same breath of "the revolution in the teaching of writing [emphasis added]" even though most teachers remain untouched by the presumed revolution. Moreover, real evidence that the boss compositionists and their pupils get the best results in their own classrooms would be hard to find. When Hillocks announces, for example, that X method works three times as well as Y method (246-49), one has to ask not just how all the variables except precisely specified differences in method have been controlled but also how better has been universally defined and accurately measured. Most such claims, it seems to me, have no more substance than the counterclaim by Dennis Szilak that "when it comes to the teaching of composition, most area specialists, as Ph.D.'s, can not carry the pencil box of an experienced composition teacher" (26).

Listening to the trumpetings of the noisier compositionists, I have to ask, "What revolution?" I see clearly that a new group of academic entrepreneurs has achieved some degree of comfort and status. I see clearly that the old exploitation of temporaries and teaching assistants continues. In other words, I see what Stephen North describes when he writes,

The field [of composition] has been driven [sic] by the need to replace practice as its primary mode of inquiry and lore as its dominant form of knowledge. That drive resulted in . . . a methodological landrush: a scramble to stake out territory, to claim power over what constitutes knowledge in Composition; and to claim, as well, whatever rewards that power might carry with it. (317)

That is a description of the oldest form of academic endeavor, bare-faced self-seeking. It is not a description of a revolution, for there can be no revolution in the teaching of writing until the exploitation of teachers is ended.

Emasculated Resolutions

There has been much pious talk about that exploitation, but little more than talk. Personal experience brings two striking instances to mind. The first has to do with the Modern Language Association's literacy conferences, remarkable undertakings for an organization whose dominant literati have treated the cultivation of literacy with contempt. At the first of those conferences, I tried to encourage a little democracy through language by floating a petition:

We, the undersigned, respectfully urge the MLA to give some practical effect to its expressed concern for literacy by prompt, strong action against the continuing exploitation of graduate students and part-timers as teachers of composition, the principal workers for literacy in higher education in the United States.

That petition, I have been told, was eventually signed by hundreds of participants, and eventually it reached MLA's headquarters; but for several months thereafter I heard nothing. When a rather embarrassed letter from headquarters did at last reach me, it reported that the staff officers had not known what to do with the petition. For dealing with petitions, the sponsors of democracy through language had no machinery. In the end, the letter informed me, my little document was assigned to some committee, and I have heard no more about it. Presumably the MLA is less concerned for literacy than for the continued use of fetal tissue in medical research.

My second instance brings me to the Wyoming Resolution, a promising bull calf which is now a steer. That resolution was from below, a people's resolution prompted by a spontaneous outburst of feeling from exploited teachers; and the great oneyers present at its birth seemed a bit vexed and embarrassed that so strange a beastie had pushed its way into the world of famed researchers and grand conventioneers. The resolution had three parts. The first was innocent enough. It called for yet another formulation of standards "for salary levels and working conditions of postsecondary teachers of writing." Such formulations, unless they are put into effect, are quite acceptable to the beneficiaries of exploitation, for they give the impression that action is being taken when in fact just nothing is being done. Parts Two and Three of the Wyoming Resolution, however, were of a different kind. Part Two called for a grievance procedure, and Part Three called for "a procedure for acting upon a finding of non-compliance": institutions running a slave trade were to be publicly exposed and rebuked. Dreamily, the resolution charged the Executive Committee of the CCCC to do all those good things.

I consider myself stupid for not seeing in advance what I now see had to happen to Parts Two and Three. They posed a threat to the system of exploitation without which English departments in their present state could not exist, the system from which administrators, literati, and boss compositionists have all thought to profit. Though all three parts of the Wyoming Resolution were approved unanimously at the 1987 CCCC business meeting, the Executive Committee first appointed a "task force" to make the innocuous recommendations of Part One and then appointed yet another committee, with James Slevin as its chair, to satisfy Parts Two and Three. That is precisely what the Slevin committee did not do. On the contrary, the committee "recommended and the CCCC Executive Committee determined that the CCCC could not at this time become involved in the censure of institutions" ( CCCC Committee 65). By that one refusal to act, the two committees reduced their joint effort to more talk about exploitation which had already been talked about for many years; and though a politically adept, congenial, and industrious Slevin has indicated continuing efforts by his public emphasis on the phrase "at this time," no proof-pudding has been served to famished diners as of April, 1991.

