INFORMATION TO USERS
This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer.
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.
Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back o f the book.
Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600
COMMUNITIES IN CONFLICT: COMPOSITION, RACIAL DISCOURSE, AND
THE ‘60S "REVOLUTION"
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of the Ohio State University
By
Timothy Paul Barnett, M.A.
*****
The Ohio State University 1997
Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Andrea Lunsford, Adviser
Professor H. Lewis Ulman Adviser Professor E. Kay Halasek Department of English UMI Number: 9801639
tnvn Microform 9801639 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.
This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ABSTRACT
Long at the center o f political and social controversies, composition is an academic
discipline particularly responsive to social influences. Its focus on language leaves it open to contention, and at no time was this contention more pronounced than in the 1960s, when students and radical groups questioned educational and political norms at the university. This dissertation focuses on the University of Washington Writing Program between 1968 and 1972 to explore the questions that were raised in terms of race and to understand why the promised educational "revolution" of the 1960s inspired only limited change.
The University of Washington began an Educational Opportunity Program for minority students in 1968, and composition was central to this program. A look at
University representations of Black-White conflict at this time reflects the ways the
University constructed discourses of "blackness" and "whiteness" that both acknowledged rapidly changing notions of education and democracy and maintained existing educational norms and power relations. In a departure from traditional composition histories, this dissertation focuses on unpublished University documents to reveal the way the University administration, the Writing Program, and specific writing classes constructed differing norms for White and Black. White students were represented as "regular" and "ordinary," when they were represented in University discourse at all; they were the unmarked norm by which the University measured all other students. Such students were constructed as apolitical, individual, and hardworking—as somehow separate from social and political spheres. Opposed to this mythological student was a "new breed" of minority students, who were entering the University in unprecedented numbers as a result of Civil Rights victories. The University constructed African American students as overly concerned with politics, as confrontational, and as individuals defined by their racial communities.
This dissertation advocates further examination into racial discrepancies in composition history and in the multiple sites of writing instruction today. It proposes a re examination of the way composition has reified limiting notions of "blackness" and
"whiteness" so that writing education will help students adapt to existing political realities as it also provides tools to change these realities and promote invigorated notions of democracy.
Ill Dedicated with love and admiration for my parents, George and Eileen Barnett, whose 50 years together have created many possibilities. I am grateful to be one of those possibilities and hope to live up to the high standards they set every day of their lives.
IV Acknowledgments
Many people have made this dissertation possible, and I am very grateful for the
support and love given me throughout my life. In particular, when my life became
especially difBcult trying to move and graduate this past summer, 1 realized how lucky I
am to have family and friends who refused to let me handle everything alone.
Teaching has made this research worthwhile, and I will never forget the many exceptional students I have met at Ohio State and Wittenberg Universities. There are few
places I would rather be than in the classroom, and these students taught me the many values of writing, the pain of change, and the rewards o f learning through teaching.
The “group” has given me a base from which to grow and made it possible for me to take chances and find a comfortable niche in life. They helped shape me growing up and will always be a significant part of who I am. Thanks especially to the Hennesseys,
Woslegers, Fallons, Hawks, Farrises, Kovaleskis, Trefrys, and Amicuccis for providing me friendship and support that contribute to my life every day.
In particular Laurie always kept in touch and shared group gossip with me; her regular phone calls made me feel a part of things. And Patty always believed in me and went out of her way to understand how and why I do the things I do. I know I still might not make perfect sense to her, but I am always extremely thankful for her willingness to ask me questions about my life and work and for Jim's and her ability to create the type of
home I will always want to visit.
The Columbus group—Rod Green, David Whitehair, David Ray, Jim Francis, and
Jeff France—is also very important to me, and I will greatly miss our dinners together.
They have provided an alternative to school work over the past few years and made me
realize how much a part of "real life" my dissertation work is; our discussions about race
and gender have had a significant impact on the way I think about these issues. They have
also moved me, put me up when I needed a place to stay, and helped me with numerous
computer and "life" problems. I hope I find similar fiiends in the future, but know I will
never replace them.
Thanks in particular to George Bridges, who has taught me more than most
teachers I have had. I especially appreciate the times he was willing to explore difBcult
issues because, even when they were painful, I learned and grew fi-om them. He told me
once I should keep track of my personal pursuit of race so that I could talk about it with
others in the "White community." This dissertation is an attempt at that and owes a great
deal to him.
Amy and Jim Kamm provided a place to stay and a great time on my research visits to Seattle and, more important, ongoing support and interest in my life. They are generous fiiends and very important to me; without them, this project never could have happened. Amy's acute intelligence and intense caring have especially pushed me and helped me believe in myself and in the value of teaching what I believe.
VI Drs. Maribeth MulhoUand and Jim Hodnett exemplify for me the idea of caring professionals, and I will never forget the patience, thoroughness, honesty, and decency they showed when working with me. Without them, my years in graduate school would have been much more difBcult, and I hope I can bring to teaching the same kind of humanity they bring to their work.
I also appreciate the willingness o f William Irmscher and Malcolm GriflBth to speak with me about their experiences when I was in Seattle, and George Slangefs continued e- mail correspondence with me regarding the UW Writing Program. Their insights and generosity helped me realize how easy it is to be critical of educational efforts at change and how hard it is to create real change that works in everyone's best interest.
Many graduate students and faculty members have also contributed to my graduate work and personal life, and I have been lucky to work with individuals interested in exploring the true possibilities of collaboration. Susan Kates, Susan West, Jean Williams,
Mindy Wright, Scott Miller, Todd English, Chris De Vinne, Marsha Ryan, Donna Le
Court, and Lori Mathis have been especially generous with their friendship, advice, and intelligent critiques of my life and work. Professors Beverly Moss, Jacqueline Jones-
Royster, Suellynn Dufifey, Brenda Brueggemann, Jim Phelan, and many others have provided the kind of role models I hope to emulate.
Carol Patzkowsky provided me a fiiendship I won’t forget and confirmed my idea that my personal life and professional interests could work together in important ways.
Wade Williams and Susan Wagner kept me sane this past year with the alternative housing they provided and their consistent optimism and generosity. I especially appreciate the
vii fact that they gave me encouragement I truly believed in, and that they made it easy to ask
for any kind of help I needed. Their confidence rubbed oflF at crucial times during the
writing process. If I work with people like them in the future, I will be lucky; if I find
fiiends like them again, I will be blessed.
Susan Swinford was my first OSU fiiend, and she has taught me more than I
probably wanted to know about school, intelligence, and myself. She has given me the
kind of insight and generosity I can never repay, and that I will continue to learn fi"om in
the years to come. Burned in my mind is the image o f Susan dragging her mother to my
apartment at 2 a m. to fix my printer and talk me out o f writer’s block during my last
general exam. While this example stands out to me, it is only one of many times she gave
of herself in incredible ways. Maybe what I learned most fi-om her is what it means to give and how important it is to be able to accept good things fi-om others. Thanks also to Matt
Ramsey and Amy Gabrila for sharing their time, energy, and friendship. I always learn fi-om the time I spend with Susan, Matt, and Amy and will miss the times we spent hanging out in the living room eating, talking, and laughing.
My committee has been one of the best parts o f the dissertation process. Kay
Halasek gave me inspiration in the two classes I took fi-om her, the most significant of my graduate career, and provided the kinds of comments to my work that always made perfect sense to me. She is the perfect editor for my work, and I will keep a great deal of her advice (maybe most important, "put your key ideas up firont") in my head when writing in the future. Louie Ulman has always provided a model of patience, persistence, and
vui integrity that I think is extraordinary. In my search for ways of teaching, doing research,
and relating to students, I could not do better than by imitating him.
Andrea Lunsford is probably the busiest person I know. Despite this fact, she
always gave me fast, incisive, and incredibly helpful readings of every draft—good and bad—I gave her. Most important, she gave me the kind of attention rarely provided to graduate students. Somehow she knew exactly the kinds of pressures I was under and what type of encouragement I needed, and unfailingly gave me exactly what I required to succeed. Her belief in me and my work has played an enormous role in all aspects of my life. Any success I have had or may have in the future owes a great deal to her ability to read not only my writing, but also my life, with extraordinary care and insight.
Tresa Toscano and Carolyn Yates have visited every year that 1 have been in
Columbus, and 1 never doubted that they would be here for me in any way 1 needed. 1 can't imagine that 1 could have moved away from home and survived without their visits and phone calls and their belief that what 1 was doing was a good thing, even if it meant they had to endure my shower each year. Tresa, in particular, simply does not fail me.
She is there at every turn 1 take and defines fiiendship for me with that quality; 1 feel lucky every day to have such a strong ally in my life.
Thanks, finally, to my family—Kathy, Bob, Adam and Sarah Foote and George,
Lynn, Clara, "baby" George, and Terry Barnett—for helping me realize over the past several years how much a part of my life they really are. 1 regret that 1 could not be home to see them all more and to see the children grow, but it took a certain amount of distance
IX for me to appreciate how much I could rely on them and why I will always want to. I am proud to be a part of their lives and hope they know how much I love them.
These people and many others have contributed to this dissertation and have helped make it stronger than I could have made it alone. I am responsible, however, for any errors, biases, limitations in this work. VITA
May 7, 1964 ...... Bom - Stamford, CT
1986 ...... B.A. English, University of Connecticut
1990 -1996 ...... Graduate Teaching and Administrative Assistant, The Ohio
State University
1996 - Present ...... Visiting Instructor English, Wittenberg University
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field; English
XI TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract...... ii
Dedication...... iv
Acknowledgments...... v
Vita...... xi
Chapters:
1. Introduction: Reading and Writing in "Black" and "White" I
1.1 Introduction...... 1
1.2 The Ebonics Debate...... 4
1.3 The "Students'Right?"...... 10
1.4 Theorizing "Whiteness"...... 18
1.5 "Blackness," "Whiteness," and the Renaissance of
Composition...... 26
1.5.1 "Individual" Students, Competing Communities, and the
"Discipline o f English"...... 36
1.6 Conclusion...... 43
XII 2. Historical Methods: The University o f Washington Writing Program
as a Site o f "Social Praxis" ...... 48
2.1 Introduction...... 48
2.2 University Writing Programs as Sites of "Social Praxis" 52
2.3 The Time...... 58
2.4 The Place...... 66
2.5 The Texts ...... 70
2.6 Ways of Reading...... 73
2.7 Conclusion...... 77
3. Competing Constructions of Community and Individuality: University
Representations of African American Students...... 80
3.1 Introduction...... 80
3.2 The University's Narrative of Progress ...... 84
3.2.1 "Special" Education Students...... 85
3.2.2 HOP Students as "Rule-Breakers" and Politicized Subjects... 90
3.3 Individuality, Community, and the HOP as a Site of Critical
Pedagogy...... 102
3.4 Conclusion...... 108
4. Writing Cultures and Representations of Race...... 114
4.1 Introduction...... 114
4.2 Communal Constructions of African Americans in the English
Department...... 116
xiii 4.3 The Languie Issue...... 123
4.3.1 Irmscher’s Philosophy of Language Difference...... 126
4.3.2 Administration and English Department Wranglings Over
Dialect...... 128
4.3.3 Intersections Between Scholarly and Personal Notions of
Dialect...... 140
4.4 Conclusion...... 150
5. Pedagogical Power Plays; Constmctions of Black and White in the
HOP Writing Classroom...... 153
5.1 Introduction...... 153
5.2 The HOP Pre-Quarter Writing Workshop...... 156
5.2.1 Background Information...... 156
5.2.2 White Instructors Evaluating Students and Constructing
Blackness...... 162
5.2.3 Composition as a Discipline, "Individual" Students, the Social
Good, and the "Problem" of Ethnicity...... 166
5.2.4 African American Students Refusing to be "The Quiet
Ones"...... 174
5.2.5 Understanding Conflicts in Workshop Evaluations Through
Conflicts in Racial Communities...... 178
5.3 An EOP Training Manual...... 180
5.3 .1 "Race-ing" the Writing Class...... 180
xiv 5.3.2 Commenting on Students' Work From a Distance 184
5.3.3 Interrogating Race and Desire Through Discourses
of "Blackness" and "Whiteness"...... 187
5.4 Conclusion...... 200
6. Conclusion; Rhetorical Responsibility in the WritingClass 203
6.1 Introduction...... 203
6.2 Rethinking Subjectivities ...... 206
6.2.1 Pedagogical Possibilities...... 213
6.2.2 Commenting With "Congruence...... 216
6.2.3 Institutional Implications...... 220
6.3 Returning to Race: A Postscript...... 222
Bibliography...... 228
XV CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: READING AND WRITING
IN "BLACK" AND "WHITE"
Whitey must begin to take the advice o f various black spokesmen who suggest that white Americans start solving the racial strife in this country by eradicating white racism in white communities, instead o f going into black communities or joining black organizations or working for legislation to 'give' the blacks political and social rights. (Bosmajian 264)
Introduction
Haig A. Bosmajian's demand for White reflection on racism comes from an article titled "The Language of White Racism," published inCollege English in 1969. To date, this call to action, made also by African American leaders such as Floyd McKissick,
Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael (Bosmajian 264), has yet to be adequately answered by the White majority, although scholars such as Marilyn Frye and Henry Giroux have made inroads in this direction. This dissertation builds on efforts such as Frye's and
Giroux's and focuses particularly on composition studies by asking how the discipline can promote ways of answering Bosmajian's request for White accountability in writing instruction. Like Bosmajian, my work considers racial discourse as it relates to English
Studies. I attempt to understand relationships between Black and White^ as they play out in one of the university’s most pervasive acculturating forces, the writing classroom.
More specifically, I illustrate some of the ways the composition program at the University of Washington (UW) responded to the formation of the University Educational
Opportunity Program (EOP) in 1968. A program begun in response to UW Black Student
Union protests, the EOP inspired writing instruction at UW that was overtly political regarding race issues in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I am especially interested in understanding the ways White dominance over discourses of "blackness" and "whiteness" hindered racial progress at the University of Washington despite the fact that important structural changes did occur, including the active recruitment of minority, especially
Afiican-American, students and the establishment of Black Studies and Women’s Studies
Programs.
Along with many educators, I struggle with the fact that a great deal seemed to change in race relations fi'om the onset of the Civil Rights movement through the early
1970s, and yet too much remains the same today. As the 1996 O.J. Simpson case and many less-publicized events reveal, race too often divides us, and White and Black
Americans in particular often exist in parallel and unequal worlds governed by separate notions of history, politics, and the social good. In addressing these historical exigencies, this dissertation seeks to answer questions such as the following: Can education further racial progress? Should it? Do universities have a special obligation to address social inequity? What role do writing classes, in particular, play in the university's culture wars?
How can a better understanding of writing education and its relation to race in the late
1960s and early 1970s help illuminate the precarious position we find ourselves in today?
Can such an understanding provide insight into contemporary writing education and
recent political shifts such as the California decision to dismantle afiSrmative action?
Answering these questions in fine detail helps reveal how community conflicts have
always been a central part of writing education. Such answers also demonstrate some of
the reasons why the hope for "revolution" held by the Civil Rights and student movements
has never been realized in the writing classroom and why racial discourse continues to be a
source of pain and confusion not only in composition today but also in discussions about
education and the national identity. As recent heated debates about Ebonics indicate, the academy has yet to fully accept academic work on linguistic difierence or the relationships between such differences and racial inequities. More important, such work and its relation to larger political and social issues has made very little impact on the general public.
However, the linguistic tensions that manifest themselves periodically in the classroom and the general community mask deeper political, economic, and social imbalances between
Black and White.
In this opening chapter, I first examine some of the current national anxiety over racial discourse by briefly considering the crucial elements of the Ebonics debate. This debate gained considerable attention at the end of 1996 but, in fact, represents an ongoing discussion o f race and writing begun in the 1960s, a discussion clouded by emotion and prejudice that has yet to be resolved. I then trace composition's history of dealing with issues of race from the 1960s through the present before considering how theories of
"blackness" and "whiteness" can offer new insights into composition history and current trends in writing instruction.
The Ebonics Debate
According to one data base^ between December 16, 1996 and May 15, 1997, over
300 newspaper articles were written about the Oakland, California School Board's decision to classify Ebonics, or what linguists frequently refer to as African American
Vernacular English, as a distinct language. From theNew York Times to community newspapers to radio and television talk shows, the issue ignited a sense of moral and intellectual indignation among both White and Black about language education. Locally, legislators in Los Angeles, Chicago, Georgia, and elsewhere discussed the possibility of pre-emptive legislation outlawing the teaching of Ebonics in their schools. At the national level. Senator Arlen Specter called a hearing "to examine the pros and cons o f Ebonics, focusing on the testimony of Dr. Robert Williams, who created the term Ebonics in 1973"
(Wilson 1). Legislators spent a good deal of time and tax-payer money considering the relationship between dialects, education, and cultural needs, and more explicit economic considerations were also part of this debate. Many of those concerned with Ebonics focused on the fact that the Oakland School Board would be eligible for federal funding for "bi-lingual" programs if it succeeded in convincing the federal government that Ebonics was a language distinct from English. The school board denied it ever intended to
seek bi-lingual funding to educate African Americans, and the Clinton administration made
it clear almost immediately that it would not recognize Ebonics as a distinct language
(Bennet), but these discussions illustrate the political and material concerns issues of
language almost automatically evoke.
Perhaps the most telling comment about this situation comes from aNew York
Times article suggestively titled, "Black Voice of the Streets is Defended and Criticized."
According to Steven A. Holmes, "The plan to use [Ebonics] in classroom instruction has
plunged the country into a racially tinged debate similar to the uproar that followed a Los
Angeles jury's acquittal of O.J. Simpson on murder charges more than a year ago" (A9).
Comparing one school district's effort to validate its students' languages with the most
racially charged murder trial of the past fifty years indicates the extreme importance placed
on language instruction and "standard" English by many in the U.S. As this analogy
indicates and as scholars like Marguerite Helmers have pointed out, such concern goes
beyond an interest in education, and into moral and social judgments as well.
In a particularly volatile column, for example, conservative Afiican American critic
Ken Hamblin writes, "If Ebonics has credibility, it is as the language of the street—the dialect of the pimp, the idiom of the gangbanger and the street thug, the jargon of the public school dropout, a form of pidgin English indicative of African-American failures"
(B7). Language in this view is tied to everything negative represented by "the streets" (an idea insinuated in the title of theNew York Times article and reinforced in many articles; one editorial in theChicago Defender, for example, is titled "Keep 'street talk' where it belongs-in the streets"). African American Vernacular English, according to Hamblin and many others, is integrally tied to—and possibly responsible for—murder, prostitution, and educational and social failure among some African Americans. Another editorial in the
Chicago Tribune asserts a similar idea;
But as Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, used to say in another connection, 'you can dress a pig up and put lipstick on it, but it's still a pig.'
And Ebonics, however, gussied up, is still just ungrammatical English spoken by people who haven't been taught properly. The cure for that is not to rename it or look for phony ways to boost the speakers' self-esteem but to teach them the right way. (1:28)
The language of many African Americans, in this conception, is a "pig," and, by extension, the people who speak it in their day-to-day lives are simply poorly educated people who have failed to comprehend "right" ways of speech. They prefer "pig-like" language because it, presumably, fits their status in the world or because they do not know any better. Such quotations illustrate in painful detail the point Patricia J. Williams makes in aNew York Times editorial. According to Williams, no dialect is subject to the abuse that Afiican American Vernacular English is, and its status is intimately tied to race relations in this country:
the very conflation of illiteracy and the reasoned, rich and expressive complexity of most forms of black speech is based on a peculiarly freighted symbolism in the American lexicon. While accent prompts many levels of discrimination in the United States, there is no greater talisman o f lower or underclass status thanthe black accent.. ., no greater license to mock than with some imitation of black speech. Whether in The Dartmouth Review or "The Lion King," black English is the perpetual symbolic code for ignorance, evil, and jest, the lingo o f hep cats and hyenas. (4:5) The difference between Hamblin's interpretation of Ebonics and Williams' is that
Hamblin takes an ontological view of the nature of Black English while Williams places language use in a social and epistemological context, one with competing views based on the different relationships individuals and groups have to language, each other, and the world. For Hamblin, Black English simply is "bad" and is not the product of a complex and frequently misread historical relationship between language and oppression. Most important, what is emphasized in Hamblin's article, theChicago Tribune editorial, and most of the articles written on Ebonics this year, is that Black English and Black English speakers and writers are almost always defined, at least implicitly, as a "Black problem."
Note the conclusion in theTribune piece, which asserts that "The cure for [Ebonics] is not to rename it or look for phony ways to boost the speakers' self-esteem but to teach them the right way." Using a medical metaphor common to discussions of difference in language, the Tribune focuses on Ebonics and Ebonics speakers when it concludes with a
"cure" for the problem.^ Variations of this idea also come through strongly in the following comments:
1 think it's tragic. Here we have young black kids who are incapable in far too many cases of negotiating even the most basic transactions in our society because of their inability to communicate... We're going to legitimize what they're doing. To me it's just ass backwards.' (quoted in Diringer and Olazewski, A17)
W e are appalled.. they are creating a subculture that will never learn any kind of responsibility to society' (Margo Koller, a former resident of Oakland who 'said she is glad she moved from Oakland,' quoted in Diringer and Olazewski, A23) 'It's black people shooting themselves in the foot' (John McWhorter, professor of linguistics and Afiican American Studies at Berkeley, quoted in Diringer and Olazewski, A23)
What these statements all have in common, and what contrasts them sharply with those of Williams and Bosmajian, whose statement on White accountability opened this chapter, is that they place sole responsibility for the "problem" o f Ebonics on African
Americans and on the dialect itself. They make no mention of responsibility the White majority has in this issue except for their obligation to teach "substandard" students how to be more like them. Many African Americans, accordingly, are "shooting themselves in the foot" (they are not being "shot" by anyone else) and show no responsibility to
"society" because of "their inability to communicate," a problem apparently having nothing to do with White and other Americans' frequent refusal to deal with languages they wish to consider "substandard." Such refusals exist despite the fact that linguists acknowledge that African American Vernacular English and all dialects are inherently equal to the
"standard." They exist also in spite of the fact that the U.S. majority seems to pick and choose when such dialects are viable. Williams writes:
The contorted battles over rap lyrics as political speech—however densely vernacular the language is—have not been about the failure of the larger society to understand the words as English.... the tension is revealed in the contradictions of black speech being simultaneously understood yet not understood. Why is it so overwhelmingly, even colorfully comprehensible in some contexts, particularly in sports and entertainment, yet deemed so utterly incapable of effective communication when it comes to finding a job as a construction worker? (4:5)
With Williams and Bosmajian, I argue that the White majority in particular needs to question its attitude towards Ebonics and "blackness" in general. Such questioning will
8 further composition's understanding of White responsibility for maintaining linguistic and other barriers that perpetuate racial domination. We need to ask where our attitudes toward language come from, why they are so explosive, and how they translate into our everyday lives—as teachers and students; as professionals and private citizens from all walks of life.
Composition studies has long been engaged in examining the relationship between language and difference, and this field of inquiry has been a driving force of the discipline for at least the past twenty years, to the dismay of some, who believe that we should simply teach the received wisdom of the ages. This "received wisdom" includes
"traditional" ways of speaking and writing because they are inherently the "right" forms of literacy—in fact, the "only ones." Composition studies has only sporadically addressed issues of race in writing classes, however, and we have come to no firm conclusions about why the achievements made by Afiican Americans in the Civil Rights movement and the university protests of the late 1960s have not provided more dramatic improvement in higher education opportunities for people of color. The University environment also remains one that alienates many Afiican Americans and other minorities. To understand how composition has attempted to change this situation—where it has succeeded and where it has stumbled— in the following section, I offer a sketch of the major movements in race and writing from the 1960s through today. The "Students' Right?"
Not surprisingly, the bulk of the work in composition on race and writing has
involved the study of Black and White, with a specific focus on dialect differences. The
recent discussions about Ebonics began at the national level thirty years ago when linguists
such as William Labov and William Stewart began work on the nature of Afiican
American and other dialects o f English. Works like Labov's 1968A Study o f the Non-
Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York and City 1969 The
Study o f Non-Standard English established for the first time to academics the complex
rule-based structure of dialects like African American Vernacular English. This work
revealed that such dialects were legitimate forms of language, which were different fi’om
the "standard" but not inferior to it in any way. On Labov's and Stewart's heels came
scholars like J.L. Dillard and, later, Geneva Smitherman and others who worked to trace
Afiican American English's roots to West Afiica and to unravel its role in today's increasingly multi-cultural, yet still White-dominated, social and political arenas.
Compositionists were naturally interested in this issue, but their interest grew especially acute in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In response to the Civil Rights movement, greater numbers o f Afiican Americans enrolled in the university, frequently bringing with them speech and writing patterns that had always been considered unacceptable in academic writing. At the same time, some scholars were asserting that these dialects were perfectly viable forms of language whose only fault came from existing in a racist country intent on demonizing everything "Black." In response to these changes
10 in the student body and linguistic scholarship, and after years of heated debate, a special body of the Conference o f College Composition and Communication created two statements, the first of which was a resolution "adopted by members of CCCC in April
1974" (Larson):
We afiBrm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers will have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language, (quoted in Larson)
In Fall 1974, a special issue of College Composition and Communication was published, the "Students' Right to Their Own Language," which includes this resolution and defends the committee's decision to make what many considered a radical and ill- advised statement about language equity and classroom practices. Counter to this work are the arguments o f J. Mitchell Morse, who argues in March 1973 that African American
English is intimately tied to "Black failure," a point that resonates with Ken Hamblin’s ideas about the relationship between Afiican American dialects and “street life” and that is reinforced by the title of Morse’s essay, “The ShufOing Speech of Slavery: Black English.”
Morse believes that Afiican American English is evidence of a "provincial" lifestyle and that educators must bring students fi'om their small communities into the "universal" community of ideas and achievement the University represents. Similarly, William H.
11 Pixton argues in October 1974 that "standard" English is not a question but a fact and that the imprecision of a dialect such as Afiican American Vernacular English is apparent in its failure to "properly" conjugate the verb "to be." In the mainstream press, the famous 1975
Newsweek article "Why Johnny Can't Write" responded to the "Students' Right" by offering the CCCC statement as an example of the liberal failure to educate children in basic literacy.
Perhaps the most typical and useful response among writing scholars to the
“Students’ Right” is represented in Mary Louise Vandover's 1975 CCCC's paper, "The
Students' Right to Their Own Language—or the Students' Right to Language Itself; A
Challenge." Vandover argues for respecting the diversity in students' speech patterns but challenges the idea that the average English teacher has the necessary background to teach all the social and practical implications of dialects. She also challenges theStudents'
Right's assertion that teaching students the value of all dialects of English will result in changing attitudes toward language variety in the workplace and nation. In this situation, as in most cases when writing scholars raise the dialect issue, heated battles took place for a limited time after the publication of theStudents' Right" but very little was actually decided among writing scholars. Even less changed in writing education and the national attitude because the status quo and the marketplace depended, and continue to depend, on forms of English that promote White solidarity and dominance.
The year 1977 proved important to studies of race in composition because of the publication of Mina P. Shaughnessy'sErrors and Expectations and Geneva Smitherman's
12 Talkin' and Testifyin': The Language o f Black America. Shaughnessy provides an in- depth look at the way insufiScient literacy skills, non-mainstream dialects, and class and racial conflicts work to keep too many students of color marginalized in the academy and the larger culture. This work has been criticized as colonizing because it focuses on the importance of learning Edited American English (by Min Zhan Lu, for example).
However, it changed notions of basic writing in the university by providing a model for close reading and analysis of student texts, a model that accords student work the same status as the hterary works English teachers have been trained to respect and interpret.
Smitherman offers a linguistic history of African American Vernacular English for compositionists to consider in contemporary pedagogy and argues forcefully for the understanding and acceptance of dialects other than Edited American English in this and many other works.
The next flurry of attention given to dialects came with the 1979 Ann Arbor case.
This trial pitted African American parents against the Ann Arbor school board, with both sides seeking the most effective ways to teach African American children the English of power in mainstream society. Edited American English. Scholars such as Smitherman played significant roles in the court case and published responses to the verdict, while
Marcia Farr Whiteman published a collection of essays from local Ann Arbor figures responding to the case.Reactions to Ann Arbor: Vernacular Black English and
Education. In this collection, school administrators such as Thomas P. Pietras echo the practical concerns of Vandover about teaching dialect speakers. For one thing, Pietras
13 argues, no other schools had established a common practice from which the Ann Arbor system could learn. He also notes that there were no generally accepted commercial reading materials designed for speakers of African American dialects. Despite the school district's willingness to work with students' home languages in order to help them read and write Edited American English more effectively, Ann Arbor stopped working programatically with African American English in the classroom after two years because of the practical and political difficulties of working with multiple dialects in a public school system (Holmes A9).
In the 1980s, one important debate surrounding dialects comes from James Sledd and Thomas J. Farrell. Sledd wrote "In Defense of the 'Students' Right'" in November
1983, an essay that laments the minimal change created by the CCCC statement on dialects. Sledd argues against the claims that a standard language is inevitable and unplanned and advocates the acceptance of different forms of English as an example of truly dialogic education concentrating on student experience. Tying language issues directly into large American ideals, he also disputes the capitalist notion of upward mobility as an illusion built on the reckless disregard for the natural resources of the earth and for subjugated groups. Therefore, he argues, teaching a "singular, proper American language" so that students can become economically successful is a false ideal.
Published at almost the same time, in December 1983, was Farrell's "IQ and
Standard English." Farrell hypothesizes that the development of abstract thinking depends on learning the standard forms of verbs like "to be" and embedded modification and
14 subordination in language, characteristics of a literate, but, according to Farrell, not an oral, culture. Farrell writes that Blacks frequently come from an oral culture and argues that any racial differences in standardized test scores result from a lack of cultural emphasis on literacy and Edited American English in African American communities.
Farrell and Sledd respond to each other’s work a year later in the "Comment and
Response" section ofCollege English^ and the way they argue their points is informative.
Farrell continues to promote the idea that students whose dialects do not include the standard variations of things like the verb "to be" will be poor readers, writers, and thinkers, an idea he defends again in 1986, when he cites Walter Ong and others to argue that print literacy promotes abstract thought, greater intellectual ability and capitalist advancement. Sledd, on the other hand, further analyzes the U.S. university, concluding that it is an institution designed to create scientific and economic advances for the government and to maintain comfort for the primarily White middle class as it oppresses minorities through, among other things, the institutionalized subordination of their languages and cultures.
While these two scholars approach the issue of African American Vernacular in diametrically opposing ways, both recognize the important connections between English
Studies and political and social welfare. Language study, Sledd and Farrell write, is more than simply the memorization of a specific grammar and set of conventions, a point driven home in 1983 with the publication Shirley Brice Heath's ethnographic study of the ways race and class affect language acquisition and education.Ways With Words. Instead, in
15 their very different ways, both Farrell and Sledd recognize that the languages we use relate directly to the economy, national and local politics, race relations, community identification, and our sense of individuality. However, while documents such as the
"Student's Right" and Sledd's and Farrell's work promote the notion that language is tied to social inequities and community conflicts, the academy and especially the public has never fully embraced these ideas in all their complexity. Part of the challenge today continues to be making academic notions about language accessible to a public who cares deeply about language use but who remains poorly informed about the ways language is implicated in our political, emotional, and intellectual lives.
Since Farrell's and Sledd's exchange, Marcia Farr and Harvey Daniels have written
Language Diversity and Writing Instruction (1986), a linguistic primer for writing instructors on language variety, and educator Lisa Delpit has contributed important work to the debate about dialects and difference through articles like "Skills and Other
Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator" and "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and
Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children." Delpit argues powerfully for both the explicit instruction of Edited American English in the writing classroom and an investigation by both teachers and students into the political and social nature of academic and other discourses. The majority of work in the late 1980s and early 1990s on race, however, has come fi’om basic writing scholars. Theresa Enos'A Sourcebook for Basic
Writing Teachers includes a great deal of discussion about the ways racial difference informs basic writing, while theJournal o f Basic Writing continues to publish articles
16 interrogating race and writing, such as William Jones’ "Basic Writing; Pushing Against
Racism" and Jerrie Cobb Scott's "Literacies and Deficits Revisited." While analysis of
race is important to basic writing, this trend indicates that Black-White relations have not
been a "mainstream" issue in writing instruction for much of the 1990s.
Interest in dialects and Black-White conflict in composition has grown recently,
however. Important work on the issue fi'om the 1990s comes fi’om Valerie Balestefs
Cultural Divide: A Study o f African-American College-Level Writers, Ametha Ball’s
“Evaluating the Writing of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students: The Case of the
Afiican American English Speaker,” Keith Gilyard'sLet’s Flip the Script: An Afiican
American Discourse on Language, Literature, and Learning and Susan Kates' "The
Embodied Rhetoric of Hallie Quinn Brown. " Balester traces students' use of Afiican
American linguistic traditions in academic work and their attitudes toward the languages they use, while Ball discusses teacher’s attitudes toward diversity in language and the way these attitudes affect the grading process. Gilyard draws from linguistic, literary, and literacy studies to revive many of the central issues of the "Students' Right" just in time for the Ebonics debate. Kates traces the work of African-American elocutionist and educator Hallie Quinn Brown, who taught between 1893 and 1923. Kates historicizes some of the complexities of the Afiican American literacy tradition and illustrates the long history of academic debates over Afiican American English and rhetorical figures within historically Black colleges. As the heated public debates about Ebonics, increased emphasis on Black and White in composition scholarship, and President Clinton's recent
17 call for national self-examination of race make clear, the relationships between language, education and racial conflict have taken center stage once again. While building on the efforts that have been made to deal with these issues in the past, composition must find new ways to confi'ont them today and in the future. A significant part of this project will involve analysis of the cross-disciplinary investigation into discourses of "whiteness."
Such analysis offers the potential to open not only composition but the general public up to the idea that writing education is based on social and political norms rather than the
"objective" ways of knowing the Ebonics debates indicate are still dominant.
Theorizing "Whiteness"
The most significant work on race in composition has gone beyond understanding dialect as a simple “language problem” to consider the larger discursive structures all languages derive firom and contribute to. As Farrell’s work makes especially clear, such work is also dangerous because we run the risk o f essentializing Afiican American culture, for example, as primarily pre-literate or less dependent on abstract thought than White culture when we establish absolute notions of “blackness” or “whiteness.” As composition is drawn into issues o f race once again, I propose that writing theory build on the recent interest literary, feminist, education, and cultural studies have shown in theoretical explorations of "whiteness" as we seek new ways to historicize our multi dimensional field. Such an investigation will broaden a debate like the one surrounding
Ebonics into a more thorough exploration of the roles language and discourse have in this
18 country’s ongoing civil wars. This dissertation demonstrates one way of doing so by
applying the work on "whiteness" to the University of Washington Writing Program as it
struggled with race issues in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Critics like bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Peter McClaren, and Richard Dyer have
begun to emphasize the idea that "whiteness" as a racialized category remains a mystery in
the academy and nation, despite the scholarly efforts of the last thirty years to understand
"blackness" and other racialized categories. Literary critic AnnLouise Keating writes:
For the past several years both my scholarship and my teaching had been informed by a critical analysis o f how 'race,' gender, and sexuality are socially constructed, but until reading [Toni] Morrison's call for an interrogation of'whiteness' I had never considered including an analysis of 'white' in my explorations of racialized meanings in literary texts. Yet it only made sense to do so; after all, we examine "black,' Chicano/a, Native American, and Asian American literary traditions, should we not also look at 'white' literary traditions? (903)
As Keating points out, however, an investigation into "whiteness" is both necessary—if we are to understand race relations in the academy and nation—and fraught with difiBculty. For one thing, "the most commonly mentioned attribute of "whiteness' seems to be its pervasive non-presence" (904). As a result, this “pervasive nonpresence makes it difBcult—if not impossible—to analyze 'whiteness' as "whiteness"' (905). What results in most studies, therefore, is an analysis of "whiteness" as it relates to "blackness" and other categories through which "whiteness" defines itself, an approach I take in this dissertation. By examining primarily White administrators' and teachers' inscriptions of
Afiican American students and faculty in university documents, I trace how the UW
Writing Program of the late 1960s and early 1970s both challenged and reified discourses
19 of "whiteness." In addition, specific examples of the ways discourses of "blackness" and
"whiteness" intersected at UW will help bring more attributes of “invisible whiteness” to
light.
One important reason to illuminate specific attributes of “whiteness” is that the invisibility it typically maintains also helps it maintain power. According to Keating, the invisibility of “whiteness” creates "a pseudo-universal category that hides its specific values, epistemology, and other attributes under the guise of a non-racialized, supposedly colorless, "human nature "... [It] operates as the unacknowledged standard or norm against which all so-called "minorities" are measured" (904-905). Sharon Stockton provides a specific example o f the relationship between ""whiteness,"' invisibility, and power in her essay, ""Blacks vs. Browns": Questioning the White Ground." In this article,
Stockton argues against the assertions made by Jack Miles in "Blacks vs. Browns: A
Struggle for the Bottom Rung." Miles denies that the Los Angeles riot set off after the
Rodney King verdict was "a complicated [problem] of many different peoples, late capitalism, urban injustice, and a long history of white racism" (Stockton 166). Instead, according to Mies, ""the riot was also, in a sense, about illegal immigration. Latinos are dislodging poor blacks from every kind of workplace, and the conflict between the groups is becoming more widespread and more intense" (Stockton 166). Stockton critiques
Miles" belief that "The problem was...a simple matter o f "Blacks vs. Browns." there have simply not been enough "unskilled" jobs to go around, and Latinos compete with blacks for work at the bottom'" (Stockton 166) and finally notes:
20 the dependence on binary logic allows Miles the politically powerful rhetorical stance of omniscient and removed white observer. Nowhere does he take into account the system that allows his own distanced and 'objective' reading of the inner city. Significantly, the cover for this issue of the Atlantic features two menacing and only slightly dissimilar black profiles facing each other against an innocuous white ground. It is this white ground—and the two dififerent binary visions it allows—that I would like to call into question. On the one hand. Miles constructs a black vs. brown opposition that allows him to stereotype both; on the other hand, his definition of the "other"—whether black, brown, or both—establishes his own oppositionally "objective" stance as critical outsider. (167)
In this reading, Stockton ties into the pervasive "invisibility" of "whiteness" its fi'equent corollaries; objectivity and rhetorical distance. Knowledge created through this perspective is fi’equently understood to be the result of unmediated perception rather than the result of looking through a complex lens dependent, at least in part, on "White" norms and values. As a result, Stockton writes, "whiteness associates itself with the universal, the natural, the normal, and the clear-sighted; 'Anglos,' as Peter McClaren puts it, 'somehow see themselves as free of ethnicity, as the true custodians of the host country and keepers of civility and rationality'" (173).
