We don't see many books able to integrate a feel for the subject matter with a sense of its academic politics. But Tom Fox's discussion of how the "singular plural" standards limits the access to higher education of nonwhite groups in America is definitely one of them. Presenting us with several ethnographic accounts of classrooms and of administrative maneuvering, Fox's book, with its gifts of plain talk and principled reflection, shows how the American belief in standards has, as a rule, been a pretext to inhibit the entry into higher education of nonwhite people. Although the book is not autobiographical, it compares with Victor Villanueva's Bootstraps as an attempt to broaden the context in which the subject of writing and language use is generally understood. It tries to show that for excluded groups, such as Latinos and African Americans, writing and language use have an urgent material weight but that for elite universities the same subjects were, since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, deliberately used as tools to separate the privileged class from everyone else.

Fox casts his work as an argument made up of a series of cases to be made about how the required first-year writing course is an "entry-level screen and socializer" that carries coded standards of membership. Issues such as grammaticality, mechanical errors, fluency, vocabulary, and the ability to make arguments in discursive forms function, Fox says, not as part of a well-conceived subject matter, but as local measures of students' assimilation to the "standard" style of hegemonic groups in America. Fox discusses some of the history of how this situation came about. Since Harvard University created a composition course in 1885 to help maintain the urbane class of wealthy men, other universities used first-year writing in similar gatekeeping ways, so that as higher education expanded, gatekeeping in the first-year writing course became the accepted way of maintaining social homogeneity. However, the standards that were ostensibly implemented to apply to writing actually applied to people: it was groups of people, not their writing, that had to meet a certain "standard." The actual function of the subject was misrepresented, but on such a broad scale that it is hard to believe that it was a national lie. This hypocrisy about writing pedagogy is a principal source for the reduced status of the formal academic discipline of rhetoric and composition today. It is a servant subject. This subject then performs its "service" by administering one-shot writing tests (entry and exit exams) that highlight "deficits" that disqualify students of color for college-level work. If they do achieve admission, Fox shows, the tests prolong their social segregation by sending them into "basic" writing sections. These students think that the subject of writing is not for them, and in an important sense they are right: writing is not about language use—a practice that governs the social existence of people—but is instead a pretext, an instrument of exclusion masquerading as a fundamental academic subject. They are discouraged as much by the lie they encounter among the custodians of truth—that is, college faculty members—as by the objective difficulties of meeting unreasonable standards.

Fox walks the line between maintaining a view of "saving the world" through a forceful literacy pedagogy, on the one hand, and "doing what one can," on the other. The result is a pedagogical philosophy of persistence—"staying around," as he puts it—of not letting any level of frustration defeat either the intention to change or the processes of trying on the part of those of us provoked by these duplicitous practices. He demonstrates his faith in this philosophy by noting that after several years of effort, the faculty at his school, California State University at Chico, spoke up and opposed the provost's attempt to hamstring the writing across disciplines program by including a list of "standards" students must meet. The story of this opposition, however, shows a series of false moves, misleading memos, concealment of real purposes, that is matched by the persevering faculty members, four of whom are Fox, Judith Rodby, Elizabeth Renfro, and Thia Wolf. This is quite a story because few of us have read accounts of administrative struggles in university English departments where names are named. Fox's presentation of these events is therefore an event in itself. On the one hand, it is annoying and sometimes boring to slug through administrative memos; on the other, we need to persist in continuously challenging administrative actions. Only the habit of responding to ideological acts that look like pragmatic moves can persuade administrations of the priority of teaching overtraining. Fox's account makes us aware that most existing conventions of reporting about academic life are such that, in the end, one is reluctant actually to report the telling details about what really happened. Fox defies these conventions, however, and it is refreshing indeed to see that we can (and should) start to report what really does happen in the faculty's interaction with administrations that continuously try to enact "standards" instead of trying to teach students.

Fox observes that the university's power to exclude derives from the fact that it is a meritocracy that operates on "ideologies of individualism and competition." I take this statement to be fundamental partly because of the title's reference to higher education and partly due to my twenty years of conversation with Fox, who I first met when he entered graduate school at Indiana University in the early 1980s. I was a faculty member there; we got to work with one another; and, for some reason, we thought along similar lines. During that period, feminism was getting its foothold in the academy. But Indiana University had virtually no African American students, except on the football and basketball teams. In Martinsville, Indiana, twenty miles north of Bloomington, black people were not welcome and made sure that they did not go there or even stop for food or gas if driving through. Tom left Indiana for Chico in 1986, and I left two years later, in part, because after twenty-two years the homogeneity of the population got to feel rather eerie. His having gone to a university in which there was a culturally varied population germinated the ideas we now see in this book: why are nonwhite students having to struggle so much in the university, which should make its business to welcome and support every single person who seeks education?

Fox's explanation of why this struggle exists is that this society and its universities assume without question the rule of meritocracy and its basis in competition and individualism. Because our society seems to believe that merit is in some sense innate in people, each individual must compete according to standardized measures. Fox's administrative struggle to oppose what was declared in a single memo is the strongest possible effort to stem a routine administrative declaration. For the university, it is "each man [sic] for himself" and "may the best [white] man [sic] win." Of course, people don't ever say this; rather it is a ubiquitous assumption dyed permanently into the fabric of university culture in the United States. What they do say is: "For God's sake, aren't we going to maintain our standards?" Institutions of higher education all say this, and in loud voices when the pressure is on to increase their share of nonwhite students.

