the past and present relevance, between local and (presumptively) global knowledge, and between personal judgment and (apparent) objectivity. Our chief means of finding balance is to circle back on the same general story, being on the lookout for different themes or seeing the same themes from different perspectives. What we hope emerges is a gestalt of basic writing that will give people interested in its history or self-definition or pedagogy or research a sense of the important trends and patterns. In this exercise of mapping, we have tried to make directions clear (if not simple) without denying the undeniable blurring and dissensus and differential development that characterizes the field, always mindful of its greatest irony: that something called basic writing should so often find itself snagged on the complexities it uncovers.
1 Historical Overview
For most scholars and teachers, the story of basic writing is tied to a specific historical moment—the open admissions movement of the 1970s at the City University of New York (CUNY). This seismic shift in university policy grew out of the social and political volatility of the late 1960s. And it resulted in the memorable teaching program led by the charismatic teacher-scholar Mina Shaughnessy at CUNY’s City College. Any overview of basic writing needs to begin with an account of how this outgrowth of the fairly new field of composition, which came into its own in the 1960s, emerged as an important subfield in the 1970s.
Of course, the presence of unskilled writers in college classrooms was not a completely new phenomenon. What was new was the heightened focus on the needs of such students. Michael G. Moran and Martin J. Jacobi make this point in their introduction to Research in Basic Writing: A Bibliographic Sourcebook. Surprised that “it took so many years for scholars to turn their attention to the problem of extremely weak student writers,” they ask what changed so that “basic writing is now an important discipline within the larger area of rhetoric and composition” (1). Their answer: “Attitudes toward these students changed during the 1960s and 1970s” (1). Despite all the talk from basic writing scholars about a new kind of student, what really made BW possible was a new kind of attention.
In the opening pages of their introduction to Landmark Essays on Basic Writing, Kay Halasek and Nels P. Highberg give a useful overview of “the early moments in the history of basic writing” going back to the nineteenth century (xi-xiv), but the first essay in the collection is Adrienne Rich’s account of open admissions at City College. People like Shaughnessy and Rich represent a critical shift of attention and sympathy, acting as catalysts of BW’s emergence, however far back its origins might be traced. Precisely because other historians of composition have duly traced distant roots and foreshadowings (see, for example, Berlin, Writing; Brereton; Connors, Composition-Rhetoric), a focused treatment of basic writing needs to know its limits. Though some scholars have found the precursors of BW in institutional and curricular developments many decades earlier, we focus here not on century-distant predecessors of basic writing at Harvard or Wellesley but instead on that time when basic writing became aware of itself, achieving self-definition as a considered answer to an urgent need.
In this chapter, we provide an overview of the history of basic writing as it has developed over the decades. Given BW’s origin in the crucible of political and educational pressures of the 1960s, it comes as no surprise that its definition has been highly contested, its past repeatedly remapped.
The 1960s
The 1960s, in the popular mind, is the classic period of unrest and upheaval, much of it concentrated in colleges and universities. Partly, this concentration resulted from the weight of numbers. Ever since World War II, when the GI Bill allowed many returning service personnel to enter college who never would have otherwise, college enrollments had been rising steadily, mounting throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. This was a time of dramatic enrollment growth, faculty hiring, and curricular change. But this unprecedented growth brought problems as well, particularly to institutions unable to support further growth. One flashpoint was City College of the City University of New York (CUNY), where free tuition made the demand for higher education especially great. In the past, raising admissions standards had kept enrollments in check—but at a cost: higher admissions standards brought into question the right to “equal educational opportunity,” which, as Kenneth Howe has shown in Understanding Equal Educational Opportunity, was a critical principle in public education in the second half of the twentieth century.
New York had found a safety valve of sorts in the legislative mandate that, in 1966, created the SEEK Program. The acronym stood for Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge, and the program’s purpose was to provide higher education opportunities to economically and educationally disadvantaged students. As it later turned out, the SEEK Program opened the door and laid the groundwork for open admissions.
With open admissions, the door became a floodgate. Enrollments of first-year students at CUNY nearly doubled in the very first year (1970), jumping from 20,000 to 35,000. Almost half of these students entered under the new open admissions standards. City College and the other CUNY colleges were not ready for open admissions and its consequences, rushed into the change in admissions policy by student demonstrations and campus unrest. Located in Harlem, City College in particular had come to seem a bastion of white privilege in a largely black neighborhood. Calls to make it less exclusive and excluding became increasingly strident. Accounts of this stridency vary, however. One alumnus (and opponent of open admissions) states flatly that “the 1970 introduction of open admissions was . . . in response to race riots” (Berman), while Adrienne Rich, discussing the seizure of City College’s South Campus by the Black and Puerto Rican Student Community in April of 1969, recounts “the faculty group’s surprised respect for the students’ articulateness, reasoning power, and skill in handling statistics—for the students were negotiating in exchange for withdrawal from South Campus an admissions policy which would go far beyond SEEK in its inclusiveness” (6). Yet in the wake of such negotiations came the torching of City College’s Great Hall, which seems to have been a decisive event. Seymour H. Hyman (who was Deputy Chancellor at the time) recalls the fire: “‘I was telling people about what I felt when I saw that smoke coming out of that building, and the only question in my mind was, How can we save City College? And the only answer was, Hell, let everybody in’” (qtd. in Maher, Shaughnessy 40). An overstatement, this was nevertheless symptomatic of a significant shift in policy. Open admissions, planned by the Board of Higher Education (now the CUNY Board of Trustees) for gradual phase-in to full implementation in 1975, was renegotiated with the protesting students in May of 1969. Minutes from the Board meeting of July 9, 1969, note that students’ demands were met for the most part.
Much has been made of this acquiescence to students’ demands, then and now. For many, it meant “caving in” and worse. The response of one City College professor at the time, effectively signaled by the title of his book The Death of the American University: With Special Reference to the Collapse of the City College of New York, was to declare that “there can and must be no retreat, no craven capitulation to the anarchists, Communists, and know-nothings who would bring down society” (Heller 12). As recently as 1999, a report on open admissions for the Mayor’s Advisory Task Force on the City University of New York used the telling heading “Policy by Riot” in its account of this time (“CUNY: An Institution Adrift” 19).
Yet presumed immediate causes are usually part of a more complex chain of causes and effects. Especially critical in this case was a looming budget crisis. As documented in Right Versus Privilege: The Open-Admissions Experiment at the City University of New York, the Black and Puerto Rican Student Community (BPRSC) made common cause with white student organizations in response to announced budget cuts. The coalition produced demonstrations of CUNY students at the state legislature in Albany many times the size of any back at CUNY (and well before the seizure of the South Campus). What’s more, the budget cuts the BPRSC feared would reduce opportunities for minority students were so serious that the college president himself announced his resignation in protest, only to have twenty-seven department chairs announce theirs as well in a dramatic gesture of support (Lavin, Alba, and Silberstein 10–11).
Open