An important part of this belief in the universal "common sense" of White ways of knowing is the dependence of "whiteness" on rules, order, and formal institutional structures. Keating calls on Richard Dyer's work in film to assert that '"white' is coded as orderliness, rationality, and control, while 'black' is coded as chaos, irrational violence, and total loss of control" (907). She also notes students' interpretations of "whiteness" gained from texts written by people of color. From the literature they read, her students believed
'"Whites' were emotionally and spiritually cold, overly concerned with rules and order.
21 rude, and entirely dismissive of indigenous American cultures, peoples, and beliefs" (908).
According to this line of thinking, the White sense of self is distant and removed from the
world, which may account for its ability to “dismiss” indigenous cultures and the horrors
inflicted upon them.
Educator Thomas Kochman and feminist Marilyn Frye note similar phenomena in their analyses of "whiteness," analyses that continue to run the danger of essentializing but that offer insight into the ways power is created and maintained through racial discourse.
In his classroom studies o f student interaction, Kochman notes that White students often thought Black students were too confrontational and aggressive in class discussion, while
Black students thought Whites too passive and uninvolved. From his observations,
Kochman argues that African Americans frequently consider argument, including dynamic opposition and affect, to be essential to discovering "truth." He believes Afiican
Americans often take a personal interest in what they debate and establish it as part of their sense of self. Whites, on the other hand, often consider passion and confrontation antithetical to creating knowledge and rely on sources (published works, "authorities," etc.) outside of themselves to determine "truth."
Frye cites scholars like Minnie Bruce Pratt and texts like Drylongso ("a collection of narratives of members of what its editor [John Langston Gewaltney] calls the 'core black community'" (152)) to assert that "whiteness" (or what she calls "whiteliness") involves assuming the roles of judge, preacher, martyr, and peacemaker; "whiteliness" calls on positions of traditional authority and knowledge to maintain its dominance and
22 sense of self. "Whiteness," therefore, aligns itself with the "oflScial" rules, rules ostensibly
made not out of political and social biases but through "objective" and "universal"
standards. A statement like the following, made by an Afiican American fi’om
Gewaltney"s collection, codifies this idea. '"White people don’t really know how they feel
about anything until they consult their leaders or a book or other things outside themselves'" (Gewaltney 99)
Two points are particularly important to bring out in this discussion. First is the possibility that different epistemologjes inform discourses of “whiteness” and “blackness,” with “whiteness,” as the dominant discourse, maintaining a "distance" fi’om knowledge that depends on the power of authorities, rules, tradition, and the written word, all of which supposedly guarantee "objectivity" and non-racial ways of knowing. “Blackness,” according to this view, is more likely to relate in personal and social ways to education and the creation of knowledge, in ways that highlight the political nature o f argument and the investment of the self and community in all education. What is problematic about this formulation, however, is an issue both Keating and Frye discuss at length: how do we both look for generalizations about racial interaction that can help explain continued White domination in the United States while not reifying a simplistic and stereotypical binary between White oppressor and Black oppressed or between White and Black "ways of knowing"?
Keating notes, for example, that students find it difficult to maintain a distinction between "whiteness" and "white people" when they read literature with an eye toward
23 defining "whiteness." Her students, for instance, had difficulty understanding how racial discourses are created and stuffing constructs contingent upon historical circumstances rather than biological, fixed essences. She writes:
we often proceed in our interrogations o f "whiteness" and other racialized categories as if these "races" were permanent, unchanging categories o f meaning.... [Ajlthough theorists of "whiteness" attempt to deconstruct "race," all too often they inadvertently reconstruct it by reinforcing fixed categories of racialized meanings. Theorists find it difficult not to conflate literary or cultural representations of "whiteness" with "white" people, and this perpetual reconstruction of separate "races" can be even more difficult to avoid in the classroom. . .(910)
One way to deal with this issue, Keating notes, is through greater attention to the
""fluidity and the historical changes in U.S. discourse on race"" (913). We need to question the ontological status we give race in criticism and the classroom by more thoroughly investigating such things as the origin of race in the United States and the shifting meanings the term has had in our national discourse. Keating remarks, for example, that
the Puritans and other early European colonizers didn"t consider themselves "white"; they identified as "Christian," "English," or "free" for at that time the word "white" didn"t represent a racial category.... It was not until around 1680, with the racialization of slavery, that the term was used to describe a specific group of people.... Significantly, then, the "white race" evolved in opposition to but simultaneously with the "black race." (912)
In addition, it is important to recognize that notions of ""blackness"" and ""whiteness" have changed over the past 500 years. Terms like ""Colored,"' ""Negro," "Black," and "African
American" indicate a "different racial identity with specific sociopolitical and cultural implications,” while ""[m]any people today considered "white" -southern Europeans, light skinned Jews, the Irish, and Catholics of European descent, for example—were most
24 definitelynot "white" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries'" (Keating 912, emphasis in original). As Keating suggests, interrogating race fi’om a constructivist viewpoint will help teachers and students understand how and why racial categories and racial domination have developed. Just as important, such interrogations will help us understand how we can revise these notions in our language and actions.
Frye also offers help with this difficult problem, which she describes as the need
"to find a way to think clearly about some kind of whiteness that isnot essentially tied to color and yet has some significant relation to color" (151 emphasis in original). Frye draws on work in feminism to understand "whiteliness" in terms of "masculinity."
Maleness we have construed as something a human animal can be bom with; masculinity we have construed as something a human animal can be trained to— and it is an empirical fact that most male human animals are trained to it in one way or another of its cultural varieties. Masculinity is not a blossoming consequence of generic constitution as lush growths of facial hair seem to be in the males of many human groups. But the masculinity o f an adult male is far fi-om superficial or incidental and we know it is not something an individual could shrug off like a coat ....(151)
Frye advocates investigating a cultural concept, masculinity, that does not define itself exactly the same way in every man and, indeed, is not a trait limited solely to men.
On the other hand, ignoring the very real relationships between masculinity, male culture, and individual men allows no way to define and revise the ways men have dominated women in western culture. The same, Frye argues, is true for race relations. What is necessary, and will be difficult to achieve, is to develop a vocabulary and a way of conceptualizing that will allow teachers and students to both recognize and work with the power binary oppositions such as "Black" and "White" have had in U.S. culture and to
25 move beyond them. We need to develop a flexibility of mind that allows us to investigate,
on the one hand, the idea that race in its many constructs has played a significant role in
shaping power relations and communal and individual identities in this country. On the other hand, we also must recognize that "race" has not shaped these things in static or monolithic ways and that racial discourses are not limited solely to considerations of skin color and can never be assumed to wholly determine individual and communal identities.
As Keating writes, "the fact that a person is bom with 'white' skin does not necessarily mean that s/he will think, act, and write in the 'white' ways I've been describing. Nor does the fact that a person has "brown' or "black" skin automatically guarantee that s/he willnot think, act, and write in 'white' ways" (905). A thorough investigation o f "race" in this country will always recognize that multiple discourses of race, class, gender, religion, family, etc. influence our lives. Such an investigation will also continually recognize that race, and especially the forced dichotomy between Black and White, has been a central metaphor for human identity in the U.S. at least since the beginning o f the slave trade.
"Blackness," "Whiteness," and the Renaissance of Composition
I turn now to some of the traditional histories of composition studies in light of the preceding discussion, histories that are full of both absence and unspoken presence.
Notably absent fi'om these histories are the voices of Afiican Americans both because
"mainstream" educational systems traditionally have not emphasized literacy for minorities and because literacy traditions in communities of color have not been recorded or
26 disseminated in the ways White traditions have been. Revealing some of the ways discourses of “blackness” and “whiteness” resonate through this history and reviewing the standard narrative of composition through a lens focusing on the dominance o f discourses favoring “whiteness,” however, can illuminate how what seemed like revolutionary activity in the 1960s university failed to fundamentally alter race relations in the classroom and nation. Such insights also can help composition consider new methods of writing composition history and the ways race relations impinge on language instruction and the national identity.
According to most sources, composition was reborn in the 1960s at almost the same time this country was attempting racial change and re-examining the relationships between education and social progress. Citing reports from the Basic English Conference of 1958, Stephen North writes that in the late 1950s, English—traditionally defined as the tripod of language, literature, and writing—turned away from a progressive model of education. This model had dominated previous decades and placed an emphasis on practice and individual students, but by the early 1960s, English Departments sought to define English as a discipline in ways it had not been previously. In response to new government interest in English education and the possibility of substantial federal funding, educators worked to establish English as '"a body of specific knowledge to be preserved and transmitted rather than a set of skills or an opportunity for guidance and individual adjustment'" (North 10). In this conception of English, knowledge is "above" the social.
Instead, this view insists that principles of the discipline be generalizable and part of a
27 tradition which can be passed on through the ages. Composition, as one important aspect
of the discipline, therefore, should have its own unified identity, one marked by inherent
principles and form and not subject to personal, social, or political trends.
As North concludes, "The reform of English would be a top-down affair," (16,
underline in original) an idea echoed by Joseph Harris, who analyzes the Dartmouth
Seminar, a seminal conference held in 1966 for both U.S. and British educators to "define
English as a school subject and to outline the ways it might be best taught" (631). Harris
notes an instructive split between the American and British positions:
[Albert] Kitzhaber and the Americans were most concerned with defining English as anacademic discipline,a body of knowledge.... Britton and the British looked instead at English as teachinga subject—that is as a loosely shared set of classroom practices, concerns, and activities. If the American hero was the scholar, the British hero was the teacher (634 emphasis in original).
The British sought to serve the student in ways the Americans (with notable
exceptions like James Moffett) had begun to criticize. On the whole, the Americans
believed student-centered pedagogies seeking to afBrm individual growth wouldnot
further English as a discipline. As Harris remarks, "One can view the American position at
Dartmouth. . .as an attempt to justify the study of English to other university experts, and
the British position as trying to place such work in relation to the needs and concerns of
students" (635). At this time, the Americans were searching for generalizable, “objective”
standards that could justify their discipline, and such an appeal played on the power of
"objectivity" as an ideal in U.S. culture. It also closely parallels the emphasis "whiteness" places on objectively authoritative ways of knowing.
28 Harris also agrees with North's contention that the government directly influenced
English studies in the 1960s, and both note that English administrators actively sought
such an alliance after the federal government, in 1958, began significant funding o f science
and math programs in response to Sputnik. In 1961, NCTE publishedThe National
Interest and the Teaching o f English to make a claim for national funding of English
programs at the high school and college levels—a controversial claim, because as Lester
Faigley notes, prior to the Kennedy administration, there had been "longstanding
opposition to federal aid to the public schools because o f fears of federal control" (50-51).
One result of this document was Project English, a federally funded program whose
purpose was "to design a sequenced curriculum for the study of language and literature
firom kindergarten to college" (Harris 635). The logical end of this coalition between
academics and government, Harris finds, is that "the content of most teaching should then
be determined by 'subject specialists,' usually university scholars. The work of Project
English was planned in thistop-down fashion, as was the Dartmouth Seminar..." (636
emphasis added).
In their references to the "top-down" approach English Studies took in the late
1950s and mid-1960s. North and Harris refer to a fairly strict hierarchy, one that begins
with a definable discipline which transcends social and political “whims.” Academics—the
majority of whom, not coincidentally, were White—were the keepers of this discipline and believed that if they properly defined an absolute body o f knowledge, English would gain the prestige it deserved. Writing scholars, in particular, attended to this model closely.
29 North writes that composition, which was traditionally the least respectable o f the language, literature, and writing tripod, benefited precisely because of English departments' relationship to the state in the years after Sputnik. As North notes, the government had special interest in writing and linguistics—which "had had some fairly visible training successes during the war" (12)—because they "were more obviously
'useful'" (12) than literature. North also cites Albert Kitzhabefs explanation that the federal authorities found literature "‘insane, possibly un-American'" (12) to account for the ability of compositionists in particular to help English departments form a relationship with the federal government.
Changing market forces also reflect the importance rhetoric programs could aspire to at this time and indicate the force economics can play at the “top” in a “top-down” model of composition. For one thing, the writing class was necessary for training a generation of students entering an age of information unprecedented in American history, a fact radical students like Todd Gitlin, former president of Students for a Democratic
Society, and college presidents like Clark Kerr noted. Gitlin writes that by the early
1960s, "The service sector of the economy was growing, the manufacturing sector shrinking. More employees than ever before were handling people and paper, not soil, ore, lumber, and steel" (Gitlin 20). Kerr confirms the importance of "knowledge" to this changing economy and, by extension, to the university:
The production, distribution and consumption of "knowledge" in all its forms is said to account for 29 percent of gross national product . . . and "knowledge production" is growing at about twice the rate of the rest of the economy. Knowledge has certainly never in history been so central to the conduct of an entire society. What the railroads did for the second half 30 of the last century and the automobile for the first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth. And the university is at the center of the knowledge process. (Kerr 84)
Kerr is writing about knowledge in its many forms—scientific, mathematical, technical, agricultural, etc.—but, most important, Gitlin, Kerr, and many others saw the U.S. economy moving toward a service economy focused on abstract knowledge rather than physical products. And, while specialists in various fields would have to be created in order to keep the U.S. in business, fi'om this point on, what all students and workers would need were skills and the appropriate mindset necessary to understand, manipulate, and communicate abstract knowledge in a changing technological landscape. Rhetoric and composition classes historically provided this kind of training, and, as such, commanded increased attention fi-om business and the government.
Buoyed by federal fimding and interest, a suddenly increased power within English departments, and a market place with a keen interest in literacy, writing scholars. North argues, worked with the top-down approach to exert "authority over knowledge about composition: what it is, how it is made, who gets to say so and why" (15). This approach, many hoped, would lead to a mode of inquiry "modeled in method and rigor on research in the sciences" (17). In addition, although North and Harris acknowledge that the curriculum can form in ways other than from the “top” down, both assign the government, university professors (in their roles as scholars and researchers rather than teachers), and a body of knowledge linked to traditional "mainstream" (i.e.. White) values to "the top."
Presumably, then, this trio form the "natural" beginnings of the English curriculum and any
31 variation from this model (a student- or minority-driven agenda, for example) is
automatically in the position of working from the "bottom" up and subversive of the
"natural order of things." In the sense of attempting to be both "scientific and natural," the
top-down model further aligns itself with objective ways of knowing as it attempts to
eschew social influences and assign itself a position of unquestionable authority, in the
same types of ways discourses of “whiteness,” which inform this model in powerful ways,
do.
However, forces were forming to challenge this model as students had been gathering power in a number of ways from the mid-1950s onward. Black students played strong roles in groups like the Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and influenced the latter part of the Civil Rights movement in particular. By the mid-
1960s, Afiican American students in the north and south were building on earlier freedom rides and lunch counter sit-ins by, for example, emphasizing the need for Afiican-
American representation in White-dominated universities, the perceived seat of power in an information-intensive age. White middle-class students, on the other hand, used their involvement with groups like SNCC along with a growing fear of such things as amoral uses of technology, the arbitrary use of power by government and other institutions, and poverty to radicalize their understanding of their positions and form New Left youth groups. In 1962 one of the largest and most controversial groups. Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS), formed when 59 people, mostly students and all White, met in
Port Huron, Nfichigan to draft “The Port HuronStatement.This document produced
32 little fanfare at the time but was to herald in a new rhetoric of “participatory democracy”
(modeled in part on the political structures o f SNCC and other Civil Rights groups (J.
\Cller 56)) and a powerful student movement. Within five years, this movement became a national one that threatened in some way much of what America took for granted: its political, economic, and educational systems, its moral standards, its language.
From these groups of youth came a series of critical, populist, and communally based rhetorics. The rhetorics the students espoused, often characterized by direct action and vigorous, eventually violent, denials of the right of the "powers that be" to rule* invaded both the academy and society at large by the late 1960s. These rhetorics were hardly monolithic, but they gained considerable attention as the youth counterculture continued to broaden its base through the early 1970s, primarily because of increased concern over U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. As Todd Gitlin writes, "a Daniel
Yankelovich poll in October [of 1968 found] that 42 percent o f college students said they were unconcerned with college's practical benefits; that of them, more (20 percent) identified with Che Guevara than with presidential candidates Nixon (19), Humphrey (16), or Wallace (7); and that, in all, some 750,000 students identified with the New Left,
’suggest[ing] a potential for disorder in our society that has barely been tapped'" (344-
345).
Despite composition's efforts to create a place for itself in the longstanding tradition of "objective" and unbiased knowledge valued by the White academy, disciplines like composition and individuals like William Irmscher—Director of Writing Programs at
33 the University of Washington and editor ofCollege Composition and Communication from 1965-74— found themselves squarely in the center of political controversy and forced to deal with changing power relations. New student populations and new notions of equality and racial responsibility made what had seemed femiliar educational territory open to serious question. The questioning extended to the subject matter of composition courses, the methods of teaching, and the attitudes of those who subscribed to the dominant ways of knowing, which relied on traditional authority, rules, and a belief in objective knowledge—in short, those ways of knowing most associated with "whiteness."
Given these forces in 1960s' culture that contradicted notions of composition as an
"objective, unified" discipline that could simply teach the received wisdom of the past, it is not surprising, therefore, that William Irmscher wrote the following in an unpublished book review to George R. Allen of Oxford University Press:
...in some past time books may have been chosen because the Table of Contents appealed primarily to the faculty. If it included material they were interested in and thought the students ought to be interested in also, they adopted it. Times are too touchy now to try tricks of that kind. I need not digress on campus conditions. The fact exists that the primary consideration today is the adaptability of a book to students—will it turn them on?—not the adaptability of the book to the instructors—will it turn them on? (June 17, 1969)
In correspondence with me, William Irmscher further sums up the difficulties of working through confrontations between an “open hand” form of “rational” discourse and “closed fist” demands at the University of Washington: “You ask why the establishment became more flexible during this period. The simple answer is that it had to; there was no alternative. Nothing like this had happened before in education. Those in authority didn’t
34 know how to respond.... How did you respond to protest rallies, sit-ins, and acts of terrorism?” (October 18, 1995).
The student movements of the 1960s undermined composition's aspirations for
"universal" knowledge and forced complicated negotiations between government, faculty, and economic forces at the "top" and minority, radical student, feminist, and other forces at the "bottom." In these negotiations, "negative” social and political influences evoking the notions of "blackness" defined earlier in this chapter came to be assigned to radical students. Black and White, involved in the Civil Rights or Peace movements, while those who wished to maintain or to gain positions at the "top" aligned themselves with discourse evoking rule-based, absolute authority indicative of discourses of "whiteness." In response, composition scholarship and pedagogy struggled between "objective" ways of teaching and studying language, overtly social and political methods that emphasized the contested and communal nature of all education, and methods that emphasized the
"sovereign" individual writer. In many ways, the "social/political" position won out in this struggle, and attention to issues of difference and power redoubled in writing scholarship and pedagogy between 1970 and the present. However, closer attention to how this struggle played out in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continues to play out in classrooms and scholarship today, reveals why the attention writing theory has paid to politics and difiference has not created more significant social change, particularly in terms of racial progress.
35 “Individual ” Students, Competing Communities, and the “Discipline" o f English
It is important to keep North and Harris’s binary of “top-bottom” in mind when
writing about composition in the 1960s and 1970s because it continues to be a binary with
the power to structure relationships between teachers and students and White and Black.
While we need to interrogate how such binaries manifest themselves in educational
contexts, however, we must also understand better the complex nature o f power relations
between different groups in this country and the roles language plays in maintaining these
relations. Therefore, it is important to investigate and expand on models suggested by
Arthur Applebee and James Berlin, which illustrate more fully the complicated relationships a "top-bottom" binary can hide. These models also provide a way of understanding why White dominance over discourses of "blackness" and "whiteness" has especially limited African Americans and other minorities in writing education as it has inhibited these groups' ability to be heard in cultural discourse.
A review of the work of historians such as Applebee and Berlin further illustrates the ways writing instruction and theory have surreptitiously been influenced by discourses of "blackness" and "whiteness." This review demonstrates how the discipline's inabihty or unwillingness to recognize the influence of these discourses has resulted in uneven educational efforts for Black and White. While the dominant White discourse has labeled
African American students and instructors, the languages that they use, and the knowledge that they form as suspect because it is "political," White "ways of knowing" in composition have hidden behind facades of "universal objectivity." Composition in many
36 ways has attempted over the last thirty years to tear down these facades, but this task remains unfinished. Re-invigorating this project will require recognizing the disparities created between Black and White in university writing classes. Just as important will be our ability to understand how these disparities relate to traditional composition histories and pedagogies, which fail to take racial difiference into account and assume a "universal" student body based on White norms.
For example, in his comprehensive study of secondary English education in the
U.S., Applebee explores the question North and Harris implicitly raise: whom does
English serve? Applebee quotes fi"om Dora V. Smith’s 1936 NCTE address—'"Are we willing to give boys and girls a share of the attention we have devoted to English as a subject and to the indisputable claims of the social order?'" (118)—and implicitly illustrates the three competing elements which have historically vied for English educators’ attention:
• the "body of knowledge" that defines English studies and can presumably be passed on
fi-om one generation to the next (a tradition supported by such things as the canon and
traditional grammar texts);
• the social order as a whole (which is addressed through critical pedagogies, for
example); and
• individual students (who are helped to grow as individuals through language or to
write effective prose so that they are employable).
37 In various contexts, each of these three elements has been privileged in English
education, but educators must account for all three in every version of English brought
into the curriculum. Further, as scholars such as Applebee and Berlin demonstrate, larger
academic and cultural concerns always influence and are reflected in the value English
educators place on each of these elements at any given moment; thus, while these two do
not distinguish between writing instruction between White and Black, we must recognize
that a nation as concerned with race as ours will always reflect discourses of "blackness"
and "whiteness" in its language education.
Berlin’s study of twentieth-century university writing education.Rhetoric œid
Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900—1985, complements Applebee’s
work practically—by supplementing Applebee’s research in secondary English education
with an historical analysis of composition at the university—and theoretically. Berlin finds
three primary epistemologies writing instructors have worked fi’om throughout the
twentieth century—the objective, the subjective, and the transactional—and these
epistemologies bear striking resemblance to the factors competing for attention fi-om
English educators; English as a discipline, individual students, and the larger social order.
However, Berlin's taxonomy not only mirrors the one set up by Applebee; through its emphasis on the transactional, it also complicates it in instructive ways for late twentieth- century culture and composition theory and pedagogy. His emphasis on the transactional also provides a way into understanding some of the roles race has played, and continues to play, in writing education.
38 The first significant epistemology in composition that Berlin notes, the objective,
fosters "positivistic theories that locate reality in the material world" {Rhetoric 139), an
epistemology closely aligned to Applebee’s concern with English as a discipline. Berlin
places current-traditional and behaviorist schools of thought in the objective category
because both assume knowledge is located outside human subjectivity and can be studied
empirically. For objectivists, knowledge has its own identity separate fi-om such things as
race, class, and gender. Berlin's objectivist epistemology coincides with Applebee's notion
of English as a discipline and discourses of "whiteness" because all three give precedence
to a defined body of knowledge or activity over both the particular interests of students
and educational philosophies explicitly emphasizing the need for social change. All these
discourses seek an unquestioned place at the "Top" by attempting to establish "universal"
and "natural" ways of knowing.
Berlin's second category, subjective rhetoric, was most commonly found "during
the sixties and seventies...in a group of diverse approaches commonly called
expressionistic" {Rhetoric 145). Closely paralleling models Applebee saw privileging
student needs and interests (as defined by students), these rhetorics define student writers
as individuals separate fi-om cultural, ideological, and other influences and reflect the U.S.
emphasis on individuality along with the 1960s assertion of individual growth and insight.
Associated with scholars such as Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow, this school emphasizes the authority students have over their own experiences and their ability to write. As the title of Elbow’s popular text Writing Without Teachers indicates, expressionists fi-equently
39 assume that writing cannot be taught; it can only be learned by motivated individuals exposed to the proper setting.
Berlin further points out that “[i]t is important...to distinguish the varieties of expressionistic rhetoric. At one extreme can be found the anarchists, arguing for complete and uninhibited freedom in writing” while “At the other extreme are the few that...see reality as arising out of the interaction of the private vision of the individual and the language used to express this vision"{Rhetoric 145-46). Finally, though, all expressionist rhetoric “denies the place of intersubjective, social processes in shaping reality. Instead, it...describes groups as sources of distortion for the individual's true vision, and the behavior it recommends in the political and social realms is atomistic”{Rhetoric 146).
Berlin's third epistemologjcal category is the transactional, which he defines as follows:
Transactional rhetoric does not locate reality in... external phenomenon...or within some realm apart from the external (ideas or vision). It instead discovers reality in the interaction o f the features of the rhetorical process itself: in the interaction of material reality, writer, audience and language. {Rhetoric 155)
Berlin includes several versions of rhetoric in this category: the classical rhetorics espoused by Edward P.J. Corbett and others; rhetorics based on cognitive psychology beginning with Janet Emig'sThe Composing Process o f Twelfth Graders, and epistemic rhetorics, represented in the work of Marxist scholars like Richard Ohmann, collaborative theorists like Kenneth Brufree, and, from the 1960s through today, a growing number of scholars interested in critical pedagogy, feminism, and cultural studies. Transactional
40 rhetorics are intimately tied to Applebee’s notion of the social good, the importance of
community to language study, and to the discourses of "blackness" I have outlined
because, of Berlin’s three models, transactional rhetorics are most concerned with cultural
contexts and the relation between writing, community, and politics. Most important, the
model Berlin fevors and which is most important to this study—epistemic rhetoric— questions easy distinctions composition scholars make among the three elements English has sought to serve: English as a discipline, individual students, and the larger culture.
That is, if we assume that “knowledge... is a rhetorical construct,” distinctions among categories like "society" and "English as a discipline" become blurred, since one cannot be understood without the other. As Berlin argues, "Knowledge [according to the epistemic point of view] . , is a matter of mutual agreement appearing as a product of the rhetorical activity... of a given discourse community" {Rhetoric 166). This claim disputes the elite status English as a discipline claims for itself as it discounts the notion that such an approach is truly “objective” and somehow divorced from cultural forces; instead, it views knowledge as communally constructed and the pursuit of academic knowledge as intimately tied to the pursuit of communal and social norms. According to this model, if we cannot fully separate knowledge and the social order, then any language pedagogy is essentially political and must consider the ways communities establish hierarchies of communication that frequently compete and conflict with each other. While critics claim such a position leads to pure relativism, an epistemic model does not highlight a simple equivalence of all competing discourses. Instead, it emphasizes the problem of relying on
41 absolute certainties and universal guidelines, the socially constructed nature of all discourse, and the importance of context and power in selecting better and worse answers for any given rhetorical situation.
Such a position leads Berlin to argue that "in studying the way people communicate—rhetoric—we are studying the ways in which language is involved in shaping all the features of our experience" (166), an idea Stanley Fish and others take further. InIs There A Text In This Class?, for example. Fish describes an experiment he used on a class of graduate students interested in 16th century religious poetry. He left a list of authors’ names from a previous class on the board and, in order to illustrate the constructed nature of poetry and all meaning, had his poetry students produce a poem out of this list. He goes on to write;
Thus while it is true to say that we create poetry (and assignments and lists), we create it though interpretive strategies that are finally not our own but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility. Insofar as the system...constrains us, it also fashions us, furnishing us with categories of understanding, with which we in turn fashion the entities to which we can then point. In short, to the list of made or constructed objects we must add ourselves, for we no less than the poems and assignments we see are the products of social and cultural patterns of thought. (332)
In response, at least in part, to the pervasive ideas of theorists like Jacques
Derrida, scholars like Berlin and Fish question the easy separation that western culture has historically made between individuals and the communities to which they belong. Berlin,
Fish, and other scholars of the postmodern are particularly concerned with notions of the self as they undermine modernist and religious notions of the unified, unique individual
42 whose core being is separate from culture. For postmodern scholars, the individual self is
not at essence a soul or, in the Cartesian sense, a solitary thinker. The individual is a
pastiche of discourses and experiences bom into and out of multiple, competing
communities. When we privilege an epistemic model o f rhetoric, we are left to consider
how we can redefine community, the individual, and academic knowledge relationally in a
constantly shifting landscape highlighted by demographic and technological change.
University writing classes from the University of Washington vividly demonstrate the ways
notions of community, the self, and knowledge have been heavily influenced by race, and
how these differing notions have, in turn, affected composition and limited the field's
efforts to use epistemic notions of rhetoric to create significant change in race relations.
Conclusion
A glance through almost any journal in composition studies today demonstrates
the power of transactional, and especially epistemic, rhetorics in the academy. While
essays such as Maxine Hairston's "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing" and groups
like the conservative National Association of Scholars reflect the controversy engendered by writing pedagogies that interrogate such things as race, gender, and/or class, the influence of such work is undeniable. The political nature of writing education is assumed by many scholars in the field who actively concern themselves with issues of difference.
Since epistemic discourses—which are closely related to discourses of "blackness" because both emphasize social formations o f knowledge—are dominant in composition, it
43 would appear that we are in a prime position to change our relationships to language, the self, and community in ways conducive to racial progress.
An analysis of the University of Washington Writing Program between 1968 and
1972 reveals, however, that the concern with politics and epistemology in writing pedagogy, administration, and scholarship was unevenly distributed between White and
Black at this time. At UW, African Americans were widely assumed to be political, communal, and in need of language education that would enable them to further their individual and community goals. Educators, and especially the general public, were willing to explore the idea that the lines between the individual, community, and academic knowledge were fluid, that language use was contested, and that the academy was bound into and by social relations when it came to work with African American students and faculty.
Whites, on the other hand, neglected to publicly assess their own political positions and interests. When the possibility of serious change in race relations or of difBcult questions about White subjectivity came into play, a more traditional binary of "top" and
"bottom" was called on by those in power: such a binary stigmatized the "political" ways of African Americans and others considered "militant" or "radical" and assigned what was perceived to be their sense of self and community and their ways of knowing to the
"bottom." Opposed to this unstable "bottom," was an equally unstable "top," which relied on the "natural, objective" academic knowledge produced by and for a White majority.
Despite the strong intentions and the structural changes that were made, most White
44 administrators, teachers, and students, and especially the White general public, did not
have the will or the vocabulary to change the racial status quo. Instead, they reverted to
notions dependent on "objective, universal whiteness" when African Americans and others
threatened White authority.
While powers of teaching composition from a political, epistemic perspective were
as important to the academy in the 1960s as they are today, the knowledge gained during
this time friled to make an impact on most teachers and especially on the general public, as
the discussions about Ebonics noted earlier in this chapter indicate. These observations
lead to questions about why the work done in the academy has failed to reach the public in
more positive ways. When does the White "sense o f self refuse to accept "objective,
academic" knowledge when it becomes too threatening? How can academic work in
linguistics and composition reach out to a more general audience in ways that make a
difference not only in job opportunities for all students but for a more democratic way of
life? Does the White academy continue to "politicize" the language and identities of
African Americans and others in our teaching and scholarship while failing to fully
consider White linguistic, political, and communal attachments? A look at one writing program from the 1960s will not provide final answers to these questions. However, the
University of Washington addressed many of these questions between 1968 and 1972, and examining the way discourses within the composition program moved between favoring notions conducive to "whiteness" and "blackness" helps clarify the complex ways race became crucial to this writing program. Such an examination will also provide critical
45 tools to help illuminate racial discourse at other universities around the country.
In the next chapter, I provide a summary o f the methodology used in this dissertation, which illustrates why new forms o f historiography in composition can help us find better answers to questions of difiference in the writing class. Chapter Three provides a broad look at University o f Washington representations of Afiican American students, and Chapter Four illustrates how these representations remained consistent in the administration of the University Writing Program and the work of William Irmscher,
Director of Writing Programs at the University. Chapter Five provides a close study of several classroom experiences that illustrate the split between "White" and "Black" ways of knowing maintained in writing pedagogy, a split that divided students o f different races fi-om each other and teachers fi-om students. In Chapter Sbc, I conclude by illustrating ways the University of Washington Writing Program did address the problem of White subjectivity in an effort both to illustrate how difficult it is to enact change in pedagogy and cultural knowledge about language and to provide a model to further these changes.
46 ' In this dissertation, I will capitalize the terms "Black" and "White" because they refer to loosely defined groups of people, but 1 will use lower case for "blackness" and "whiteness" because these terms refer to discourses afiecting all of our lives which are not limited solely ly racial classifications. 1 also alw ^s use quotation marks around "blackness" and "whiteness" to signify their constantly shifting nature and the fact that such discourses are not limited to strict notions of race.
' 1 consulted the OhioLink Newspaper Statistics database on May 15, 1997, which had recorded 307 articles to date about the Ebonics d ^ te . This statistic does not take into account magazine articles, television and radio interviews, or many other sources, and therefore provides a conservative estimate of the interest in the topic arotmd the coimtry.
^ See Mike Rose's "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University" and Marguerite Helmet's Writing Students for historical explorations of the links between illiteracy and illness.
* Interestingly, the writing process of this document mirrored the current emphasis in composition on collaboration, small group work. Tom Hayden wrote the initial draft of the statement, but at the three-day stay in Port Huron, the leaders of the convention decided that "eight sqjarate small groups.. would discuss in detail a difierent part of the manifesto.... The members of each group were expected to raise questions about the manifesto without trying to come up with new language. These questions would then be put to the group as a whole..." (James Miller 109-110)
^ See Edward P.J. Corbett's 1968 essay “The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist” and Richard Marback's 1996 essay "Corbett's Hand: A Rhetorical Figure for Composition Studies" for discussions of this trend.
47 CHAPTER 2
HISTORICAL METHODS; THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
WRITING PROGRAM AS A SITE OF "SOCIAL PRAXIS"
[W]e ought to pay more attention to what was actually taught, haw institutional practices constituted disciplines, and how such institutional trends reflected the political relations and discursive practices o f the period. Tightly focused ‘‘local” histories can provide “thick descriptions " o f haw institutionalized intellectual assumptions and social conditions were involved with changing educational practices (Geertz).... Educational institutions are a strategic archival site fo r localized histories o f rhetoric as a social praxis because schools and colleges are richly inscribed, socially constituted texts that document changes in political relations, theories o f how knowledge is created and trarjsmitted, and assumptions about how shared traditions speak to social problems. (Thomas Miller 74-75)
Introduction
In response to Thomas Miller's call for "local histories" of "rhetoric as a social
praxis," this project shifts the context of composition historians’ usual discovery ground to mine underutilized materials that provide insight into the racial politics and practices of one writing program, that of the University of Washington from
1968 to 1972.
48 This "local history" reveals many of the individual and institutional struggles that resulted when students sharply contested the theories of knowledge their teachers presented. Traditions that once seemed monolithic at universities such as Washington were contested as racist, sexist, and classist—i.e., inherently exclusionary and constituted according to specific social and political norms—and we continue to search for satisfactory alternatives to these traditions today.
Histories of composition most frequently have provided sweeping studies that historicize composition based on information obtained from academic scholarship and textbooks.* However, to investigate more thoroughly the relationships between writing and social change, compositionists need to understand writing education and administration more deeply and from alternative angles. Analysis of internal UW documents reveals complex representations of students, faculty, and the discipline of composition as each of these were affected by racial issues at the University. Such analysis also illustrates how one
“mainstream” academic institution recognized the social construction of knowledge in composition and the ways the University responded by reconsidering the political and social nature of writing pedagogy and administration.
By looking at the discourse that surrounded the UW Writing Program and discussions of education in general, I follow scholars such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson who argue that "[o]ur ordinary conceptual system, in terms of
49 which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” and that
"[o]ur concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and
how we relate to other people" (3). In composition. Marguerite Helmers applies
this concept to the relationship between writing teachers and their students and
determines that their relationship is locked in language. Helmers' work examines
metaphors applied to students in composition scholarship, and she agrees with
Lakoff and Johnson that such tropes, especially when they become generic staples
of academic scholarship, serve not as linguistic flourishes. Instead, these concepts
"structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people" (12), such as students, colleagues, and the general public.
To build on Helmers’ examination of scholarly work, I apply similar textual analysis to unpublished educational and administrative texts—English
Department and University memos, letters, and pedagogical materials—that helped structure the practice, pedagogy, and theory of the UW writing program.
This study is also enhanced by correspondence and conversations I have had with former UW instructors and faculty members. Such methods of investigation promote new insight into writing pedagogy and the relation between Black and
White at the University in the late 1960s and early 1970s since not only academic scholarship or literary masterpieces affect the way we think and act. Indeed, texts such as memos and personal correspondence reflect daily life at the University, and it is this "daily" way of living, that which seems most "common-sensical,"
50 that remains under-investigated. Daily activities in composition are tied to emotions, attitudes and actions, all of which help structure formal theories of teaching, administration, and scholarship. Composition has neglected the relationships between these activities for too long.
This study depends on understanding a number o f discourses: national discussions about race and social progress, the idea of education as an acculturating and knowledge-making force, the specific role of writing instruction in creating social change and theories of knowledge, and specific local texts and activities fi'om one writing program. I build fi’om traditional historiographical methods to construct a methodology that begins to account for these multiple discourses. In the remainder of this chapter, I illustrate my methodology by considering
• why composition needs to focus further on historicizing university
writing programs as sites of social praxis;
• why the University of Washington between 1968 and 1972 provides
an excellent model for this type of study;
• why local texts and "ephemeral" classroom materials are vital to this
new model of research; and
• how I read such texts.
51 University Writing Programs as Sites of "Social Praxis"
My interest in exploring specific contexts o f composition as sites of social
praxis responds to writing scholars’ sustained call for studies that emphasize the multiple discourses that inform writing instruction and administration. Stephen
North, for instance, writes:
The tendency in most of the [historical] studies I have cited has been to focus on a very limited number of features relevant to a history of the idea of teaching writing, located in an intellectual context...but pretty much stripped of place and time in other ways. Demographic concerns, geographic, economic, political concerns (national, local, academic)—texts and textual features that might tell about these have not yet gotten much close attention. (77)
North believes that understanding the history o f composition only through an
"intellectual context," which typically promotes ways of knowing conducive to
White, academic notions of "universality" and "objectivity," will not fully reveal important contextual conflicts specific to individual universities. They also will not effectively illustrate the relations between sites of instruction and local and national cultures.