The Slevin committee not only rejected implementation of the resolution which it had been called upon to implement; it also neatly subverted the argument that the teaching of composition, not just research in composition, should be honored and rewarded. The first word in the first sentence in Part One of the committee's report was research, and the first recommendation was that "in hiring, tenure, and promotion considerations, research and publication in rhetoric and composition should be treated on a par with all other areas of research in English departments." "Commitment to the teaching of writing" was to be demonstrated by "research and publication, participation in professional conferences, and active involvement in curriculum development and design." Faculty thus "professionally committed to rhetoric and composition" should have boss jobs: they "should coordinate and supervise composition programs" (62). There was no suggestion that the best evidence of commitment to the teaching of writing is just its devoted teaching.

The Slevin committee further weakened its report by its remark on graduate students as teachers. Unlike the part-timers and temporaries, from whom the professoriate might learn a great deal, graduate students keep the professorial seminars going; and the Slevin committee apparently assumed that "faculty professionally committed to rhetoric and composition" would continue to leave much of the actual teaching to teaching assistants, whom the committed professionals would "coordinate and supervise." Such vague reform of present conditions as the committee recommended would still allow the maintenance of armies of assistants (62-63).

These and other objections to the Slevin committee's "draft report" were made at the 1989 meeting of the CCCC at Seattle, but apparently without result. After a final rewriting, the CCCC official "Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing" appeared in CCC for October, 1989, where the voice is the voice of Slevin though the hand is that of the Executive Committee (329-36). This final statement is a current answer to the problem posed by John Fisher thirty years ago. Part-timers and full-time temporaries are gradually to be got rid of, but the armies of teaching assistants may be maintained, and quartered in departments of English, not rhetoric, so that the literati will not lose the enrollment in their seminars. Yet the research machine of the compositionists is also well cared for. In fact, if administrators were to accept the official assertion that doing a composition textbook is "a primary form of original research," compositionists would be recognized as the most prolific of all original researchers at the very moment when the quality of original research collapsed (331). The losers in all this maneuvering are just the teachers of writing--the teaching assistants, who will continue to be exploited, and the part-timers and temporaries, few of whom will make it to those "full-time, tenure-track positions" where research, not teaching, is the name of the game.

A Last Hope?

I consider myself stupid, as I say, because after fifty years in major English departments (precisely the fifty years that I have talked about), I still had fond hope for the Wyoming Resolution. I should have known that in English departments, for all their self-glorifying gabble about democracy through language, the exploitation of labor is systemic, the foundation of the enterprise, not to be corrected without upheaval. The privileged--whether compositionists, literati, or higher administrators--have resisted such change in the belief that it would deny them their privileges. It is consequently the height of quixotism to suggest that the continued abuse of composition teachers, however probable, is still not quite inevitable. Yet I do risk that suggestion.

One reason is that a more intelligent consideration of self-interest might prompt the privileged to deliberate, beneficent action. The foofaraw about literacy and the shortcomings of higher education does make it presently impossible to abolish college composition altogether, and when "the real world" compels the doing of a job, it might as well be done properly. Nobody profits from the maintenance of a permanent ghetto, and there would be no real gain from the gentrification of English departments by the banishment of the slum-dwellers to a new slum in another academic neighborhood. Right recognition and reward for the teachers of an admittedly important subject would put an end to the old and debilitating grievances that Campbell wrote of in 1939. To the argument that money is unavailable, the answer is that inadequate support of an essential program is the most wasteful of possible alternatives.

Quixotism, however, has its limits. Voluntary reformation from above is even less likely than reformation forced from below. A male-dominated professoriate has indeed treated composition-teaching as mainly women's work. One result has been that many competent and articulate women are among composition's best yet angriest teachers. If these mature but unrewarded professionals could make common cause with their male colleagues and with exploited graduate students, and if the two groups chose to risk really militant action, they might together do what generations of professors have failed to do. Should the example of their action prove contagious, the abuse of contingent labor in other academic departments might also be checked, and our universities might improve--far more so than by the mutterings of businessmen and bureaucrats.

A last hope is no more hope than fear. Human prophecy is fallible. "An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king" may be the instrument of change as unintended as it is unpredictable. But quixotism has now declined into the evangelical.

University of Texas
Austin, Texas