Lives on the Boundary, but it did garner gradually growing attention and admiration. In October 1998, Sternglass drew from it for her keynote address at the annual CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors Conference, and in Spring 1999 JBW published a version of that keynote as the lead article. In December 1998, Time to Know Them received the Mina P. Shaughnessy Award of the Modern Language Association at the organization’s annual convention. In March 1999, it received the Outstanding Book Award at the annual convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The careful, patient research the book represented was more powerful for many than the strongest polemic. Into discussions permeated by politics and invective, Sternglass injected the stories of students who struggled on while standards were supposedly ratcheted up and gates of access were beginning to swing shut. The lessons to be learned were the sort summed up in one of Emerson’s aphorisms—“The years teach much that the days never know.” The student experiences recounted in Time to Know Them cautioned against giving credence to easy generalizations and quick fixes to problems as complex as those faced by the field of basic writing as it prepared to move into the twenty-first century.
2000 and Beyond
The new millennium began with basic writing scholars taking stock of the field—looking back to the past and into the future. In her 2001 overview of BW pedagogy, “On the Academic Margins,” Deborah Mutnick begins with a telling allusion to “Mark Twain’s famous quip about his father: Shaughnessy seems to have learned a great deal since I carefully worded my critique in Writing in an Alien World of what I saw then as her essentialist depiction of the basic writer” (184). Mutnick goes on to say that Shaughnessy, dead for a quarter century, now seems to her to remain impressively relevant, still the figure to contend with.
The Journal of Basic Writing was also taking stock in another special issue published in 2000, the result of a fin-de-siècle invitation that editors Otte and Smoke made to luminaries in the field, one they summed up with the wryly punning question “W(h)ither Basic Writing?” The responses showed a wide range of opinion, perhaps even a widening of differences. Shor, for example, continued to argue for the abolition of basic writing—using accounts of students who could elude BW placement and yet forge ahead, guilty of the “Illegal Literacy” that gave his piece its title. Others in the issue argued against this position. Deborah Mutnick held that “to indict basic writing . . . obfuscates the real impediments to democratizing education” (“The Strategic Value of Basic Writing” 77). And Keith Gilyard wrote, “Shor thinks composition’s future lies in discipline-based, field-based, critical social work. Critical? Field? Fine. But I’m not all the way on board with that vision for I’m not ready to give up an important interdisciplinary site, which I think courses in critical language awareness can be” (“Basic Writing” 37). Other ramifications of the debate—accounts of alternatives to BW as well as eliminations of it—continued to play out in this issue. Judith Rodby and Tom Fox described their mainstreaming work at Cal State Chico, while Terence Collins and Melissa Blum of the University of Minnesota General College mourned the loss of students to state-mandated cuts.
The issue included suggestions that there was more to mourn than program cutbacks. Lynn Quitman Troyka described “How We Have Failed the Basic Writing Enterprise” in an article criticizing the field’s failure to grapple with certain tough problems, particularly those with political consequences. “Why,” for example, “did we recoil from the public’s demand that we show results?” (119). Troyka noted there were recent answers to some long-burning questions—she described Sternglass’s Time to Know Them as “the most important BW research to date” (119)—but her indictment of the field’s failures was sweeping and incisive. Similarly, William DeGenaro and Edward White decried BW researchers’ “inability to communicate effectively, that is to say in a way that advances our knowledge of issues of developmental writing” (“Going Around in Circles” 27).
And yet, if the field had not communicated its answers effectively, then it had at least developed a central, critical question. The concluding section of DeGenaro and White’s article begins, “To mainstream or not to mainstream. That is the question” (34). The most thorough answer to date is a book edited by Gerri McNenny and Sallyanne Fitzgerald (with a foreword by Marilyn Sternglass) and published in 2001—though it explicitly traces its genesis to that momentous fourth National Basic Writing Conference held in 1992 (1). The book is titled Mainstreaming Basic Writers: Politics and Pedagogies of Access, and the plurals in the title are telling. Regardless of whether a former sense of singular purpose for basic writing was really a kind of mythical hegemony (as some scholars like Bruce Horner aver), it is now a fragmented enterprise. Some chapters in Mainstreaming Basic Writers resist or question mainstreaming while others advocate it from a variety of sites and perspectives. One piece resisting mainstreaming is by Terence Collins of the University of Minnesota and Kim Lynch of Anoka-Ramsey Community College in Cambridge, Minnesota. Working in BW programs at their respective institutions (and focusing on that of the General College at Minnesota), they are unapologetically proud of BW’s success at a specific site. Indeed, they argue that specificity makes all the difference: “‘Mainstreaming’ rhetoric too often (and too conveniently) implies that there is a single entity X (bad, essentializing, otherizing, exploitive basic writing) that ought to be transformed into entity Y (good, liberating, mainstreamed composition). Isn’t it more complicated than that? And shouldn’t we know better?” (83–84).
Sadly, the institution that Collins and Lynch were so proud of ceased to exist in 2005 when the General College was given departmental status within the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development as the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning (PSTL). Basic writing courses were transferred to the newly created Writing Studies Department in the College of Liberal Arts. The rationale given for this change by university administrators was that students in the General College were not succeeding at a high enough rate—as measured by time until graduation (University of Minnesota). In a sense, students who had previously received special support from the General College are now mainstreamed. Although the PSTL is attempting to keep something of the General College’s legacy by crafting a curriculum of connected courses in interdisciplinary learning communities for first-year students, there have been losses for students placed in basic writing. It’s harder to get into the University of Minnesota now.
By the fall of 2006, the Journal of Basic Writing was again assessing the state of BW in a special issue, this one in recognition of the publication of the journal’s twenty-fifth volume. Leaders of the field were invited to contribute articles in a variety of areas including BW and public policy (Adler-Kassner and Harrington), the place of the increasing number of multilingual students in colleges and universities (Zamel and Spack), and—once again—how the field defines itself and thus relates to the larger institutional and political world (Gray-Rosendale).
Increasingly in the new century, that institutional and political world has been exerting pressure on basic writing and the students it serves. Like the University of Minnesota’s General College, which was the victim of institutional pressures, colleges and universities across the U.S. are being pressured to eliminate basic writing. Legislatures in several states including California and Tennessee have passed laws eliminating or severely curtailing “remedial courses” in four-year schools. Pedagogically innovative BW programs have been created to meet these stipulations—for example, at the University of Tennessee at Martin (Huse et al.), Arizona State University (Glau, “Stretch at 10,” “The ‘Stretch’ Program”), and San Francisco State University (Goen-Salter; Goen and Gillotte-Tropp). By offering some academic credit, such programs have begun to move BW instruction out of the anteroom that Shaughnessy described and ever closer to the college mainstream.
Regardless of where it is located or how it is structured, the success or failure of a mainstreaming initiative or BW program has to do with a host of factors: how students are defined (and define themselves), how programs are constituted, what theories drive the work, what practices are encouraged, what institutional support is provided (or withheld), and, as Mary Soliday’s The Politics of Remediation (2002) has stressed, how the work is represented and understood by policymakers as well as stakeholders.