Scholars such as Joseph Harris and Lester Faigley further North's argument that we should theorize the relations between social and political discourses and specific writing programs. Harris writes: "We need to look at how our work with students is shaped by and responds to pressures outside our classrooms, and try to show how growth, when it does occur, is the result not of some natural or spontaneous process but of a complex negotiation between
52 competing demands and discourses." (“After Dartmouth” 643) Similarly, Faigley
notes: “Those in composition studies have written little about how the broad
changes that have taken place in U.S. society during the years of the process
movement have influenced the teaching of writing” (49).
By arguing against the idea of writing education as a “natural” and
"universal" process, Harris and Faigley refute the idea of an “objective” tradition
of knowledge through which we can define composition. Instead, they emphasize the variety of discourses influencing composition, an idea William Irmscher echoes in his last publication when he notes that writing always results from “a rhetorical context, whether the writing represents a short story, a laboratory report, a business letter, or a treaty. The differences between these symbolic acts can be described, primarily in terms of their setting and purpose, but the differences can hardly be measured” (84). Irmscher’s emphasis on “description” over “measurement” supports his argument against what he sees as a disciplinary predilection for empirical studies. The model for research he proposes attends to the various genres of writing and considers “the total act of composing in a natural environment that can be described in rich detail within the limits of the investigation”(85). This model also depends “less on generalizations about all cases than on insights about particular cases in a selected discourse community”
(86).
53 As Harris and Faigley suggest, the first step for compositionists is to
recognize the multiple influences on composition inside and outside the
classroom, especially those influences that are not typically considered
"intellectual" but that vitally afifect knowledge-making in composition. As
important as this recognition, however, will be our ability to define, analyze, and
categorize the wealth of competing contexts—administrative, pedagogical,
institutional, regional, national, etc.—that influence, and are influenced by,
language instruction. And, as Irmscher notes, thick descriptions of particular institutions allow for strong analysis of the interaction between specific educational contexts and more "universal" textual forms— such as the writing assignment— and racial tropes— such as the notion that minority students are
"culturally deprived."
Thomas Miller perhaps best articulates the need for new kinds of histories of composition when he advocates teaching the various traditions of rhetoric and the social processes that influence and spring fi'om these traditions rather than a singular "rhetorical tradition" (70-71). Because composition teaches language use, and, more specifically, language practices viewed as essential to cultural and economic well-being, it reflects and influences competing cultural and political activities. As a result, compositionists need to look at a wide variety of texts and to theorize the daily activities of pedagogy and administration to understand more fully composition's relations to multiple rhetorical traditions, many of which have
54 been silenced in published works.
My eflFort to read the highly contextualized work of writing classes in light
of larger social discourses also takes its cue from the students of the 1960s and
from public attitudes toward composition. A popular expression at the time,
which has turned into a maxim for many, was “The personal is political,” and the
idea that all events, large and small, were linked in powerful ways permeated the
ideology of many student radicals and other critics of race, class, gender, and the
Viet Nam War. William Irmscher notes this issue in a letter explaining to Cheryl
Kupper of McGraw-Hill Book Co. why he had not responded to her
correspondence: ‘T was sent down to San Francisco State College last week to
analyze their mess. I almost got locked in with the Third World Liberation Front.
Three professors including the Director of Freshman English there were arrested
on Friday. Who knows, I might have been a sacrificial victim to the cause of
Third World” (May 29, 1968). Irmscher’s irony signals a concern for the connections some were making between local institutions, such as the University, and international stmggles. The drama he briefly describes, however, illustrates the conflicts resulting from the 1960s’ tendency to look for connections, part of a larger effort by young people in particular to find wholeness in a disjointed mass culture.
Notably, the university came to be seen as a microcosm for this image of the world. Clark Kerr of the University of California popularized the term
55 “multiversity,” a term which implied that the uni-versity was not one, unified institution serving students and seeking a holistic world view. Instead, many thought it was a conglomerate of services for a variety of high-tech consumers.
Including the government and big business, and were concerned that the university masked more than it revealed. Radical groups were especially dismayed with universities’ highly specialized and fi-agmented departments and their attempts to appear ideologically neutral while contributing to such things as arms research for the government. These structures and activities exemplified for many the university's attempt to hide politically and socially grounded modes of research in claims of “objectivity” and "intellectual freedom."
Thus, students’ and others' efforts to unmask the epistemic—political, social, and highly connected—nature of all knowledge resulted, at least in part, in a search for connections: between race relations on their campuses and the war in
Viet Nam, between students’ personal interest in politicization and issues of university free speech and constitutional liberties, between traditionally assigned texts read in literature classes and institutionalized racism and sexism. By following the students’ example and understanding the university as a key reflector of and contributor to culture, I read texts from the UW Writing Program to uncover the dialectical interaction between racial discourse from 1968-72 and practices in composition. These interactions illustrate composition’s essential grounding in cultural constructs—its epistemic nature—and the ways such
56 constructs were used to make academic, political, and social knowledge.
Finally, public attitudes toward writing instruction also reflect the importance of composition to the general public's sense of self and social welfare—to "social praxis." UW administrator Charles Evans notes in his 1970 status report on the Educational Opportunity Program: "Virtually everyone with even a casual interest in the [EOF] seems to feel an urge to offer 'expert' advice as well as criticism of the instructional program in English" (1) and "Counseling is second only to the teaching of English as a subject on which casual observers of the [EOF] as well as those engaged in the program expound their thoughts with conviction and urgency" (2). The "Students' Right to Their Own Language," published in 1974, asserts a similar sentiment:
... if [English] teachers are often uninformed, or misinformed, on the subject of language, the general public is even more ignorant. Lack of reliable information, however, seldom prevents people from discussing language questions with an air of absolute authority. Historians, mathematicians, and nurses all hold decided views on just what English teachers should be requiring. (1)
English instruction, particularly in writing, is contentious because language is universal (it belongs to all of us), personal (it serves as a primary means of self- identification) and political (it is a primary social tool o f inclusion and exclusion).
Inevitably, then, programs like the Washington EOF writing segment, which were explicitly concerned with educational and social change, were sites of controversy, intellectual debate, community interest, and powerful emotion.
In summary, this dissertation delineates the cultural practice of rhetoric in
57 composition at one large, public, “mainstream” university as it interacted with
larger discourses of race and writing/ As Thomas WBUer argues, rhetoric classes
are ideal sites for understanding social praxis because the dramas they produce
often get to the heart of a culture that has raised representation and textuality to
new levels of importance. An emphasis on a specific university context
recognizes that each context is unique and that composition needs to develop methods of understanding individual stories arising from individual writing programs. Equally important, this emphasis recognizes that writing instruction at an institution like UW is not random. Such instruction always draws from and contributes to larger community and national concerns about race and writing, even as it does so in unique ways. This dissertation explores and theorizes these relations.
The Time
“The 60s” exist as a mythological period in contemporary U.S. culture, one often characterized by images of upheaval. Many events could be said to frame the era, but, as the title of Joan and Robert K. Morrison's bookFrom
Camelot to Kent State suggests, John F. Kennedy's election in 1960, with its emphasis on youth and continuing progress, and the National Guard shootings at
Kent State and Jackson State Universities in 1970 perhaps best illustrate the dramatic change and the generational battles that mark the decade. The story of
58 the 1960s cannot be confined to a ten-year period, of course, and the multiple
stories that have arisen from this period remind us of the futility of looking at the
decade simply as a “success” or a “feilure.” What is certain, however, is that not
only do the 1960s remain significant to U.S. culture in general; they are also
particularly important to university life. They reflect the key role universities played in the Civil Rights and Viet Nam eras, and a study o f the events of the time as they relate to university writing programs confirms Thomas Miller’s belief in the relationship between rhetoric, the institutions that teach it, and social praxis.
In addition, the 1960s are a hotly contested period open to a variety of interpretations from scholars, politicians, and everyday citizens on the Left and
Right. From the Left, Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson, editors Theof 60s Without Apologyhave provided a wide- ranging re-valuation of the 1960s that celebrates the decade's attempts to create radical change and protests attempts to demonize this period or to reverse its achievements. Former student activists such as James Miller and Todd Gitlin offer in-depth histories of radical student activity and mixed views regarding the period's significance to long-term changes in U.S. culture, while conservative critics like Peter Collier and David Horowitz, also former activists, lament the excesses o f the 1960s and their effects on modem life. Rick Perlstein examines the debate between 1960s scholars who lived through the period and younger scholars re-evaluating the decade, frequently from more skeptical and more
59 conservative positions. A telling attitude Perlstein cites comes from Carol
Anshaw, a reviewer of 33-year-old Barnard professor David Farber’sChicago
'68: “Anshaw argued that 'perhaps [Farber] wasn’t the person to write the book.'
ICs study didn’t convince, she harrumphed, because he 'had no experience of a decade that was primarily experiential'” (Perlstein 31-32). As this excerpt indicates, not only political questions are crucial to historicizing the 1960s and understanding the decade's impact on all that has happened since. Questions regarding the relations between "personal" experience and "objective" scholarly methods became especially acute at this time, and the battles over the meaning of the 60s have as much to do with questions of epistemology as with determining what "really happened" or whether the Left or the Right won out.
Through this debate, important documents like the "Port Huron
Statement" have been reprinted, and books, both popular and academic, continue to pour forth about the Viet Nam war and 1960s culture. The academic and popular concern with the 1960s suggests the importance many place on "owning" the meaning of this decade since so many current debates—about affirmative action, feminism, the family, multi-cultural education, etc.— stem from this time.
The close proximity of the 1960s, their obvious impact on U.S. culture, and the emotion many o f those who lived through the period feel about their experiences invite close historical analysis of the effects of the decade on U.S. culture and careful consideration of the methods used to understand this recent past.
60 The 1960s are important to composition in particular in at least two ways, as I suggest in Chapter One. First, as Stephen North and other scholars document, the 1960s were a crucial time for the growth of composition. For one thing, Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer publishedResearch in Written
Composition in 1963—a compendium o f writing research completed to that time and a plea for more rigorous research in composition, that would justify writing as a disciplinary subject. A growing number of empirical, historical and other studies of writing followed in response. Such studies, focused for the most part on writing as a process, along with government and public interest in literacy, led to a renaissance in composition. The field began to develop graduate programs, teaching clout, and a rapidly growing body of research as it appealed to major sources of public and private funding. Further understanding of this period, fi-om a variety of perspectives, is cmcial if composition scholars are to historicize accurately the apparent “success” of composition in the late twentieth-century academy, build fi"om its strengths, and critique its limitations.
Scholars are beginning to more thoroughly historicize composition fi’om the 1960s onward, and important in this regard are texts such as Joseph Harris'sA
Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966, Lester Faigley's Fragments of
Rationality: Postmodemity and the Subject o f Composition, and Richard
Marback’s 1996 essay, "Corbett's Hand: A Rhetorical Figure for Composition
Studies." Harris traces the development of five key words in recent composition
61 scholarship ("growth, voice, process, error, and community") to argue that composition is "a teaching subject,...Xh&\ part o f English studies which defines itself through an interest in the work teachers and students do together" (ix, emphasis in original). Composition, in this conception, always maintains a relational view to knowledge dependent on the interaction o f students and teachers rather than absolute authority over knowledge. Faigley relates 1960s composition pedagogy, movements such as feminism and the rise of computer technology, and the postmodern shift in subjectivity, which began to announce itself in the 1960s. Such relations offer a way to contextualize current controversies over "pohtical correctness" and pohtically-oriented composition programs and to historicize the relations between language use and subjectivity.
Particularly important is Marback's article, which reviews Edward P.J.
Corbett's 1968 essay ‘The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the
Closed Fist.” Both Marback and Corbett work to understand a particularly volatile year, one characterized by Vietnam, assassinations, racial strife, and rhetorical figures like the Black Power Salute Juan Carlos and Tommie Smith made at the Summer Olympics. Marback attempts to understand Corbett’s text and his finstrations with the social upheavals of 1968 fi’om a perspective both informed by events of the time and sharpened through critical distance. He recontextualizes Corbett’s belief that American life and education in the late 60s were characterized by competition between conciliatory, open discourse
6 2 (represented by the open hand and closely related to the type of knowledge seen to be promoted by the white academy) and a closed, irrational logic, which was often physical and sometimes violent (represented by the closed fist and associated by the White majority with discourses o f "blackness"). By looking closely at this binary, which many educators and the general public took for granted, Marback elaborates the multiple tensions that make a reading o f a
"rational" White system that had to contend with "irrational" groups of students and minorities appear simplistic. A reading dependent on this binary reifies racial and other difterences, and a truly beneficial reading of the '60s, according to
Marback, will enable us move beyond such binaries as we expose the power they have held in U.S. culture.
As Marback writes: "To provide a historical grounding for current debates over writing pedagogy and multiculturalism that resists ideological totalization within either a conservative or liberal countermemory requires an examination of the immediate responses in composition to the events of 1968" (180-81). Like
Marback, we must continue to re-contextualize moments and places important to composition by examining the ongoing relationship between composition and the multiple cultures that have informed it. However, while Marback and others have revisited significant texts and theorized the general significance of the 1960s culture to today’s university and culture, little attention has been paid to specific, contested sites of writing education in this period, a gap crucial to fill if
63 composition is to link theory and practice in the ways it has long advocated.
Finally, it is important to note that race was pivotal to education and
composition between 1968 and 1972, and analyzing local conflicts between Black
and White at this time is particularly important. This importance is illustrated in a
Summer 1971 copy of the I/D/E/A Reporter, an educational newsletter Irmscher
saved that accurately reflects the racial tenor at UW. According to the newsletter
“Because Black students have been the trail blazers, how the experiment in
minority education is judged will largely be the question of how well Black
students do, how they are seen, and how they see themselves” (3). This comment
demonstrates the kinds of pressures put on minority students in general and
African-American students in particular. They, and not the system, would be the
ones judged as they tried to change severely oppressive educational and social
institutions that had historically been beyond their control. African-American
students would be held accountable as individuals, African Americans, and also as
members of minority groups everywhere. Their academic performance and
response to the changes slowly working their way through the U.S. system would
indicate to the White majority whether such change was really necessary or beneficial. And, while the spotlight was on African American and other minority groups, it was deflected from the White majority, who, because of their numbers and traditional hold on authority, typically had the privilege of deciding what kind of changes were necessary and at what pace change would be made.
64 The period between 1968 and 1972 represents something of an anomaly to the tradition of absolute White authority at the University as African American and other groups demanded and received unprecedented power in some instances.
However, the University of Washington and other White institutions found ways to regulate the dynamic changes being proposed and accepted by a larger number than ever before in "mainstream society." In terms of activism and visibility, these four years represent the zenith of the student movements, marked not only by massive protests against the war in particular and general White unease over political groups like the Black Panthers, but also by a general crumbling of coherence among radical groups and goals. In many ways, the shootings and deaths at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 also signaled the death of radical change as it had been envisioned for most o f the decade, even as they inspired the largest protests yet seen in the '60s. Such turmoil meant that, in these years, more than ever before, universities were forced to deal with issues o f critical pedagogy, multi-culturalism, and difference in their daily experience. For most "mainstream" public universities, such dealings were new and incredibly taxing.^
Such concerns with difference led to an examination of the social bases of knowledge in composition and the academy, and it is important to note the ways interest in the possibihties of equality, by students in particular, helped bring forth a more social, epistemic understanding of knowledge in the academy and in composition. From a perspective thirty years later, it seems easy to see that
65 student social movements in the 1960s did not result in equality between races
and genders at the university or in U.S. culture. However, investigating
composition in this period can give new vigor and significance to national debates
about education, difierence, and identity and the role of language in constructing
these concepts. Such investigations can also help us see where we have failed to
take advantage of insights provided by theories of social construction,
postmodernism, and critical pedagogies as well as how these theories may
continue to help further educational and racial reforms.
The Place
An important site of writing instruction at this time was the University of
Washington, a significant institution both because it was exceptional in some ways
and, just as important, because it was not exceptional in many others. UW was
exceptional because its faculty included established scholars and teachers such as
Irmscher who “earned his Ph.D. from Indiana [University] in 1950, with a
dissertation on John Donne’s love poetry” (Tracey 176) but who spent most of his career teaching composition and administering a writing program. He also spent nine years, from 1965 to 1974, “building[College Composition and
Communication] into the preeminent journal in the field of college rhetoric/composition” (Tracey 178). Irmscher’s commitment to composition and his perspective on what was important to the field are central to understanding the
66 UW program. Ms ideas often contrasted sharply with traditional notions of literary scholarship and academic excellence and sometimes foreshadow progressive models for English Departments today.
Irmscher, for example, was an early proponent of the scholarly possibilities of textbooks, as he indicates in an unpublished letter to Regina
Hoover of Central NCchigan University: “...to deny that pedagogical scholarship—my term for it— exists and that special skills are necessary to accomplish it successfully is simply to adopt a prescriptive position that finally says a scholar is one who does things in a narrowly defined way” (March 17,
1972). Such attitudes, along with the fact that UW was one of the few institutions at this time offering graduate courses in rhetoric and composition, begin to illustrate the significance of rhetoric and composition to the University and the significance of William Irmscher to the growth of composition as a respected discipline.
In addition, the University of Washington is the largest public university in the largest city north of California, and as Jane Sanders notes in her history of the school, “In the early 60's UW boosters liked to declare that it was the best university north of California and west of the Mississippi” (39). As befits this status, UW experienced significant protest and radical student alliance by the late
1960s, and, in some cases, the University was a leader in progressive activity. For instance, its “successful resolution of the Speakers’ Ban [which prohibited public
67 appearances by controversial figures] and Loyalty Oath situations in 1964 [was] well in advance of the more famous [Free Speech Movement] at Berkeley”
(Sanders 15). However, as Oiaime Louise Walker argues, the University of
Washington was “a follower, not a leader, in the national movement” (41). UW never took on the notoriety o f a Berkeley or Columbia, for example. It could not forget its position as the “public” University for the Pacific Northwest, a position that made it accountable to the status quo even as it attempted to accommodate new student populations and a growing discontent with tradition.
In many ways, the University was the prototypical large, public,
“mainstream” institution of American life. For one thing, its population in 1968 was overwhelmingly White. Walker writes that “Arval Morris, Chairman of the
Faculty Committee on Community Services...proposed to the Faculty Senate in
January [1968]...a program for increasing” the Afiican-American population firom
200 (of an approximate enrollment of 30,000 at the University) to 750. Morris also proposed “that a total o f 1500 minority students would be suitable” (54), and this proposal indicates that even meeting the outside goals of Afiican American representation would leave Black students woefully underrepresented at the
University. In addition, the faculty was predominantly White and male, the student government was dominated by White men, and male students had greater privileges than women, a fact made an issue in 1967 before the University finally allowed female students to vote out most of their curfew and visitation
68 restrictions (Hutchison). While no university can fully represent the larger cultures in which it participates, the University of Washington reflected the status quo of the state of Washington and the nation in significant ways. It also represents a type of institution particularly significant for study because large, public universities like UW have long maintained an image of accessibility—an image sharply under fire by 1968. The university wars of the 1960s boldly displayed the exclusionary practices endemic to the most “public” of universities, and UW documents reveal some of the ways those involved in the writing program worked to understand its role in such practices.
Studying UW at this moment in composition history also is important because higher education, especially in the public sphere, was attempting significant change, and composition was at the heart of this attempt. At UW, for instance, composition was critical from the start of the Educational Opportunity
Program. Many at the University believed, for example, that "The most critical skills for academic success fall in the area of reading and language usage or communication skills" {The Senate Agenda, May 14-21,1), and Irmscher and the composition program contributed to the Program fi-om its beginning. Finley C.
Campbell, a Black Studies and American Literature Professor from Wabash
College, also supports the importance of composition in a letter to William
Irmscher: "English Composition is a field which I believe is one of the most important areas, outside of a Black Studies program, for acting as a transition into
69 college life" (July 28 1969). For at least some in the academy, effective rhetoric
instruction represented not only a passport to a better economic future but also a
means toward productive Black and White integration.
The Texts
As important as the perceived relationships between literacy and racial progress is the feet that the University of Washington archived William Irmscher's correspondence from his tenure as Director of Freshman English along with a number of documents regarding the relationship between the Educational
Opportunity Program and composition at UW. As I have suggested, a significant problem Stephen North relates about the need to broaden composition historiography stems from a systemic reality of most histories of composition. He writes, "Historical inquiry to date, based as it has tended to be on textbooks and related published materials, has been more the history of publishing practices than of classrooms" (73), a critique echoed by Robert Connors, Gerald Nelms, and
Susan Miller, among others.
Writing scholars have historicized academic work from the past—work written by scholars for other scholars or, in the form of textbooks, for students— frequently because such texts are all that remain to document writing instruction and intellectual movements in composition. Historicizing academic and textbook work is significant if we are to document intellectual and political trends of the
70 discipline. However, we know little about how scholars, and others who did not publish, performed as teachers and administrators. We also know little about what their students accomplished as writers, and studying only published academic texts will not allow for more detailed "local histories" of the sort
Thomas Miller describes. To understand better what is at stake in debates about writing education and its relation to racial discourse, it is important to look at specific, site-based texts. The UW texts I have located fi’om the late 1960s and early 1970s include the following:
• University status reports on the nature and goals of the Educational
Opportunity Program;
• Memos written by members of the English Department, the
administration, and the Black Student Union detailing conflicts among
the groups' conceptions of the EOF;
• William Irmscher's correspondence with former students, faculty fi-om
other universities, and publishers concerning 1960s educational change
and the types of texts appropriate for racially integrated education;
• Instructors' evaluations of students involved in the first EOF Writing
Program;
• A training manual, focusing a good deal on issues of race, written for
new teaching assistants by an experienced teaching assistant in the
EOF;
71 • Writing assignments, short examples of student writing, and
instructor's comments on student essays; and
• Student and local newspaper accounts of White-Black conflict on
campus and the progress of the EOF;
In addition to University and English Department documents extant from the time, I also interviewed in person and have corresponded with instructors and administrators who worked in the UW Writing Program between 1968-72. This concern with oral evidence is supported by Gerald Nelms, who argues persuasively for the use of oral evidence in composition history, in part because composition’s “almost exclusive reliance on written documents as evidence has at least contributed to" positivism in our histories (357). This reliance has neglected the individual experience of teachers and students, especially with regard to their
“motivations, attitudes, and feelings” (380). Nelms further argues that “oral evidence also allows the historian to question and thus better understand the rhetorical situations involved in the documentary record” (377), and analysis of the rhetorical situations of textual and oral evidence is central to my methodology. As I have suggested, however, in order to begin deeper analysis of this sort, historians in composition must expand their scholarly contexts, look for alternative artifacts to help explain composition’s past, and question the rhetorical situations and generic conventions of the multiple and many-layered texts available.
72 Ways of Reading
The unique institutional narrative told through the documents I discovered
at UW foreshadows today’s discussions about literacy, multi-culturalism, student-
centered learning, and aflSrmative action. The UW texts not only relate a great
deal about the social climate at the University but also reflect the importance of
the Writing Program to the University’s vision of social change and the role of
students in the educational process. In addition, they reveal many of the blunt,
heartfelt, and often conflicted ideas and emotions o f those involved with the UW
Writing Program. Reading them with an appreciation for the ways they both
complement and contradict formal scholarship in composition adds a great deal to
the way we can understand writing instruction in the 1960s and the current
moment in composition.
In my textual analysis, I follow the lead of Marguerite Helmers and others
who examine the ways students have been represented in academic journals.
Helmers is attuned to the power of textuality as it bears on the relationship between writing teachers and students, the importance of context in understanding student representation, and the power of genre as it determines what can and caimot be written, and I utilize these ideas in my reading of racial representations at the University. My methodology depends on a close reading of
English Department documents, which have a different relationship to the
University context than do published works and which powerfully construct the
73 relationships among White, Black and English as a discipline.
While scholarly articles and textbooks sometimes address specific issues
and events fi-om university contexts, they also assume a national audience and
invoke generalizations and events that will “universalize” their work to a wide
variety of teachers and scholars interested in writing. Such texts also, as Helmers
and Robert Connors attest, follow conventional narrative forms that define their
scope. In her study o f scholarly essays in composition, Helmers traces the
dependence of this form on fictional and non-fictional genres such as the
"testimonial," in which "the instructor perceives a lack or absence in the students, the instructor 'discovers' a means of correcting that lack, the students are happy
and fulfilled as a result of the instructor's efforts" (20). Because o f the power of the genre to shape the story, Helmers argues that we cannot understand "the testimonial as a record o f what actually happened in a classroom." Instead, we must "begin. ..to view it as a selection of topoi arranged around a familiar plot" and set up for a specific audience of writing teachers and scholars (21).
The UW documents, on the other hand, take part in discourses subject to generic and institutional standards very different fi-om those they mediate scholarly work because they respond to different audiences and purposes. A vice- president’s report to the Faculty Senate regarding the Educational Opportunity
Program, for example, will read differently fi-om ajournai article Irmscher might publish about the program. Analyzing these texts and the genres they belong to
74 helps address a problem Robert Connors notes, the fact that “Journal articles often reflect mainly what authors wished or hoped students were doing or learning,” (60) rather than what they were actually doing. Of course, no amount of university materials will fully reconstruct “what happened” in writing classes, but thick descriptions of institutional documents provide many o f the details writing instructors, administrators, and scholars could not or would not write about for publication. These documents detail significant parts o f the daily, lived events of writing programs that all too often remain ignored.
Specifically, the documents I have examined foreground many of the conflicts Irmscher and others faced as they assumed editing, scholarly, teaching, and administrative roles. For example, in personal correspondence Irmscher advised me last year that, as editor ofCollege Composition and Communication at a turbulent time, he was wary of "unbalanced" political agendas in scholarly discussion. Instead, he "was trying to create balance" by including articles which he, personally, might have thought were "foolishness" (for example, fi'om instructors who advocated "doing whatever students wanted"). He may not have approved of such articles politically or pedagogically, but they represented, he believed, "what was going on," and that, to his mind, was a valid reason for publishing them. He goes on to write, "Richard Ohmann, Collegein English, on the other hand, had his own political agenda, but certainly not balanced" (18
October 1995). As these words indicate, Irmscher distinguishes between those
75 who at least try for neutrality in their scholarly and editing work—by presenting a
spectrum of political stances—and those who work from one "biased" political
view.
The administrative and pedagogical texts from the UW archives, on the
other hand, show the heavy, and not always voluntary, political and social
involvement Irmscher and his writing program had in a variety of activities; they
also demonstrate some of the commitments individuals and the program as a
whole had to make in a pivotal era o f education. Most notably, the UW Writing
Program was heavily involved in and had to take explicit stands on what many
considered a rash “social experiment” fraught with political and cultural
implications: the Educational Opportunity Program. The University initially
began this program (at the demand o f the Black Student Union) to fulfill its liberal
goal of minority inclusion and to begin a process of social change dependent on
“mainstreaming” those who had historically been marginalized, African American
students in particular. However, the textual evidence left behind details the way
the University’s ideas of inclusion and of a liberal education were complicated by
the program. These complications can be glossed over in “ofiBcial” institutional
histories, but they disclose the University’s growing awareness o f and unease with the epistemic implications of English education and the political nature of
"whiteness."
76 University officials sometimes attempted to maintain an aura of objective neutrality in these texts, but the passion, concern, anger, and cynicism that they reveal are forceful representations of “real” people trying to complete daily jobs rather than “detached” scholars attempting to publish through scholarly conventions emphasizing argumentation, certainty, and detachment. The documents’ emotional vigor, intellectual acumen, and practical worries come from administrators and instructors struggling to teach and learn in a period that vibrated with the speed of change. Some resisted the change and others embraced it, but all struggled with the intellectual and moral doubt that accumulated as students uncovered ambiguities regarding the purpose of the university, the nature and impact of racism and sexism, and the role of the United States in Viet Nam and the world.
Neutrality, writing administrators and instructors found, was a difficult position to defend or live with in daily university life, even as they advocated it in scholarship.
Conclusion
The gap between attempted "neutrality" in scholarship and the emphasis on social change in daily University activity is only one such gap I discovered in my reading of internal UW documents. This example, however, is central to my study and illustrates how new historiographical methods in composition can fiirther illustrate to other scholars, students, and the general public the highly charged and political nature of all language use.
Composition is a "bridge" discipline, necessary for students to leam the language of the
University so that they can become part of the academic and larger social communities.
77 Writing classes also frequently serve as sites for teaching critical awareness o f rhetorical practices in the academy and the larger culture. Because of these two often conflicting goals, writing instruction and administration act as barometers that gauge the relationships between large cultural changes—such as those occurring in the late 1960s and early
1970s—and education. Composition classrooms are among the most responsive to social and political change because they must teach students to adapt to these changes as they often ask students to be critical o f them at the same time. Work in composition is also always public and open to fierce debates among experts and non-experts alike, a fact that put the University of Washington EOF Writing Program under intense scrutiny from
University personnel in every department, from students, and from the local and larger communities.
Exploring University of Washington rhetoric on race as it responded to the larger social arena. University and English Department cultures, and specific writing pedagogies helps unravel how educational "experiments" like the EOF work either to change or maintain the status quo, and how they sometimes do both. In the next chapter, I look at the varying constructions of "individuality" and "community" the University used to represent the EOF and EOF students in order to create the kinds of social change it deemed appropriate at a pace with which it was comfortable.
78 ‘ I am thinking of works like James Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 andWriting Instruction in Nineteenth Century American Colleges. Recently, however, greater numbers of scholars have written "alternative'' forms of history. See Susan Kates’ dissertation, “Critical Pedagogy and Educational History; Rhetorical Instruction at Three Non-Traditional Colleges 1184-1937" and Ddwrah Brandt's historical studies of literacy in practice for productive examples of the kind of woric that results from a greater attention to context and to alternative sites of investigation, such as university archives and family traditions.
' Thick description, as Clifford Geertz describes it, is an analysis of "a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, wûch are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit" (10).
^ While, it is true, as Susan Kates points out, that a concern with difference and with what we now call “critical pedagogy” has a long tradition in the American university, the schools she studies—women’s schools, historically black colleges and labor schools—formed around a point of difference and were particularly interested in social change.
79 CHAPTERS
COMPETING CONSTRUCTIONS OF COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUALITY;
UNIVERSITY REPRESENTATIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS
The white problem will never be solved as long as American Black life is an imagining, a TV spectacular, the product o f rank intuition, the casualty o f gross misrepresentation, and grist for statistical games. The white problem will never be solved as long as American Black life remains an object, a titillation, a scare, an unknown reality, and an unfamiliar voice. (Jordan, June. "On Listening: A Good Way to Hear, " 1967)
We contimie to have black problems [at the University of Washington], and I can ready for a vacation. Those sentences aren't a non sequitur. I hope in the Fall that things will look less bleak, even though they will be more black. (August 1968 letter from William Irmscher to Jar old Ramsey at the University o f Rochester)
Introduction
As I suggest in Chapter One, by the late 1960s, a crucial question was being raised for the first time for at least some White Americans: "Whose problem is race?" As Haig
A Bosmajian notes inCollege English in 1969:
A day does not go by without one hearing, fi’om people who should know better, about the Negro problem,' a phrase which carries with it the implication that the Negro is a problem. One is reminded of the Nazis talking about 'the Jewish problem.' There was no Jewish problem!... 80 There are several indications that from here on out the black American is no longer going to accept the phrase "the Negro problem.' As Lerone Bennett, Jr. said in the August 1965 issue ofEbony, 'there is no Negro problem in America. The problem of race in America, insofar as that problem is related to packets o f melanin in men's skins, is a white problem.' (268-269)
In at least some public forums. Whites were being asked for the first time to consider whether the "race problem" was indeed a "Black" problem, as it had traditionally been defined by the majority, and to consider what it meant for race to be a "White" problem.
For institutions like the University of Washington, addressing this question meant, in part, establishing programs like the Educational Opportunity Program, begun in 1968 at the insistence of the Black Student Union. This program offered varying and conflicting answers to the questions of whose problem race really was and what the best ways were to solve it.
As I have indicated previously, and as I will demonstrate throughout this chapter, the Educational Opportunity Program (or EOP)— despite the significant number of
Chicano/Chicana, Native American, Asian, and White participants—was associated with
"blackness." The program was begun in response to Black Student Union activism, and
Afiican-Americans were the single largest racial group within the program as well as the single largest minority group within the University. The Black Student Union also maintained the strongest minority voice at UW, and stories of Black/White conflict frequently dominated University and Seattle news. In reference to these stories, the EOP was commonly mentioned to defend the University's commitment to racial change and as a
"carrot" to placate angry students. The program was a crucial site of conflict between
8 1 discourses o f "blackness" and "whiteness" at UW and will be the focus of the remainder of
this dissertation because of the ways it demonstrates both the power of these discourses
and the ways they have been challenged over the past thirty years.
As I suggested in Chapter Two, and as I will demonstrate more fully in Chapters
Four and Five, composition was central to the Educational Opportunity Program from the
start. In this chapter, however, I begin analysis of the EOP by offering University
representations of the program and tracing attitudes towards race and change that
extended beyond the writing program and into University culture. To accomplish this
task, I trace important events leading up to the formation of the EOP and follow its
progress through its first few years.
Different UW documents, of course, depict EOP students and the program itself in
different ways, and one determining factor of how these documents represent students and
the program is degree of public access. In this chapter, I primarily examine documents
and events that were either made public to the University or that were available to a wide
range of audiences, and these documents provide a narrative that emphasizes the power of the University to create change through the EOP. This narrative, however, is complicated both by the sub-text of the public documents I read and especially by the less public documents—such as internal memos and personal correspondence—I analyze in this chapter and Chapters Four and Five.
The University's dominant narrative presents the EOP as an enormous institutional risk that allowed previously inadmissible students access to a productive future.
82 According to this narrative, the University was "responsible" for the growing access to educational and capital resources by minorities and a leading example o f White benevolence and paternalism. The University showcased its role as an agent of change by representing African American students as culturally and intellectually deficient, a "risk" to the institution's standards, and as politicized agents tied to their communities and static notions of "blackness." Further, according to UW texts, African American and other minority students were primarily responsible for "changing," for assimilating into the dominant White culture through the "help" o f the University. Such documents offer conflicting views about the possibility of real change for the University as an institution and very little hope for change in larger systems under attack at the time, such as capitalism. Instead, they maintain that all students can and should find their ways into a relatively benign system rather than seek to destroy it or alter it significantly.
The complicated interactions between the overwhelmingly White University administration and African American students can never be reduced to a simple conflict between discourses of "blackness" and "whiteness." However, these discourses did play a significant role in shaping many of the relationships on the University of Washington campus. Examining University representations of these relationships illustrates the impact both the institution and students had on a changing educational landscape and the way the
University leveraged its power through discourses which played on deeply ingrained notions of "blackness" and "whiteness" in the collective White psyche. Most important, the University's dominance over racial discourse allowed the University to avoid a
83 thorough self-examination of its own political and cultural biases and its role in maintaining a racially stratified nation.
The University's Narrative of Progress
Begun in response to a Black Student Union sit-in in May 1968 as the "Special
Education Program," the Educational Opportunity Program was headed first by Charles
A. Evans, a microbiology professor who became Special Assistant to the President with this post and directed the program through the 1969-70 academic year. On June I, 1970,
Samuel Kelly succeeded Evans as director of the program and became “the University’s first Vice President for Minority Affairs” (Sanders 22). Many at the University, including
Evans and Kelly, thought the program exemplified the ways education could fight racial and other inequalities, and University oflBcials routinely cited the program to promote UW as a leader in these fights. In hisAnnual Report o f the Office ofMinority Affairs fo r the
Academic Year 1970-71, for example. Vice President Kelly writes that "Traditionally the
American university has served as an agency of change, particularly as it is able to provide the intellectual and pragmatic skills necessary for upward social and economic mobility"
(1). According to Kelly, higher education is tied to notions of class mobility and has more to do with helping students fit into an existing class-based system than with questioning the validity of that system. In praise of UW’s leadership, Kelly also writes; "Compared to programs for the education of disadvantaged students at other universities, I must say that the University of Washington is doing an outstanding job. In terms of hard dollar
84 commitment from university general funds, our Program ranks among the top three"
{Report to the Faculty Senate 10).
In keeping with the program’s role as ‘leader” in reform, the EOF grew relatively
quickly, and public University documents also emphasized this growth. Kelly writes in
1971 that
In four years the Program has grown more than five-fold, from 257 students in Autumn, 1968, to 1368 students in Autumn, 1971. O f these, 54% are Black; 15% are Chicano; 15% are Asian; 8% are American Indian and 4% are White. The Program has graduated 23 students, including one who was elected Phi Beta Kappa; and this year we expect that between 80 and 100 undergraduate students will earn their degrees.{Report to the Faculty Senate 10)
It is important to note, however, that the program had a good deal of growing to do if it were to commit itself successfully to anything like a representative minority student body at UW. And, while both Kelly and Evans were pleased with the initial growth o f the program, they also recognized how far it had to go in terms of numbers. In 1971, Kelly also urged the Faculty Senate to encourage the University "to commit itself to an enrollment of at least 10% minority and disadvantaged students in the EOF" (11), a number to match the estimate of the minority population of the Seattle and surrounding communities.
"Special Education" Students
One way the University maintained its position o f authority in its "narrative of progress" was to paint itself in sharp contrast to the students it was educating in ways that
85 played on age-old stereotypes about African Americans. For example, as I note above, the program was initially called the "Special Education Program" (or SEP), and one o f the first things Kelly did when he took control in 1971 was to change the name of the program to the Educational Opportunity Program', a name which suggests a more progressive view of the program's goals and status. What this program signified to many, however, was just what the original name implied; students who had never been considered "university material" were joining an institution which had to provide remedial education and special support to help them become the kinds of students and people
"appropriate" for life at a White-dominated university. It seems no rhetorical accident that
"special education" was also the title for educational efforts aimed at the mentally challenged at this time since both groups were seen as outsiders to the traditional academic enterprise, outsiders with real limits who needed special attention if they were to take part in any kind of intellectual work.