Through citation of students' writings, Fox's book shows what happens to the outsiders to this ideology when they come into his classrooms. How do they react to the situation? They lose confidence; they nod and comply with the instructor's encouragement, and then they stop showing up to class. Why? Who can say? Fox can only say that they stopped. Often the weight of poverty and other forms of personal responsibility do not let them have clear heads to sit for hours and study. If they make mechanical errors in their writing, the institution stands ready to disqualify them. If these errors persist, the students become those who "can't write." If you can't write, you can't think. If you can't think, what are you doing in college? This situation looks like a pedagogical and bureaucratic process, but this book suggests otherwise—namely, that exclusion and dropping out are meant to happen, and the university, in its historic role of service to the powerful, complies.

The result is a gross distortion of the subject matters in rhetoric and composition. Fox writes, "Composition originated in the repudiation of writing in everyday public uses, i.e., writing in the broadly defined extracurriculum." This view suggests that the developing university (in the nineteenth century) took writing as an action and changed its function in real life to one that is suited to the university's connections to society's corporate interests. In the prestigious university (Harvard, for example, and those which emulated it), the composition classroom prepared white men to serve and then take on the reins of American society. Fox shows how, historically, it was feared that literacy would fall into the hands of those not now privileged. (This is a point also made—in relation to eighteenth century Britain—by Miriam Brody in Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition). Focusing on America, Fox traces this fear back to slavery when the white majority forbade literacy-learning among slaves. But among slaves—and today, among any population who takes its own upward mobility as an assumed project in society—writing is the means of self-definition, of social mobilization, and of the public declaration of historic injustices. The potential of any writing to have this effect was known by Plato, who therefore advocated censorship. In America, censorship was forbidden by the Constitution, but higher education stepped in and practiced it anyway. It was renamed "standards." Fox does not say this, exactly, but it is how I read his book. Most of us who teach writing acknowledge, on the one hand, its potential to help in educating people to move out of poverty, and, on the other, its convertibility into a weapon to repress multitudes of illiterate people. Fox describes the history of literacy among slaves, and how, repeatedly, slave narratives were written as reports and warnings, how people continued to acquire literacy in spite of punishments and threats. He gives us a taste of the enormous effort it takes for anyone who is not given literacy to get it, and how, in spite of such obstacles, it is still acquired by many, though not by the majority who were denied.

This point brings us to the constituency with which Fox deals most of the time: the majority who are denied. He makes a point of using Gramsci's idea of "hegemony" in order to portray the impersonality of the denial of education to classes of underprivileged people. At such points, I want to take the characterization further. I know that hegemony is meant to suggest a collective situation of denial by a superior power disguised as normal rule. I wonder just how impersonal it is, and if a vocabulary more complicated that Gramsci's "hegemony" or Marcuse's "domination" is needed to describe the malice in the style of thought that generated the use of the singular plural, "standards." Even "competition and individualism" perhaps fail to characterize the activating sentiments that are carried forth in the ideology of standards. Of course, we should do as Fox advises: concentrate on our own discipline and persist; don't let up; stay around and speak and write. But from feminism and perhaps from other sources comes the perception of the sadism that energizes individuals to defend hegemony and domination. This feeling is collective and personal at once, and we don't have an established vocabulary to accommodate this double perspective as a single condition of schools that exclude. Sadism is sometimes associated with men's domination of women, but similar feelings characterize the slaveholder, as Toni Morrison describes in Beloved. It is hard to think of the situation of mass sadism when we are speaking of academic administration and of writing pedagogy. Yet, this is what Fox's argument suggests to me; I think sadism applies if we internalize, or assimilate to our own set of values, what his book describes. There is a bureaucratic immunity for those who render judgments that reduce the lives of others and a pleasure in being aware of that immunity. There is a by-product of triumph in the feeling of having upheld a standard and having humiliated someone—of being the ones that have declared others unworthy—in that cause. I don't know if "sadism" is the right term, but the persistence of exclusion and condescension by some in the academy toward others is not explicable only as compliance with large impersonal ideologies. There is a premium, a reward for going along that also is an effect. It might help to consider if such feelings should be identified by our critiques of higher education.

Some readers may ask how we should go from standards of writing to a critique of higher education. This question is also an appealing feature of Fox's book. I felt it was self-evident because of the range of reference in his discussion of American history and society. However, it may not be self-evident from the following perspective: higher education is based on the mores of our uses of language. We are in the habit of thinking of language as a transparent medium that "conveys" information, and our teaching of writing—sometimes by the most sophisticated of teachers—is meant to pass along to students the techniques of "conveyance," the ability to "communicate." The gatekeeping role of writing pedagogy perpetuates this view of language, which, in turn, suggests that language is itself a matter of secondary importance. The administrative maintenance of standards begins in writing courses but continues through the writing demanded by other subjects. Almost invisibly, the processes of learning take on the need to maintain standards, instead of the need to discover or achieve something new and helpful. Many of us who have "stayed around" know that we don't worry about standards at all with regard to our own research and scholarship. We think, rather, "what subjects will be most interesting and most important" and we understand that our research projects suggest how far we should go, what counts as responsible work.

Why wouldn't the same circumstances obtain for undergraduates? Why wouldn't their standards be defined by their purposes? This point is made dramatically in Fox's citations of his students' writings, where their social, personal, and academic purposes emerge. It is one thing for an individual teacher to tell an individual student what it takes, for example, to become a doctor, but it is another thing to exclude classes of people on the basis of writing tests. Students understand from these tests what appears in the title of Fox's book: a higher education whose standards are exclusionary.

Reading this book made me add Fox to my list of people, which includes Adrienne Rich and Richard Ohmann, whose works represent academic writing that has a heartbeat and a backbone. It also teaches how we may find the heartbeat and backbone in others' writings, especially our students' writing. Tom Fox gives us access to his standards.