Where Did College English Studies Come from? Author(s): Thomas P. Miller Source: Rhetoric Review , Autumn, 1990, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 50-69 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/465417 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/465417?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Rhetoric Review This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:12:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THOMAS P. MILLER University of Arizona Where Did College English Studies Come From? Twenty-five years have passed since William Riley Parker asked "Where Do English Departments Come From?". Parker's answer that "the teaching of English, as a constituent of college or university education, is only about 100 years old" has become a basic premise of discussions of our history (Parker 3). Like Parker, historians such as Graff, Mathieson, and McMurty have dated our discipline from the introduction of English literary studies in universities like Oxford and Harvard in the last half of the nineteenth century. Such eighteenth-century developments as Hugh Blair's professorship in rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh have been discounted because they were not really "first steps in the development of an academic discipline" (Parker 7). However, if we set aside our concept of what qualifies as an academic discipline and simply ask when English was first taught in a concerted way at the college level, then even Blair is too late. Lectures on English literature, rhetoric, and composition were delivered in the Scottish univer- sities as early as 1730, and English was being studied at numerous Scottish and American colleges at about the same time that Blair became Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in 1762. The teaching of college English actually began almost exactly a century before Blair, for English was first taught at the college level in the academies that English Dissenters established when they were forced to leave the universities by the introduction of religious tests in 1662. All the major figures in eighteenth-century college English studies were either Scots, Americans, or Dissenters, and they form a recognized school of thought, which Howell has termed the "new" rhetoric. The best-known figure to come out of the Dissenting academy tradition was Joseph Priestley, tutor in Languages and Belles Lettres at Warrington Academy from 1762 to 1767. From Scotland came the most influential sources of early college English studies-Hugh Blair and George Campbell. According to Howell, Guthrie, and Kitzhaber, the first sig- nificant American rhetorician working in English was Blair's classmate John Witherspoon, who was President of the Presbyterian college at Princeton from 1768 to 1794. Any account that fails to include these figures will inevitably fail to account for why college English began in the first place. College English originated not at the elite universities but in the British cultural provinces as a result of basic disruptions of the dominant educational and cultural traditions: When the Dissenters were removed from the classical university curriculum, they began to study the logic, language, and social experience of contemporary life because their 50 Rhetoric Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall 1990 This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:12:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Where Did College English Studies Come From? 51 direct participation in the dominant culture was limited. Dissenters could not serve in the government or the military, and their political and religious rights were broadly restricted. Dissenters began to teach the contemporary culture for the same reason they began teaching contemporary politics: they wanted to prove to their children and themselves that they had a legitimate right to be fully accepted as members of educated society. Like the "North Britons" and colonial Americans who first taught college English, the Dissenters were cultural provincials, outsiders for whom the contemporary idiom was problematic enough to be studied and important enough to be taught. If we ignore this period and begin with the introduction of literary scholarship in the elite universities a century later, we will fail to understand the broader significance of where college English came from. Priestley, Smith, and Witherspoon helped introduce the study of modem history, politics, economics, and experimental science as well as English. Locke is often identified as a source of this break from the classics, but Calvin had as much to do with it as Locke did. Virtually all of the first college English teachers were middle-class clergymen of Calvinist backgrounds. The Dissenters came almost entirely from the middle classes, and the Scottish universities included far more middle and lower class students than the English did (see Hans 28). In America, the study of English had its most propitious beginnings in those colleges with the closest ties to the Dissenters and Scots, colleges like those at Princeton and Philadelphia, which had broader student populations than Harvard or Yale. While one can make a number of other broad generalizations about the first teachers of college English, a whole host of questions have yet to be asked, let alone answered. Why did teachers break from accepted tradition and begin to study English? How was English actually taught? Why was college English first taught by seventeenth-century Dissenters, widely established in Scotland and America in the eighteenth century, yet ignored in the English universities until a century later? How did the social and educational contexts of each country shape the founding assumptions and goals of college English? And finally, did these developments represent the beginning of college English in a sense that has contemporary significance? The published texts alone will not answer such questions. For example, from the text of Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres one cannot even tell if he assigned compositions because he deleted his references to student papers when he revised his notes for the reading public. Yet, when we try to reconstruct how English was taught, the lack of records and the vagaries of educational history become daunting. Even defining what "college" meant is not as easy as one might think. Except for an initial Latin oration, John Ward delivered an influential series of rhetoric lectures in English at Gresham College from 1720 to 1758. However, while Gresham is important as the home of the Royal Society, Gresham was not a "college" but a foundation for supporting public lectures that did not have a This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:12:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 52 Rhetoric Review student body or grant degrees. On the other hand, the Dissenting academies were colleges. They offered a wide range of scholarly and practical subjects to students of college age (then around fifteen to eighteen) who went directly into the professions, or in some cases completed their education with a year of MA studies in Scotland (see Curtis 115-17; Barnard 29). "College English studies" is also a problematic term. Prior to the development of English as a field of study, students learned to read and write the vernacular by studying Latin, and professors were lecturing in English before they were lecturing on it. Sometimes English was even used to teach rhetoric, but English itself was not the object of study, as in the case of Ward and John Lawson (Professor of Oratory and History at Trinity College, Dublin from 1750 to 1758), both of whom remained bound to classical models and generally ignored English composition and literature. To understand the origins of college English, we need to know much more about the educational traditions and social experiences of the Scots, Americans, and English Dissenters. Often the differences among the three traditions are not apparent in the major texts themselves. For example, if we read only their publish- ed rhetorics, Blair and Priestley appear to be belletristic rhetoricians with similar epistemological and cultural assumptions. However, if we examine their educa- tional and rhetorical practice, we can see that Priestley was a radical reformer in politics and religion as well as education, while Blair was a conservative defender of the political status quo. To understand these figures, we have to go beyond the history-of-ideas approach that has lumped them together as followers of Locke and explore the social and educational practices that informed their theories of rhetoric, composition, and literature. In this essay I will try to show that by the end of the eighteenth century there were three interrelated traditions in college English studies. I will concentrate particularly on the Dissenting academy tradition that first introduced the teaching of college English because we know almost nothing about our practical educational origins. To understand how the major theories were shaped by educational and social practice, we must develop a more detailed understanding of the educational context and a broader understanding of the social context, and to do that, we have to go beyond the major texts.