Many Whites in particular took this definition seriously and demonstrated this belief in their attitudes and actions, but minority students and educators, and some progressive Whites, often fought it vigorously. Statements like the following represent a strong denunciation of the idea that "Special Education" students were a "problem" that had to be fixed by the University:
deeply concerned students, questioning the university's methods, philosophy, and ends, are attacking the very fabric of education. Julian Bond has enumerated some of their questions: "Are we really high-risk' students or 'culturally deprived,' or indeed is 'high-risk' a two-sided coin with the reverse often being true when a minority student enters a middle class, white-oriented traditionally sanitized school? Is he not taking the greater risk?" Or "Why should we not have an ethnic cultural center or 86 house on campus, when the Episcopalians, Jews, and Catholics often have them? Why shouldn't we learn about ourselves? Haven't we been made to learn more than we ever wanted to know about you?"... These are questions which the Educational Opportunity Program...attempts to answer. (JfitViy Annual Report 2)
What those opposing the automatic labeling of Afiican American students as
"special education" students discovered, however, was the extreme difficulty of
penetrating and revising institutional definitions created by and for a White majority,
especially since this phrase was tied, as Kelly notes, to other powerful phrases, most
notably "high risk" and "culturally disadvantaged." Such phrases occur fi-equently in the
language surrounding the EOF and contribute to the notion that EOF students were in the
same category as the mentally challenged. For example, a 1970 report notes that "Since,
in our society, many black students, Mexican Americans and American Indians perform
below their capability in their high school academic programs, most come to the
University with serious academic deficiencies. Many of them fall in the category of'high
risk' students" (4). Kelly relates a variation of this idea in 1971; "...no college or
university president in the United States has matched Dr. Odegaard's willingness to put
himself and his administration on the line in support of minority education... He has
risked much in the process!" (Report to the Faculty Senate 2).
Both these comments make clear that the University and its officials believed
themselves to be risk-takers in their endeavor to “improve” minority lives and make U.S.
society more equitable, and their voices dominated those of the minority students.
According to this position, any change that the University might undergo to accommodate
87 such students would risk its integrity and its status as an "objective" creator of knowledge.
The prevailing, and traditional, attitude was that the University was the culture-bearer and that EOF students historically had been left out of the educational and cultural loops because they were “culturally disadvantaged," a phrase which meant, according to one
UW document
that the social, economic and educational environment which normally provides the background for and motivation to higher education is lacking in such a degree as to prove detrimental to achieving this kind of education. The University has recognized for years that the numbers o f students representing certain minority groups, especially the Negroes, American Indian and Spanish-sumamed Americans, is far below the numbers expected on the basis o f their representation in our state's population. Cultural and economic factors are accepted as the reasons for this deficit (Evans Senate Report 3).
The use of the passive voice in the last sentence of this statement implies the prevalence of such a view. Professors and administrators who create definitions of "cultural deprivation" do not view their definitions as reflections of human subjectivity or biased perspectives enforcing racial domination; rather, such definitions—which concern only the
"other" and do not question the roles of the institutions and individuals doing the labeling—"are [universally] accepted" and not open to question.
In accordance with this view, many at the University were concerned that an influx of students (primarily o f color) not admissible prior to this time would result in the lowering of academic standards—that the “high” culture of the university would succumb to the “low” culture of the new students— and Faculty Senate battles raged around this issue. Such concerns were augmented by UW’s concern, especially as a state-funded
8 8 institution, with its public image. It wanted to avoid, for example, the outcry of politicians like Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who loudly denounced the University of NCchigan's commitment to a 10% African-American population in the 1973-74 academic year as a submission to social influences and a denigration of university standards.
The conflicts here are multiple. Certainly, many students in the EOF—Black,
White, Hispanic, Asian or Native American—were not strong readers and writers for a multitude of reasons. As Evans writes in a memo to William Irmscher, “The [EOF] at the
University of Washington has much lower admission requirements than comparable programs at any other institution with which I am familiar.... We take truly high risk students by comparison; these other schools do not” (March 24, 1970). Clearly, something needed to be done to help some of these students become more fluent with academic written language. However, because some of the students lacked the levels of literacy needed to achieve at the University, administrators and instructors assumed that teaching these students could and should be a one-way process. They assumed that the students simply had to absorb what the University had to offer so that they could take their place in an essentially "just" U.S. culture, which, according to this argument, would welcome them with open arms once they were reading and writing fluently in edited
American English. They believed that the University did not have a great deal to learn from these students about alternative language possibilities and traditions, about the meaning of "culture," and about the ways racial, gender, and other identities shape language use and the power system in this country.
89 From this general background, a University narrative begins to emerge that suggests that students, particularly students of color, entering the University through the
EOF lacked basic skills and any sort of positive cultural background. The answer to their woes, accordingly, was education from an institution that could provide both knowledge and culture free of specific racial afhliation and separate from the Black-White conflict so responsible for shaping U.S. history. However, the notion that the University was "race- free" itself is a product o f "whiteness" and an idea that, rather than helping eliminate racism, helped to reinforce racial domination. Further, a deeper look at this story reveals the ways discourses o f "whiteness"—which essentialized and politicized Afiican American students but labeled White students as individual, apolitical beings—manifested themselves at the University even as UW created important changes in the curriculum and enabled students to assume previously unheard of roles in University life. These manifestations were not necessarily conscious or malicious, but they did contribute to continued alienation for students o f color at UW and continued White dominance at the University and beyond.
EOP Students as "Rule-Breakers" and Politicized Subjects
Important to my development of this history is Dianne Louise Walker's MA
Thesis, "The University o f Washington Establishment and the Black Student Union Sit-In o f 1968," a document which provides a great deal of the following information. Most important, I want to extend Walker's thesis that UW had an "internal conflict between a
90 desire for changes for Blacks without changes in university structure and practice" by
relating this conflict to discourses of "blackness" and "whiteness." White universities were
facing difficult political questions, and the University of Washington responded in part by
masking its conflicts, primarily through diverting attention fi'om its own struggles and
placing attention on the actions and motives of Afiican Americans. Such diversions
allowed the University's political investment in the status quo to remain almost unnoticed,
at least by the White majority, and these diversions typify conflicts between "whiteness"
and "blackness.” The University’s efforts resulted in positive change, but change that was
always subject to existing power relations.
In the years prior to the Educational Opportunity Program, Black-White relations
at the University o f Washington were tenuous, but these relations were rarely noticed or
remarked on by the White University or Seattle communities, in part because there were
so few Afiican-Americans at UW. As Walker notes, "in the fall of 1967,...the total [of
African American students at UW was] approximately 150 out of 30,000 students" (47).
The University did start an Upward Bound program for minority and disadvantaged
students in 1966 (Walker 46), but the results of this program were minimal, and relations between Black and Wffiite reached a breaking point in 1968. Several events demonstrate the changing nature o f Black-White relations and the way institutionalized discourses of
"whiteness" dominated these conflicts. This dominance assured that change would be kept to a minimum, or at least at a pace with which the majority was comfortable.
First, as Walker documents, "In January 1968 the UW Student Afro-American
91 Society and the UW chapter of SNCC merged to form a Black Student Union, after representatives of both groups had attended the conference in San Francisco sponsored by the Black Panthers" (47-48). This newly formed union, influenced in particular by Jimmy
Garrett, "Black Panther Minister for Education, former SNCC field worker and teacher of
Black Humanities at San Francisco State" (48), was more radical and less willing to wait for change than either of its predecessor groups. A second important event was Martin
Luther King's assassination on April 4, 1968, which stirred up "violence, looting, and twenty-one arson fires" (Walker 46) and helped wake the University and Seattle to the power of racism and the anger of Afiican Americans in their own communities.
Also important were the April Days of Protest (ADOP), sponsored by a New Left coalition consisting o f Black and White groups opposed to "the war, racism, and university war complicity" (Walker 50). As part of this protest, "Four hundred students filed through [University president Charles Odegaard's] office and each placed a copy [of ten demands] on his secretary's desk. The ten demands included the abolition of ROTC and the admission and hiring of blacks at UW in proportion to their percentage serving in
Vietnam" (50-51). What followed this incident, according to Walker, was not a substantive discussion of the issues brought to the attention of the president and the
Faculty Senate; instead, she notes that the main discussion among these groups was how to get students to "not circumvent the 'functioning procedures for changing policies and practices,' in other words the faculty and especially the Faculty Senate. Odegaard also scolded the students for not using the traditional channels for voicing their complaints"
92 (51). Walker goes on to write, "It is striking that in none of the letters, memos, or minutes [from the administration regarding ADOP] is there substantive discussion o f the
issues of ADOP .. [Ejvidence of consideration of the merits of ADOP demands or motives of the protesters is absent, and.. .almost all university officials were most concerned with preserving and shoring up the university governance routine" (53-54).
An additional important precursor to the formation of the EOP was the University administration's response to housing discrimination by campus area realtors. Arval
Morris, a faculty member concerned with civil rights, asked the Faculty Senate to publicly endorse an open housing ordinance that Seattle was considering. However,
on April 11, the Faculty Senate voted 51-11 against endorsement. Odegaard was against. He explained that 'official action was not appropriate,' but urged the senators to write to the city council-men as private citizens urging the adoption of the ordinance. Professor Otis Pease of the Department of EBstory.. .defined Odegaard's reasoning: "... endorsements of community political questions would lead to an erosion of the university's immunity from community intervention." (Walker 56-57)
The discussion about discrimination in housing and UWs stance as a community on this topic became further confused by a debate about protocol. The administrator of the University Housing Service had not been consulted about the proposal to support the open housing ordinance, and he wrote Odegaard about this perceived slight. The ensuing debate about power between various factions of the University resulted in the fact that, as
Walker notes, "The principle of racial discrimination in question was quite obscured, demonstrating yet again the extreme importance to the university establishment" (58) of maintaining traditional channels for reviewing change. A further result of this concern
93 with "proper channels" was that the University seemed willing to overlook substantive political involvement in the name o f individuality and "academic freedom."
The University tied discrimination issues to discourses that wavered between emphasizing "community" and "individuality." This wavering obscured any responsibility it may have had in issues having to do with minority people's freedoms or its role in changing community problems. On the one hand, the University deferred problems such as housing discrimination and the way it affected real people's lives. Instead, it focused on maintaining proper control within the University community, a community whose rules for order were more important than the African American community's concerns with finding reasonable places to live or with changing White racism. On the other hand, when pushed to respond as an institution to problems of racism, the University asserted that it was essentially not a community; instead, it argued that it was a loose collection of individuals who, as a group could maintain "immunity from community intervention" only by denying its own communal status and impact on community affairs. The University specifically stated many times that it supported full African American integration into American life and believed in its role as the creator of culture and knowledge for outside communities.
However, it also fully believed in its "immunity" to community intervention, at least when it was politically feasible. Such stances created large conflicts indeed.
In such a context, it is not difrBcult to understand that African American students in particular were frustrated by the slow pace of change and the mixed signals the administration was giving. As a result, on May 20, 1968, the Black Student Union took
94 over administrative buildings and made monetary, administrative, and curricular demands o f the administration. The group wanted more Afiican American professors and students, more courses centering on Afiican American contributions and achievements, and a greater voice in all programs affecting Black students. Only as a result of this closed fist display of power did change occur. The administration and students quickly reached an agreement that seemed to favor the administration (their written agreement '"twice stated that the "control" and authority [of any new] programs would remain with the university'"
(Walker 67)). However, "one phrase of the statement is crucial. It refers to the operation of the blacks' program through the university's existing, or newlv created channels. And it was these newly-created channels which were used to speedily accomplish so much
[including the implementation of the Educational Opportunity Program] in the next few months" (67 underline in original).
After further negotiations between the BSU and administration, in fact, the faculty seemed willing to concede a certain level of responsibility for the maintenance of White dominance. A report of the Faculty Committee on Academic Standards, as quoted by
Walker, notes that innovations like the Educational Opportunity Program "could be accomplished without abandoning our faculty responsibility.... We must not let ourselves be bogged down in investigations and reports.. .the slow moving processes of white institutions.. have so frequently been used as a way of rejecting [minorities'] legitimate claims'" (69). Such pronouncements, however—while most likely sincere—did not always represent the majority view and, more important, were very diflBcult to put into action.
95 While University officials "stressed that the university had formerly relied on traditional
processes" and that "it was now time for 'rigorous self-examination,'" the tools for active
self-examination were not available, and the will to maintain such a painful examination
wavered over time.
These examples graphically illustrate the emphasis discourses of "whiteness" place
on "rules" and "traditional" authority, as critics like Marilyn Frye and AnnLouise Keating
note. Concerns with protocol often overwhelm political concerns promoting change and,
not coincidentally, help maintain "traditional" authority, which in this country has largely
depended on the power of “whiteness.” Most important is that a term like "traditional"
authority becomes sacrosanct in discussions like the ones held at UW. Because these lines of authority are so ingrained in the White mindset and because they have governed power relations for so long, it is easy for the majority to dismiss analyses that describe this
"traditional authority" as "political" or "biased." They simply seem "natural," and altering them, as the UW examples indicate, is extremely difficult.
This analysis can help explain the contradictions in the following scenario. Many in the University administration recognized the importance of the BSUs sit-in, at least in hindsight. They recognized that this overtly political and confrontational piece of collective action was the primary catalyst for important University change. As one administrative document notes, "While the President of the University of Washington had, as early as 1959, expressed concern that the University should provide equal educational and employment opportunity for all with particular reference to racial minorities, very little
96 real progress had been realized in achieving this goal" (Kelly/4«m/ûr/R eport 3) until the sit-in.
Charles Evans substantiates the importance of the sit-in: "The pressure exerted by the Black Student union in the Spring of [1968] generated a substantially increased commitment by the University to recruit more...[minority] students. For this purpose a
'Special Education Program'...was organized" (3). Even President Odegaard recalls, a few years after the sit-in in an open letter to the University community, that the Regents and administration in 1963 “asked ourselves why so few blacks appeared in the
Commencement line... [W]ord [about the need for racial reform at the University] moved slowly through the corridors of the University and... more substantial action in the direction of special programs followed only after black demonstrations in the spring of
1968” (1). These and similar statements validate the BSUs strong action in May 1968 and admit that the University body was likely to acknowledge only explicit statements of power such as the sit-in.
As these comments suggest, the gap between Black and White notions of equality and representation at the University was so wide that “rational,” academic discourse about the matter was useless, something Kelly, Evans, and Odegaard acknowledge in their statements about the (overwhelmingly White) faculty’s slow reception of racial reform.
June Jordan, writing in 1967, articulates this problem more fully:
There lives a man who is spoken for, imagined, feared, criticized, pitied, misrepresented, fought against, reviled,and loved, primarily on the basis of secondhand information, or much worse.
97 This man, that object of attention, attack, and vast activity, cannot make himself be heard, let alone be understood.He has never been listened to. He has almost never been asked: What do you want? What do you think? Coverage of a man screaming in crisis is not the only way to hear him think. (39) (emphasis in original)
As Jordan suggests, the physical, body-based, sometimes “closed-fist” rhetorics employed by Civil Rights and Black Power activists were hardly simple manifestations of a culture prone to violence or lacking discursive power. Instead, they were African-Americans’ calculated and sometimes desperate attempts to employ alternative rhetorical systems so that they would be heard in a White system determined to time out attention to difference, except when such attention fit its own views and goals. Most important. White individuals and communities frequently nullified difference that would emphasize the need for White self-evaluation and attention to the constructed, and therefore changeable, nature of White institutions. In this tradition, African-American students at UW called on Civil Rights- based rhetorics and communicated through their bodies. They took over properties they were excluded from physically and ideologically to force confrontation and ensure the
University and Seattle communities wouldhear them. By taking over UW administrative buildings—which housed the “rulers” of the University, the final determiners of UW policy and practice—and helping create new “channels" for change at the University, the BSU demonstrated what Civil Rights veterans had proved for years: the racial status quo was so deeply entrenched in U.S. institutions that White negotiators could negotiate, frequently among themselves, for years without moving ahead. Physical confrontations were often required to create a space for systemic action.
98 These kinds of demonstrations often were cited for very difierent rhetorical
purposes, however, by the very White institutions which acknowledged their effectiveness.
For example, during the sit-in and in many other instances, Odegaard was less sanguine
about the Black students’ actions. His comments, which, in these instances, reflect an
extension of the University's obsession with maintaining "rules," paint the BSU as
"militant" and overly political. As Walker reports, Odegaard told the Central Seattle
Community Council that “ .. the BSU had been too impatient, flouted University methods, and hadn’t believed him” (71). He further stressed in many instances that the University had maintained its authority throughout the sit-in because, as he writes to the Joint
Committee on Higher Education of the State Legislature, “Students had "been informed of the limits of dissent,' and there had been 'no important disruption in operation of the
University”’ (79). Maybe most important for Odegaard and the University, “all the new programs remained 'in the traditional authorities’ hands”’ (Walker 79). Finally, during the sit-in, Odegaard
said he wanted to stress 'the normal university procedures,' so he had chosen to speak 'beyond' the protestors to methods of problem-solving at a university. He neatly summarized his opinion about established practices in western society as well as a university: “The instinctive procedural way of changing policies and conditions through orderly processes is the saving grace of the Anglo-Saxon world” (Walker 51).
When necessary to preserve the University's authority, Odegaard and other
University leaders used rhetorical strategies such as this one to emphasize the overtly political, disruptive, and "anti-intellectual" stance of the Black Student Union as opposed to the "rational" and "orderly" methods of the (White) University. Especially important in
99 Odegaard's comment are his references to the "instinctive procedural way" and to the
"Anglo-Saxon world." "Instinctive" sets up a binary between the "natural" ways of the
University, based on years of study and a strong understanding of "human" nature, and the
"unnatural" violence of the BSUs con&ontational methods. Even more interesting, the adjective "Anglo-Saxon" implicitly admits what the BSU was suggesting: that the valorization of the University's way o f doing things was simply a way of imposing White values onto others in order to maintain White dominance. In this view, "Anglo-Saxon" values, and all that that phrase implies in this country, were considered supreme by the
University. By choosing to speak "beyond the protestors," Odegaard also suggests they are outside the "Anglo-Saxon world" and incapable of appreciating its ways.
Another example from the second year of the EOP's existence clarifies this idea.
In 1970, Charles Evans reported on the violence associated with student demonstrations against University relations with Brigham Young University. Many students at the time were concerned that UW engaged in sporting and other activities with Brigham Young because o f the school's continued overt discrimination against African Americans and other minorities. Therefore, several students disrupted a gymnastics meet on January 31,
1970, and
[b]y March 12, thousands of students had participated in mass meetings, most in a spirit of active interest and much of the time in a carnival mood. But the carnival mood and the mass involvement was by no means an iimocuous state. It provided the conditions suitable for some in the group to cause disruption of University operations and ultimately injuries to more than a dozen students. (EvansStatus Report 6)
100 Evans goes on to note that "Those who inflicted personal injuries and damaged property included both blacks and whites.... Of the 526 [EOP] students enrolled Winter
Quarter,... not more than 2% and more likely 1% or fewer were personally guilty of such acts" (7). However, what resulted was a serious attack on the [EOP] as a whole because individual African-American students, acting in a cause which had wide support, were automatically identified with this program. Evans writes that "A common reaction has been: 'If they are going to destroy the University and attack innocent students, why should we help them to come to this school?'" (7).
The majority viewed the University as a White domain, and Black students, according to this argument, were only there through White generosity, generosity which would and could be revoked depending on White perception of the Black community as a whole. If Afiican American students overstepped their "boundaries," by being too loud or forceful or by not using the proper University "channels" for change, they would no longer receive the "help" of the University and White majority. This attitude fit the University's general sense of itself as the educational "savior" for the "underprivileged. " According to
Evans, most White students and faculty members did not ask themselves why the African
American community and others were so upset with Brigham Young's policies on race or
UWs implicit endorsement of these policies through athletic and other encounters. They did not consider how or why UW might make a stand against institutional racism. Rather, the White majority seemed to take the BYU protests personally and, because of them, threatened to eliminate one of the University's few links to the Afiican American
101 community: the Educational Opportunity Program.
Thus, the University, which politically could no longer stick to simply labeling
African American students in general as "Special Education" students, could still perpetuate stereotypes of African Americans as irrationally loud and angry and as prone to violence. By forcing Black, and other, students into situations where they would not be heard unless they demonstrated in ways that were outside "the University protocol," the
University maintained a certain leverage over "unruly" students in the court of public opinion it helped create. The changes which the University did implement, such as the
Educational Opportunity Program, can not be ignored, but in University representations of the program (and, as we shall see, English Department representations also) we find continuous depictions of the "political" and "socially constructed" Black student— who is implicitly contrasted to the apolitical and individual White student. One significant result of this discrepancy between Black and White that continues today is the ongoing examination of the social and political nature of "blackness," while "whiteness" remains unexamined and unexaminable, a myth to the White majority—but a myth with the power to keep White control alive.
Individuality, Community and the EOP as a Site of Critical Pedagogy
One last set o f examples will illustrate in more detail the ways UW administrators constructed minority students in relation to communal, political selves. As I have suggested, the notion o f "community" and of "positive social change" were difiBcult ones
102 to define at the University of Washington and became more conflicted as White and Black
"communities'' came together in ways they had not before. The primary issue traces to the question I ask at the beginning of the chapter—"Whose problem is race?"—a question that
University EOP documents consistently, if implicitly, asked. On the one hand, the
University believed that minority students had everything to gain and nothing to lose fi'om taking part in the University experience and that individual minority students would serve as bridges to their communities to create positive change there. Such notions were supported by University-sponsored outreach programs to Afiican American, Native
American, ffispanic, and Asian communities designed to spread the keys to power the
University held and to recruit prospective students. On the other hand, there was also the belief, held at least by some officials at the University and many students, that a large minority population would create much needed change on the academic inside, that more was needed than to fit students into a faulty system. According to this view, a changing student body and a rigorous examination of traditional White, patriarchal values would revolutionize a system badly in need of an overhaul. This goal was emphasized and supported by the creation of such things as Black Studies and Women's Studies programs around the country.^
At the University of Washington, Vice President Samuel Kelly’s reports regarding the EOP emphasize both sides of this equation. He notes, for example, the importance of community to successful minority education throughout his reports; "I certainly am concerned about the quality of education the University is prepared to offer, but the need
103 for a large minority enrollmentshould not be required to wait for the final perfection of that optimal or millennial condition"{Report to Faculty Senate 3, emphasis added). Here,
Kelly nods to the common idea that the University was not ready to accept the culturally
“disadvantaged” and that such students would drag down the standards of the University.
He goes on to illustrate his disagreement with this idea in significant ways:
I think o f the monumental requirements. . .necessary for the education of...talented minority people to affect responsible change within the confines o f a social order which places high priority on the profit motive. I think o f the horrendous obstacles...these young people must hurdle in order to traverse that ground to the University, to graduate, and...to return to their communities to affect responsible change.... I...believe that education is one o f the ways to provide for upward mobility, and I subscribe to the concept that this must be bound up in numbers of students.{Report to Faculty Senate 4, underline in original).
I think this University needs to commit itself to an enrollment of at least 10% minority and disadvantaged students in the EOP. Such an enrollment figure would prepare the numbers of professional and well-educated people each o f the disadvantaged minority groups needs so much in their communities. We need Indian lawyers and Chicano doctors. We need Filipino professors and Black chemists. And most of all we need the kinds of changes and exchanges education will expedite.{Report to Faculty Senate 11)
In these passages, Kelly disavows the idea that minority students are incapable or culturally limited when he questions the "limiting" system within which they work, but he also tows the standard liberal line on change. He notes, for example, the possibility of
"talented minority people affect[ing] responsible changewithin the confinesof a social order which places high priority on the profit motive." Assumed in this concept of change are the "confines" o f a "social order" that will not budge or adapt to alternative social or educational norms. Therefore, students must always work within this system to achieve
104 "upward mobility," a phrase implying individual upward economic and social status as
opposed to a hard look at the limits of capitalist systems.
Working within the "confines of the system," Kelly suggests, also implies that
minority individuals work to "better" their home cultures by helping these communities
assimilate to the dominant culture He writes about seemingly isolated communities of
White, Black, Filipino, etc. in phrases such as the following: "Such an enrollment figure would prepare the numbers of professional and well-educated people each of the disadvantaged minority groups needs so much in their [own] communities." Kelly assumes both that minority doctors and lawyers have an obligation to work for their home communities and that these groups will not have adequate professionals working for them unless they are directly from their own community. According to this statement. White,
Black, Native, Asian, and Chicano communities are separate, with different goals and different needs, and what will be "good" for one community will not necessarily be good for all—an assumption that may not be faulty but that problematizes any general notion of the "social good."
Periodically, however, Kelly makes more radical calls for university change that also rely on notions of minority community:
The University needs understanding and perspective about the Asian experience, the Chicano experience, the American Indian experience, and the Black experience; and that understanding can be achieved only with numbers of students and academic excellence.{Report to the Faculty Senate 3, underline in original)
By voicing the need for educators and administrators to open themselves up to the
105 possibilities of learning from minority students, Kelly clearly believes that the University is not the only teacher involved in this situation. It is also important to recognize Kelly's belief that such two-way education cannot come from traditional forms of scholarship only; equally important are the people whose lives are bound up in the experience of being
Asian, Chicano, Native or Black in the White-dominated U.S. In accordance with this idea, Kelly promotes a radical reform of scholarship and pedagogy at universities like UW;
"What we expect... is commitment to a hard, ongoing re-evaluation of every area of scholarship and teaching, for they are both deeply affected, consciously or unconsciously, by the white dominated past"{Report to the Faculty Senate 6). In support of this "re- evaluation," he cites Ralph Ellison's faith in the power of Black community: "'If Negro writers ever become the mainstay of American literature... it will be because they have...used the intensity, emotional and political, of their group experience to express a greater area of American experience'" {Report to the Faculty Senate 6-7).
Kelly then urges:
there must be a vigorous departure from white-oriented scholarship which is the current reality on campuses throughout the country. Ralph Ellison described it clearly: "Our lives...have been described mainly in terms of our political, economic, and social conditions as measured by outside norms, seldom in terms of our own sense of life or our own sense of values gained from our own unique American experience"{Report to the Faculty Senate 7 underline in original).
Carefully—given his position of border guard, representative both of the administration and of minority students and their communities—Kelly proposes a dialectic relationship between minority students and the University. The relationship he proposes is
106 designed to both uplift the oppressed and to revise the academy in order to make higher education and the humanity of minorities more compatible. In these passages, Kelly describes what could be a contemporary North American model of Freire's problem- posing education. Such a model calls for an examination of the act of learning and of competing epistemologies as ongoing parts of academic life as well as students and teachers learning from each other. Freire's model, however, emphasizes that knowledge is never ahistorical or information useful only to help students gain employment. Rather, it is knowledge placed in an ideological framework that emphasizes the lived and felt experience of students and teachers. In the UW system, as Kelly's documents indicate, this model is both promoted and problematized. For one thing, his primary, and certainly worthwhile, interest was in helping students gain good jobs and escape cycles of poverty determined, at least in part, by their race. To achieve this goal, it was imperative that students conform to "mainstream" social and linguistic values. The UW Writing Program, however, could have created a more truly Freirean model if it had explored the personal and political experiences of White students and faculty in the same ways it explored the experience of minorities. Most important, it could have explored the relations between various groups that enable categories such as “Black” and ‘White” to exist. Instead, it continued to paint the experience of White teachers and students in "neutral" colors that were difiBcult to see or interpret.
The largest conflict Kelly's comments point to has to do with the problem of defining "social change." Can notions o f changing an "entire social order" coincide with
107 notions emphasizing the ways each individual minority group must change, by, for
example, adapting to "unquestioned" norms deriving from discourses of "whiteness?" Will
the "system" change to acknowledge and afl5rm African American and other minority
traditions, or will these groups be forced to conform fully to the values and goals of the
majority? Where is the point where an effective compromise may be reached between
these extremes? Most important, what does it mean to be unable to define a general
"social good?" Or are such definitions still possible even as we continue to explore race,
gender, and class and the way such categories inform competing discourse communities?
Conclusion
In spite of good intentions and notable efforts, the University of Washington
undermined its goal of racial equality even as it created educational change. As I will
demonstrate in the remainder of this dissertation, the greater burden of change was placed, and continues to be placed, on minority students, and the University failed to fully enact its re-examination of "White scholarship" and its commitment to White values. Today, almost thirty years later, the academy has not come to significant conclusions about the influence of "whiteness" on education even as we continue to define and problematize
"Black" and other literatures, scholarship, etc. This failure to examine "whiteness" results from many tilings, including the difficulty of unveiling powerful institutions and a mis reading of historical notions on the part o f the White majority.
By relying on the power of individual minority students to create "responsible
108 change" in their communities, the White University followed a long tradition perhaps best articulated through W E B. Du Bois’ notion of “The Talented Tenth,” which he describes in a 1903 essay of the same title that begins;
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education... among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away firom the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. (Du Bois 133)
As Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West acknowledge in their recent workThe Future o f the Race, a re-printing and analysis of Du Bois's essay, these ideas have long been a central and controversial part of Afiican-American history. Gates and West point out, for instance, that “The work of [Frederick Douglass and Alexander Crummell] would especially inform [Du Bois’] thoughts about the Talented Tenth,” (120) and that Du Bois had, in fact, borrowed the phrase from Henry Morehouse “who coined the term in 1896"
(125). While Du Bois may have codified the notion, interest had long been prevalent in the possibility of a group of leaders exemplifying and redefining Black success in White- dominated America, interest which continues today.
Therefore, White universities such as Washington, in one regard, could feel comfortable following in a long tradition of Afiican American leadership in their efforts to place the primary burden of change on African American students, who would serve as ambassadors to their communities. However, while it is dangerous to make assumptions about "White" and "Black" points of view, this position, in general, seems more sensible from an African American perspective than a White one/ As Louis Farrakhan—leader of
109 the Nation of Islam—and others preach today, if the White power structure is not going to
provide equal opportunity for all, African Americans must take what they can from this
structure and rely on themselves and their own communities for support and success.
The tradition of "The Talented Tenth" suggests another model for White
universities and individuals to follow, however. A White response to racism that places
the responsibility for change on African Americans and others allows the University to
believe it can uncritically pass on the knowledge it has to minority students. It can
overlook the possibility that its curriculum, theories, rhetorical norms, and pedagogies
might be intricately involved in racial division or implicated in institutional racism and
proceed as if the knowledge it provides is purely "objective"—the kind of knowledge that
will simply "improve" minority students as it offers them the opportunity to relay this
knowledge to their home communities. Alternatively, the idea of the "Talented Tenth"
suggests that Whites work within their own communities in order to create "positive
change," which would make visible the reality of White privilege as well as the ways such
privilege is affected by things like class, gender, and sexuality. Such work should not be
seen as a means of promoting "liberal guilt" but as a way toward active change and as a
means of highlighting the investment we all have in the political and social systems of this
country.
1 am not arguing that universities like Washington completely failed in their promise to examine their own traditions and values or that programs like the Educational
Opportunity Program are inherently evil. Indeed, a great deal of positive change for
110 Whites, Blacks, and many others has occurred as a result of these programs, change which
has been accompanied by shifting notions of "whiteness" and a move toward epistemic
ways of knowing that emphasize the interaction o f individuals, audiences, language, and
the physical world in the construction of knowledge and selves. However, as the
following chapters illustrate, self-examination on the part of White institutions and
individuals has lagged behind their examination o f minority political and social positions.
The resulting difference has helped maintain division in academic subjects (for example.
Black Studies is still marginalized in the academy because of its "social" and "political"
nature) and Black and White individuals and communities.
Composition, which has frequently been an "activist" discipline concerned with
social change and the moral and political uses of language was in the thick of this issue in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Examining its role in creating change will help us understand how the 1960s "revolution" in education and society failed to be truly revolutionary and why race is still a "problem" in and out of the academy today. I examine race and writing education and administration in the following two chapters, both of which illustrate the consistency of University representations of African American students and faculty. At UW, White students and facult>’ typically remained unmarked
"individuals" with no racial or political affiliations in composition discourse. The Writing
Program, however, constructed African Americans in ways that were marked by a complicated negotiation between "individuality" and "community" and that undermined the potential for both White and Black to create positive and far-ranging social change.
111 change that would be not only structural but also attitudinal.
112 ' Although the documents I refer to use either the "SEP" or "EOF" depending on the time they were written and the status of the program, I will refer to the "EOF" in all hiture references for the sake of consistency.
~ Yale, for instance, instituted an Afio-American Studies Program in 1969 (see Gates and West 6), while Ohio State began offering a loose collection of offerings in Women's Studies by 1971.
^ One aim of this dissertation is to understand better how the same discourse can be used for very different purposes and to very different effect by White and Black speakers or by representatives of White or Black interests or institutions, regardless of their color. Such analysis involves consideration of the assumptions informing particular statements and the political and social contexts individuals and institutions are woridng within, a process that is difBcult and can be dangerous. This analysis is necessary, however, if we are to see more clearly how and where communication about writing education broke down in the 1960s and where racialized discourse falters today.
113 CHAPTER 4
WRITING CULTURES AND REPRESENTATIONS OF RACE
Black Studies now shows encouraging signs o f becoming a vibrant youngster, respected in the Ivy halls.
That’s how it is anyway, at the University o f Washington. Black studies, offered as a major there since 1969, is in a state o f transition...
The program—as is the case at many other . . . schools where it has survived—is in the process o f changingfrom a political program to a much more academic one... (The Seattle Times, 19 July 1972: 19B)
Introduction
Reports like this one from The Seattle Times indicate that by 1973, the University of
Washington perceived a shift in emphasis from "politics" to "academics" as a sign of progress. This shift reflects the cautiousness of an institution that tended to equate
"blackness" with politicization. The University feared becoming too political and losing the "objective neutrality" on which it based its reputation and its position of authority. By
1973, even programs such as Black Studies were retreating from their political goals despite their grass roots activist origins. This retreat represented a dr amatic change from goals of the program as they were described as recently as 1970, whenThe Seattle Times
114 remarked that the UW Black Studies Program as one which promoted students who
"hopefully won't see their education.. .as merely a means of making a living but will view it
as integral to the future and survival of the black community" (A5).
Composition, which historically had grappled with the difficulties of balancing
"politics" and "education," was in a similar bind as Black Studies by the early 1970s, and
UW consciously worked to maintain the "proper" relationship between the two in the
Educational Opportunity Program. As I have noted, composition was an essential part of the HOP from its beginning. The English Department, and especially those interested in composition, played a large role in helping to form the first inter-disciplinary Black Studies
Program at UW. In fact, David Llorens, Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Black Studies Program at UW, writes in December 1970 that "Only the Department of
English seems to have won the confidence o f Black students" (5). EOP writing pedagogies, as Chapter Five illustrates, worked toward many of the same goals as Black
Studies classes, but both moved away from poUtical confrontation when such challenges became too fierce for the White majority to handle. Only in this way could both Black
Studies and composition achieve "respect" from the academic mainstream.
To look at the many layers of interest in the EOP writing program and explore the ways White administrators were personally as well as professionally bound to language instruction, I look in this chapter at English Department texts that deal primarily with administrative, scholarly, professional, and other issues as they relate to the EOP and conflicts between Black and White. I take a broad look at English Department culture.
115 especially as this culture reflects notions of writing instruction and the ways English
Department administrators mediated between writing classrooms and University administration and between discourses o f “blackness” and “whiteness.”
First, I consider how the notion o f the "Talented Tenth" played a role in the
English Department, illustrating how the construction of African American students remained consistent across the University and was especially important to language instruction. English Department officials and students valorized the notion of educating
"talented" Black leaders and the idea o f "Black community"—only until these ideas became politically and academically hostile to entrenched White interests. They also failed to apply the lessons learned from notions of "Black community" to themselves. They never theorized the possibilities of "White community" in the ways needed to create serious academic and structural change. In the second part of this chapter, I consider the ways notions o f "blackness" disrupted composition as a discipline and notions of the self through a sampling of the heated debates occurring at this time about alternative dialects.
At this point, the White rhetoric surrounding African Americans changes to de-emphasize the possibilities o f a "Black community" and of social change. It instead focuses on containing these notions by appeals to individuality and a national "race-neutral" community—singular, unified, and whole.
Communal Constructions of African Americans in the English Department
As I noted in Chapter Three, a figure important to the UW Black Student Union's
116 political activism was Jimmy Garrett, a former SNCC leader and Black Panther from
California. Garrett also caught the attention of UW EOP and English Department leaders and of leaders in education across the country. In March 1970, William Irmscher wrote a letter to Charles Evans regarding Garrett, and the terms he uses sound strikingly similar to those of both UW Vice-President Samuel Kelly and W E B. Du Bois:
When I visited San Francisco State in May, 1968,1 spoke with Dr. Summerskill, who was then president. He told me...that Harvard had offered Jimmy Garrett a...fellowship for graduate study. Jimmy Garrett refiised it because he did not want to remove himself from the political scene. Dr. Summerskill, although he realized why Garrett had acted as he did, said that he personally regretted the decision because he felt that the greatest need in ten years would be for black intellectuals who could become the leaders of their communities and the spokesmen for their groups. .. I think our task in a university like this one—it would not be the same in all colleges—is to train black intellectuals for the future. If intellectuals is a dirty word, then call them talented men and women who will acquire knowledge, perspective, skills, and self-confidence through their university education. (5 March 1970, underline in original)
Irmscher's words indicate that not only did the University have trouble finding the "right mix" of politics and education; so did young African American leaders like Garrett, who would not leave the "political scene" even for an invitation into the privileged (White)
"educational" world of Harvard.
I can only speculate on the exact reasons why Garrett would not accept this fellowship, but, based on Irmscher's testimony, it seems reasonable to believe that Garrett did not think real political change could be effected through the kind of education Harvard offered. This conclusion is borne out in Irmscher's conclusion when he agrees with Dr.
Summerskill about the importance of training Black intellectual leaders. In his last
117 sentence he calls these future leaders, "talented men and women who will acquire
knowledge, perspective, skills, and self-confidence through their university education," and this list of the positive things education can provide is decontextualized and abstract; it is removed fi'om the political and social turmoil with which Garrett was concerned. The word "perspective" seems especially important in this context because it implies that someone like Garrett did not have the correct "perspective" on Black-White relations and the role of education in his life, possibly because o f his seemingly radical views.
Accordingly, induction into the (White) academic world might provide a way to modify these views into ones academics like Irmscher and Summerskill would consider more useful and appropriate.
