JAC Volume 19 Issue 4

Recent historical scholarship has provided compositionists with valuable insights into the field's pre-disciplinary past as well as that of writing instruction in general. Thanks to this work, current researchers and teachers can situate the scholarly, pedagogical, and administrative dimensions of their labor within useful frameworks. Sharon Crowley's Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays, winner of the1998 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize, offers a history that is also, in her words, "a critique of the institutional foundation of composition": the required first-year course. It is this sustained attention to that course that distinguishes Composition in the University from other historically oriented works. Crowley argues for abolishing not the first-year course but its "universal requirement." The merits of such a proposition are, of course, debatable. As director of a large first-year composition course, I have both theoretical and pedagogical reservations about it. But by taking such a distinct and controversial stand, Crowley widens the field of discussion on both the value of the universal requirement and the future of composition studies. This is one of the book's important contributions.

Another is the rhetorical and scholarly example it sets. Readers may be familiar with Crowley's often-published abolitionist position on the universal requirement. But they may not know the historical contexts that inform it. Composition in the University uses history to advance its argument, to make its case--not to tell what happened, not to tell the truth. I think Crowley assumes, quite correctly, that the archive is a group of texts that can only ever be interpreted. Such a methodology does not seem as radical now as it did before postmodern historiography became a theoretical option. Still, this methodology is not yet part of the normal discourse of composition studies. Thus, the book is an example of the kind of empirical/archival/theoretical work that is possible in composition studies, and for that reason alone it should be required reading in our graduate programs.

The first chapter serves as an introduction and a rough outline of the issues addressed in the subsequent chapters, including what Crowley identifies as humanist and pragmatist orientations toward the first-year course. She situates composition studies and the first-year course--intellectually and institutionally--in relation to each other as well as to the English department, literary studies, the humanities, and the university. While later chapters treat the pragmatist question in greater detail, the second chapter tries to establish the humanist origins of the uneven composition/literature relationship that, according to Crowley, has traditionally vexed yet sustained the universal requirement. Crowley sees humanism as a force that has exerted extraordinary influence on composition instruction, most recently evidenced in a published debate among Gary Tate, Erika Lindemann, and others over the role of literature in the first-year course. But here, unfortunately, lies a significant shortcoming in Crowley's argument. Given that humanism has been under attack for some time now--from within both composition theory and literary theory, as Crowley notes--its role as scapegoat in this narrative will make quite good sense to many readers. But precisely because assent is so easily achieved on this matter--because terms like "Arnoldian humanism" are now familiar pejoratives in the lexicon of English studies--it merits more careful scrutiny than Crowley offers here and throughout the book. While she does offer a discursive footnote that addresses humanism's various definitions and applications in education, one is left, nonetheless, with the impression that a revisionist history of composition requires a similarly revisionist account of humanism, if the two are as intertwined as Crowley suggests.

Chapters three through five chart the now-familiar rise of literary study (and its humanist origins) at the expense of composition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Readers of James Berlin, Susan Miller, and David Russell will recognize elements of this story, but Crowley emphasizes the centrality of the first-year course. It is both the locus and emblem of the event we currently understand as the demise of rhetoric and the rise of aesthetics in the new and modern field of English. For example, Crowley notes that the privatization of invention, as part of a general bourgeois appropriation of classical rhetoric, yielded devastating and quite tangible results for writing instruction. She points out that after this operation had been carried out, "the only bits of classical invention that remained were the topics, put to humble--and literate--service as a means of paragraph development." Readers familiar with Crowley's writing on current-traditional rhetoric will find throughout Composition in the University well-reasoned scorn for such anti-rhetorical practices operating under quasi-rhetorical pretenses.

But Crowley notes that the changes that made possible the situation in the English department were part of a larger transformation occurring in the university itself. She points out that as the interest in new research replaced the emphasis on tradition as the university's main mission, pedagogies such as recitation, which had been meant to instill in students a "sensus communis," were replaced by such activities as "lecture, discussion, lab demonstration, and independent study." Again, this part of the narrative will be familiar to many in composition. But Crowley goes on to argue that the first-year course was and continues to be suspended between these two very different institutional visions. On the one hand, it carries out "moral surveillance" by evaluating character instead of mastery--a feature of the classical college. On the other hand, it is the only course that continues to do so despite the fact that it is taught largely by people who are training or have been trained in the modern university and who, Crowley notes, are often rightfully "squeamish" about having to conduct such evaluations. Crowley is here laying groundwork for the position she will articulate more fully in the last chapters, the argument to abolish the universal requirement.

