done by Mina Shaughnessy—now almost canonical for many in basic writing—had overgeneralized and oversimplified the basic writer. In the early 1990s, Min-Zhan Lu launched the first major salvo in her campaign to realign the origins and direction of basic writing: “Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence” (1991). In this essay, Lu maintained that by focusing so heavily on “error,” Shaughnessy was isolating language from meaning and, at the same time, minimizing the significance of cultural and linguistic differences. Not long after, her extension of this argument, “Conflict and Struggle,” appeared in the same issue of College English as Paul Hunter’s “‘Waiting for Aristotle’” (1992), his analysis of the 1980 issue of the Journal of Basic Writing published as a memorial to Shaughnessy—an issue, he argued, that defined her contribution so as to co-opt it for conservative ends. The response was an unprecedented six-author “Symposium on Basic Writing” (1993) in the next volume of College English. Four authors—including a co-worker of Shaughnessy’s and an open admissions student who had gone on to become a professor—charged Lu and Hunter with decontextualizing and misrepresenting the historical and philosophical foundations of basic writing; Lu and Hunter responded to these charges.
The call for more careful historicizing of BW took an ironic turn not long thereafter with Bruce Horner’s “Discoursing Basic Writing” (1996). Horner, a colleague and frequent coauthor of Lu’s, argued that the representation of basic writing even and especially by its advocates had been decontextualized, cut off from the social realities that forged it; he called for a recuperative, alternative history. Meanwhile, finding Lu’s critique of Shaughnessy a misrepresentation of BW’s seminal figure, Jane Maher embarked on her biography of Shaughnessy, itself not only a recuperative act but also a countermove whose motivations she discussed in a JBW article (“Writing the Life”). More recently, Brian Ray, writing in 2008 and representing a new generation of BW scholars, reassessed the debate of the 1990s from a fresh perspective, arguing that when viewed through Donald Davidson’s concept of linguistic charity (as articulated by Kevin Porter in “A Pedagogy of Charity: Donald Davidson and the Student-Negotiated Composition Classroom”) the views of Shaughnessy and Lu are really not so far apart.
To return to the debate as it surfaced in the 1990s, about the same time that Shaughnessy’s legacy was being critically reassessed, something else occurred that would lead to debates about the future of basic writing. In 1992 the fourth (and, to date, the last) National Conference on Basic Writing was held in College Park, Maryland. It featured David Bartholomae as the plenary speaker and focused on the theme “Critical Issues in Basic Writing: How Are We, Our Writing Programs, and Our Institutions Meeting or Failing to Meet the Needs of At-Risk Students?” The way Bartholomae chose to answer that question would have enormous impact on the field. At that point, early signs were that enriched perspectives could and would breed enriched pedagogy. In addition to the powerful personal narratives of scholars like Rose, Gilyard, and Villanueva that gave personal depth and cultural complexity to a field increasingly unhappy with pat labels and neat placements, there was the considerable success of Bartholomae’s own program at the University of Pittsburgh, documented in Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts. That 1986 book had been followed by Bartholomae’s ascension to the leadership of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1988. The Pittsburgh program had been widely praised and adopted. In his plenary speech, Bartholomae recounted the success story:
[T]his is a story I love to tell. It is convenient. It is easy to understand. Like basic writing, it (the story) and I are produced by the grand narrative of liberal sympathy and liberal reform. The story is inscribed in a master narrative of outreach, of equal rights, of empowerment, of new alliances and new understandings, of the transformation of the social text, the American university, the English department. I would like, in the remainder of my talk, to read against the grain of that narrative—to think about how and why and where it might profitably be questioned. I am not, let me say quickly, interested in critique for the sake of critique; I think we have begun to rest too comfortably on terms that should make us nervous, terms like “basic writing.” Basic writing has begun to seem like something naturally, inevitably, transparently there in the curriculum, in the stories we tell ourselves about English in America. It was once a provisional, contested term, marking an uneasy accommodation between the institution and its desires and a student body that did not or would not fit. I think it should continue to mark an area of contest, of struggle, including a struggle against its stability or inevitability. (“Tidy House” 6)
Bartholomae was by no means alone in this struggle. When Bill Bernhardt and Peter Miller, who had succeeded Lynn Quitman Troyka as editors of the Journal of Basic Writing, approached Bartholomae about publishing his keynote, he suggested that they consider including other presentations as well. They did. The resulting Spring 1993 issue of JBW is a rich re-examination of basic writing as a field—but a highly critical one, not afraid to suggest that BW as an enterprise may be fundamentally misguided. With the help of hindsight, the issue seems a checklist of the misgivings and concerns about basic writing that would become increasingly grave over the next ten years, concerns seeming to support Bartholomae’s suggestion that BW, as an institutionalized curricular construction, was suspect. Peter Dow Adams, outgoing co-chair of the Conference on Basic Writing, presented evidence that students who somehow escaped being tracked into BW classes actually fared fairly well in the mainstream. Tom Fox looked at the term “standards” as a kind of codeword used to justify exclusion. Jerrie Cobb Scott and William Jones examined the racism inherent in the deficit model of remediation, formed on the assumption that BW students are lacking rather than different and unassimilated. Jeanne Gunner addressed the sorry status of BW teachers, something Joseph Trimmer had already cited as keeping the field less productive and progressive than it might otherwise be. And Mary Jo Berger, a writing teacher turned college administrator, considered the chronic underfunding of BW instruction.
The one person to defend the status quo—and to resist Bartholomae’s against-the-grain tack—was Karen Greenberg, then director of the National Testing Network in Writing (NTNW), who later became coeditor of the Journal of Basic Writing with Trudy Smoke. In her contribution to the Spring 1993 issue of JBW, Greenberg wrote:
I believe in what I do. Therefore, I strongly disagree with many of the assertions made by David Bartholomae in his keynote speech at the Fourth Annual [sic] Conference on Basic Writing in Maryland. David characterized most basic writing courses as “obstacles rather than opportunities.” He stated that most basic writing programs “marginalize students” and “preserve them as different.” He also accused basic writing teachers of “merely satisfying [their] liberal reflexes” by trying to make students “more complete versions of themselves” in courses that don’t work. David was equally unimpressed with the assessment procedures used to place students into basic writing courses. He asked the conference participants, “Do you sort students into useful or thoughtful groups?” (“Politics” 65)
Greenberg answered yes to this question, but even she was careful to ground her defense of established practices for assessment and teaching in the details of her own context, the Developmental English Program she ran at Hunter College. As the only CUNY representative in the issue as well as the sole defender of current practices in BW assessment and instruction, Greenberg represented a legacy that others elsewhere were repudiating or at least calling into question.
Leading the charge was David Bartholomae, who, with Anthony Petrosky, had built a program at the University of Pittsburgh that purportedly moved the field well beyond Shaughnessy’s early vision at City College. But even their legacy was subject to critique. In “On the Academic Margins,” Deborah Mutnick wrote: “Despite the Pittsburgh program’s theoretical advances, Bartholomae and Petrosky continued to elide the political basis for excluding social groups from cultural institutions like universities; their narrative of basic writing omits the race, class, and gender inequities that pervade higher education” (191).
Redressing inequities and exclusions had been a centerpiece of Shaughnessy’s agenda in the early years, but then attention had turned to other questions, with answers sought in cognitive science and critical theory.