The idea that Black students were primarily representatives of their communities and that university education was responsible for creating a certain type of Afiican
American leader also affected the UW writing program directly. Particularly significant is the story of Errol Seaton, the only Afiican-American teaching assistant in the UW English
Department in 1970. Irmscher narrates an important story about Seaton's disastrous job visit to the University of Califomia-Santa Barbara in a letter to Elliott Evans, a professor in the UC-Santa Barbara English Department. During his campus visit to UC-Santa
Barbara, students questioned Seaton about his race, his identity, and his community ties, issues clearly already on Seaton's mind, as Irmscher's letter to Evans indicates;
You told me that as a way of breaking the ice one of the young ladies asked Errol whether he was married. Errol, of course, was several jumps ahead. He inferred that this was leading to the "white wife" question. Of course, he isn't married; he never has been; he doesn't even have a white girl-fiiend either. He could have answered the question simply in the 118 negative, but he was standing on principle. He was also concerned about the questions of community involvement. He is willing to do things of that kind as long as he thinks he has a life of his own and the freedom to make choices. (1 April 1971)
Irmscher, and apparently Seaton, was clearly disturbed by the possible motivations behind
the students' questions and needs. A track prospect for the 1972 Olympics, Seaton may
have felt it impossible to adequately align his various roles as a teacher, as an individual
athlete whose personal training needs were great, and as a member of a community that
demanded his political and social alliance due to the intense social pressures placed on it
by the majority. And, yet, he seems to have been offered little choice.
Irmscher goes on to write;
Having come from Jamaica, Errol's first experience in this country was at Indiana University in 1965. He was the only black man in the dorm there and was given the frill nigger treatment. The experience was so traumatic that he gave up his fellowship and went to Michigan. I tell you this because one of the students asked Errol how he thought he could teach black students with his white education. Errol said he was flabbergasted, absolutely incapable of answering the question. O f course, I don't have to explain to you. Attending white institutions has not been his education. He has been educated the hard way in white society as many other blacks have; he knows the black experience. No one needs to worry about his blackness. I am afraid he is all too self-consciously and sensitively black. (1 April 1971)
Most important for Errol Seaton in his interview at UC-Santa Barbara was not his literary or rhetorical knowledge or his qualifications as a teacher, since these things could not be separated from his social and individual identities. Primarily in question was his
"blackness" and his commitment to the Afiican-American community. This question, ironically, was answered for Seaton—in the only extant historical document I have
119 found—by a White professor who notes that what created Seaton's "essential blackness" was his association with White-dominated America; "He has been educated the hard way in White society as many other blacks have; he knows the black experience. No one needs to worry about his blackness." In Irmscher's eyes, Seaton's "blackness" depended on the attitudes of Whites for its existence, a claim never made in the reverse in UW documents.
White people, at least from the White perspective, do not define themselves, or let themselves be defined, in relation to Afiican-American existence or by ties to a larger
White community or set of communities.
Toni Morrison, however, argues differently inPlaying In the Dark. In this critical treatise, Morrison claims that White American literature can not be understood without understanding the "Africanisms" which inform it and help create its identity in the same way that Irmscher suggests we cannot understand Seaton's "blackness" without understanding his relationship to White America. These parallel assertions (parallel, I would argue, despite the fact that Morrison is talking about literature and Irmscher about a student) are important in the way they illustrate the dependence of White on Black and vice versa when we define individual, community, and literary identities. Most significantly, they can contribute powerfiiUy to our understanding of the way such identities are socially constructed and based on contests of power.
Equally important is the need to reflect on the reception o f these arguments by the academy and U.S. culture. Morrison's work, published in 1993, is still somewhat revolutionary and is likely to find little recognition in a culture wary of historical and
120 literary "revisions" that, for many, seem to stem from racial grievances and not "factual" or aesthetic interests. Irmscher, on the other hand, worked within a culture that encouraged
White individuals to view others in relation to the standards they set (through the use of terras like "non-White") but to consider their own identities as somehow outside the realm of social relations. Notable 1960s figures like Eldridge Cleaver and English scholars like
Haig A. Bosmajian were questioning the term "non-White" as it reflected White America's understanding of people of color at this time. However, the term had yet to be truly interrogated by the time of Seaton's interview, and most Whites had not even considered its implications. In fact, the concept is still with us and will be difficult to overcome as a guiding notion for a White majority that measures normalcy from its own limited, yet seemingly universal, perspective(s).
Irmscher's and Morrison's arguments may be intellectually parallel when viewed together and as part of a larger epistemic framework that understands individuals, academic knowledge, and social structures as intimately linked and socially constructed.
That is, Morrison's belief that we cannot understand "White" literature without understanding the "Africanisms" that inform it seems analogous to Irmscher's belief that
Seaton's "blackness" was constructed through White culture. However, in a culture that has emphasized White individuality and universality, that has glossed over notions of
White political and social interests and the socially constructed nature of "White" writing and individuals, and that has failed to value difference, Morrison's arguments are likely to take little hold, while Irmscher's fall into the realm of "common sense." In scholarship.
121 personal correspondence, interview situations, and, most important, the mind of the general public, notions of a politicized "whiteness," formed through a relation to other racial discourses, are often dismissed, while African American politicization and dependence on “whiteness” is taken for granted. Such disparities maintain notions of essential difterence between races and contributed to ongoing racial difficulties at the
University of Washington between 1968 and 1972.
However, the conflicts between “whiteness” and “blackness” could not be contained only through discursive appeals to Black community—through appeals to notions such as the "Talented Tenth" that valorized the Afiican American struggle but that also undermined "blackness" because of its assumed communal, political nature. As the next section indicates, when the threat of Black political action became too great. White
English educators changed the rhetoric surrounding Afiican American education by disparaging the “excessive” emphasis Afiican Americans placed on the power of their communal movement. White academics defused the political associations of Afiican
Americans and avoided self-examination by using the communal constructions of Black students they had helped create to re-construct these students as “failed” individuals who would not or could not live up to the classic Western mode. When Civil Rights pressures became too great, the Afiican American movement became characterized as "all too self consciously Black" just as Seaton is in Irmscher's description of him. To contain serious questions about White dominance in language instruction and the U.S., English professors
122 also emphasized the idea of a singular national culture, virtually free of conflict (except for the "unhelpful disruptions" of activists).
The Language Issue
The switch in emphasis—between painting African American students as communal and political to painting them as "failed" individuals—is especially visible in the
English Department and University administration’s concerns with alternative dialects and minority students. As I have documented, and as works such as Mina Shaughnessy's 1977
Errors and Expectations make explicit, concerns with non-standard usage were great at universities around the country during this period. Documents like the 1974Students '
Right to Their Own Latiguage, along with the responses it received, reflect the bitter divisiveness in the academy and in U.S. culture over this issue. At the University of
Washington, minutes from the October 18, 1968 "Meeting of the Academic Council of the
[Educational Opportunity] Program" confirm the significance of the relationship between the EOP English component and students who spoke alternative dialects of English:
"Another major aspect of the teaching of English to this group is the relationship of ghetto talk to standard English. This affects not merely the construction of sentences but also spelling and is a rather pervasive aspect of the English course" (2).
Even this short sentence gives a strong indication of the administration's attitude toward both alternative forms o f English and writing education. It would be difficult to construe in a positive way the phrase "ghetto talk"— which embodies a complex
123 relationship between race, class, and language—coming from a White educational
institution that, presumably, believes writing classes should be concerned with spelling and
sentence construction and leave broader issues of philosophy and identity to others. ‘ The phrase "ghetto talk" also illustrates the administration's belief that this way of speaking was "social" and particular to a racially and economically marginalized community.
Accordingly, many African American, and others', dialects were local and historical and contributed to their "cultural deprivation."
By the late 1960s, the linguistic work of scholars such as William Labov and J.L.
Dillard had helped many in the academy revise their belief about the legitimacy of alternative varieties of English. As the "Students' Right to Their Own Language" reveals,
most linguists agree that there is no single, homogeneous American 'standard.' They also agree that, although the amount of prestige and power possessed by a group can be recognized through its dialect, no dialect is inherently good or bad.... Our pluralistic society requires many varieties of language to meet our multiplicity of needs. (5)
For many Whites in particular, however, the idea that dialects such as African American
Vernacular English were intellectually and linguistically equivalent to the “standard” forms was a threat to traditional rhetorical norms at the university and to the White sense o f self and community. If linguists were right that edited American English was socially constructed, rather than objectively "correct," and that it was not inherently superior to other dialects, than what would logically have to follow was a reconception of the social and political norms inherent in “White” English. Composition as a discipline would have to seriously restructure its goals and examine the ways edited American English serves and
124 shapes the White majority and race relations as “Black” English serves and shapes both
African American and White lives.
The work of these linguists and others did push compositionists to ask new and
important questions about writing curricula: "Whose problem is linguistic difference?
How does this difference relate to other differences? How is it that the dialects of many
African Americans are understood to be socially and politically determined, whereas
edited American English is simply considered 'correct?'" These questions, however, did
not lead to a full examination of the nature of language and the role of writing instruction in a racist society. Instead of examining their own political and racial positions and the role of language in helping shape these positions, the response by academics in the
University of Washington English Department and administration was to focus the attention back onto African Americans, students in particular. Further, examining some o f the controversy surrounding dialects as it played out at the University of Washington clarifies that it was not only definitions of individual selves that characterized conflicts between “blackness” and “whiteness;” also in question was the curriculum, especially in composition, and how “social” it would become. Because the curriculum of composition is language, the ties between individuals, communities, and composition as a discipline became especially difficult to disentangle at this time. It is particularly important to begin disentangling them, however, to understand better the ways language instruction reinforces and contributes to larger social discourses.
125 Irmscher’s Philosophy o f Language Difference
William Irmscher makes his preference for edited American English known several times in UW documents and published works. Perhaps most clear is this passage from his most comprehensive and best received pedagogical work.The Holt Guide to English, published in 1972;
...if a person thinks that any kind o f language will serve any purpose of writing, he limits the audience he can write for. The broader the audience he wants to address, the more inclusive the language needs to be. The furthest extension is a kind of national language, capable of being understood throughout the country. National magazines use a national language. All media that address a wide audience use a national language— essentially a standard dialect and standard usage. English is not different from French, German, or Italian in this respect, and the lack of a common national dialect in less developed countries, for example, China, India, and certain emerging African nations, is universally accepted as a barrier to advancement. A standard dialect actually operates to everyone's advantage.
The language o f universalism is prevalent in this passage, as Irmscher advocates a national standard as a means of absolute inclusion. A linguistic version of the melting pot, edited American English, according to this view, provides an opportunity for everyone to take part in national discourse and to reconstruct what historically has been a divisive culture, split by race, class, and gender. In this view, universalization is not a tool of erasure or a way for one culture to impose its linguistic values on another. Rather, a standard"actually operates to everyone's advantage," and, in fact, contributes to a country's national well-being and status in the world. Linguistic alternatives, if they are given the same status as a national language, work to oppress an entire culture by prohibiting its scientific, cultural, and economic progress; they are"universally
126 accepted.. .barrier[s] to advancement" unless they are clearly subordinated to a national standard. Presumably, then, those in the U.S. who operate from different linguistic systems than edited American English or advocate a respect for linguistic difference are working to undermine U.S. advancement. Irmscher continues:
Acknowledging a standard dialect is not to say that other dialects are not effective and valuable. But, given the great diversity among English- speaking people, it is not true that all dialects are equal in reaching out to the total audience or in realizing the fullest capacity of the English language for expression. It stands to reason that the person with plentiful resources of language will find writing easier and more pleasurable. If he acquires a growing respect for the power of language to communicate, influence, and delight, he will come to see writing as something worth doing and worth doing well. (10)
Here and in many documents, Irmscher acknowledges the value of alternative forms of English. As the next document I examine indicates more clearly, Irmscher respects the deep significance of dialects to many students and their communities.
Following practical, liberal thought, however, he finally believes that a university education must prepare students to succeed in the dominant culture, especially since that is what many students, minority or otherwise, and their parents were looking for. Irmscher also makes the practical argument that "not all dialects are equal in reaching out to the total audience" but makes a much more controversial statement by proposing in the same sentence that all dialects are not equal "in realizing the fullest capacity of the English language for expression." This statement asserts, with no evidence and no hesitation, the idea that some forms of English are inherently better, more fully "expressive," than others.
Instead of drawing on a more social understanding of language and connecting the first
127 and second half of this sentence—by, for example, commenting on the possibility that some dialects may appear less than "fully expressive" because many in our culture choose only to stigmatize them—Irmscher makes value judgements, masked as intellectual forms o f objective knowledge, which maintain political boundaries and linguistic barriers.
Irmscher concludes this passage by subtly withdrawing from the hotly contested issue of dialect and into a "neutral" description of language that traces back to poets and rhetoricians such as Sydney and Cicero. By writing, "If [the student] acquires a growing respect for the power o f language to communicate, influence, and delight, he will come to see writing as something worth doing and worth doing well," he draws on longstanding notions of the ability of rhetoric to "teach and delight" to defuse questions about what it really meant to write "well" in the 1960s academy. At some point, Irmscher implies, we must simply rely on traditional models. Change cannot happen too quickly, especially when carefully planned out models for the future o f writing instruction have not been laid out.
Administration and English Department Wranglings Over Dialect
Internal university documents narrate a similar story full of contradiction and difficult questions about the goals of the EOP writing component and the program's definitions of its students and subject matter. Dean Philip W. Cartwright begins a dialogue about dialect when he writes the following to a group of EOP administrators, including
128 Irmscher, in an interdepartmental memo at the end of the EOP's first year:
Essentially, the criteria suggests that we would admit routinely aU students with highschool GPA's above some critical cutting score below the present 2.5 but not significantly below.... Those below the 2.5 or with academic unit deficiencies will be given other tests to determine whether they are capable of regular University work. Beyond this group, it is the intention to recommend to the Board of Admissions that they admit 40-50 special students on basis of criteria other than high school grade point and that we attempt to work intensively with these students again as a kind of experiment in instruction to see if these students can be brought up to a level at which they are capable of handling Univer[s]ity work and to give ourselves some experience in working with these students who have deficient academic backgrounds. (11 April 1969)
The "special" students Cartwright notes were known as "Group EH students," and they represented the biggest "risk" the university was willing to take in regards to the EOP.
The administration was clearly uncertain what it was undertaking in this project or whether its efforts to provide education to a diverse student population would pay off and felt the need for such "experiments" to determine what these students could achieve.
Significant to this passage is the somewhat clinical and absolute nature of the language Cartwright uses to define the program and the student population, language most common in documents fi’om Deans and other administrators removed fi’om EOP practice but active in decision making about the program.- The 50 students Cartwright notes in this document are to serve as part of an "experiment" to judge the effectiveness of the program. They are a distinct educational underclass, and, at this juncture, represent the test group whose progress will determine whether such students can be prepared for
"University work." The question is not how such students might best be prepared for such work, and not how the University might need to adjust both its pedagogy and its
129 epistemological values in accordance with the insights gained from working with such students. Nor is the question how best to educate the White majority about linguistic and other differences significant to writing instruction. The limiting and limited question
University administrators ask is whether it is truly possible to fill the educational and other
"deficiencies" Group m students had. Central to this question is how to categorize a new group of students whose academic records and personal lives seemed impossible to judge by traditional academic standards, such as grade point average.
Irmscher’s response complicates Cartwright's attempt to conduct a neat educational experiment that will help UW resolve its commitment to racial and social change. He begins his response by agreeing that the criteria for admissions that
Cartwright has laid out "seem both reasonable and flexible" (April 22, 1969), but he goes on to note, in direct response to Cartwright's reliance on statistics and grade point average, that:
However, I suppose everyone is aware that ... [the admissions criteria] will not guarantee that we get students who are academically inclined—that is, students who are going to perform well in the traditional sense—and I think there are no such guarantees, at least in English. Attitudes, values, and motivation will be stronger factors in the success of these students in English than a host of measurable criteria.
Here Irmscher provides a variant of Ma'sud Zavarzadeh's and Donald Morton's contention that "the function of the humanities.. is to develop theaffective makeup of the labor force: to produce in the labor force the kind of (ideological) consciousness which situates the subject of labor in a manner necessary for the reproduction and maintenance of the existing social relations" (69, italics in original). While "skills" such as reading and
130 writing are necessary for survival in the workplace, what is more important, according to
Irmscher and Zavarzadeh and Morton, are the "attitudes, values, and motivation" students bring with them to the university and take away from it. As Irmscher demonstrates later in this memo, EOP students seemed to differ in strong ways from the "traditional" students he was used to, and much of the work o f his writing classes involved working with and transforming the "affective makeup" o f these students: who they were, what they valued, and how they connected politics and education.
For Irmscher, the students’ base of knowledge was less important than their willingness to learn "in the traditional sense." Irmscher and the rest of the UW establishment, however, were more willing and/or able to critique the "attitudes, values, and motivation" of EOP students than to interrogate the attitudes, values, and motivation of the University and of traditional ways o f knowing. Irmscher's next few paragraphs begin to illustrate the way he assigns EOP students individual responsibility and agency only in accordance with mainstream political interests, while he calls on the language of community and excessive political activity to contain African American unrest. The memo continues:
What you refer to in your letter as bringing these students 'up to a level at which they are capable o f handling University work' may be translated in terms of English composition as their capacity to meet the demands of standard English without necessarily obliterating the marks of their own dialects, particularly in speech, which are important to them for purposes of racial identity and pride. Yet some white militants of the English profession are now attacking standard English as absurd and racist.
Cartwright's memo speaks in broad terms about students' capacity for success at
131 the University, terms that Irmscher translates into what students need to survive his writing program: the ability to balance their personal linguistic habits with those demanded by the University. It is important to note the distinction between speech and writing
Irmscher works from because this distinction suggests an apolitical notion of writing. On the one hand, Irmscher accepts as inevitable the idea that speech is local and helps individuals and groups establish their identities and community ties. On the other hand, while he recognizes the power of standard written forms to empower people in school and the workplace, he also wants to assign writing a less contentious place than speech. It should not depend on any individual's or group's "standard," but, instead, should be nobody's and everybody's, an idea echoed in other documents I will examine shortly.
Irmscher's willingness to distinguish between the political possibilities of oral and written
English foreshadows the positions of scholars like Thomas J. Farrell, who argues almost twenty years later in 1986 that a standard written "grapholect" is separate from spoken dialects and is not culturally bound. Written dialects, according to this view, remain separate from the political and social wranglings always central to spoken discourse and individual identity.
Also important to Irmscher's discussion about the political nature of writing and speech is his statement that dialectal forms are important to EOP students, a term that, as I have noted, primarily refers to African-American students. In this paragraph and in his other work, Irmscher does not reflect on the importance of "standard" forms of English to himself as a member of the dominant group or to the White mainstream. He emphasizes
132 that minority students are politically motivated and determined to mesh their lives and their political commitments with the curriculum, all of which is in keeping with an epistemic rhetoric that never loses sight of composition’s relationship to the world and its contested nature. However, Irmscher fails to address adequately the social and political commitments already present in the curriculum in general; he does not note that the reliance on particular versions of English are also important to White Americans "for purposes o f racial identity and pride." In addition, he stops short of recognizing that the failure of writing curricula to adequately historicize “standard” forms o f English sets up a curious dichotomy in the writing classroom; between forms of language that are socially and politically based, such as African American Vernacular English, and those that exist unquestioned and apparently separate from the social sphere, such as edited American
English.
In this regard, it is particularly important to note the first sentence of this paragraph: "What you refer to in your letter as bringing these students 'up to a level at which they are capable of handling University work' may be translated in terms of English composition as their capacity to meet the demands of standard English without necessarily obliterating the marks of their own dialects, particularly in speech, which are important to them for purposes of racial identity and pride." This sentence obscures the agency of
English educators and the University in regards to the "obliteration" o f students' dialects.
Implied in the structure of this sentence is the idea that students themselves are responsible for any violation of their home language habits, that they are responsible for simply
133 choosing whether to give up or modify their language use, while the institution bears no responsibility for these changes.
Also, buried within this sentence is the word "necessarily," which leaves the door open for the very "obliteration" Irmscher regards as problematic. Much of his work, published and unpublished, indicates Irmscher's commitment to helping students maintain those elements of their language that are important to them personally and culturally, but a word like "necessarily" suggests a great deal about the practical political compromises writing programs such as this one needed to make. While an ideal world might allow for a multitude of language forms, Irmscher's world, which we continue to inhabit, insisted upon mastery of edited American English for mainstream economic and social "success."
Many in the academy at this time believed that if the only way students could master the standard was by obliterating their home languages, then that was a sacrifice worth making.
While Irmscher’s phrasing in this sentence leaves open the possibility that we can teach a standard without "necessarily" obliterating students' home languages, the prevailing attitude was that assimilation was a painful but necessary process for all students, and this was the view most frequently acted on.
Such an attitude has long been a part of the U.S. assimilationist mode of education and makes a certain amount of practical sense. It does not, however, fully recognize that writing education in the U.S. is especially complicated by attitudes toward race, as
Orlando Patterson points out. Patterson studies language acquisition by U.S. and
Caribbean Black students, and his conclusions fi'om this cross-cultural work are instructive
134 to my analysis. Patterson also believes that “Attitudes are critical” (155) in writing
instruction, but he focuses on teacher rather than student attitudes. He notes, for example,
that many Caribbean islands have been dominated by Blacks, number-wise, and that
Blacks have been the prime importers and teachers of European and other cultures, which
are considered crucial for economic and social success because of European colonization of these islands.
According to Patterson, island children easily adapt to a version of standard
English very different from the Creole they often speak at home because they identify the language with their (Black) teachers—who, in turn, believe in their students—and with a successful Black middle class. In the U.S., however, différent historical circumstances have resulted in language standards being appropriated by and associated with an oppressive White majority, a majority that has not only constructed an image of the
“ignorant slave” but that has used the language most associated with Afiican Americans as primary proof of Black ignorance and their deserved status in U.S. culture. Further,
African Americans frequently discover that conforming to linguistic and other standards never fully erases their "blackness" in the eyes of the White culture; the promised emancipation of assimilation never fully comes.
While in many ways, the EOP Writing Program was grounded in what we would call critical pedagogy today, it did not interrogate racial attitudes such as this one deeply enough. In addition, a governing assumption was that students were ultimately responsible for conforming to and accepting institutional needs, which, because they
135 represented the dominant view, had the privilege to masquerade as objective reality. Such conformity constituted "survival" and the best for which students and universities could hope.
While "reality" may indeed dictate a large degree of conformity for survival, many educators and activists point out that we should teach explicitly to students the constructed nature of this "reality" and its inherent problems so that we can consider the possibility of alternative ways o f knowing in the writing class. June Jordan, for example, writes the following about the nature of Black English:
. . .our culture has been constantly threatened by annihilation or, at least, the swallowed blurring of assimilation. Therefore, our language is a system constructed by people constantly needing to insist that we exist, that we are present. Our language devolves from a culture that abhors all abstraction, or anything tending to obscure or delete the fact of the human being who is here and now/the truth of the person who is speaking or listening. (132)
bell hooks and others remind us of the racist implications of assuming that Black
English (23), or any other form of the language, can only be used in concrete, metaphorical or personal ways, and, therefore, of assuming that African-Americans, women, or any other groups are somehow limited in their ability to think abstractly or to theorize. However, it is signifrcant to consider whether those who find themselves frequently at a social or economic disadvantage, because of race or gender or class, might construct languages tending to emphasize agency—their own as well as that of individuals and groups responsible for social injustice—while dominant groups use languages that play more loosely with the idea o f agency to maintain power. Jordan writes, for example,
"you cannot say "Black English is being eliminated' [in Black English]. You must say
136 instead, 'White people eliminating Black English,'" (132) a phrase markedly dififerent from
Irmscher's roundabout "What you refer to in your letter as bringing these students "up to a
level at which they are capable of handling University work' may be translated in terms of
English composition as their capacity to meet the demands of standard English without
necessarily obliterating the marks of their own dialects, particularly in speech, which are
important to them for purposes of racial identity and pride." Making explicit the ways
these two very dififerent constructions of a similar idea create dififerent and competing
realities is an important goal for the kind of writing class Jordan proposes.
Irmscher continues his memo with an exploration of exactly whatindividual
African-American student writers need to succeed at UW. Although part of a program that, in many situations, constructs EOP and minority students as members of larger social and political groups, Irmscher also holds these students up to traditional notions of the
"individual" in ways that find them lacking. He downplays the need for students' afiSliations with home cultures to argue for linguistic and other forms of assimilation and the importance of one national culture;
I mention these facts [from the first three paragraphs] as a specific illustration o f the importance o f attitude and motivation. If a student is determined that standard English is establishment talk and he will have nothing to do with it, our working with him except in creative, expressive writing is futile, regardless of his intelligence or talent. If he is determined to do his own thing, he won’t respond to Freshman English or remedial work or anything else we plan. If, on the other hand he sees standard English, not as our way of whitewashing him, but of providing him a means to move in the social structure for his own purposes, then we may have someone we can work with. In brief, standard English provides a broad base for communication which exclusive dialects and private jargon do not. But if a student does not accept that we are working for him, not against him, then we can’t do very much. 137 In this paragraph, Irmscher first downplays the communal or political affiliations of standard English; students who believe the "standard" is "establishment talk" are clearly mistaken, and do not have the proper attitude for success at the Universityin spite of their "intelligence or talent." Such concerns about the political and social connections of language translate for Irmscher into a student "determined to do his own thing [who] won't respond to Freshman English or remedial work or anything else we plan." Such students are unresponsive firom this point of view because they are completely self- absorbed, concerned with narrow, individual agendas with no concern for the larger good or their place within a social system. The idea o f African American community or the power of a Civil Rights movement working to reform existing power relations is given little credit. Instead, Irmscher's notion that edited American English wiU help an individual
"move in the social structure for his own purposes" acknowledges the relationship between "standard" forms and a singular, non-racial social structure; the phrasing of this sentence highlights the idea that there is one social group, to which we all must belong if we are to succeed. There is no clash of groups or of cultural values but only malingering students who refuse for personal reasons to take part in the one social structure of the
U.S. This idea is highlighted by the phrase "exclusive dialects and private jargon," which again pits individuals and their purely "personal" language habits against the good of a mythical "whole."
Irmscher concludes this memo with a puzzling paragraph:
If we can get minority students who want to come to the University of Washington because they see it as an opportunity for themselves and their 138 cause through education, not politics, then I think we will have a factor that insures success better than grade point or test scores, provided these are in a range that does not hopelessly frustrate him from the very beginning. Of course, these same things might be said o f any student, but I think they are particularly crucial among those students who are determined not to be coopted, assimilated, and made invisible. (22 April 1969)
Clearly, Irmscher wishes to end with one of his strongest convictions and one of the prevailing sentiments of the time: the idea that students should be concerned with education rather than politics, and that it is reasonable to separate the two. What is especially significant about this paragraph, however, is the final sentence, which appears paradoxical. If "these same things" refers to a separation between education and politics, then Irmscher seems to be saying that all students can benefit from maintaining this distinction, but especially those "determined not to be coopted, assimilated, and made invisible." Creating a political forum out of a writing class by acknowledging the community conflicts inherent in U.S. culture and language use, Irmscher implies, will only inhibit students from maintaining individual and communal identities. Instead, students should stick strictly to learning the kinds of knowledge that will help them succeed in the
"national" culture. According to this argument, only such learning will help them join this larger culture and prevent them from becoming, or remaining, "invisible." They will have the power the larger national culture bestows on all those who conform to its guidelines.
Lost in Irmscher's conclusion is the argument of minority students and others that the national culture is, in fact, primarily a White culture, which demands assimilation and loss o f identity for people of color if they are to survive, and, even then, always
139 marginalizes them in more and more subtle ways. When this argument is considered,
Irmscher's argument that African American and other students should pay attention to politics rather than education in order to avoid assimilation seems ill-founded. Instead, what he seems to be arguing for is the trading of one identity—one defined by
"blackness," for example—for another superior, "national" one, which masquerades as racially neutral and color blind, but which is actually tied to White social and political norms. The following exchange between Irmscher and another English professor helps illustrate why these sentiments are a masquerade and work to ensure White dominance.
This exchange also illustrates the ways many White, and other, academics approached issues of difference in the early 1970s, approaches we continue to use today in order to avoid difBcult questions about race and to maintain the authority of "whiteness."
Intersections Between Scholarly and Personal Notions of Dialect
Jack Conner of California State College wrote Irmscher an unpublished letter on
November 8, 1971 to question a point made in an essay titled "Guidelines for Junior
College English Teacher Training Programs," published inCollege Composition and
Communication in October 1971. We do not know exactly why Conner wrote to
Irmscher, rather than to CCC's, for example, but the personal emotion he displays in his letter makes it appear he was looking for a forum other than a national one from which to present his case. Judging from the tone of the letter, Conner is apparently at least an acquaintance o f Irmscher’s (he addresses his letter to Irmscher 'Dear Bill”), and he seems
140 to be looking for confirmation of his ideas fi'om a peer he was confident would share his views and with whom he could be less than "academic." In this letter, Conner expresses himself fi'ankly and sarcastically and relies on notions of White solidarity to achieve consubstantiation with Irmscher.
The third figure important to this exchange is Greg Cowan, a professor at Forest
Park Community College who, while not the actual subject of Conner’s and Irmscher’s exchange, becomes central to their discussion as the leader of the committee responsible for writing the "Guidelines for Junior College English Teacher Training Programs." In his letter, Conner ostensibly worries that the language of the Junior College Guidelines rules out the importance of edited American English to a student’s academic and economic success. He indicates his strong belief that edited American English belongs to no one group, and, therefore, can be used to overcome difference o f all kinds. Implicitly, however, the exchange between Conner and Irmscher reveals the way they use standard forms to position the differences of others and, in doing so, sustain traditional power relations while maintaining the invisibility o f "whiteness." Their correspondence reveals that difference is an integral part of the American sub-text and that the central question we should investigate at the university and beyond is not whether difference—in languages or in writers—exists, but, instead, who gets to define this difference and how such definitions maintain or work against existing power relations.
Conner focuses in his letter on a very small section o f the Junior College
Guidelines, which reads in part, "academic insistence on a so-called 'standard' English for
141 all situations is an unrealistic political and social shibboleth based on unsound linguistic information" (CCC Guidelines Committee 305). Conner goes on to write that "the rest of the report is thorough and sound" but that "[t]he missed point [regarding the importance of Standard English]...is central" (I). It is significant that the point Conner believes to be central to the Junior College Guidelines is almost hidden within the larger work. The bulk of the ten-page report does not address dialect issues, and Conner's focus on such a detail implies that questioning the dominant language in any way threatens him and the system he works within. As we see in the Ebonics debates today, even the smallest challenges to the linguistic status quo are quickly brought to public attention and held up to judgement by a majority happy to maintain institutions which justify their own ways of speaking, writing, and understanding. The most obvious result of such majority confirmation is to make these rhetorical norms appear "objectively" correct as it implicitly ridicules the possibility that different forms of the language have value fi’om which we can all learn.
Conner goes on to read “The Guidelines for Junior College Programs” in relation to the man he believes to have written them, Greg Cowan. Conner writes:
as Mr. Cowan has written the report, I cannot tell anything...about him except that he is in command of the standard written language. There is no sign of his native speech: I cannot tell what color he is, from what race he sprang, which social traumas troubled him in his youth, what occupation his parents followed, which church he has ceased to go to—nothing (8 November 1971).
Here, Conner argues for the "whitewashing" of academic language. He believes the standard can and should obscure all forms of difference as he places race in a category of identity with obviously satirical references to the "occupation [Cowan's] parents
142 followed," "which church he has ceased to go to," and, most important, "nothing."
For Conner, the erasure of individual and communal identity is the standard
language's defining feature, as the following passage makes clear:
Mr. Cowan achieved this feat of self-obscuration by using the standard language conventionally.
That is what the standard language is for. It is nobody’s native tongue, and must be learned (much as if it were a second language) by everyone who uses it. When anyone has learned it, he can use it to express whatever he chooses to express, and by using it he can avoid introducing extraneous and irrelevant things into what he writes. When he speaks, on the other hand, he cannot avoid introducing those extraneous irrelevancies, because everyone.. .speaks in his native voice. If a man writes as he speaks, the signs of his race, religion, occupation, social position, and even color spring out from every syllable. (8 November 1971) Conner's belief that edited American English is "nobody's native tongue" suggests that it is not a socially created form of English linked to a White middle-class majority's way of thinking, speaking, and writing, but that it is simply a superior form of language. It succeeds, in these terms, where other dialects fail by allowing writers to "express whatever
[they] choose to express." However, what is most significant about this passage is
Conner's assumption that such things as "race, religion, occupation, social position, and even color" are "extraneous" and “irrelevant” in a country with our history of racial oppression and division. Also curious is his assumption that individual identity can and should be denied in writing, which acts as a linguistic "equalizer." Accordingly, the answer to intolerance and social inequity is to neutralize any difierence by assimilating those "less fortunate" into a different way of life—a life represented and constructed through a language that exists "outside" social and political spheres and is "unmarked" by
143 such things as race, class, and gender. It is important to this argument, therefore, that
advocates of the standard, such as Conner, locate it outside of the social realm, and
especially outside of White rhetorical norms, so that teaching all students the standard will
not be seen by others as assimilation or cultural domination.
Conner continues:
Therefore when Mr. Cowan says...that "academic insistence on a so-called 'standard' English for all situations is an unrealistic political and social shibboleth based on unsound linguistic information;" and when he says...that "every student...has a right not to be forced by his instructor to adopt another dialect of that language in order to succeed in school" : we can sympathize with his intention, but we ought to recognize that the two remarks may be dangerously misleading.
They leave the impression, with the incautious reader, that the Junior- CoUege instructor ought never to insist on acquisition of that "other dialect."
The consequence of the advice, if followed, would persuade students that they can succeed in school, and in work after they finish school, without mastering the standard language. (8 November 1971, punctuation in original)
The logic Conner uses to read this brief passage is somewhat difBcult to follow but is clearly linked to his concern that students use their education to succeed in a culture that is immovable and implacable. While it is true the guidelines advocate that writing instructors not "force" their students to acquire the standard forms, it does not follow that teachers or their teaching practices "would persuade students that they can succeed in school, and in work...without mastering the standard...." Conner seems to feel that
144 CCCs readers are incautious indeed and would be unable to consider options like the ones
Lisa Delpit advocates.
Delpit writes of the "culture of power," which includes such things as knowledge
of Edited American English, and the importance of making this culture explicit in a writing
class, especially to students traditionally left outside its boundaries. In many ways,
Delpit's position is not dissimilar from Conner's because she believes composition teachers
should explicitly teach edited American English in order to help students achieve their educational goals. However, what is crucial to her pedagogy is that she views the teaching of writing as intricately bound to the teaching of culture and insists that her students recognize the clash of communities and power struggles inherent in language education so that they can make informed choices about their own language use. She does not, that is, underestimate or mask the power o f difference in this country or in writing classrooms as Conner does when he writes "Perhaps somewhere there is still a teacher who insists on the use of standard written English 'for all situations. ' I thought all of those had retired. But the statement leaves the impression that no one ought ever to insist on standard English at all" (8 November 1971).
Conner is either naïve or hopelessly optimistic if he truly believes that most English teachers, at any level, had come to understand the constructed nature of edited American
English by 1971 or that they had an appreciation and understanding of alternative dialects that they taught their students. His statement that "all those [teachers who insisted on the standard] had retired" denies the University's and individual professor's and student's
145 commitment to edited American English as well as their role as the keeper of the White majority's values and ideals— and not simply of "objective knowledge." Such an assertion demonstrates either a willful manipulation of actual circumstances or, what is more frightening, an actual belief that the vision he was espousing was reality. If he truly believed what he wrote here, and if he is in any way representative of the norm, it is easy to see why more dramatic change has not taken place in writing instruction.
Irmscher's reply, which explicitly supports Conner's ideas, implicitly reveals the dangers of such thinking. It also reflects the way "blackness" is politicized in this debate, while "whiteness" consciously works to create an appearance of neutrality, an appearance it can not fully maintain. Irmscher writes:
You should have seen the early version of the junior college guidelines. They had all o f the Cowanisms in there that would have told you about the man. I was one who objected strenuously to the original tone, and presumably there were other objections .. .because the whole thing was "standardized" to a great extent.
Greg Cowan is a junior college instructor at Forest Park Community College..., which probably has as many radical instructors as Wilbur Wright College in Chicago. .. .I've known him personally for a long time. He has been angry and bitter ever since the University of Washington told him.. .that he was not good enough to go on for the doctorate. All of which is gossip because.. .it's not relevant to the inquiry you are making. (19 November 1971)
This passage provides only a glimpse into the complexity of the issue, but it is important to note that Irmscher refutes Conner's implicit argument that Cowan and the committee wrote in edited American English because, presumably, it is a better form. The writers of the "Junior College Guidelines" clearly believed a different language would suit their
146 work, but editors such as Irmscher, who in his published work often noted the validity of alternative dialects, were not willing to legitimize these alternative forms in ajournai like
CCC’s, even from a group of professors with obvious command of edited American
English. The persona Cowan and the committee constructed in its original draft of the junior college guidelines, one that enacted the difference Conner and Irmscher opposed, was dismantled in the editing process, and all difference was flattened out.
Irmscher's re-construction of Cowan in his letter to Conner, therefore, takes on added significance. Another part of Conner’s argument—the idea that differences like race and occupation do not matter— is called into question by the information Irmscher provides about Cowan, even though Irmscher dismisses this information as "irrelevant" because it is only "gossip." We get only an incomplete picture of Cowan through
Irmscher's description, but it is important that he is described in terms of his community.
He is a junior college instructor and a member of a radical department as well as a representative of a national group of radicals, and it is important to remember that
"radical" at this time was a code word hinting at many things, including race and individuals and groups prone to unjustified violence.
White individuals seriously concerned with changing race relations were generally called “radicals,” while African-Americans who seriously questioned White standards were typically labeled “militants.” What is especially interesting in this situation is that Conner initially brings up Cowan in a context that clearly invokes race relations of the time. While early debates about dialects nominally included a wide variety of alternative forms—such
147 as Appalachian English, which Cowan, as an Appalachian American, would have been familiar with—it was typically polarized as a Black-White issue. Irmscher, who knew
Cowan was White, switches the terminology used to describe Cowan, with his reference to the term “radical,” and his language reflects some of the ways class intersects with race.
Because Cowan considered the standard as a political and social construction rather than an objectively superior form of English and because he represents a view that would for many have empowered ideas of “blackness,” Irmscher calls on White definitions of
“blackness” to contain the threat Cowan represents, a threat that is as intricately bound in class as it is in race. Cowan's "radicalness" is further juxtaposed with the intellectual inferiority Irmscher implies by the double reference tojunior collegewhen he writes "He has been angry and bitter ever since the University of Washington told him.. .that he was not good enough to go on for the doctorate." Irmscher can dismiss Cowan's questioning of edited American English because Cowan is simply a malcontent, unable to overcome his intellectual deficiency and willing to cause trouble because of it. Such was the status of those. Black or White, who emphasized "politics" over "education."
