JAC Volume 17 Issue 1

A self-described "Southern, conservative, paleo-Methodist," James Sledd has been raging against the greed, hypocrisy, and foolishness of academic institutions and English professors for decades (xvi). He takes the stance of an angry prophet, sometimes echoing Scripture in his prose, skeptical that his words will be heard or heeded but continually compelled to bear witness. Sledd's criticisms of universities, English professors, and other institutions, groups, and individuals are often harsh and personal, and he makes difficult demands on English and composition faculty. As I read the essays that Richard D. Freed has collected in Eloquent Dissent: The Writings of James Sledd, I frequently smiled when Sledd turned his wit against trends, institutions, and people that I oppose and frequently winced defensively when he skewered ideas, individuals, and aspirations that I have sympathy for, particularly when he turned his attention to composition specialists and "the Empire of Rhetoric" (144). A book of Sledd's essays is long overdue, and these essays are as relevant to English instruction today, and as troubling to read, as they were when they were written.

Eloquent Dissent includes fifteen essays, all originally published between 1961 and 1991, a period when Sledd moved away from writing about structural linguistics and medieval and eighteenth-century literature and toward addressing political and moral issues concerning the teaching of English language and composition. Freed has arranged the selections chronologically, and he includes an introduction that describes how he composed Eloquent Dissent, short excerpts from a 1993 interview with Sledd, and a bibliography of books, articles, and selected reviews by Sledd. Several of the essays in Eloquent Dissent are well known and influential, including "BiDialectalism: The Linguistics of White Supremacy," "Doublespeak: Dialectology in the Service of Big Brother," "In Defense of Students' Right," and "See and Say" (which helped to inspire the Wyoming Resolution). But Freed also includes a number of lesser-known essays. Sledd composed many of these pieces as public addresses, and several were written primarily for schoolteachers. Three issues dominate this book, as they have dominated Sledd's career for the last four decades: instruction in the English language for schoolchildren, bidialectalism and Students' Right to Their Own Language, and English departments' exploitation of graduate teaching assistants and non-tenure-track faculty.

Many of the early essays in the book describe how English teachers largely abandoned the teaching of the English language in frustration during the 1950s and 1960s when traditional grammar was abandoned for structuralist grammar and later structuralist grammar was replaced by transformational grammar. Sledd suggests that rather than foist "a shiny new program in `The New Linguistics'" on teachers, schools should "hire good teachers and give them a chance to teach, freely" (29). Sledd encourages teachers to include some instruction on the lexicon, dialects, and history of the language as well as grammar, but he opposes doctrinaire attitudes that prescribe what system teachers should teach. (Later essays suggest that Sledd believes that the process movement in composition has been too doctrinaire, interfering with many good teachers' ability to teach freely.)

In his best known essays, Sledd attacks the assumption that students must know standard English in order to make a decent living or to participate effectively in society, and he opposes the bidialectical approach to teach standard English to speakers of other dialects, which seems to value students' dialects but actually promotes linguistic prejudice and insecurity. Bidialectalism is a failed pedagogy that wastes students' time with "incessant drill on inessentials" (37) and an immoral pedagogy that assumes "that the prejudices of middle-class whites cannot be changed but must be accepted and indeed enforced on lesser breeds" (35) as it harms the psyches of many students. While he has always agreed that standard English should be taught to all who want to learn it, Sledd states that "the basic questions are motives, methods, and policy toward the students who don't learn" (32). To deny these students access to college and jobs on the basis of their dialects promotes "a two-tiered society—haves and have-nots" (32). Bidialectalism, Sledd argues, "would never have been invented if our society were not divided into the dominant white majority and the exploited minorities. Children should be taught that" (44). Sledd also speaks against students' "upward mobility" as an important goal of education. "Upward mobility," Sledd states, "means getting and spending more money, wasting more of the world's irreplaceable resources in unnecessary display, and turning one's back on family and friends who are unable or unwilling to join in that high enterprise" (59).

