a vengeance. Bartholomae, explicitly reading against the grain of his own narrative and citing Mary Louise Pratt’s recently published “Arts of the Contact Zone,” was calling for “a curricular program designed not to hide differences . . . but to highlight them” (“Tidy House” 13). The highlighting of differences would in fact be reflected in some of the most important books of the decade, notably Mutnick’s own Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education (1996) and Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu’s Representing the “Other”: Basic Writers and the Teaching of Writing (1999).
The perceived need for a narrative of basic writing that acknowledged inequalities of race, class, and gender was also subsequently acknowledged by the Conference on Basic Writing (CBW). Though it had given up on national conferences as too expensive and logistically difficult, CBW decided to hold all-day workshops each year on the day before the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) began (Uehling). The second of these workshops, held in 1997, was devoted to “Race, Class, and Culture in the Basic Writing Classroom”; papers from it were published in another special issue of the Journal of Basic Writing, this time put together by new editors George Otte and Trudy Smoke. For all the weight these papers had and all the attention they deserved, one piece far outstripped the others in impact. It was Ira Shor’s “Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality.” In figuring basic writing as “our apartheid,” Shor claimed that the problem was structural: with students identified by suspect tracking mechanisms, BW represented a subcollegiate curricular level that would always see concentrations of students with socioeconomic disadvantages and cultural differences, always be tended by underpaid, overworked, and inadequately prepared teachers. Basic writing, according to Shor, did not need to be rethought or revised; it needed to be dismantled.
Shor’s piece kindled fires of controversy. His characterization of basic writing as “our apartheid” and his call for its dismantling provoked heated discussion at a CBW post-workshop meeting, a meeting he did not attend; the discussion was picked up on e-mail lists like CBW-L and WPA-L thereafter. A special concern fueling the discussion was that others besides Shor (and with politics very different from his) were calling for the dismantling of BW programs. Public systems in Georgia and Florida had eliminated them from four-year colleges, and plans to do the same were moving forward in states from California to Massachusetts. CUNY, so thoroughly identified with advances made in the early days of open admissions, was itself in the process of dismantling BW, at least at the four-year schools. James Traub’s City on a Hill (1994) cast City College, that seedbed of BW, as a once-proud institution devalued and dumbed-down by the admission of underprepared students. In the wake of this attack, New York’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, encouraged CUNY’s Board of Trustees to take a critical look at CUNY’s admission and placement practices and appointed a special task force to review these policies. On January 25, 1999, the Board voted to phase out all “remediation” in its four-year colleges by January 2001. Such dramatic changes were by no means confined to New York. Across the country, policy makers well to the right of Shor on the political spectrum were demanding an end to remediation as a drain on resources and an institutionalized lowering of standards.
The editors of JBW received a number of responses to Shor and chose to publish two of them in the Fall 1997 issue, both making due note of this conservative trend. Karen Greenberg, who saw what was happening at CUNY, stressed that “there are reactionary political forces currently trying to achieve precisely this barring of access and precisely this reduction in size in colleges across the country” and claimed that Shor’s proposal “would, in fact, justify the curtailment and the consequent reduction or elimination of basic skills programs” (94). Terence Collins, academic dean of the General College of the University of Minnesota, more tersely and colorfully remarked, “We who teach from the left are peculiarly fond of beating each other up while the right wing eats our lunch” (100). But he also said Shor’s argument put him in mind of “Deborah Mutnick’s warning [in the preface to Writing in an Alien World] to be careful in how we mount educational critique from the left, that in impolitic critique of Basic Writing we risk crawling into bed with the very elements of right wing elitism which access programs and many Basic Writing programs were founded to counteract” (99).
For the remainder of the decade, the Journal of Basic Writing would often include accounts of the dismantling of basic writing programs, sometimes on a statewide basis, like Gail Stygall’s account of the “unraveling” of BW at the University of Washington. What these accounts showed was that such dismantling tended to disregard pedagogical considerations, whereas Shor’s call for dismantling was in fact founded on concerns about pedagogy. Attacks on basic writing from the right took advantage of the vulnerability accompanying low-status programs for unwelcome students, whereas Shor’s critique decried that lack of status and welcome.
Still, different as these points of attack from the left and the right were, they combined to make basic writing programs seem not only vulnerable but also almost indefensible. Even for champions of BW, defending the status quo was tough; however deserving the students were of attention, the attention granted them often seemed too arbitrary in its placements, too unsure of its methods and pedagogy. The key question—what would become of BW students once BW programs were gone—was almost imponderable. Hemmed about with contingencies, value-laden claims about what could be done or should be done for such students, the answer to that all-important question could seem too speculative until it was too late. Would basic writers survive without support (and stigmatizing placement), as some claimed? Should they have access to better instruction in their pre-college years, as others insisted? Such arguments among those interested in basic writing could go on endlessly, often while ignoring the obvious: the easiest, likeliest thing to do was not to test the efficacy of different placements or instructional structures but simply to slam the door, to cut off access.
To the extent that it was about access (or its evil opposite, exclusion), the debate around Shor’s argument was by no means new. In fact, in an important sense, it had simply reversed the order of another recent debate: Edward White’s 1995 defense of assessment and placement practices (“The Importance of Placement and Basic Studies”) that Sharon Crowley critiqued in 1996. Like Crowley, who felt that tracking and placement procedures were fundamentally mechanisms of exclusion, Shor argued for radical restructuring of institutions—including the abolition or thorough reconfiguration of first-year composition. With basic writing, Shor was also able to point to significant experiments along these lines, notably Mary Soliday and Barbara Gleason’s mainstreaming experiment at City College at CUNY and Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thompson’s at the University of South Carolina. Yet these attempts at mainstreaming did not easily take root—the one at CUNY did not outlast its grant period—so the debate went on as a discussion of both politics and pedagogies.
What the arguments on both sides shared (and in a way that bodes much for the future and draws much from the recent past) was an ever deeper grounding in particulars. Like the highlighting of difference that made the personal political (and vice versa), the consideration of institutional change (hoped for or mourned) suggested that the politics of change sprang at least as much from local considerations as from larger political forces. Context was ever more important.
Ironically, too, at the same time that basic writing was being billed as “our apartheid,” a major book arrived on the scene suggesting that, given enough time and support, students who had initially been placed in basic writing could succeed in the academy and beyond. This was Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level published in 1997 by Marilyn S. Sternglass. As the title and subtitle suggest, Sternglass tracked a number of students at City College, most of them initially placed into basic writing, over an extended period (a full six years). Most were success stories, but more compelling than that heartening news was the depth of detail in Sternglass’s account. How these students fared in a variety of courses over their entire academic careers was richly, thickly described, as was the impact of their personal and social circumstances on these careers. Unlike the largely autobiographical accounts of a Rose or a Gilyard or a Villanueva that were likely to be read (and perhaps too likely to be downplayed) as exceptional cases, Time to Know Them included