Irmscher's conclusion unwittingly points again to important differences between
"blackness" and "whiteness";
The statement on usage is not Cowan's, although he subscribes to it. It comes directly from a resolution on English usage formulated by the N[ew] U[niversity] C[onference], and members have gotten up at both NCTE and CCCC for the last two years to preach the new doctrine and to imply that anybody who thinks differently is either insensitive or racist. Well, I suppose it's apparent where I stand on the issue. I see the whole thing as misguided evangelism—a supposedly magnanimous attitude by white liberals that will only keep minorities in the same box at they have been in for years. I have been interested to see that blacks get up to oppose this 148 position. I heard one say, "I don't care what you call it; standard English, white-man's language, or cash language; just teach it to us.. ."
Irmscher uses a common strategy here by calling on the practical language of
liberalism ("I see the whole thing as . a supposedly magnanimous attitude.. .that will only
keep minorities in the same box that they have been in for years") and especially by
appealing to the power of the Black voice. A rhetorical device many Whites used in UW
documents was to cite the authority of the African American voice to back up the majority
position in ways that would seem irrefutable. Irmscher's argument seems to be that, "if
some African Americans acknowledge the necessity of edited American English, then they
all do, and Whites who stand in the way o f their expressed desire to learn Edited American
English are presumptuous" as he once again resorts to the narrative of Black community.
More important, he fails to elaborate on the motives African Americans might have for
learning edited American English and insisting on their children being taught traditional
school grammar.
It is important, however, to consider how African American interest in edited
American English might have been different from White interest; it is likely, for example,
that many African Americans were responding to institutional structures at this time, such
as the university, that refused to question seriously the nature of the dominant languages
or the possibility that such languages were not universal or "objectively" correct. If the
only route to economic and social power was through the language of the majority, this language would have been looked on by many who did not speak it as necessary, despite the individual and community identities that may have been compromised with the home
149 language. However, this "reality" does not make such losses the best alternative writing
education can offer individuals or any of the multiple communities that make up this
country.
Conclusion
UW documents indicate that clashes between standard and non-standard dialects
and between "Black" and "White" notions of community and individuality have the
potential to challenge educational and political world views that, if seriously threatened,
will disturb deeply held and almost invisible notions of "whiteness." These clashes also
have the potential to shake up the way we learn English in this country, what the purposes
of English education are, and the relationship writing instruction has to social welfare and
individual lives. However, the same documents, especially when read in conjunction with
contemporary dismissals of Ebonics, reflect a White system's determination to hold onto
"objective, universal" modes of "standard" English and to represent political and racial
neutrality as its goal. What this conflict indicates is that we will not easily change the
linguistic habits and expectations of university culture, students, or the general public.
However, we can make the conflicts more visible and openly interrogate notions of
"whiteness" in scholarship, administration, and the classroom in order to break the cycle
established in the late 1960s of differentiating between "political" Black languages, communities and selves, and "neutral" White languages, communities, and selves.
Another important goal of this chapter has been to illustrate the multiple levels of
150 discourse compositionists need to examine in order to best understand the personal and political nature o f the work we do. This emphasis illustrates the many ways our attitudes shape and are shaped by both the curricula we teach and the larger social systems in which we take part. For example, the "gossip" Irmscher mentions in his letter to Conner would never be a part of an academic article or of an official university document, but confidences such as the ones these two men share suggest that such "gossip" does matter and can never be removed from composition scholarship, administration, or the classroom.
Certainly relevant to this exchange is the fact that both men's letters are written in edited
American English, but just as important are the larger discourses that inform the contents of their exchange. In the same way, discussing the differences between writing "he is" and
"he be" in a writing class is a politically and pedagogically important strategy for teachers of writing. Equally important, however, is to bring out the ways languages of power appeal to "objective, neutral" ways o f knowing that frequently hide the racial and gender affiliations of the writer while highlighting these affiliations in others.
In this instance, the ability o f two privileged White academics to deny difference in language and in individual writers even as they inscribe it in ways conducive to their own ways of thinking represents an unwillingness or inability to examine their own positions and their relationships to race. Conner and Irmscher, as they promote edited American
English as a neutral, leveling entity, align themselves with such neutrality; they maintain their authority in an academy and society that value "objective, unbiased" ways of knowing in spite of the power theories of social construction have held over the past thirty
151 years. Moreover, the kind o f authority obtained from larger social discourses of
"whiteness" became a part of writing pedagogy in the UW Educational Opportunity
Program, a process I will consider in the following chapter.
' While full descriptions of the administration's attitude toward writing instruction are unavailable, 1 later note the medical metaphors the administration uses to describe the EOP writing program. The next note, which discusses "emergency room treatment" offers an example of why 1 believe the University administration in particular viewed writing instruction as a quick fix for relatively simple problems of sentence construction, spelling, and grammar.
' Dean Frederic T. Giles writes in a similar way about the program when he uses the illness metaphor scholars like Mike Rose and Marguerite Helmers note is often associated with basic writing programs and "basic" students. Referring to the BOP's obligation to bring students up to college-level woik, he notes that EOP services "should be provided in a clinical. laboratory, student-motivated, personal way— something like the emergency ward in a hospital that provides specific treatment for specific problems when it is wanted and needed" (July 21 1971).
152 CHAPTERS
PEDAGOGICAL POWER PLAYS; CONFLICTING
CONSTRUCTIONS OF BLACK AND WHITE IN THE EOP WRITING
CLASSROOM
Even after we have made curricular innovations and hired more black instructors, have we only accommodated the system to present demands, not altered it?
Do we want to alter it?
In the final analysis, are the educational objectives that our courses & requirements represent acceptable to students, both black & white, who are now coming to the U. ofW .? If not, what are their objectivesf? ] I suppose this is actually the other topic of our discuss[ion] today—the relevance o f what we are doing to what is going on.
—Anonymous attachment to Teaching Assistants’ Evaluations. University o f Washington, 1968.
Introduction Not surprisingly, given the climate existing at the University of Washington in the late 1960s and early '70s, conflicts between apolitical "whiteness" and various politicized
153 "others," particularly African-Americans, were especially volatile in writing classrooms where teachers and students frequently foregrounded issues of power, difference, and subversion. As George Slanger, a professor at Minot State University and a former teaching assistant at UW writes, many English instructors at the time
felt that if we could just "break through' whatever... it was, we would emerge into a clear new dawn.... It was the 60's. Breaking taboos was the order o f the day, and I think we had the vague feeling that taboos were part and parcel of the ' system' that had shunted these [EOP] students off the academic track. So if we had them write about things sufficiently 'counter,' their syntax.. and paragraphing would improve (e-mail correspondence, 2 August 1996).
Because of the assumed links between education and revolution, politics and paragraphing, EOP writing classes became overtly political in ways composition classes had not before. Many instructors found a central connection between language education and subversion through race, and reading and writing about race'—Black and
White, in particular—became an important part of writing pedagogy. Few detailed pedagogical documents remain from the UW program, but those that have survived provide important stories that, while not fully generalizable, reflect the ways institutionalized notions of "blackness" and "whiteness" contributed to specific classroom contexts and the ways writing classes helped maintain and question such notions. White writing instructors at UW often opened discussion about race, questioned general notions of "whiteness" and their own subject positions as instructors, and connected language to oppression and local and international politics in remarkable ways. Nonetheless, institutionalized discourses of "whiteness," emphasizing the appearance of White objectivity, neutrality, invisibility and individuality, prevailed according to the documents I
154 examine. This uneven politicization of race and writing accounts in part for the failure of what many would consider "radical" writing programs, like the UW Educational
Opportunity Program to transform education and White dominance at the university and in
U.S. culture.
In this chapter and my concluding chapter, I focus primarily on two sets of documents. First is a set of teaching assistant and faculty evaluations from the first EOP writing project, a pre-quarter workshop for students held in the summer of 1968 before the program officially went underway that fall. Second, I examine a draft of a training manual written by teaching assistant George Slanger around the summer of 1971^ after he had taught in the program for two years. Along with the training manual, I include excerpts from recent correspondence I have had with Professor Slanger that provide retrospective on EOP writing education. In this chapter, I describe the differing relationships to "composition as a discipline," "individuality," and the "social good" that
White instructors and students held in comparison to Black students. These differences resulted in continued White domination and problematic constructions of both Black and
White on the part of the Writing Program. In my final chapter, I focus on some of the issues the program most productively addressed through the EOP "experiment." This final look at UW's use of composition to improve race relations provides elements of a model that composition can foUow today to further racial equality and construct more effective critical pedagogies.
155 The EOP Pre-Quarter Workshop
Background Information
The inconsistencies and conflicts which marked Black-White relations at UW
began well before the Educational Opportunity Program and were both relieved and
intensified by the program's direct confi*ontation with the "problem" o f race at the
University. As I have noted, the program went into effect in the fall quarter of 1968 after
the Black Student Union demonstrated, in the spring of that year, for stronger Afiican-
American representation at the University and greater links between education and racial
justice. Reflecting its strong commitment to the program, the University of Washington
English Department held a three-week intensive workshop prior to fall quarter for
incoming EOP students thought to need assistance with college-level writing, a significant
portion of whom, according to a phrase with strong implications, were "recruited
principally fi'om the streets" (KeWy Antmal Report 3) by the Black Student Union (BSU).
An uneasy alliance between the English Department and the BSU was established for the
pre-quarter workshop, and the issues that arose clarify the ways discourses of "blackness"
and "whiteness" marked the program's development from its very beginning.
It is important to remember that the White-dominated university, an institution
experienced at maintaining power, was able to write the dominant definitions of
"blackness" and "whiteness." Of course, these definitions in some ways reflected what
was going on in the "real world." There were members of both communities who
demonstrated attributes associated with the racial tags reinforced and produced through the EOP: Afncan-Americans who recognized the power of Black community and the
156 ultimately political nature of their languages and day-to-day experiences, and Whites who
would have labeled themselves without any affiliation, simply as individuals whose race was incidental to who they were. However, the source o f these constructions, by both
White and Black, was a discursive and political history dominated by Whites and based in many ways on the degradation o f Blacks. The qualities I describe were not essential or apolitical qualities of African Americans or Whites, and they certainly were not universal.
They represent complex individual and communal responses to a set of power dynamics we are still in the process of trying to undo.
Despite efforts at change in the 1960s, universities and other dominant White institutions had the privilege of promoting and enforcing notions of "Blackness" and
"whiteness" in ways that African-Americans, or even the average White citizen, did not.
And, in fact, the University of Washington used its discretion to revise its goals for and definitions of EOP students in response to perceived threats to White dominance even as it gave up certain traditional means of control. UW administrators and instructors involved with the EOP writing program shifted pedagogical emphasis from composition as a discipline to the individual student to the greater "social" good in ways that were related as much to maintaining the existing social order as they were to "good writing."
Left behind from the summer workshop is a set of documents consisting primarily of detailed evaluations of students and the program written by teaching assistants. These evaluations are introduced by William Irmscher in a short note that appears to be aimed at a faculty audience, probably administrators responsible for the EOP program. Following the instructors' evaluations is an attached rough handwritten document, which I will focus
157 on first to provide a broad overview of the workshop and its implications for the UW
Writing Program and composition today. This attachment appears to be a draft of a
memo about the program fi-om a faculty member or administrator significant to the EOF,
possibly Irmscher. It is not certain whether Irmscher wrote this draft or whether it was
distributed as I have found it (or at all). However, it clearly represents the thoughts of a
university oSicial. The writer refers to the "instructors" in the third person and as
subordinates and also notes that "Yesterday, the Fac. Council of Academic Standards
passed my recomm. to make the basic sections a hyphenated course "{Attachment 1,
abbreviations in original), the type of recommendation likely to be made to a governing
faculty board by a faculty administrator.
This attachment to the evaluations also appears to be from a faculty advisor
because it describes the program in official terms that provide a positive overall
assessment. The tone of this text is one likely to be used in an oflBcial argument for the
program's success:
[The program] was a concentrated effort—5 days a week, 2 1/2 hrs. per day, for 3 weeks—consisting of reading and writing. The 1[4] TA's who taught reported that the groups were highly responsive, that many of them as instruct[ors] found it the most valuable teaching experience of their lives. For the first time, they had to assess what they were doing and defend (verbalize) why they were doing it. One group, for instance, refused to write until the instructor first taught them how. He did not easily persuade them that that wasn't precisely the way one went about learning how to write. ( Attachment to Teaching Assistants’ Evaluations, abbreviations from original)
It is interesting to note that the instructors' needed to explain their pedagogies in ways they had not in the past. Such a statement implicitly acknowledges that there were
158 greater differences between instructors and students in the EOF workshop classes than there had been in previous composition classes at UW. How else to account for the fact that instructors "for the first time" had to make explicit to students their methodologies and theoretical bases for writing? What was it about these students and the discourses they were a part of that forced teaching assistants to create new languages for their classrooms in order to convey ideas, attitudes, and activities previous students may have understood in more "intuitive" ways? Asking these questions can help composition studies use examples like the UW HOP program to understand better how we can explain our methods and theories to students, the academy, the public, and, maybe most important, ourselves. This process will involve acknowledging in more depth the bonds language has to communal and individual identity as well as the ways race relations have influenced individuals and communities in and out of the classroom.
As the writer of this memo suggests throughout the document, answers to these questions will never simply be "determined" or settled "once and for all." Instead, they must be constantly negotiated and renegotiated in individual classroom settings responding to changing social, political, and cultural attitudes. This process of cultural critique can enable and be enabled by the writing process, but both processes are difficult and allow neither students nor teachers the luxury of bypassing power issues in the classroom and language's role in creating and maintaining a stratified society. Part of such a process is hinted at below in another excerpt from the attachment to the instructors' evaluations, and, while here the negotiation process is met with confusion and exasperation, elsewhere in these documents it is met with hostility:
159 Cannot begin to convey the infinite complexities of things that have happened since last Spring. SuflBce it to say that the BSU completely reversed its position concerning the pre-aut. program and the arrangements for F[reshman] E[nglish] this Fall. The result is that the new demands were met with a compromise.
The pre-aut. program, instead of being segregated (as originally intended) was integrated{Attachment to Teaching Assistants' Evaluations I).
Clearly the power struggles between the Black Student Union and the English
Department, although barely described here, were "infinitely complex." Negotiations between the Black Student Union and the English Department were tense before the EOF program went into effect and became more complicated once Afiican-American students requested, and received, greater representation in curricular, pedagogical, and administrative matters. Such negotiations were also unprecedented. Never in the past had students at UW been given the kind of authority accorded the BSU, and, as this writer notes, one divisive factor in the dispute between the BSU and the UW administration was the makeup of the EOF classes. This concern carried all the implications of segregation verses integration, an issue that had been playing out locally for years in public schools,
Woolworth's, and the work place and that also went to the heart of the national character of the U.S. The perceived "flip-flop" of the BSU represents many things but, perhaps most important, Afiican American uncertainty over the best way to intermingle
"blackness" and "whiteness" in a writing classroom created by and subservient to White interests.
As will become more clear with further examples, also at stake was the issue of power itself. While integration was an important theoretical and pedagogical issues for
160 both the White administration and the Black Students, just as significant to both parties
was who got to make such decisions regarding the makeup of the class, class assignments,
etc. In addition, a crucial difference between the two groups was that Afiican-American
students in general and the BSU in particular saw education and political struggles as
intimately linked. The White administration and faculty, on the other hand often seemed
blind eye to their full political investment in whiteness as they played with racial discourses to their benefit. The issue of who decided, for example, whether first-year writing classes
would be integrated or segregated by race was viewed as essential to the educational
process by Afiican-American students tired of seemingly "objective" institutions helping to maintain White dominance. Administrators and faculty, on the other hand, made it clear that they frequently thought the BSU was playing power games to no useful end—simply because it could.
That the University compromised in this instance—by holding integrated classes at the request of the BSU—and in many others reflects its willingness to offer the BSU more control of curricula and also, perhaps, its concern over being labeled racist if it refused.
When it came to important decision making, the University realized it could not always simply dictate its position as it had in the past. It conceded authority in many cases, but when it felt vulnerable to exposure as a political entity bound to more than simply the
"best and brightest of the Western tradition," it used its control of White, academic discourses to check Black power and maintain its own "unquestionable" authority. It constructed African American students as communal, political subjects and encouraged them to think of themselves that way when it was politically feasible or not very
161 threatening to do so. However, the University maintained that these students should
concentrate on "education" rather than "politics" when it felt threatened. It also demanded
a traditional notion o f "individuality" from African-American students when these students'
alliances proved difficult to handle. Finally, it reserved the right to claim for itself a
neutral "objectivity" in order to quench the threats of students it believed to be simply
acting out of "political interest" and not in the best interests of "pure knowledge."
White Instructors' Evaluating Students and Constructing "Blackness"
Irmscher and the teaching assistants more specifically detail some of the
complexities surrounding the program, and their comments establish the rewards and
disappointments White teachers got from the experience along with their attitudes toward
race and writing at UW. All the teaching assistants' evaluations are anonymous, as
Irmscher notes in his introduction, "I have reproduced [the instructors'] remarks
anonymously simply because they were asked to write to me personally. If they had been
asked to write for a wider audience, the comments may have been more polished, but less
spontaneous"{Introduction to Teaching Assistattts' Evaluations). In fact, many of the
comments do seem "spontaneous" in their appraisals o f the program and of the
significance of race to the success or failure of their efforts: they are blunt, enthusiastic,
confused and hostile at the same time. These conflicts among different instructors and within individual instructors' accounts can be explained in part by the fact that fourteen different instructors taught fourteen different sections o f students who, at least in some cases, seemed very different from those they were used to. The conflicts can also be
162 explained, however, by the conflict between the instructors' interest in wrestling with racial conflict and their inability or reluctance to politicize "whiteness" and their own subject positions in the same ways that they politicized "blackness" and African-American students.
Some basic information the instructors provide about the program will help begin this story. All the sections were "racially mixed," and all but one of the instructors make clear references to the racial makeup of their classes and/or to the BSU in ways that illustrate the importance of race and racial politics to the workshop. Even the instructor who does not specifically mention race or the BSU writes about the problems with
"recruiting efforts" for the program; noting that many of the recruited students "lacked basic language skills" (4), the instructor makes a veiled reference to race since the students
"recruited" for the program were African-Americans done so as part of the University's agreement with the BSU.
The classes ranged in their diversity, however. Some sections were predominantly
African-American— one instructor writes that all but one member of his or her class was a
BSU member {Teaching Assistants' Evaluations 1)— while others write that three quarters of the class were Black or members of the BSU {Teaching Assistants’ Evaluations 2, 7).
Still other Instructors note that the classes were evenly split between Black and White or write something like the following; "I had only three black students.. .and although I would have liked several more, especially men, I found the combination of Black, Chinese
American, G.I. veterans and ordinary" white students stimulating and enlightening to everyone—especially the young white students" (5, my emphasis). This brief mention of
163 "Chinese-American[s]" and references to "Orientals" and a Native American poem by two other instructors are the only references to racial difference other than Black and White in the evaluations. In fact, the Black-White binary is so fixed in these texts that one instructor is compelled to note that "veiy early on...my class split in two" but that "the schism was not a racial one" (8) in order to differentiate this class fi"om the vast majority whose breakdowns appeared to be based on a Black-White split.
As I have noted, the instructors' responses to the programs range widely also, but common threads include a clear displeasure that priorities were confused by the parties involved in the program's planning, which, as some participants noted, may have resulted from the extremely short planning time involved. Many comment that too many parties were involved in setting the priorities for the program (of which the writing component was only a part), and one group the instructors thought had too much power was the
Black Student Union. Irmscher sums up this attitude in his introduction to the evaluations:
What is clear to me is that a program of this kind can be extremely helpful...but that its full success depends upon the willingness o f the individual student to work intently and upon conditions that allow the instructor fi-eedom to do his work uninterruptedly. What is not clear to me is whether the chief emphasis of the [HOP] program this year was academic, social, or ethnic. It could conceivably be all three if the priorities were clearly defined and observed. If they are not, we encounter the kind of confusion, frustration, and lack of success we experienced upon some occasions this year.... I think full credit for what success we have had should go to a group of young instructors who, I know, worked with a sense of true commitment to the effort. {Introduction to Teaching Assistants' Evaluations)
164 In this passage, Irmscher sets up a dichotomy between teacher and student that valorizes the teachers and subtly puts the onus of summer school problems on students, and, as we shall see, more specifically on the Black Student Union, an idea expressed throughout the evaluations. Important to this idea is Irmschefs concern over "priorities," something brought up explicitly in several of the teaching assistants' evaluations and implicitly in virtually every one. The following statement, which echoes Irmschefs, sums up the majority position of the teachers;
There was a failure, I think, to establish a clear system of priorities for the students to follow. Nominally, the classes were the most important activities, but in actuality the students were pulled out of class sessions for a whole variety of non-academic reasons: (1) an evaluative test; (2) registrations; (3) advising; (4) a BSU political meeting; (5) rush week activities. {Teaching Assistants' Evaluations 9)
Several instructors name all or many of these disturbances as problems with the pre-quarter workshop, but most focus on the BSU as the primary problem. Irmscher and his teaching assistants were exasperated with the fact that the BSU had asked all EOF students to sign up for the summer workshop but that classroom attendance for these students was frequently poor. They were especially frustrated that the BSU made many other demands of the Afiican-American students, including scheduling talks and meetings during the times some of the students were scheduled to be in their writing classes. The following remark, though particularly strident, is by no means unrepresentative:
Something must be done to contain the BSU. These people are constricting students by their rigorous schedule of meetings— even to the point of calling meetings for 9:30 and 12:30, during class time. There seemed to be no reason of this, beyond a show of power and control. Their indoctrination confuses more than it clarifies. I had one black student ask me after class if I were black—it didn't seem possible that my attitudes and concerns could belong to what she had been taught white people were.
165 This last is probably not the province of your oflBce; the BSU usurping class time may be, however. {Teaching Assistants' Evaluations underline5, in original)
There is no question that the BSU, and other factors, interrupted the summer workshop in ways that most universities and instructors would find difiScult to accept.
However, from a vantage point of almost thirty years later, it is easier to see how this group disrupted the workshop and the instructors' sense of themselves and their discipline in ways conducive to contemporary theory of language and the self. It is also important to acknowledge the ways the BSU "disruptions" influenced the move Berlin notes beginning in the 1960s toward a more epistemic understanding of rhetoric and education, a move which has yet to be completed for reasons significant to composition today. In order to unravel this importance, I want to return to the three categories traditionally competing for English educators' attention—composition as a discipline, the "individual" student, and the "social good"—in order to understand how they relate to the UW EOF question of
"priorities," and, in particular to see how they are complicated by new notions of
"ethnicity" in the writing class.
Composition as a Discipline, "Individual" Students, the Social Good, atid the "Problem " o f Ethnicity
Important to this understanding is the BSU's role in the pre-quarter workshop and Irmscher's concerns with whether "the chief emphasis o f the [EOF]... was academic, social, or ethnic" and with the "individual" student. Irmscher's three categories provide an
166 interesting parallel to composition as a discipline," "the individual" student, and "the social good" and illustrate the way composition at UW worked with these ideas to renegotiate traditional priorities in writing instruction. They also illustrate important slippage among these terms, slippage the BSU, both actively and simply by its presence on campus, helped bring to light.
As most of the evaluations note, what concerned the writing staff most about the pre-quarter workshop was the idea that the academic side of things got lost in the confusion. The BSU disturbances named above overshadowed composition as a discipline, and a comment such as the following illustrates the general feeling that students did not learn to write as they should have;
No thanks to the BSU for the lack of priorities set in the last three weeks. From what I saw, the social experience looked like a good one for the new students. But I do think some judgments about priorities are necessary.... Couldn't [the BSU's] support go to those black students who need academic help by encouraging them to get to work?{Teaching Assistants’ Evaluations 3)
The repetitive use of the word "priorities" indicates the strong concern that students' "academic" work was lacking, and such academic work is described by sentences like the following: "We talked a lot about writing, organization, logic, development and so on" (8). Another instructor writes in more detail that
At the end of the session, most of the students had made progress in distinguishing a theme from a summary, developing a topic from thesis to paragraph to theme, supporting the thesis with some kind o f argument, and all of them recognized the need for making their writing more concrete. A few had become interested in playing with language and imagery. If nothing else, each student has learned what the expectations of Freshman English are. (2)
167 Many instructors write about "themes," "summaries," and "arguments" in reference
to readings they used from Afiican-American writers such as Langston Hughes as well as
more traditional selections. However, the impression the instructors leave is that, although the students were capable of reading and discussing the readings presented, their
command of some sort of decontextualized writing skills (their general abilities to do such things as "organize" and "develop" or "recognize a theme") were frequently lacking. As the second writer suggests, the belief also existed that these decontextualized skills make up composition as a discipline (knowing such things would give students the "keys" to
Freshman English) and that the specific reading and writing assignments for each composition class were secondary to larger general principles of "writing." The instructors' references to the "academic" side of the workshop match Irmscher's concern with the "academic" when he questions whether the emphasis of the summer workshop was "academic, social, or ethnic," and both reflect "composition as a discipline:" the notion that "facts" and "skills" of writing are constant, transcend such things as race and history, and can be passed along from generation to generation.
Further, both Irmscher and the teaching assistants' references to the "social" aspects of the summer workshop parallel the notion of the social good, although the emphasis is somewhat different from others I have cited. Applebee and Berlin, for example, in their studies note pedagogies whose aim is to promote large, typically liberal, goals of social improvement, while Irmscher and his instructors discuss college traditions such as fraternities and political organizations. However, the importance of community and of the academy—writing classes in particular—providing opportunities for community
168 and for an understanding of the social nature of language and the self is the same. It is
also significant to note that, in the example I cite above, the instructor believes the "social"
opportunities the BSU provided many Afiican-Americans to be important but clearly
secondary to the specifics of "writing" in some broadly disciplinary way, the dominant
attitude expressed in the evaluations.
What is left in Irmscher’s trio of terms is the troublesome one, then, the "ethnic,"
an important bridge in a contemporary reading of the relationship between composition as
a discipline, "individual" students, and the social good because it relates directly to
Irmscher’s notion of "the social" and his initial emphasis in this paragraph on "individual"
students. In this context, "ethnic" is a thinly coded word for "Black," but it is also a word important in its implication that not only Afiican-Americans but Hispanic Americans,
Native Americans, and others were beginning to or soon would request greater "inclusion" in the university curriculum. Understanding how such a term connects and problematizes the individual and the social— and both of their relationships to composition—sheds light on the conflicted notions of the "social good" highly visible today through educational efforts at multi-culturalism.
The term "ethnic" acts as a bridge in many ways. First, it must be noted that the
1960s was the first time in the history of the U.S. public university that a White administrator like Irmscher would worry about whether the emphasis in a writing class was too "ethnic." The term has ties to a highly specific kind of community that immediately is more recognizable, more easily historicized, and more difficult for the
White majority to deal with than abstract notions of the "social good," which previously
169 had been more easily definable as "for the good of the White majority, especially the middle and upper classes." The instructors' evaluations virtually always define individual
Afiican-American students by their race, as in other UW EOF documents, and the following statements very specifically highlight some of the differences instructors noted between White and Black students. Defining the discrepancies between "ethnicities," especially between Black and White, was especially significant at this time, and these disparities reflect conflicting ideas about the two group's relationships to "identity" and
"ethnicity."
There is much fear, on the part of Freshmen, about success or failure at the U. The regular students were, for the most part, quite dependent on me for comments and encouragement, and eager for suggestions. The few blacks I had contact with showed none of this. It seemed clear to me, at least within the small group of students I met, that the regular students were suffering from isolation and, in a few cases, hovering parents, while the blacks were finding a good deal of support among their own peers. (3)
The only difference I noticed was that literature dealing with Black problems motivated papers fi"om the Black which were superior in thought and power compared to those papers fi-om Whites written on White problems. (7)
The white students were more oriented towards writing, less interested in discussion, particularly if the race problem was the topic. The black students, when they attended, were very articulate, veiy vivacious—but not much luck with writing, unfortunately. (10)
According to the instructors, individual African-American students were frequently more oral, less literate, more community-oriented, and more in touch with their "ethnicity" as a foundation for their identities than White students. Therefore, writers such as
Langston Hughes were used as motivational tools designed to meet the needs of these students in specific classroom contexts. This emphasis on "ethnicity" clearly opened the
170 possibility for questions of race and "racial problems" to be asked ofall students and faculty. Significantly, though, this instance is the only one where the instructors reference
"white problems," and no where do we get a definition of this phrase or a discussion of the relationship between "white problems" and individual White students' identities. Questions of ethnicity and its relationship to individuality and to discourse were unevenly distributed in the UW EOP summer workshop, as they continue to be today.
The University's shifting and politically related constructions of Afiican-American students reflect its attempts to balance truly difficult questions about the "social good" with a traditional emphasis on individual education for "personal" success. On the one hand, the University administration, the English Department, and English instructors emphasize Afiican-American students as "always already" racially and politically affiliated, tags that are limiting in their own way. On the other hand, these same groups felt the EOP classes were in danger o f becoming too "Black" and that Afiican-American students'
"blackness" and racial affiliation were superseding a more objective, neutral notion of composition as a discipline and impinging on "individual" students' abilities to succeed in traditional ways at the university. For Irmscher and his teaching assistants, the concern with "blackness" in the writing workshop set up a dynamic of competing interests between
"blackness" and "whiteness," and such competition made visible the idea that any sort of general "social good" would be difficult to come by and highly contested.
This conflict is evident when Irmscher suggests that the "full success [of the program] depends upon the willingness of theindividual student to work intently and upon conditions that allow the instructor fi-eedom to do his work uninterruptedly"
171 (emphasis added). Such a comment suggests that African-American students are both
members of larger political and social communitiesand individuals responsible for
classroom attendance and work—while White students do not have the same conflicts.
This idea also reverberates in the instructors' evaluations in several ways. First, as I have
noted, the primary concern that the instructors had was the BSU's interference with class
time and the fact that African-American students seemed to have their priorities "mixed
up." A parallel concern was that the African-American students simply did not show up to
class or commit themselves to school work in the same ways as the White students. While some instructors mention that there was trouble with attendance for both Black and
White, the following comments represent the racial trend most instructors found:
Six of the seven regular students and three of the eight [EOP] students completed the program. (9)
Not too many comments on Pre-Autumn program. It was too bad the black kids didn't show up more regularly. .. As for practical results in writing, the three non-[EOP] students improved and got some sort of head start. The others - no. They just weren't there enough. (10)
The black students (and one white student...) did not attend regularly enough for me to teach them much of anything. From some of them I received only one short paragraph. It was also difficult to arrange private consultations. (10)
Given these concerns with African-American students' attendance and writing production, it is not difficult, then, to read instructors' seemingly race-free comments in temis of Black-White conflict. This reading is all the more viable because of these instructors' emphasis on "commitment" and "motivation," concerns which foreshadow
Irmscher's focus on these ideas and their relationship to individual scholastic achievement
172 in the memo to Dean Cartwright concerning alternative dialects of English (see Chapter
Four);
The main problem was commitment. I felt that much of my time, students' time, and somebody's money were wasted. (3)
Many of the students in the Pre-Autumn Program.. .lacked motivation and therefore it was very difBcult to teach them.. basic skills.... Many students simply refused to do assignments. (4)
The racial comparison is explicit in the following statement, one that recognizes the "hard work" of the White students in the class and their ability to set the proper tone for everybody else:
From my conversations with other instructors, I gather that the Basic sections tended to be much more diflBcult to teach, stormier with poor attendance, but I think the presence o f several really eager, hard-working white students helped keep my class running smoothly. Also, the smallness of the class encouraged a friendly, informal atmosphere which. I'm sure, was as attractive to the Black students as to me... .(6)
In these passages, Irmscher and the instructors draw a comparison between some notion of the "ahistorical" ideal student—that is, a "regular" White student motivated to go to school for personal gain rather than a sense o f racial reform and to work hard at traditional academic subjects without seriously questioning either the subject matter or the pedagogy used—and students belonging to groups like the BSU. According to this argument, illustrated in Irmscher's comments and throughout the instructors' evaluations, when students identify themselves first as individuals and second as members of a political or racial group, they have a better chance of focusing solely on "academic" work as defined by the instructor and the university. They are also less likely to inhibit the
"fi-eedom" of the instructor, anindividual working ostensibly out of academic interest and
173 not from the same sorts of political and racial biases groups like the BSU espouse.
"Commitment," in this scheme, means commitment to something "pure" and apolitical: to
coursework, to education, to knowledge removed from social influences. Despite its
rhetoric of community and change, the University viewed the members of the Black
Student Union, as well as other African-American students, as individual students
responsible only for school work when political questions and alliances threatened to
overwhelm the curriculum and raise the possibility of serious racial and educational
reform. Such students were expected to fit in the existing academic and social cultures, cultures emphasizing individuality and personal success over social involvement and cultures arguably created directly out of Black degradation.
Thus, to a traditional concern with composition as a discipline, the individual
student, and the "social good," we must add Irmscher's concern with the "ethnic" in any study of writing pedagogy from the 1960s through today, especially as this concept undermines traditional Western notions o f the "individual subject" and a universal "social good." At UW between 1968 and 1972, a study of this term in its relationship to
"blackness" and "whiteness" reflects a constant re-positioning of Afncan-American students by the White university as "individual" and "ethnic." At the same time, the political nature of "composition as a discipline" and the "individual" natures of White students, faculty, and administration remained virtually unquestioned.
174 African American Students Refusing To Be "The Quiet Ones”
The discursive positioning of African Americans takes many forms, and a final
example from the pre-quarter workshop comes from an important class for at least two of
the instructors, both of whom write about the day several classes got together to watch a
James Agee film. The Quiet One. This film is "a study of a disturbed Black child in a
school for disturbed children in New York City" (6) and was considered especially
effective for the Afiican-American students. As one instructor writes, "Dealing with a
young boy who grew up in Harlem, it seemed to have a particular appeal to the Black
students, who found it both honest and at the same time debatable in some significant
ways" (1).
Significantly, this film was used to bring up issues of race and difference focusing
on the African-American experience. Another instructor writes that "The discussion
after the film with several classes meeting together gave both black and white students opportunity to exchange views on slums, raising children, mental illness, treatment for delinquent children, and the Black ghetto conditions as well" (6). The adjective "Black" is used only to describe "ghetto conditions," but given the fact that the film is about a
"disturbed Black child [from Harlem] in a school for disturbed children"(6), it seems likely that the "Black experience" of "raising children, mental illness, and treatment for delinquent children" was the focus of the discussion this instructor notes. The instructor's conclusion about the productiveness of this film makes this assumption even more reasonable:
175 In fact only when several black students began dominating the discussion with a paralyzed denunciation of "the system" an hour and a half later, did the students become restless and bored. From this experience I began to question the view o f this program as a "catharsis" for [EOP] students and I trust that other instructors were not misled into allowing the more militant students to determine the direction and content of class discussions. The discussions on black issues which my class did have were productive, and I think, enlightening for the white students, but were kept to a minimum because I don't think the class should be run as an educational experience for white students either. Obviously, the black students already know all this business themselves, and only a certain amount of classroom hostility and destructive attack is useful for educational purposes.{Teaching Assistants' Evaluations 6)
When the Afiican-American students turn the conversation fi"om a Black focus to a
White one, by attempting to discuss White systemic involvement in racism, the instructor and the White students become very uncomfortable. Discussion shuts down despite the fact that the instructor showed the film to arouse political discussion. Whereas many instructors in the workshop wrote about the importance of the "free-flowing" nature of the classes and of active student participation, there were limits to the directions discussions could take according to this and many of the other instructors. Students who refused to look at the singular example of a "disturbed black child in Harlem" or the "Black experience" and, instead, concentrated on broader issues of White discourse, politics, and the self clearly exceeded these limits.
In their attempts to talk about the White "system" and its relationship to the film, the African American students attempted to construct White students, instructors, and institutions in the same ways that these entities have constructed African-Americans, and this analysis could have lead to White students and instructors questioning their own racial ties and the ways they position minorities. However, such analysis is dismissed as
176 "catharsis" for the African-American students, as an unworthy goal for an academic course
and, most important, as having little to do with the White students and instructor. Finally,
the Black students themselves are dismissed through the term "militant," a term which
paints them as "social," "political," and "unacademic" in the same ways the word "radical"
painted Greg Cowan (see Chapter Four) and defused the possibilities of his arguments
about dialect.
The instructor's conclusion to this situation is in some ways a very neat argument
for dismissing talk of race entirely in the writing classroom. If composition classes are not
supposed to educate White students about "blackness," and the Afncan-American students
"already know all this business themselves," then it seems pointless to bring the issue up
since no one will benefit. However, a word like "paralyzed" is crucial to understanding
why this conclusion is false. Although the instructor writes that the African-American
students' arguments about the "system" were paralyzed, the main point seems to be that
these arguments, because they were static or went nowhere, "paralyzed" what once had
been a productive discussion. It is certainly possible that in this situation the Black
students "paralyzed" discussion or argued their points in ways that were less than fully
productive, but I would suggest that the paralysis has less to do with ineffectiveness on the
part of the African-American students' rhetorical skills than on the White university's and
students' language deficit in regards to "whiteness." What was missing in this classroom, and is still missing in classrooms today, is a terminology that will make discussions centering around a system of "whiteness" anything but paralyzed. The vocabulary for understanding "blackness" that was arising, sometimes productively and sometimes not, in
177 writing classes in the late 1960s did not translate into similar work for White students and faculty. Instead, such work was seen as transgressing "composition as a discipline" and as overly political.
Understcmding Conflicts in Workshop Evaluations Through Conflicts in Racial
Communities
The absence of the appropriate language and will to understand "whiteness" in the same ways instructors and students were attempting to understand "blackness" makes it easier, therefore, for instructors to write sentiments like the particularly aggressive one I note above: "Something must be done to contain the BSU. These people are constricting students by their rigorous schedule of meetings—even to the point of calling meetings for
9:30 and 12:30, during class time. There seemed to be no reason o f this, beyond a show of power and control. Their indoctrination confuses more than it clarifies." It may be easier now to understand how the same writer begins and concludes this evaluation with overwhelmingly positive statements:
On the whole, I felt my class was successful; my students' writing definitely improved—in fact, their entire response—both written and oral—seemed to be deeper and more certain at the end of the course than at the start. I find no serious faults with the organization or intent of the program (4).