The chapters on the influence of pragmatist composition yield perhaps the freshest historical and theoretical information in the book. Here Crowley details, for example, the high-octane humanism of English professor Norman Fester and his battle against a plan for curricular reform in the University of Iowa's College of Liberal Arts during the 1940s, a battle that ultimately resulted in his resignation. This plan envisioned first-year composition as a course in writing and reading skills rather than as the introduction, provided through canonical Western texts, to what Fester called "human values." Crowley relates the details of the turf war between Fester and colleagues in the College of Liberal Arts who objected to having their disciplinary texts appropriated and between Fester and colleagues in the university at large who questioned the need for what they saw as literary indoctrination at the expense of writing instruction. But, more interestingly, Crowley also examines the sources and rationale behind Fester's humanist stance. Crowley explains that in Toward Standards, published in 1928, Fester established his humanism as a response to what he saw as naturalist skepticism, a belief that scientific values and methods could explain human behavior. Fester's humanism was a secular spirituality, rooted in Greek and Christian textual traditions, that sought to account for the moral and ethical dimensions of human activity, something he thought no naturalistic approach could hope to provide. Crowley's exploration gives readers a brief historical glimpse of the conflict over the role of the humanities in higher education, and it offers some scrutiny of humanism that is missing in other parts of the book. It also helps place today's humanist conservatism in a recognizable context. At the end of the chapter on Fester, Crowley compares his position to those of William Bennett and Lynn Cheney, but readers will have already made the connection. More importantly, Crowley shows how the first-year course as universal requirement has been at the very center of such larger debates.

Likewise, Crowley's discussion of what she calls "the communication skills episode" brought on by the exigencies of World War II and the military's ensuing appropriation of higher education allows readers to suppose that the subsequent revival of rhetoric and, ultimately, the birth of composition studies as an academic field were in a very real sense made possible by the non-humanist curricular reform of that time. Furthermore, Crowley's analysis suggests that we see the related General Education movement, with its post-war emphasis on the preservation of democracy in the face of fascism and communism, as a catalyst for the return of rhetoric. In short, readers get the story of a process that has been underway for a few decades, a process of resisting the humanism--and the cultural elitism associated with it--plaguing both higher education in the U.S. since the late nineteenth century and the modern English department since its inception around that same time.

Presumably, then, composition can further participate in this resistance by removing the allegedly elitist device of which it is the steward: the universal requirement. This proposition is the focus of the book's last three chapters. In chapter ten, "The Politics of Composition," Crowley addresses the transition from current-traditional to process pedagogy in the first-year course, arguing that while the latter's liberalism may be somewhat preferable to the former's conservatism, neither pedagogy is equipped to deal with "the politics of class, status, and location" that saturate the classroom. Our generally liberal dispositions, Crowley argues, do not allow us to see students "as people whose discourse is immersed in the master discourses of our culture." More importantly, even if we do manage to make this observation, we can draw on no pedagogical resources in current-traditional or process pedagogy to help us or our students negotiate them. Instead, students and teachers must suffer the worst features of both ideologies. Crowley writes that "liberal composition pedagogy insists that students' identities are the subject of composition," which guarantees that students will explore highly charged and personal issues. Yet, residual conservative surveillance policy requires all students to take the first-year course, which means that their disclosures are forced. To Crowley, no educational benefit results from such a situation; only pain accrues--for everyone involved.

Chapter eleven, "A Personal Essay on Freshman English," offers the actual proposal to drop the universal requirement. She lists and explains her objections to it: it exploits teachers and students; it negatively affects the curriculum, the classroom, and the field and its standing in the university; it prevents the development of truly integrated writing instruction. Finally, in chapter twelve, "Composition's Ethic of Service, the Universal Requirement, and the Discourse of Student Need," Crowley argues that while the composition's service ethic "is not necessarily incompatible with disciplinary status," the unusually low status of that service ethic does impede the field's growth and maturation.

It is possible to read Composition in the University as a counter-revolutionary manifesto against a vaguely defined humanism and the modern university. And, in part, it is that. But while the polemical aspects of Crowley's argument might encourage such an interpretation, she discourages it ultimately by respecting the complexity of the problem. A return, for example, to the classical college is not only impossible but also profoundly undesirable, and Crowley is not calling for this. She recognizes the rather different elitism of the older model while understanding that one thing they did get right was to teach rhetoric. In a sense, then, this too echoes a familiar argument: that rhetorical education ought not to be reserved for the few. The historical and political narrative that Crowley and others have constructed--that of a higher education system radically altered to accommodate an expanding middle class, in which accommodation included creating a humanist tradition catering to that class's genteel aspirations and persistent fear of slipping downward--leaves the rest of us with an enormous but now well-defined problem. If the university is in ruins, as Bill Readings suggests, can we help to rebuild it, this time as a democratic institution? Like others, Crowley argues that rhetoric must play a central role in any such reconstruction. But unlike others, she is willing to offer a concrete suggestion toward that end, even if that suggestion seems to threaten composition's hard-earned identity.

As I noted above, Crowley's call to abandon the universal requirement of the first-year course is useful as an invitation to reconsider some persistent questions in the new field of composition studies, not the least of which is that of this new field's status and place in the English department, the humanities, and the university. The debates that this call prompts are important, even if the call itself is questionable--despite the pedagogical, theoretical, and historical evidence Crowley has marshalled in support of it. In fact, I suspect that Crowley herself has her eye on a slightly bigger picture. These are "polemical" essays, after all. And the irony of subtitling her formal list of objections "A Modest Proposal" cannot be overlooked. So, while I find myself considering counter-arguments in favor of the universal requirement, I also realize that, in a way, this simultaneously is and is not the relevant issue. By placing the first-year course and its universal requirement at the center of her argument, Crowley exhorts compositionists--especially those of us who no longer teach first-year composition on a regular basis, if at all--to reckon with the field's turbulent institutional and political past, and to understand that the past is still with us in the form of this course.