Sledd saves some of his angriest words and most savage wit to discuss the exploitation of adjunct instructors and graduate students who teach first-year composition classes. He especially faults big universities that are more interested in research and corporate partnerships than in undergraduate instruction and literature professors who hold cushy positions that depend on the abuse of faculty and students in first-year writing programs. Sledd does not spare composition specialists in his indictments, however. Compositionists, he argues, have separated themselves from mere teachers, who teach most of the writing classes. In Sledd's view, the main achievement of composition specialists has been to create a few privileged tenure-track positions for professors who conduct composition research but teach no more first-year writing classes than most literature professors. And Sledd has little respect for most of this research.

For Sledd, the individual nature of teaching makes it difficult for anyone to make conclusive claims of knowledge about teaching writing, and he expresses contempt at times for the quality of composition research and for claims about teaching liberation in oppressive institutions. His bitterness comes out most strongly in a 1991 article originally published in JAC, "Why the Wyoming Resolution Had to Be Emasculated: A History and a Quixotism," which condemns the CCCC Executive Committee for failing to carry out the mandates of the Wyoming Resolution. Sledd may be the most vocal critic of the professionalization of composition, for professionalization in the modern university means supporting research at the expense of teaching and abusing teachers and students to further corporate greed and oppression in the United States and abroad. "We are downwardly mobile, not upwardly," Sledd tells English faculty, "yet our boasted professionalism (in fact a humble tribute to our masters) is an attempt to distance ourselves from the powerless and to lay some feeble claim to status" (157).

Although its essays are arranged chronologically, Eloquent Dissent does not present a picture of a man developing his convictions over time, for Sledd was middle-aged with an impressive list of scholarly achievements by the time he published the earliest essay in this collection. To read Eloquent Dissent is to hear the voice of a man who had come to several important moral convictions about his profession and has felt called to argue them vehemently throughout the second half of his life. Over time, the essays do express a diminishing sense of hope, although Sledd's optimism was never great. And Sledd is as critical about northern liberals in the 1960s, bidialecticalists in the 1970s, and composition specialists in the 1990s as he is about corporate leaders, government bureaucrats, and English department literati—more critical at times when he sees them professing high moral purposes when their work supports their own interests and the interests of big business and the state. For readers who want to gain a sense of how Sledd developed his positions, Freed includes "Prejudice—In Three Parts," an autobiographical essay published in 1961 when Sledd was a professor at Northwestern University. In it, Sledd describes his encounters with racism and discrimination as "a middle-aged conservative white Southern academic from an educated middle-class Protestant Christian family" who grew up "in the calm unspoken assurance that I belonged to a superior race" (3). His experiences and observations in Austin, Chicago, and Ceylon led him to the conclusion that

In the end the only solution that Sledd sees to the problems of racism, classism, waste, and exploitation is "social revolution," and that will not occur until the exploited believe that they will suffer and risk less by opposing the status quo than by going along with it. Reformation of English departments also will have to be "forced from below," by composition teachers and graduate students able to find allies and willing "to risk really militant action" (177). Sledd is not hopeful that that time will come soon. Until then, he argues, "we should practice the critical thinking that we talk so much about. We should see and say--see our work in its full social and educational context, speak out against the hypocrisies in our society and our profession even when whistle-blowers take a beating and our best efforts seem ludicrous and pretentious" (145).

I don't believe Freed when he writes that Sledd's essays are "in danger of being forgotten" (xii). It may be true, however, that although we have embraced Sledd's longheld belief that education is always political and now pay attention to the institutional constraints on writing instruction, we prefer to cite writers who are more temperate in their language, more optimistic in their outlooks, and less savage and personal in their critiques of English departments and composition programs. Though Sledd has always expressed respect for English teachers and the importance of teaching English language and composition, he has little respect for the writing process movement and the rise of composition studies. And he demands that his audience pay attention to the chasm that has grown between those who have benefitted from the composition movement and the English teachers whose lot has remained the same or become worse in the last thirty years. It's difficult to read Sledd without getting angry, at Sledd as well as at our institutions and ourselves. But prophets don't seek comfortable responses.