I am very excited by the program—to put it mildly, I think it's great, both for me and the students. I have never put as much work in teaching as I have for this program, and I have never felt as much satisfaction, involvement, and, I guess, just plain humanity as I have in this program. (5)
The positive spin put on the opening and closing of this instructor's comment make words and phrases like "contain," "These people" and "indoctrination" especially
178 provocative. "These people" clearly establishes Black students, through their link to the
BSU, as the "other" in this instructor's classroom, an "other" more because o f their
insistence on the political and social nature of education than simply because of their skin
color, although the two are deeply entwined. The writer wants the BSU "contained" so that it will not interfere with the real work of the University, work represented by the writing class. He or she also questions the educational value of an organization like the
BSU through the implication that such an organization "indoctrinates" rather than teaches or organizes in an apolitical, liberal, pluralist fashion as the University is assumed to do.
Especially important is the assumption on the instructor's part that the BSU was interested solely in power and control. By assuming to know the group's motivations, the writer usurps the Black Student Union's voice and discredits their work without giving adequate attention to the power struggle inherent in all education, particularly language education where accusations of "indoctrination" are not uncommon. This move is especially disheartening in an era where a primary goal of education was ostensibly to radically revise race relations and the nature of school. The instructor, therefore, ignores the push for control and power in his or her own statements, even the glowing ones, and the problems inherent in a program that asks instructors to discover their own "humanity" and
"involvement" at the expense of a student "other."
An unpublished EOP training manual provides more detailed interactions between a White instructor and African American student "others," and these interactions reflect more specifically the ways Black students became the subjects of both Black and White analysis, while White instructors and students remained texts written in invisible ink.
179 An EOP Training Manual
"Race-ing" the Writing Class
Efforts to explore racial dynamics in the classroom are very visible in an EOP
training manual, written in 1971 by George Slanger, a teaching assistant who taught in the
program from its inception. In it, he narrates an extended encounter between an African
American student and himself, a White EOP instructor. This document provides a wealth
o f specificity about one instructor, his writing pedagogy, and his views on race and writing, but it is important to remember that it does not allow us to make absolute generalizations about the UW writing program. For one thing, teaching assistants had a great deal of latitude to teach as they believed in the EOP writing program. Further, as
Slanger writes;
I lost track of... how much got done with the document I produced. I assume it was distributed, but I can't document that. Irmscher was unhappy that I didn't turn in a cleaner version, but I would[n't] guess his frustration extended to not using it. He had his office clean it up, which I don't think he'd have done if he didn't plan to use it. (e-mail message, 2 August 1996)
In addition, we have only a limited opportunity to judge Slangefs classroom activities from this representation of them. His comments about teaching could never cover all that went on in his class discussions or all his methods of pedagogy. It is fair to assume, however, that even if Irmscher did not circulate Slanger's document among the other instructors, that Slanger's ideas and experiences were representative of the program's general mission and of this instructor's most significant ideas about EOP writing education. It is also fair to assume that Slanger's ideas were influential with at least some
180 of the other teaching assistants in the writing program. It is hard to imagine that Irmscher
would have commissioned Slanger to complete such a document or that Slanger would
only remember Irmscher's displeasure that the initial text was not "cleaner" if Irmscher did
not feel the manual adequately represented significant elements of his program and would
be useful for other instructors to follow.
Slanger introduces the draft o f his manual with the following; "I have divided the
world of EOP teaching into four parts: the teacher, the student, the classroom and the
course. Of the four, the student is the most important, and so I begin there." (1).
Reflecting the influence of expressionist and epistemic notions of rhetoric, Slanger begins
with the student as the primary focus of a pedagogy that appears, as I will illustrate, also very interested in the social good and larger communal notions of change. He sees
students as socially connected and language as a tool for change, but his emphasis on the student as the most important element in the classroom narrative he tells is significant both in its emphasis on student-centered learning and provocative in the way it helps shield the instructor's subject position in the classroom.
In this section, Slanger traces the progress of "Debbie," "a black girl. ..in English
104," by reprinting ten of her written texts from the class "warts and all"{M atmal 1).
Because of the way he at least loosely positions her and the fact that the papers he reprints foreground individual and racial politics, we can assume that writers' identities matter to
Slanger, and he appears very interested in the political and social ties students bring with them to composition classes; the assignments he gives support these interests, and the students themselves seem very interested in wrestling with such issues. However,
181 although the student writing described in the training manual is often explosive and
disturbing, Slanger’s responses to these texts maintain an aura of distance from the
complex personal and political issues the student raises. His responses, wittingly or
unwittingly, align him and his classroom with composition as a "neutral" discipline and
with apolitical notions of "whiteness."
Several extended examples from the training manual illustrate the complexities of
Slanger's and his student's interaction. As the following indicates, in his manual Slanger provides copies of the student's written work, his initial comments to the student about her work, and additional comments he makes to share with new teaching assistants about the student's work and his own. The following is Slanger's representation of "Debbie's" response to his first assignment along with his initial comments made directly to the student and additional comments for the instructors'*:
Paper #1
Assignment: Describe your best time of day. (The assignment was much longer of course, and included a series of sub-questions: are you a night person, an early riser, etc.)
[No title]
Three O'clock A.M. and my mind is in a very deep dream, nothing to worry about, away from the hasel of thinking. This is the only time that I can lay my head at rest. Every day at three A.M. my mind say's free at last, free at last, thank GOD almighty I'm free till 9:30.
Comment (then): Your "best time" is when you get away from things, so you could tell us what it is you want to get away from and be more interesting.
182 Additional Comment: I have tried to type the papers pretty much as they came in, warts and ail. In every case I did some marginal comments on the paper, some internal "correcting" that I haven't tried to reproduce here because of the complex typography it would require. It is hard to know how much to worry about "mechanics" (spelling, verb agreement, punctuation) and how much to concentrate on the coherence and complexity of the "thought." It is certainly a mistake to mount a frontal attack on mechanics, covering the paper with a mass of red-inked corrections, and devising exercises in the construction of independent clauses. That is the approach that has, by definition, not worked with these students. But it is equally a cop-out to concentrate on "what is said" or the "soul" o f the piece, and ignore "mechanics" as bourgeois phenomena unworthy o f the attention of sensitized souls in search of the truth. What about dialect? Ink and even blood have been spilled over whether white teachers have the "right" to mark a student down for constructions that are quite correct in his dialect, however much they might offend the ears trained on prestige dialects. However enlightened we may be about the impossibility of assigning any dialect more intrinsic worth than another, certainly the students are going to meet teachers who do equate the use [of] "standard" English with possession of intellectual skills, and HOP has some obligation to confront that sad fact. My own compromise is to teach the standard dialect, a bit at a time, always with the appropriate preface about the unfairness (for them) of having to do so. But I have never lowered a student's grade just because o f his refusal, or his inability (I don't distinguish between them) to write in the appropriate dialect. And I never will. (M anual 2)
In this example, Slanger demonstrates sensitive insight into the problem of error, the necessary balance instructors need when responding to the content and grammar of student writing, and the difficulties of dealing with dialect. He seems to reject an expressivist view that romanticizes individual students and instructors as the founts of meaning when he writes, "it is equally a cop-out to concentrate on 'what is said' or the
'soul' of the piece, and ignore 'mechanics' as bourgeois phenomena unworthy of the attention of sensitized souls in search of the truth." Instead, he is vitally aware of the politics involved with HOP language teaching when he agrees with Irmscher's idea that
183 edited American English must be taught. He takes a somewhat more radical stance than
Irmscher, however, by noting that edited American English should never be taught out of
a social context and that the power structure of the U.S. automatically places many
minority and other writers at a disadvantage for arbitrary and unfair reasons.
What is most interesting about this passage is that Slanger demonstrates a real interest in going beyond the rules of rhetoric and exploring the relationships between language, power, individuals, communities, and education in the classroom. It is hard to know how elaborate his explanations of the political and social significance of dialects are, but his "appropriate preface" about the unfairness of teaching the standard would seem to make possible classroom interaction about language and its relationship to racialized subject positions. Slanger's pedagogical attempts to break through White, academic discourses that unevenly construct writers of color and "regular" white writers, however, are sporadic and often end up fiustrated.
Commenting on Students' Work From a "Distance”
"Debbie" submitted the following unsolicited paper to Slanger as a second assignment, and the writer's text along with Slanger's comments tell a somewhat more complicated story from the one Slanger narrates above about a classroom open to interrogations of the relationships between race and writing.
Something's Missing (And how can I help?)
My title has a lot of meaning such as; something is missing in. a person or a subject, but something is missing here, here in my english class, what it is I really can't put my finger on it, but I'll try and go into deep detail, about this situation. My First day in class, I entered, had a seat and pulled out my
184 pen and pad ready for business, when all of a sudden the professor was saying how the class is basically for minority races, well this was O.K. but then again when we get down to business, talking about certain things such as races and religions he acts as if he wants to say more but can't, what's the problem? I would like to help in some way, and I think I'll be helping the whole class so let's get down to it. I'm sure there's others who's thinking the same way. {Manual 2)
Slanger records his comments to the student as follows: "Well, if you felt comfortable
enough to write this, all can't be lost. Thanks"{Manual 2)
The student wonders how the instructor views the relationship between her writing
class and such difficult issues as race and religion, and it is important to note that she believes other students feel the same way. She attempts to create a critical community from her experience in English 104 that intimately involves her instructor, but Slanger avoids the issue with his brief comment. This comment, in all it does not say, indicates a reluctance to fill in the gaps the student sees in her teacher’s relationship to race, gaps the student may especially want to fill because, as we shall see, she is urged to explore her own relationship to the subject throughout the class.
Slanger then discusses in his manual the way he responded to this student's work for the benefit of those who will be reading the manual, future teaching assistants. The student, however, never sees the following comment:
I seem to get at least one paper like this a quarter.... I also get the opposite of this, the unsolicited "hate" theme ("You have never even tried to read my papers for what's in them; the only thing you ever think about is how is it organized. I think you are just as racist as anyone. All I try to do is run down the facts for you and my opinion, so how can you judge anybody's opinion. What I believe is just what I believe."...) Those don't bother me quite as much. I usually try to talk to the student soon afterwards but about some other issue. Then, if the student really has something on his mind, he'll say, "Did you read my paper, you know the one?" And you can say, "Oh yeah, I thought it was a good job. Forceful,
185 direct, fairly dear. Yeah, I liked it." The conversations can end there or proceed on down to the nitty-gritty. But many times the students seem unwilling to pursue the issue. They will claim the paper was the result of a "mood. " Then all I can do is... examine my own teaching to see if the student's criticism is valid from my point of view. In this case, I think the girl was referring to the drcumspect nature of the rhetoric the first few days of class. I regret that circumspection, but it seems inevitable, so I didn't do anything more about this paper. (3)
Clearly, "Debbie's" willingness to write her concerns signifies her comfort with an instructor who wants to explore the subjectivities of both Afiican-American students and
White instructors as they relate to writing education. However, the vagueness of Slanger's commentary both to the student and to the teaching assistants is important. First, Slanger notes that the opposite of the type of theme he received from the woman in his class is a
"hate" theme; does he believe the young woman's essay praises his class, or is a "love" theme in some way? Also, from the way he describes his responses to the "hate" themes he receives, it is clear that the responsibility of truly forcing a difiBcult discussion about race and the teacher's relationship to it is with students. Slanger "confronts" students who question his position as a White writing instructor by approaching the student soon after about another issue. His willingness to wait for the student to push to the real content of his or her essay is disturbing and signifies the difiBculties the teacher has involving himself in the political turmoil he provokes. It seems easier to believe that such difficult questioning really is only the result of an individual student's "mood," instead of being related to larger community conflicts in which both teacher and student play roles.
The teacher's conclusion regarding the essay "Something's Missing" is even more confusing. He neatly avoids the questions about his failure to follow through on race-
186 related themes in class for a second time when he writes: "In this case, I think the girl was referring to the circumspect nature of the rhetoric the first few days of class. I regret that circumspection, but it seems inevitable, so I didn't do anything more about this paper." It is impossible now to know whether the teacher’s "circumspection" was truly "inevitable," but I wonder if Slanger could have explained this "inevitability" to the student and instructors more clearly. After writing anunsolicited comment on the class, one with a clear request for a certain type of teacher involvement and one that expresses the student's willingness to help a situation she sees as troubled, the student receives no answer from her instructor. The bulk of the teacher's response to this situation goes to new teaching assistants as part of a training manual that offers this example as a model from which to learn. In this case, Slanger distances himself from the openness he portrays in his comments to the students' first assignment and takes on the objective posture Irmscher and Jack Conner advocate. He separates himself from racial discourse through a writing- teacher persona that advocates responding to students' papers that critique teachers' positions in the University with a comment such as, "Oh yeah, I thought [your paper] was a good job. Forceful, direct, fairly clear."
Interrogating Race and Desire Through Discourses o f "Whiteness" cmd "Blackness"
An even more complicated and explosive exchange comes from the eighth assignment of the quarter, a paper Slanger's class wrote after listening to "some of the
'Last Poets' record. The students were told to take a phrase or stanza from one of the poems and 'support, refute, or qualify'" {Kicomal 8). "Debbie" quotes a selection from this
187 record and then explores the difficult implications of a "Black Revolution." In this paper,
she attempts to reconcile the competing interests that she is both a part of and that she feels somewhat helpless to affect:
Niggers are Scared of Revolution
"Niggers ffick white thighs/yellow thighs and black thighs/ Niggers shoot shit into their arms./ Niggers shoot off at the mouth/ Niggers are actors/ Niggers are scared of Revolution."
The following phrase is surround the so-called Black Revolution. The Black people say that the revolution will come about in 10 years, but how can anything come about while the black man is fucking around with everything even themselves. The black man is so busy trying to keep up with the Jones instead of fighting for the war on poverty. Niggers are too busy fucking with dope, white thighs, and shooting off at the mouth while they should be getting their black women or man together for the Revolution. I feel that a black woman's duty is to be her man's side this means stop fucking over her, in other words if you (the Black man) wants to fuck; then fuck with a Black woman to increase the black population. I'm pertaining to the Black men on this campus (University of Washington).
If there's going to be a revolution, it isn't going to take place in Seattle, because if so it will take too long to get the Black man's mind together, and furthermore Niggers are great actors on the U. of W campus. The other night I went to the BSU meeting; which was held at the HUB, the same Black men whom were talking about the Revolution, were the same Black men who I saw walking and rapping to some white broads, the previous morning. Some Niggers (the orioles) are scared of themselves. And the Black Revolution? {Mcamal 8)
The student's draft is intimidating because responding to such work constructively, empathetically, and in a way conducive to critical writing pedagogy is very difficult. This draft is very rough but represents a clear effort on the writer's part to engage in very
188 complex issues and assert powerful feelings about a wide range of topics. It is both
personal and political and brings together racial, economic, and sexual issues from this
woman's life, the UW campus, and the nation in visceral ways, which for some might
border on the pornographic. However, such explosive political and personal work was
frequently promoted by instructors in the EOF Program and was a somewhat more
common staple o f writing classes in the late 60s than it may be today. It is also important
that this paper was included as part of a training manual for new writing teachers for we
can assume Slanger provided it as an example of what new teachers could ask o f and
expect from EOF students. Slanger provided the following comment to the student about
this draft:
Comment (then): As I read this, you make a number of points:
1 ) The blacks are spending too much time on dope.... 2) The Blacks are trying to keep up with the Joneses (What do you mean here? You mean buying cars, houses, etc.?)... 3) The Black man is hung up on "white things."... 4) Blacks shoot off too much at the mouth.... 5) A black woman's role in the revolution is with her man.... 6) The Black man fucks over the Black woman instead of fucking her. 7) Black men at the UAV are insincere. {M œmal 8)
You have seven different points. Any one would make a good paper. Your point #3 seems to be the one that interests you most. Number 6 is related. You have something to say here. I'd like to see you rewrite this and really say it. {Matnial 8)
What is most significant to note in this exchange between teacher and student is the difference in tone between the two. A sentence like "I feel that a black woman's duty
189 is to be [at] her man's side this means stop fucking over her" contrasts sharply with "You
have seven different points. Any one would make a good paper." Maybe most important
is the difference between teacher's and student's personal investment in the issues the
student raises. Slanger assigns writing based on the "Last Poets"—the record to which
the student responds with such intensity—and is clearly interested in students exploring
their individual and intellectual positions on emotionally and politically charged topics.
However, his position on race, revolution, and sexuality and on the relationship between
composition and such issues is notably absent in this response.
Slanger's comment that "Your point number three seems to be the one that
interests you most" is especially telling because what he is actually referring to is his
interpretation of her main point: "The Black man is hung up on whitethings'" (emphasis
added). No where in the student's essay does "Debbie" use the phrase "white things"^
although such a reading makes some sense because of her use of phrases like "keep[ing]
up with the Jones." However, it is difficult to see how a reader could see anything but the
perceived Black male obsession with "white thighs" as the central point of this essay because that is the strongest theme running through the student's entire essay, from the quote she cites from the Last Poets through each paragraph of her own text. A specific focus on the relationship between sexuality, race, and power is shifted in the instructor's comments to a more general, more neutral, and safer topic for his classroom, a shift that is rectified by the student in the next draft of this paper, as we shall see.
Given that Slanger attempts to generalize what appears to be a loose but fairly specific focus in the student's essay, it is ironic that he also notes that she has too many
190 points and must narrow her focus. However, listing the major points of the student's
paper and providing end comments like "You have something to say here. I’d like to see
you rewrite this and really say it" allow him to not actually respond in a critically
substantive way—that is, in a way that allows his subject position to become a part of the
text—to the content of the student's essay (just as the students noted in the "hate" themes they sent him; "You have never even tried to read my papers for what's in them"). Instead he offers an implicit criticism, by assuming the powerful words she has written have not really said anything.®
In his comments, rather then responding to the content of what she has said,
Slanger, reasonably, responds to the demands of academic writing, which requires a limited number o f points—points which can be "worked out" and satisfactorily concluded in the essay format—and a certain level of depth to the points being made. His comments here do not help the student work out her complex points or create that depth, however, because he both asks her to write about a more general topic and, at the same time, denies many of the interconnections already present in her text. Although Slanger remarks on the relationship between points three and six, it might be more accurate to note the way all seven points relate in conflicting and competing ways and to work at resolving at least some of them into a workable thesis. In fact, this is what seems to have happened when the teacher and student worked together on the next draft.
This paper is the only one we get a further report on, and both the students' and instructor's pursuit of this essay are instructive. Slanger writes in his "additional comment" about this paper:
191 At my request, the girl came in for a conference about this paper. She was not singled out. I conferenced with all students at this point. During that conference.. .1 tried to help the girl formulate and write down her central idea—the thesis statement. She finally wrote this: "The Black men at the UAV can never make great progress toward improving themselves until they overcome their irrational lust for the white woman and leam to accept the Black woman both sexually and as a person." (9)
In their conference, which Slanger notes lasted an hour, "Debbie" and Slanger appear to have worked out the problem of focus and come up with a strong thesis sentence which is both provocative and written in a way that would satisfy most grammarians. They also seem to have agreed on the centrality of sexuality to the essay. Equally important to note is the way the student revised this thesis statement on her own (or with outside help we are not aware of) when she turned in her next draft, which appears to be the final. Slanger writes that, after their conference, "She was to rewrite the paper and submit it, together with a cover sheet containing the 'final' thesis statement, [and] an 'outline.' What I got was this:"
Thesis sentence: Black men at the University of Washington can never succeed in gaining Black control, or leadership, until they can overcome their irrational lust for the white women and leam to accept the Black woman or settle for nothing at all.
Outline I. Man biggest Hang up, dealing the Black revolution. A. White Thighs 1. Why white thighs? 2. Why not black thighs? B. What is the Black man trying to accomplish? 1. Has this furthered the Black man toward Black control? No. and how? why?
The Black Man is Hung up over "white thighs" My title was taken from the Last Poets, Niggers are scared of revolution.
Basically, I feel that the "white thigh" is the central attraction in the Black
192 Revolution. Being a Seattiite for eighteen years, and now attending the University of Washington, I have reasons to believe that the white thigh is the Black man's most vulnerable hang up within the campus.
I a Black woman ask myself time and time again what can I do? The question is yet to be answered.
The Black man is rendering himself to the point of no return (not being able to get accepted back into the black society. Friends, clubs, etc.) Being a very inquisitive young woman, I asked a black man, who dates a white woman, what is it that you’re trying to accomplish? He replied in a gruesome tone of voice, I quote "I date white women for physical reasons, sociological reasons, male ego and to prove my manhood." The impression I got was that he had to overcome his own irrational lust, with any woman, not just white. The odds stands as follow; for every Black women, they're three Black men. WOW! ! !
In order to overcome this state o f being (the white woman being very permissive, and the Black woman very dominant) the white woman listens to anything that the Black man tells her. He can prove to himself that he is still a sex loving and money hungry man. This problem is very irrational.
I feel that if a Black man wanted a Black woman, he could always go outside of campus to find a Black female companion who would love him, cherish him, and give him her all and all to keep him well satisfied.
This occurence has set the Black man further and further away from that giant step toward Black Supremecy.
I also feel that a woman cannot come up with a solution, which has to deal with a man's mental state of being. Further more it's the man's perogative to say whether he's right or wrong, in other words it's one's self to make up one's own mind.(Manual 9-10)
The essay most significantly reveals the relationships between "the social good"
and "individual students" in the way it both raises questions about the relationships between "individuality" and "ethnicity" and then dismisses these questions in the conclusion. "Debbie" battles between traditional Western notions of the sacredness of individual agency and her awakening political awareness of the socially constructed nature
193 of human subjects, and this battle can be seen in her text in many ways. First, as I have noted, she reclaims the importance of the "white thigh" to her essay by including the term in her title and weaving the idea more thoroughly throughout the essay. A first sentence like, "Basically, I feel that the 'white thigh' is the central attraction in the Black
Revolution" leaves little doubt that sexuality is her focus, and this focus calls into question traditional ideas of the self by opening up complex ideas about the political nature of desire and the importance of Afiican Americans unity on all fi-onts.
The student goes on to subtly shift her thesis again fi-om the one her collaborative effort with Slanger produced ("The Black men at the UAV can never make great progress toward improving themselves") to one which emphasizes that Afiican-Americans do not necessarily have to "improve" themselves because they are somehow less than the White majority but that the main concern is with "gaining Black control, or leadership," a highly specific kind of political "improvement" that asserts the idea that "Black" improvement is relational—it depends on certain types of interactions with the majority White community—rather than dependent on the power of "individual" Afiican Americans to work their way into a benign system. "Debbie's" refusal to accept any notion of Black inferiority, except in a political sense, is also implied through her concern with "Black
Supremacy" later in the essay, while her belief that Afiican American men must "overcome their irrational lust for the white women and leam to accept the Black woman or settle for nothing at all" reflects a powerful notion of absolute Black solidarity in personal, political, and social relationships.
194 More specifically, the quote the writer provides fi-om the Afiican-American male student provides a good example o f her concern and horror with reconceptualizing the individual: "He replied in a gruesome tone of voice, I quote 1 date white women for physical reasons, sociological reasons, male ego and to prove my manhood.'" This statement leaves a great deal to the imagination, but it effectively deconstructs two things often considered very "individual" sexual relationships and gender identity. Noting that he dates White women for sociological reasons, the student "Debbie" interviewed follows
Eldridge Cleaver inSoul On Ice and others by recognizing the vast historical and cultural influences that contribute to something most consider a "natural" element of personal life—desire—and particularly the way race relations contribute to the formations of desire.
In addition, his recognition that he has "to prove [his] manhood" implies that the concept of "[his] manhood" is social rather than individual; a "male ego" in this sense is never fully individual in a classical Western mode. Instead, it is a much more complex concept because it always stands in relation to the multiple cultures from which it arises.
This second draft is more focused than the first and, through this focus, explores
"the irrational problem" of sexuality and its relationship to race in more detail. Part of the
"irrationality" of this problem stems from the writer's inability to fully elaborate her growing recognition of the culturally constructed nature of individuals. The questions she asks simply do not make sense within the dominant culture she lives in, and so she retreats from this exploration by concluding with a mode of discourse valorized by the White academy and conducive to maintaining White control: "Further more it's the man's perogative to say whether he's right or wrong, in other words it's one's self to make up
195 one's own mind." In a remarkable statement that parallels the problems African-
Americans in general have in a White-dominated culture, she notes that, as a Black
woman, she "cannot come up with a solution, which has to deal with a man's mental state
of being." Finding herself in a politically weaker position than the African-American men
on campus, this writer believes that it is finally up to each individual Black man to discover
the problems with "irrational lusts," and, thus, the writer’s second paragraph— "1 a black
woman ask myself time and time again what can 1 do? The question is yet to be
answered"—resonates in her conclusion.
Is it true, she seems to ask, that oppressed groups (African-American women or
Afiican Americans in general) have to simply wait for each of their individual oppressors
(in this case, Afiican-American men or Whites) to change his or her mind before justice
will be done? Such a question could lead to many more for both writer and instructor.
Do oppressed groups have any way of pushing oppressors to examine their relationship to
communities and political discourses? What is the use then of a focus on collectivity, on
social notions o f the individual and the academy, on the importance of language in creating
individual and social identities? What can this writer do with the analysis she is beginning
into the complexities of "manhood," "womanhood," "blackness," and "whiteness?" Can all
her difficult and slippery questions and answers simply be dismissed by an acceptance of
"personal choice" as the final criteria for answering social and political questions?
Obviously, these dilemmas will never be frilly resolved in a first-year writing class, but the
clashing discourses of community and individuality in this student's text are well worth the attention of both student and instructor, especially for the way they both radically question
196 and finally accept the dominant and limiting ideal of "personal choice." Accepting this
Western ideal virtually ensures that the student's question "I a black woman ask myself time and time again what can I do?" will remain unanswered.
Interestingly, Slanger does not provide the response he gave to thestudent for this second draft (maybe because he did not provide one to her), but he does provide a comment for the teaching assistants who are the audience for his manual:
Is this an advance or a regression? What's happening?
I think this student is learning to write. Notice the way she has changed the thesis statement from the one she left my office with. Notice the way the paper "leans toward" that thesis in a very real, though a very distant way. The outline looks hopeless, yet it seems to me to be a real outline not the hokey fabrication a "good" student can come up with to get a teacher off his back. More important, the tone of this piece is remarkably effective; it reaches out even through the crudities of style. Notice the quote. Most important, the girl is letting her thoughts come out, ill-formed, but pulsing with life. She could have given me some antiseptic, well-formed bit of pap. But she is secure enough in the class that she feels she needn't do that. This paper needs another draft, another two drafts, another three. But she has not opted out of the real struggle toward expression of her feelings. I say, "Right on, girl, and write on."{Manual 10, underlines in original)
Two things stand out about this comment. First, Slanger begins with and focuses on the formal aspects of writing, and, even when he does consider the content of the essay, he remains extremely vague. The problems of sexuality, the self, and community this writer raises are lost in the instructor's general comments about her thesis and coherence, the "realness" of her outline, her tone and style. His comment that her writing is "pulsing with life" also could be a description o f a student's essay about walking on the beach or being on a picnic and makes no reference to the white-hot content of the student's work and its relationship to what was going on outside the classroom.
197 Second, when Slanger does address the writer's subjectivity, he does so in the same way the student concludes her essay: with an emphasis on a pure notion of individuality. By writing, "she has not opted out of the real struggle toward expression of her feelings," he acknowledges, at least in a general way, the powerful emotion present in the student's text but refuses to connect her personal feelings with larger political struggles, just as the writer fails to engage with the political problems of inter-racial sexuality in a conclusion that succumbs to discourses of individuality. Moreover, he never addresses the problem of responding to this paper in any way except one that emphasizes form. The instructor's subject position, which the student implicitly reads through his inclusion of such classroom texts as the "Last Poets" album, remains invisible in Slanger's written comments to the student's text and in his comments to other instructors’. He thus sets up a model that asks for Black students to engage in political issues and to foreground personal and community involvement in their writing. This same model, however, suggests to White instructors that their interest in such topics should not be overtly engaged in the classroom, or, at least, that the instructors have the right to position themselves differently to "composition as a discipline," individuality," and "the social good" than they position their Black students.
While this class and many other writing classes at UW were explicitly concerned with exploring political engagement through language, the students took on the bulk of the difficult work while the instructor maintained the sort of neutrality supported by discourses of "whiteness." This neutrality masks the political complicity of all of us in the complicated social, sexual, racial, and economic text "Debbie" begins to write. I am not
198 suggesting that teachers or students expose themselves politically every day in class, especially in casual or uncritical ways, or that they impose their views on students,.
However, just as critics like Lester Faigley suggest writing instructors consider the motivation behind soliciting and valuing personal writing, we also need to critique the ways we solicit and interact with overtly political writing.
I wonder if Slanger, for example, could acknowledge to the student the incredibly difficult situation both he and she are in—in the classroom situation and as members of a racially tom nation. He could also make explicit his goals for asking his students to listen and respond to the "Last Poets," something that is important not only when an assignment is introduced but that also needs to be restated within the context of each student's work.
Does he hope the student will publish a version of this essay? That she will confront members o f the Black Student Union? That she will carefully consider where the personal and public collide in her life as well as in the African-American men she describes or how gender and race intersect in complex ways? Can the teacher provide an example from his life—his personal experience, his teaching, his scholarship— to illustrate the difficulties of interrogating categories of desire along with more traditional political and social questions? Such interaction with texts and students is not easy, but would illustrate, not a solidarity with the student, but a recognition of the instructor's vested and often competing interest in the same issues.
199 Conclusion
The uneven constructions of blackness and whiteness adopted by the UW EOF
writing program—often adopted by Black and White subjects alike—reflect the
University's fears, then and now, of any sort of "revolution," and, most particularly, a
"Black" revolution. Many in the Writing Program embraced the implications of this
country's horrific past in regards to race relations and felt a real urgency to use the power
of education to contribute to the growing changes going on aroimd the country. The
difiiculty, however, came about in their efforts to both affect change and maintain a
culture that was comfortable for the majority. Resolution of this difBculty came about
through the relationships the Writing Program maintained to "composition as a discipline,"
"individual students," and "the social good" as these things were newly and profoundly
affected by "ethnicities" that threatened to expose the "ethnic" and communal natures of all institutions and selves.
These relationships, revealed in Irmscher's and the writing instructors' evaluation of the program, confirm the importance of Berlin's notion of epistemic rhetoric to the late
20'*’ century academy as they reflect the ways instructors and students sought to connect language, ideology, and material reality in the classroom. These activities also bolster my contention that concepts like "composition as a discipline," the "individual student," and the "social good" have little meaning when understood separately. We have to understand these concepts through their inter-dependence and through looking at the political implications of emphasizing one over the others in the writing curriculum. Moreover, it is important to recognize that the changing color of the U.S. academy in the 1960s greatly
200 enabled this understanding. During this period of upheaval, students of color brought with
them to the university political, moral, and social questions that they refused to ignore in
ways the White-dominated academy was used to. With these questions and lived
experiences also came new ideas about the uses of education and the inter-relatedness of
language, community, and identity. Finally, the shifting nature o f "composition as a
discipline," "individual students," and "the social good"—as reflected in the EOF pre quarter writing workshop documents and the EOF Training Manual—illustrates my belief that "epistemic" rhetorics arising out of the 60s "revolution" only partially acknowledged the political and social nature of composition and the "individual" student. These partial acknowledgments directly relate to continued White dominance at the University and in
U.S. culture.
201 I Concerns were with racial colonization, defined in broad terms. The U.S. social situation—specifically, the existence of a stigmatized Black "underclass”—was viewed by many in the academy as analogous to and symptomatic of larger colonizing efibrts by Western countries, such as the Viet Nam war. exploitation of Africa, etc. Thus, while my focus is on Black-white relationships in the UW EOF program, an important sub-text to many educational efibrts at this time, including UWs concern with Afiican- American students, has to do with larger efibrts at decolonization and academics' and radical students' efibrts at connecting local, national, and international events.
■ Professor Slanger writes to me that "1 would say[I wrote this document in the] summer of 1971. I think 1 wrote it after my second year in the program. I taught in the program in 69-70 and 70-71" (e-mail correspondence. August 2. 1996)
^ Several of the instructors categorize Afiican American students racially and refer to white students as "regular" or "ordinary" students, a binary which reinforces the idea that idea of "normalcy" was based on white standards in the UW EOF Writing Program, as the \ust majority of writing programs continue to be today.
^ I have copied both Slanger's and the student's texts verbatim except where absolutely necessary for clarity or where 1 have deleted extraneous material. Therefore. I have not attempted to make the student's writing grammatically correct or to make consistent things such as Slanger's tendency to sometimes capitalize the "B" in Black and at other times to use the lower case.
^ I appreciate Loirie Ulman's observation of this fact an observation that makes a significant contribution to this analysis.
^ Thanks to Beverly Moss for this important analysis.
As 1 will demonstrate in Chapter Six. however. Slanger usefully questions his relationship to race in contexts that are not directly classroom based, questions. 1 argue, that can and should be brought into the classroom.
202 CHAPTER SIX
RHETORICAL RESPONSIBILITY IN THE WRITING CLASS
The students...have some right to expect the teacher to take some responsibility for his actions atidfor the system from which he accepts money a nd other services....
[I]n EOF teaching... the problem is a delicate balance o f two things: to attain (and teach) the skills sufficient to survive in the world-as-it-is and to provide an environment as close as we can to the world-as-it-ought-to- be. If we are very wise and very patient, we might even be able to build our course on the few places where [the] two worlds are the same.
(Slanger, George. Unpublished EOF Teaching Mamial, 13, underline in original)
Introduction
With thirty years hindsight, it is tempting to look critically on the University of
Washington's efforts to battle racial problems. A moment's reflection, however, demonstrates the degree to which we are still grappling with racial inequities in education, often in less productive ways. For all its difBculties, the University was at the forefront of a movement that helped revise curricula around the country and pushed universities to engage in self-examination about their roles in maintaining White dominance, and it had
203 little to model itself after in this regard. The experience of UW reflects that o f universities around the country that were attempting to satisfy many constituencies and to build new forms of knowledge and purposes for the academy. At the same time, every step any university took toward effecting the political relationships between race and writing was the source of a heated battle. As William Irmscher indicates in the following excerpt from a letter to Virginia Burke at the University of Wisconsin-Nfilwaukee, programs such as the
Educational Opportunity Program and Black Studies were always sites of fierce debate and political critique from all sides:
I am enclosing a copy of the Black Studies Curriculum at San Francisco State [which established one of the first Black Studies Programs in 1968].... In brief. ..San Francisco State need not be viewed as a model.... [T]he regular Freshman English sequence [is] taught by a very militant black, who was at one point suspended for beating up the editor of the campus magazine and later made speeches advocating the assassination of President Summerskill.
No one in the English Department seemed to know anything about Modem Afiican Thought and Literature....
All of this is to say that the English Department is interested in racial problems but completely uninvolved in Black Studies.... One man in the English Department told me that he thought there was Black writing but not Black literature and that he would resist to his dying breath any such course in the English Department. I encountered some interesting attitudes in this "avant-garde" university of the West. (19 June 1968)
As this passage indicates, individuals such as Irmscher who negotiated the 1960s race wars found themselves in virtual no-win situations. While the White majority would never accept the "militancy" of instructors like the one described in this passage, they also failed to account for individuals like the San Francisco State English Professor, who not only resisted the idea of Black literature but seemed to take the notion as a personal
204 ofiFense worth fighting to his death. In particular, most failed to recognize how attitudes
like the English professor's, though often unspoken, were deeply implicated in the
"militancy" of the instructor who advocated the assassination of the San Francisco State
President. Irmscher and others who attempted to negotiate these positions fi"equently
found themselves in the middle of emotionally charged battles, which left them the object
of attack by Black and White, radical and conservative. As a result, many—Whites in
particular—either failed to involve themselves explicitly with issues of race or depleted
themselves quickly through such personally and intellectually challenging negotiations.
For many in composition today, however, the democratic goals of the 1960s and
the ideals of programs like the EOF are not dead, and, in the first part o f this chapter, I
examine some possibilities for furthering these goals through an expanded understanding
of epistemic writing pedagogies. In spite of the racial problems encountered and
sometimes reinforced at the University o f Washington, we can leam a number of positive
things about race and writing fi-om the experiences at the University, and I offer
possibilities for change in the writing classroom and beyond based on the UW model. In the second part of this chapter, I conclude by engaging again the difficulties of writing about race and o f dealing with such issues in the writing classroom. We must always be careful not to reify discursive categories such as "race" in academic settings that continue to emphasize "objective" forms of knowledge. We also need to recognize that pedagogical strategies involving race are subject to constantly shifting political and cultural conflicts and can, therefore, never be taken for granted or assumed to be fully theorized. A better understanding of Black-White interaction in the writing classroom
205 requires not only historical appreciation o f race in this country, but also a willingness on
the part of both teachers and students to re-evaluate continuously the histories of U.S.
communities, individual subject positions, specific classroom configurations, and ongoing
social systems o f the University, the media, and language—all of which help shape our
world.
Rethinking Subjectivities
To consider greater possibilities for instructors' and students' subject positions in
the composition class, I return to the EOF training manual I examined in the last chapter,
and my analysis in this section follows the work of scholars such as Lester Faigley and bell
hooks who advocate a renewed attention to the roles teachers play in constructing both
knowledge and students. George Slanger's manual contains philosophical advice and
pedagogical tips, and, as Chapter Five indicates, is deeply concerned with the difficulties
of dealing with race in composition and with the political positions taken by students,
particularly Afiican Americans. In the last chapter, I focused on Slanger's section on
"Students," but in this chapter, I am most interested in his section titled "The Teacher,"
which, as Slanger notes, more accurately represents his concerns as a young teacher
engaged with theorizing pedagogy{Manual 1). In this section, Slanger spends a good
deal of time outlining the various pedagogical philosophies he had used to that point in his
career. For example, he illustrates his engagement with Rogerian and "radical" pedagogies through classroom stories. Slanger concludes his discussion of "The Teacher" with several paragraphs beginning, "Finally, I think I have to talk about guilt" (15). White
206 "guilt" and the subject position of the White writing instructor, however, are subtexts of the entire section, and this sub-text helps reveal the difficulties and possibilities for instructors teaching issues of difference.
As Slanger discusses Carl Rogers' influence on his teaching, for example, he notes that early in his career, "student-directed learning" meant doing everything he "could to be
'congruent,' to show 'empathy' and 'unconditional positive regard' [for students]. I took
[Rogers] at his word when he said that these things were more important than either what
I did in the classroom, or what I know about the material I was teaching."(II).
Connections with students were the emphases in the early part o f Slanger's career. These connections relied less on knowledge of some unchanging field than on the ethos Slanger was ability to establish in the class, on his ability to maintain a certain presence with which students could identify and trust and which illustrated the teacher's trust in the students.
Throughout this section of his manual, Slanger questions these methods and his initial
"uncritical" adoption of them, but he also notes that
These attitudes and non-procedures worked, by and large, with the white students I taught for four years. That was at a community college, and the students were partly fi-om agricultural, partly fi-om scientific elite backgrounds. Evidently my classes were their first contact with a self consciously applied program o f classroom democracy, low-key evaluation, and a lot of deliberate non-structure.... I tended to see students as 'victims' of a repressive, highly structured high school background, and I believed that if inhibitions could be lowered and a little 'room around one's feelings' provided, students would blossom. I still believe that. But my belief now is criss-crossed with wires of irony and reservations. (11)
It is important to note that classroom freedom and sophisticated decision-making
(as Slanger writes, "If they didn't like a particular assignment, we cast around until we
207 found another one" (11)) were new to the White students in Slangefs class. Yet the
scenario he describes is positive because the students were able to adjust and use a student-centered classroom to find stronger classroom identities and more powerful positions from which to write. The final sentence hints at the failure he was to experience using the same techniques with Afiican-American students, however, and Slanger accounts for this failure through Rogers' key terms, "empathy" and "realness:"
..I assumed that since minority students were even more the victims of repression, that what we needed to teach them was even more Carl Rogers—more empathy, less evaluation; more positive regard, fewer assignments; more congruence, fewer examinations.... It would be so easy to say that I failed utterly, that I went to totalitarianism, and taught happily ever after. But the situation is much murkier than that. It would be more accurate, to use Rogers' terms, to say that the more empathy, and positive regard I cranked out, the less congruence I felt. Congruence, in case you've forgotten your Rogers is the teacher's feeling of'realness'—his feeling that he is accepting and expressing his own feelings, being a person in his relationship with his students. (11 underline in original)
This passage is important in the way it emphasizes Slangefs pedagogical belief in teachers' ability to feel comfortable with themselves in the classroom and their ability to interact in "genuine" ways with their students. That is, for Slanger, concepts like
"empathy" and "realness," which have been questioned thoroughly over the past thirty years, cannot simply be dismissed as naïve products of a romantic world that no longer exists. In all classroom encounters, he believed, are "real" moments that contribute to the success of the student-teacher relationship and to students' and teachers' learning. Today current theoretical trends that emphasize the social construction of knowledge and individuals seem to encourage us to dismiss such notions of "realness" as products of a naïve and romantic belief in individuality. The idea that the notions of "realness" and of
208 "being a person" are constructed and always relational, however, does not change their rhetorical and material impact on learning situations. There are still very "real," material consequences for mastering or failing to master the dominant ways of speaking, writing, and knowing, and we need to seek ways of teaching writing that illustrate both the profound impact knowledge of these things can have and the constructed nature of such standards. Rather than simply dismissing these terms then, we should engage in understanding the "real" effects of education and further notions of what makes a more or less "real" learning experience for students and teachers in light of social constructivist ways of knowing.
As Slanger further illustrates in this section, "realness," for him, is directly related to "empathy," which, for political, social, and personal reasons Slanger could feel more easily for his White students than for his Black students. As the following example illustrates, Slanger clearly thinks about this disparity critically and in ways that display sensitivity to White-Black history in this country;
Think about the term empathy in the context of a white teacher teaching a section of EOF English. I grew up in a town of 600 people. Both my parents went to college, and it was always assumed I would. The closest thing I had come to being oppressed was once when my parents made me take world history instead of commercial math. How am I going to "experience an accurate empathetic understanding of the [student's] inner world of private personal meanings as if it were [my] own." With my white students with their rural or scientific backgrounds, I could do this. With minority students, my efforts to "empathize" would only seem ridiculous and make them uncomfortable. Perhaps I had seen myself as a person with special insight into the world of minority students. In fact, I was a teacher of English with some special willingness to find flexible ways to help people learn that subject. On that basis, I could accept myself. On that basis, the students could accept me. (13)
209 The general theory that Slanger worked from, with White and Black students, was
that they were the "victims of repression." However, despite the fact that he makes light
of his own "oppression" at the hands of his parents, he could somehow find a way to
"’experience an accurate empathetic understanding of the[White student’s] inner world of
private personal meanings as if it were"his awn. Such an idea, while open to question,
also opens the door to a discussion of "White community." Was it simply the color of their skin that allowed this instructor to feel a bond to his students? Was it also their upbringing or common values they shared as a result o f class or geographic location?
How are these things related to race? How do such connections exclude others, and where do they break down?
Slanger is right to acknowledge problems with White writing instructors assuming they can accurately know African-American experience; indeed, it is impossible to fulfill the criteria of accurately experiencing an '"empathetic understanding o f [anyone else's] inner world of private personal meanings as if it were'" our own. However, that should not mean we cannot strive for a certain level of "realness" and congruence with students based on other criteria. In terms of the White teacher teaching Afiican American students, such "realness" may depend in part on teachers explicitly recognizing in the classroom the inevitable racial ties all White individuals have to larger systems of power and politics.
Slanger notes that
In a sense I think that I was only 'ready* to teach minority students when I realized that relationships between black and white in this country are congenitally contaminated, and are going to remain so for a very long time until the poison of slavery and racism works itself out. Until that time I really doubt that any white can be in an 'authentic' relationship with a non
210 white person, that is, a relation totally without condescension, curiosity, and other forms o f using.' That is not to say that much good, including much teaching and learning and sharing, cannot be done. But it is going to be an imperfect process at best, and any presumption, on the part of a white person, that he can perfect it by flashing his bibliography of minority and revolutionary writers, is only going to slow down the process of coming together.
That, of course, excuses no one from ...making that bibliography as long as he can, from doing whatever else he can to learn what it is like to be non-white in America. By working very hard, one can move a silly millimeter dowm a very long road, but that silly millimeter...can make many things possible in human relationships. (13)
Just as Slanger felt he had "real" relationships with White students in general— which allowed for a sharing o f classroom values and expectations with which most seemed comfortable—in this passage, he acknowledges his position as a member of a "White community" that has historically conflicted with an "African American community." It is inevitable, he seems to say, for every individual to be involved in this conflict and to maintain communal identifications along racial lines that especially emphasize Black and
White because of the power o f history. What is most interesting, however, is that Slanger is willing to share these theories with other pre-dominantly White teaching assistants through his manual, but, as Chapter Five indicates, is reluctant to share them with students. Rather than approaching a "real" relationship with students of color that acknowledges his and their relationships to larger community struggles and race-based histories of power, he—reasonably, given the difBculties of such discussions—returns to academic notions of "objectivity" and critical distance in his comments to student work.
It is important for instructors to bring such conversations into training manuals for teaching assistants as Slanger does. It is equally important, if much more dfficult, for
211 instructors to open such discussions in the classroom. However, we can explore with
students of all colors the way White "identifications" such as the one Slanger describes
often remain obscured and invisible—at least to Whites—and how they sometimes allow
White students and White teachers to identify strongly with each other in a writing classroom, where close identification is of supreme importance and translates frequently
into high grades. At the same time, such a discussion does not have to polarize and become simply a Black-White issue. It would also be important to acknowledge where
"White," "Black," "Hispanic," and other "communities" break down in response to issues such as class, gender and sexual orientation and what the links are between these various categories.
In this way, we can reconsider Slangefs concern that "Perhaps I had seen myself as a person with special insight into the world of minority students. In fact, I was a teacher of English with some special willingness to find flexible ways to help people learn that subject. On that basis, I could accept myself. On that basis, the students could accept me" (13). When he believes he cannot fully empathize with Afiican American students in the same ways he did with his White students, he seems to retreat to an emphasis on the
"subject matter" of composition, as we saw in the last chapter. He recognizes the knowledge of language and literature with which he is comfortable, and he depoliticizes his own position in the classroom by retreating to this "objective" knowledge as he encourages Afiican American students to explore their political and social commitments. I would suggest, however, that one alternative to de-emphasizing the teacher's relationship to racial politics in the classroom is the possibility that Slanger offer himself as a person
212 with "special insight" into the W hite community, especially as it relates to African
American and other communities. He demonstrates strong insight into this subject throughout his manual along with a willingness to explore this issue with other members of the White academy; the next step might be to bring this role into the writing classroom.
Pedagogical Possibilities
One way to explore this issue in class is through a discussion of definitions, racial and otherwise, and the role they play in shaping social norms and physical reality.
Students could work to define terms such as "Black" and "White"—through both their personal impressions of these terms and their conceptions o f cultural definitions, including stereotypes—as they consider their relationship to social norms and language practices.
This process could involve reading fiction such as Toni Morrison's "Récitatif," a story about Twyla and Roberta, who first meet in an orphanage and whose lives intersect in various ways throughout their lives. Morrison's story is especially effective because, while she lets us know that one of the characters is Black and the other White, she never tells us which one is which. She plays throughout the story on racial themes, stereotypes, and historical events (such as the debates about busing in the late 1960s) that lead most readers to decide that one of the characters is Black and the other White and to read the story based on those constructions. Morrison also uses cues dependent on the intersection of race and class and, to a lesser extent, gender, which "encourage" readers to assign race to the characters.
When readers discover, through confronting other interpretations of "Récitatif in
213 class discussion, that the information Morrison offers justifies reading Twyla as Black or
White (and that the same is true for Roberta), their notions of reading, writing, and race
are typically shaken. Morrison's work points out in vivid ways the role the reader has in
creating meaning in the story as she makes two equally important points about race: first,
since either Twyla or Roberta could be Black or White based on the information given in
the story—information that seems "objective" and "natural"—race is clearly a constructed
entity dependent in many ways on narrative and linguistic forms. In that sense, race is
arbitrary and inconsequential. In the spirit of most liberal thought, it really "does not
matter." On the other hand, most readers initially read the characters as absolutely tied to
the race they assign them, and the meaning assigned to the story depends on the reader's
decision that either Twyla or Roberta is Black and that the other is White. When creating
an "absolute" interpretation of something seemingly as basic as race suddenly becomes
problematic, readers begin to see how even arbitrary constructs, such as race, help
construct material reality through such things as discrimination, oppression, affirmative
action laws and repeals, etc.
Morrison, that is, creates a binary which states at the same time that
• race does not matter in any sort of absolute way (otherwise, she could never have
written a story where the narrative evidence justifies a reading of either girl being
Black and either being White); and
• race always matters in this country because of the political and social structures upon
which this country has been built.
Because she reveals race as a construct, however, Morrison opens the door for possible
214 change in racial conceptions and relations. Race does not matter in the ways we typically think of it, but we cannot ignore it and assume racial difference does not affect all of our everyday lives.
The instructor's role is vital in defining terms like "Black" and "White " or reading stories like "Récitatif." Rather than playing the role of distant observer, instructors can share their reading experiences of "Récitatif" which depend on their own definitions of race, class, and gender. When I first read the story, for example, I assumed Twyla to be the Afiican American character based on such things as the narrative structure (she is the first person narrator and, therefore, seemed more likely to "represent" Morrison), her class and political positions (she has a blue-collar job and eventually takes a pro-busing stand, two traits that felt "Afiican American" to me), and simple linguistic bias (Twyla sounded more like an "Afiican American" name to my mind). Rather than simply "correcting" students who think they can accurately pinpoint the race of the characters, I encourage them to trace their own reading processes and their relationships to the cultural constructs
Morrison works with by using my first reading of the story as a model. It usually then becomes easier for all of us to deal with the meaning of the surprise we had at finding out the very cultural codes we took to "prove" Twyla Black or White could have been used to interpret her in the "other" way.
Students can then re-read and write about their interaction with race, class, and gender in "Récitatif," a process which illustrates how Morrison, readers, and larger cultural codes all play a part in making "meaning" of the story. Most important, such a process illustrates that students and teachers—Black, White, Hispanic, Native American,
215 Asian—all are caught up in racial discourses that affect the way we read not only stories like "Récitatif' but the everyday world. Such an understanding demonstrates our ability to gain greater intellectual authority and critical distance from issues o f race as it also compels us to recognize our relationships to competing community discourses that frequently depend on racial difference for meaning. A class that emphasizes these ideas then becomes "epistemic" in the sense that teacher and students alike recognize the rhetorical nature o f knowledge—the way individual subject positions, community commitments, the languages we use, and the material world interact to create reality.
Such a class helps students recognize the importance of argument to all knowledge as it offers some of the tools needed to question "common sense" issues.
Commenting With "Congruence"
One further example from UW illustrates my notion of opening up instructors' subject positions to students in the writing class and allowing both the learning and teaching process to be epistemic. I located the following anonymous, handwritten note in the UW archives, and my impression is that the introduction to the italicized words is
Irmschefs or another White administrator's:
5/20/69
Tommy Lee’s response to a student’s comment that he didn’t think grammatical matters deserved so much attention in paper-marking as Lee had given his:
"Listen, Man, there's no reason why you should not read over your work before laying it on me. I told you that I am not ’ tryinto hang you out—so why hattg me up with your petty errors? I had to leam the man's shit grammar too. After I got the grammar and writing scoped, I used it
216 against him andfor the beautiful brothers and sisters. Now Dig, some folks in the movement are in the streets doin ’ the job; you 're in the University. Your job is to get your shit together. You 'd better start doing it or the pig will wipe you o ff as another Svipe-out. ' Later. Remember: Soul is survival motion set to music. (underline ’’ in original, italics added)
It seems likely that the individual who copied Tommy Lee's words is using them to advance the University position on edited American English. In many ways, this document represents Irmscheris and the University's ideas about the language controversy, and the original, italicized section has the added rhetorical benefit of coming, presumably, fi’om an African-American instructor. Irmscher or someone else may have saved this handwritten document to defend his or her views, possibly to radical teaching assistants or students, on teaching the "standard." Most interesting, however, are the tensions inevitable even in a short text like this one, which undermine any easy separation between education and politics the University often wanted to make.
Tommy Lee initially makes a comment to the student that could derive from a current-traditional approach: "...why hang me up with your petty errors?" His reference to "petty errors" assumes an objective right-wrong understanding of University writing.
This seemingly objective approach, which holds a student accountable for not measuring up to unquestionable standards, is, however, quickly subsumed in a more epistemic rhetoric that assumes socially constructed linguistic norms at the University. Lee believes that edited American English is not separate fi'om the racially charged culture he knows and that it is “The man’s”—a social construct that is part of the White community and, therefore, a linguistic system open to question and implicated in racial conflict. It is also
217 "shit," less because o f its inherent "badness" than because of its attachment to a community Lee sees as oppressive.
Lee goes on to remark that learning dominant forms o f English allowed him to work against the White establishment "and for the beautiful brothers and sisters" even as he disparages the idea that political work in the University is political in the same sense as
"the movement...in the streets." His closing comments indicate a movement away from
"street politics" and into a battle within the system, a rhetorical move that opens the notion of education as a political tool. By urging his students to get an education, he is urging them to alter their relationship to an oppressive system that will potentially wipe them out because it has already labeled them as nothings, as "wipe-outs." Lee's rhetorical turns in this comment finally do not eliminate the possibility of politics within education; they simply set up a different notion of politics within the University confines as opposed to more traditional political demonstrations and radical activities. Lee advocates working for change within the system, much as Vice-President Samuel Kelly does in many of his documents (see Chapter Three), and he opposes this kind of work to political action in
"the streets"' as if such political action is purely oppositional in some sense and does not represent work sanctioned by and subject to mainstream culture.
Most important, however, is Lee's willingness to acknowledge a position on the subject of academic language that goes beyond a simple acceptance of an "objective standard." He is obviously empathetic to the student's concern with racial progress and sets himself up both as an authority figure and as an individual with vested communal and political identities that dictate his approach to writing education. The differences between
218 this response to a student and the ones I note in the last chapter are subtle but signal a
significant rhetorical shift, one that opens the door for students to make more critical
decisions about language use. Where Slanger concentrates on formal aspects of writing
and removes himself from his comments when he addresses student texts raising questions
of race and politics, Lee implicates himself and his politics in his response to this student.
Lee makes an argument, rather than states a "fact," and suggests to the student
that this argument is based on a reconciliation of competing political and linguistic
commitments that are not final because they are part of his political and social positions,
both of which are intimately tied to his race and subject to change. Such a comment,
while it reinforces the University's position on edited American English, helps students recognize the power relations inherent in language use and the subject positions both instructors and students work from when deciding how linguistic knowledge is made. His parting comment in particular—"Remember: Soul is survival motion set to music”— denies the notion that "objective" knowledge is the primary goal of University education.
Both Lee and the student are in a battle for survival, and the University is a political and social tool that can help them achieve this goal.
Of course, a great deal is missing in this scenario that might help us make further sense of Lee's comments, and there are many questions we can ask about his ability to reach "congruence" with this student. Is he only able to be more public with his social and political commitments because he and the student are both Afiican-American? Does Lee attempt to rely on color to establish "solidarity" with a student who may be alienated from him in terms of class or in other ways? How do students respond to comments that, on
219 the surface, contradict their beliefs but that recognize the epistemic and rhetorical nature
of university learning? Can they use the implied message of comments like Lee's to create
a stronger position from which to form their own notions of language use, notions that
will both help them succeed in the mainstream and offer them the possibility of creating
change?
Rogers' notion of congruence is important here in the sense that Lee offers not
pure empathy or even agreement with his student's implicit understanding of writing
education and politics. What he does offer, however, is a political position that can be
more easily argued by the student than a dogmatic statement like, "Edited American
English is the one right way to write." An openness about the political nature of writing
and of teachers and students, of course, would have to be built on in classroom
discussions and writing assignments so that students and teacher alike would gain more
practice questioning their own understanding of "writing" and communication and leam to interrogate each other’s. A final step in this process would involve interrogating systemic notions of language—where they come from, how they maintain power, and the roles individuals and communities have in reforming such notions.
Institutional Implications
The institutional implications for the conclusions I am reaching are both theoretical and practical. Primarily, I believe in the need for greater reflection by all of us and a close analysis of the ways different groups are asked to provide different levels of reflection on their political and social positions in the academy. Why do students do more of this work
220 in the classroom than do teachers? Why are African American and other minorities asked to do more of this work than Whites? How do institutional norms inscribe and protect these disparities and, therefore, protect the status quo? A significant part of such reflection will involve the formation of a new vocabulary, one beginning with terms like
"whiteness" that offer the possibilities for Whites reflecting on our implication in issues of power and community, which began with slavery and continue today.
One way to begin creating such a vocabulary is by understanding and critiquing the existing vocabulary we use to describe such things as students, race, gender, and class.
Such a critique requires analysis not only of published documents but of the kinds of documents I discovered at UW: memos, letters, comments to students' work, and internal teaching manuals, all o f which contribute to a greater understanding of the day-to-day workings of composition. We have to begin valuing and saving such materials, however, if we are to critique them, and renewed attention has to be paid to the construction of historical archives if we are to provide such opportunities for analysis to future historians.
Attention must be paid to cataloguing and categorizing a wealth of texts, including student papers, so that future historians of writing will have more avenues to discover how we teach writing today than simply through published reports in journals likeCollege
Composition and Communication.
Finally, graduate programs in English must give renewed attention to the connections between theory and practice, composition and literature, teaching and scholarship. At The Ohio State University, for example, incoming graduate students are required to take two courses: an introduction to composition pedagogy and an
221 introduction to literary theory. While the introduction to composition pedagogy includes
discussions of power and difference in the classroom, it has traditionally been given less
weight by students and faculty than the introduction to literary theory, which is
significantly titled "Introduction to Graduate Studies." Until recently, the pedagogy
course was given fewer credits than the theory course and students have taken it much less
seriously as a result. Its position reflects the position of composition in general in the
academy: it is seen as the poor stepchild with few connections to the high ground of
literary theory. In many universities, in fact, new teaching assistants are given teacher
training for no credit or are not trained at all. What 1 would propose would be to combine
theory and pedagogy courses like the ones at Ohio State into one two-term course so that
the abstract notions of theory could be used in concert with the concerns of teaching
language, diversity, and epistemology every day in introductory composition and literature courses. Such a move would highlight the importance of teaching, teaching writing in particular, and push students and faculty to consider the multiple connections between theory and practice at the university.
Returning to Race: A Postscript
The documents I examine above reflect specific pedagogical tactics that can illustrate the epistemic nature of writing and education, which are intimately connected to larger cultural codes of "whiteness" and "blackness" and which implicate teachers and students o f all colors in discourses of race, class, and gender. In fact, these texts favor discourses of "blackness" in the sense that they make visible the political, constructed
222 nature of all individuals and of the knowledge we gain at the university. Such pedagogical
strategies can help students to write edited American English more effectively and
eflBciently, especially when used with peer responding and theories of writing as a process,
both of which allow students to work through complicated arguments in a setting that is
collaborative and constructively critical. Just as important, such strategies begin to
illustrate the way we all make meaning by looking through lenses that emphasize racial
and other differences and the importance of language to the construction of difference.
While writing instructors have a great responsibility to offer all students the linguistic power provided by edited American English, we also have a responsibility to offer them critical insight into language and its relation to power and social change.
As AnnLouise Keating points out, however, focusing on topics of race or gender in the classroom is risky, and the following warning helps demonstrate the dangers of engaging race uncritically in the writing class, whatever the instructor's or students' motives;
[T]he problems with discussing "whiteness" and other racial categories without historicizing the terms and demonstrating the relational nature of all racialized identities include (but aren't limited to) the following. First, our conceptions o f "race" are scientifically and historically inaccurate; they transform arbitrary distinctions between people into immutable, "natural" God-given facts. Second, constant references to "race" perpetuate the belief in separate peoples, monolithic identities, and stereotypes. Third, in this country racial discourse quickly degenerates into a "black"/"white" polarization that overlooks other so-called "races" and ignores the incredible diversity among people. And fourth, racial categories are not— and never have been—benign. Racial divisions were developed to create a hierarchy that grants privilege and power to specific groups of people while simultaneously oppressing and excluding others.... At the very least, we should complicate existing conceptions of "race"—both by exploring the many changes that have occurred in all apparently fixed racial categories and by informing students of the political, economic, and historical factors
223 shaping the continual reinvention of "race." (916-917)
In heeding Keating's advice, composition studies needs to address the relation between language instruction, individual students, and social change by reconsidering a category like Berlin's epistemic rhetoric as it relates to all academic knowledge and discourses o f "whiteness." In order to maintain authority, discourses of "whiteness" at the university have frequently shielded themselves behind veils o f "invisibility" and
"objectivity." It is important to consider how the epistemic movement—which focuses on the social construction of knowledge and the individual, the competition among different communities vying for the ability to "own" knowledge, and the importance of language to these processes—can offer insight into deconstructing "whiteness" as it also offers the opportunity to deny essentialist notions of race. Perhaps most important, instructors should emphasize that discourses o f "blackness" and "whiteness" are ultimately more closely related to issues of power than they are to skin color, and that similar discursive competition occurs between "masculine" and "feminine" discourses and within seemingly insular communities, such as the African American or gay communities. In whatever setting, individuals and communities who can successfully offer their linguistic forms and methods of proof as "objective," "universal," and "natural" will gain discursive and political power. At the same time, analyses of power in this country cannot escape the issue of race, especially the conflict between Black and White, since our country was founded and has foundered on violently conflicting notions o f racial freedom and equality.
As Keating implies, such a process will necessarily be cross-disciplinary and will push composition instructors to consider with students the importance of linguistic and
224 political histories to language use today. We need to recognize that definitions of "White" and "Black" do not have the same meanings today that they did during the era of slavery or Jim Crow or even as they did thirty years ago when the Civil Rights Movement began to impact the laws and economic practices of this country. It is important to inculcate in ourselves as much as in our students the ability to assess arguments and write fi'om a carefully considered and authoritative standpoint even as we reconsider the criteria and
"common sense" fi'om which we make such arguments. Revision, in this sense, applies not only to the words we put on paper but to the epistemological modes that govern our ways of thinking and our understanding o f the relationships between discourse, difference, and power.
Students and instructors, for example, can question the importance of "objectivity" to argumentation, the difference between arguments and opinions, and our continued reliance on metanarratives, such as science and religion to advocate universal and absolute ways of knowing. The answer surely is not to promote absolute relativity and the idea that we are all impotent in the face o f competing, and perfectly equivalent, discourses.
However, we need to question further how we define values through language and to maintain a flexible attitude as well as a finely tuned critical sense when we confi'ont difference in the rhetorical and material worlds.
Finally, I believe with George Slanger that "The students...have some right to expect the teacher to take some responsibility for his actions and for the system fi-om which he accepts money and other services"{Mmmal 13) even as we ask students to take responsibility for their actions, including linguistic ones, and for the systems in which they
225 take part. Such critical self-awareness on the part of teachers and students offers one way for epistemic approaches to writing instruction to maintain their full power by politicizing and more accurately historicizing all teachers and students. It also offers instructors a way to find "the delicate balance" between the two poles of the thorny binary with which history has left us; only a strong sense of critical awareness and the ability to truly hear student critique will allow instructors to recognize the differences between "the world-as- it-is" from the "world-as-it-ought-to-be" so that we can find ways "to build our course on the few places where [the] two worlds are the same" {Mmmal 13). The composition class is a primary site for creating a space for the "world-as-it-ought-to-be" because of the opportunities it offers to look at language as an active constituent of ideology and material reality even as it reinforces student awareness of the "world-as-it-is." Creating such classroom dynamics will not revolutionize the academy or the country, but, through individual instructors and students, they offer the potential to begin healing community conflicts and to create systemic change.
226 ’ The metaphor of "the streets" comes up repeatedly in ny examination of Black-White relations. For example, in Chapter One, 1 note the many references to Ebonics as the language of "the streets," while in Chapter Three, 1 relate the contention made by an EOF administrator that the students recruited for the program came &om "the streets." Lee is the only one who does not imply a wholly negative connotation to this term, but all these references suggest that "the streets" are somehow fully removed from "mainstream" culture. "The streets" are part of a renegade culture, apart from ordinary law. and the phrase carries strong racial connotations; it often acts as a code for "blackness."
227 BIBLIOGRAPHY
"Is Ebonics the new N-word?"Chicago Tribune 26D qc. 1996; 1:28.
"Keep'street talk'where it belongs—in the streets." Chicago Defender 24 Dec. 1996: 9:1
Anonymous. Attachment toInstructors’ Comments on Pre-Autumn Program, September 1968. William Irmscher Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
Anonymous. Instructors' Comments on Pre-Autumn Program, September William1968. Irmscher Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
Anonymous. "Tommy Lee's Response." 20 May 1969. William Irmscher Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
Applebee, Arthur. Tradition mid Reform in the Teaching o f English. Urbana: NCTE, 1974.
Balester, Valerie. Cultural Divide: A Study o f African-Americmi College-Level Writers. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1993.
Beimet, James. "Administration Rejects Black English as a Second Language."New York Times 15 Dec. 1996: A22.
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-85. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Bosmajian, Haig A. "The Language of White Racism." College English 31 (1969): 263- 272.
Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer.Research in Written Composition. Champaign: NCTE, 1963.
228 Brown, Frank B. Ed. I/D/E/A Reporter. Summer Quarter 1971. William Irmscher Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
CCCC's Executive Committee. "Guidelines for Junior College English Teacher Training Programs." College Composition and Communication 22 (1971): 303-313.
Campbell, Finley. Letter to William Irmscher. 28 July 1969. W.U. English Department Freshman English Program Papers. University of Washington Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
Cartwright, Philip. Memo to William Irmscher. 11 April 1969. William Irmscher Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell Publishing, Inc., 1968
Cohen, Mitchell and Dennis Hale.The New Student Left. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
Collier, Peter and David Horowitz.Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s. New York: Summit Books, 1989.
Conference on College Composition and Communication. "Students' Right to Their Own Language." Spec. Issue ofCollege Composition and Communication 25.3 (1974): 1-32.
Conner, Jack. Letter to William Irmscher. 8 November 1971. W.U. English Department Freshman English Program Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
Connors, Robert. "Writing the History of Our Discipline."An Introduction to Composition Studies. Eds. Ericka Lindemann and Gary Tate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Delpit, Lisa. "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children." Harvard Educational Review 58 (1988): 280-97.
—. "Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator." Harvard Educational Review. 56 (1986): 379-85.
Dillard, J.L. Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States. New York: First Vintage Books, 1973.
Diringer, Elliot and Lori Olazewski. "Critics May Not Understand Oakland's Ebonics Plan." San Erancisco Chronicle 21 Dec 1996: A17.
229 Du Bois, W E B. "The Talented Tenth." In Gates and West: 133-157.
Dyer, Richard. "White." The Matter o f Images: Essays on Representation. New York: Routledge, 1993. 141-63.
Emery, Julie. "Black Studies Showing Encouraging Signs of Growth."Seattle Times. 2 July 1973: 19B
—. "The U.W.'s Black Studies Program: Developing Leaders is Major Goal." Seattle Times 29 March 1970: AS.
Enos, Theresa, Ed. A Sourcebook fo r Basic Writing Teachers. New York: Random House, 1987.
Evans, Charles. Status Report on the Special Education Program (Reprinted from The Senate Agenda May 14-21, 1970/ William Irmscher Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
—. Memo to William Irmscher. March 24, 1970. W.U. English Department Program Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
—. Minority Group Programs (Text o f a special report to the Senate). 1968. William Irmscher Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
Faigley, Lester. Fragments o f Rationality: Postmodemity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.
Farr, Marcia and Harvey Daniels. Language Diversity and Writing Instruction. New York: ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Eduation et al., 1986.
Farrell, Thomas J. "A Defense for Requiring Standard English."PRE lE X T l (^\9Z6)\ 165-79.
—. "IQ and Standard English."College English 34 (December 1983): 470-84.
Farrell, Thomas J. and James Sledd. "Comment and Response."College English 46 (December 1984): 821-29.
Fish, Stanley. Is There A Text In This Class'l Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Freire, Paulo. The Pedagogy o f the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1989.
230 Frye, Marilyn. "White Woman Feminist." Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism, 1976- 1992. Freedom, CA; Crossing, 1992. 147-69.
Gates, Henry Louis and Gomel West. The Future o f the Race. New York; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1996.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Race, Writing, and Difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation o f Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gewaltney, John Langston, Ed.Drylongso: A Self-Portrait o f Black America. New York: Random House, 1983.
Gilyard, Keith. Let’s Flip the Script: An Afiican American Discorirse on Language, Literature, and Learning. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.
Giroux, Henry and Peter McClaren. "Radical Pedagogy as Cultural Politics: Beyond the Discoures of Critique and Anti-Utopianism."Texts for Change: Theory/Pedagogy/Politics. Ed. Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. 152-86.
Gitlin, Todd.The Sixties: Years o f Hope, Days o f Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987.
Hairston, Maxine. "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing."College Compositon and Communication 43 ( 1992): 179-93.
Hamblin, Ken. "Don't get hooked on "EbonicsDenver ' Post 24 Dec. 1996: B7.
Harris, Joseph. "After Dartmouth: Growth and Conflict in English"College English 53 (1991): 631-646.
—. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since I960. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice- Hall, Inc., 1997.
Heath, Shirley Brice. Wcys With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Helmers, Marguerite H. Writing Students: Composition Testimonials and Representations o f Students. Ithaca: SUNY Press, 1994.
Holmes, Steven A. "Black Voice of the Streets is Defended and Criticized."New York Times 30 Dec. 1996: A9.
231 hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston; South End Press, 1990.
Hutchison, Sue. "Surprise Proposal: EUminate All Hours." University o f Washington DotTk 4 January 1967: 1.
Irmscher, William. "Finding a Comfortable Identity."College Composition and Communication 38 (1987): 81-87.
— . The Holt Guide to English. New York: Holt Publishing, 1972.
—. Introduction to Instructors' Comments on Pre-Autumn Program, September 1968. William Irmscher Papers. University o f Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
—. Letter to the Author. 18 October 1995.
—. Letter to Charles Evans. 5 March 1970. W.U. English Department Freshman English Program Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
— . Letter to Cheryl Kupper 29 May 1968. W.U. English Department Freshman English Program Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
—. Letter to Elliot Evans. 1 April 1971. W.U. English Department Freshman English Program Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
—. Letter to Jack Conner. 19 November 1971. W.U. English Department Freshman English Program Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
— . Letter to Jarold Ramsey. August 1968. W.U. English Department Freshman English Program Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
— . Letter to Philip Cartvmght. 22 April 1969. William Irmscher Papers. University o f Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
—. Letter to Regina Hoover. 17 March 1972. W.U. English Department Freshman English Program Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
232 — . Letter to Virginia Burke. 19 June 1968. W.U. English Department Freshman English Program Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
Jones, William A. "Basic Writing: Pushing Against Racism."Journal o f Basic Writing 12.1 (1993): 72-80.
Jordan, June.Civil War: Observations From the Front Lines o f America. New York: Simon and Schuster (First Touchstone Edition), 1995.
Kates, Susan. "The Embodied Rhetoric of Hallie Quinn Brown."College English 59 (1997): 59-71. Keating, AnnLouise. "Interrogating Whiteness, (De)Constructing Race.'"College English SI {\995)\ 901-18.
Kelly, Samuel. Annual Report o f the Office o fMinority Affairs fo r the Academic Year 1970-71. William Irmscher Papers. University of Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
—. Report to the Faculty Senate on the Status o f Minority Affairs at the University o f Washington. 1971. William Irmscher Papers. University o f Washington Libraries Manuscripts and Archives Division, Seattle.
Kerr, Clark. "The Uses of the University." The University Crisis Reader: The Liberal University Under Attack, V. V. Eds. Immanel Wallerstein and Paul Starr. New York: Random House, 1971.
Kochman, Thomas. "Classroom Modalities: Black and White Communicative Styles in the Classroom." Lattguage in School and Community. Ed. N. Mercer. London; Edward Arnold, 1981.
Labov, William. A Study o f the Non-Standard English o f Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City. Cooperative Research Project No. 3288, 2 vois. Mimeographed. 1968.
—. The Stiufy o f Non-Standard English. Washington,DC., 1969.
Lakoflf, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Larson, Richard. Introduction to the "Students' Right to Their Own Language." Spec. Issue of College Composition and Communication 25.3 (1974); 1-32.
Llorens, David. "Black Studies at the University of Washington."University of Washington Arts and Sciences Newsletter. December 1970.
233 Lu, Min Zhan. "Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Innocence."Journal o f Basic Writing 10.1 (1991): 26-40.
Marback, Richard. "Corbett's Hand: A Rhetorical Figure for Composition Studies." College Composition and Communication 47 (1996): 180-198.
Miller, James. Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege o f Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1987.
Miller, Thomas P. "Teaching the Histories of Rhetoric as a Social Practice." Rhetoric Review 12.1 (1993): 70-82.
Morrison, Joan and Robert K.From Camelot to Kent State: The Sixties Experience in the Words o f Those Who Lived It. New York: Times Books, 1987
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination New York: First Vintage Books, 1993.
—. "Récitatif." Confirmation: An Anthology o fAfncan American Women. Ed. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka. New York: Wm Morrow and Co., 1983. 243-261.
Morse, J. Mitchell. "The Shuffling Speech of Slavery: Black English." College English 34(1973); 834-43.
Nelms, Gerald. "The Case for Oral Evidence in Composition Historiography."Written Communication 9 (1992): 356-84.
North, Stephen. The Making o f Knowledge o f Composition: Portrait o f an Emerging Field. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1987.
Odegaard, Charles. "Odegaard Defines Employment Policy."University o f Washington Daily
Perlstein, Rick. "Who Owns the Sixties: The Opening of A Scholarly Generation Gap. " Lingua Franca 6.4 (1996): 30-37
Pietras, Thomas P. "Lawyers, Linguists, and Language Arts: From the School Administrator's Viewpoint."Reactiom to Ann Arbor: Vernacular Black English and Education. Ed. Marcia Farr Whiteman. Arlington, VA; Center for Applied Linguistics, 1980.
Pixton, William H. "A Contemporary Dilemma: The Question of Standard English." College Composition and Communication 25 (October 1974): 247-253.
234 Pratt, Minnie Bruce. Identity: Skin Blood Heart."Yours in Struggle. Eds. Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith. Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1984.
Rose, NCke. "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University."College English 47 (1985): 341-361.
Sanders, Jane.Into the Second Century: The University o f Washington: 1961-1986. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987.
Sayres, Sohnya, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson.The 60s Without Apology. Miimeapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Scott, Jerrie Cobb. "Literacies and Deficits Revisited."Jountal o f Basic Writing 12.1 (1993): 46-56.
Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide fo r Teachers of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Shells, Merrill. "Why Johnny Can't Write." Newsweek 8 Dec. 1975: 58-65.
Slanger, George. E-mail Correspondence to the Author. 2 August 1996.
—. Untitled EOP Training Manual. Correspondence to the Author. 1 August 1996.
Sledd, James. "In Defense of the 'Students' Right.'"College English 45 (November 1983): 667-75.
Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin' and TestifyitT: The Language o f Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977.
Stewart, William. "On the Use of Negro Dialect in the Teaching of Reading."Teaching Black Children to Read, eds. Joan C. Baratz and R.W. Shuy. Washington D C., 1969.
Stockton, Sharon. '"Blacks vs. Browns': Questioning the White Ground."College English 51 {\995): 166-81.
Students for a Democratic Society. The Port Huron Statement. In James Miller: 329- 374.
Tracey, Richard. "He Takes the Teaching of Writing Seriously: A Bibliography of Works by William F. Irmscher." Balancing Acts:
Vandover, Mary Louise. "The Students' Right to their Own Language—or the Students' Right to Language Itself: A Challenge." Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College compositon and Communication (26*, St. Louis, MO, March 13-15,1975).
Walker, Dianne Louise. "The University of Washington Establishment and the Black Student Union Sit-In of 1968." M.A. Thesis. University of Washington, 1980.
235 Williams, Patricia. "The Hidden Meanings ofBlack English'"New York Times 29 Dec. 1996: 4: 5.
Wilson, George. "The 'color* of language." Chicago Defender 22 February 1997: 22:1.
Zavarzadeh, Ma'sud and Donald Morton. "A Very Good Idea Indeed: The (Post)Modem Labor Force and Curricular Reform." Cultural Studies in the English Classroom. Eds. James A. Berlin and Michael J. Vivion. New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 1992: 66-86.
236