student-led coup, though it is important to see it as a real change shaped by radical egalitarianism as well as fiscal exigency. It is equally important to realize that City College already had a structure in place for the writing instruction of the new students that the hurried-up policy of open admissions brought in. Since 1965, even before the SEEK program, the college had offered a Pre-Baccalaureate Program, and the director of the SEEK Program had some trouble getting out of the habit of referring to it as the “Pre-Bac” Program (Maher, Shaughnessy 92). Her name was Mina Shaughnessy.
Like the social circumstances surrounding her program, Shaughnessy’s personal circumstances seem especially significant. An extraordinarily successful and committed teacher passionate about both writing and literature, she lacked a PhD, and her teaching prior to her appointment at City College had been in part-time positions, chiefly at Hofstra University on Long Island and Hunter College, another CUNY campus in Manhattan. Impressive recommendations from Hofstra and Hunter and a successful interview earned her an appointment as lecturer in City College’s Pre-Baccalaureate Program in April of 1967, starting in September of that year. Just how profound an impression she had made as an applicant became apparent over that summer when the director of the Pre-Bac program suffered a heart attack and Shaughnessy was asked to assume the directorship. Anxious about the challenge she was taking on, she could scarcely gauge the much greater challenges to come. The SEEK program (so renamed) that Adrienne Rich and Shaughnessy taught in and that Shaughnessy directed had classes capped at fifteen students and was a relatively modest enterprise in the 1960s, though Shaughnessy did meet with resistance from the tenured (and mostly male) professors who felt the students served by her program signaled a lowering of standards and a misdirection of effort (Maher, Shaughnessy 88–90). But such grumbling was only a mild intimation of the seismic rumblings to come.
The 1970s
With open admissions came a dramatic shift in scale and intensity. During the summer of 1970, while most faculty were away, Shaughnessy hired over forty teachers for her program (Maher, Shaughnessy 101). Just months after threatened budget cuts produced massive protests, Shaughnessy was recruiting for a program that many of her colleagues saw as an unfortunate diversion of resources. Not so long before that, the focus had been on raising standards at City College (partly as a check on burgeoning enrollments), something of a national trend, one documented by Albert Kitzhaber (18). Only a few years later, there was an abrupt reversal. The pressure of rising enrollments hadn’t disappeared any more than the concern over standards had, yet a dramatic policy change had suddenly swung the gate open wide, allowing students into college who never would have had a chance to attend only a short time before.
Why had this happened—and not just at City? It was a question Shaughnessy herself struggled with in the opening pages of “Basic Writing” (1976), the bibliographic essay she wrote for Gary Tate’s collection Teaching Composition. This question was related to another: what was she to call the new field? The memorable opening of her essay situated her on a frontier: “The teaching of writing to severely unprepared freshmen is as yet but the frontier of a profession, lacking even an agreed upon name” (177). And the evocation of a new frontier was not something she did lightly: she was convinced that the kind of instruction she was speaking of was really quite new, leading her to reject terms like “remedial” or “bonehead” English—though the latter term
catches something of the quality of the course and the attitudes that shaped it. But this type of course was waning, along with Freshman English, when the new remedial population began to appear in the sixties. In 1964, the first year of the War on Poverty, the headings “cultural deprivation” and “cultural differences” appeared for the first time in Education Index. By the next year, they were among the most heavily itemed headings in the Index. We can date the “new” remedial English from then. (178)
More important than her choice of terminology that still grounds the field and gives it an identity (people call it basic writing because she did) is Shaughnessy’s sense of social change giving rise to the “new”—above all to “the ‘new’ students who entered colleges under the open admissions revolution of the sixties” (178).
In her teaching and writing, Shaughnessy conveyed her sense of a new population of student writers brought forward by shifts of social perspective and responsibility. For Shaughnessy, blaming the students for supposed deficiencies was feckless and unjust; errors and other nonstandard features were the result of social inequities, not personal failings. As Deborah Mutnick has written, “More than the scholars who followed in her footsteps, Shaughnessy consistently shifted the focus of her research and writing on the problems of Open Admissions from the students to the teachers, administrators, and society in general” (“On the Academic Margins” 185).
At the time, however, City College was not the only CUNY campus to develop programs to meet the needs of the new student population, and Shaughnessy was not the only one working to develop exciting new programs. The 1970s were a time of pedagogical innovation throughout the university. Dynamic programs of a different focus and pedagogy were developed at Queens College under Robert Lyons, later assisted by Donald McQuade. Acclaimed poet Marie Ponsot, also working at Queens, emphasized the imagination in working with open admissions students. Brooklyn College developed an innovative program called the New School of Liberal Arts (NSLA), originally housed in downtown Brooklyn. NSLA was a high-level academic program for traditional as well as “underprepared students” that included additional counseling and workshops in academic reading and writing for open admissions students. On the main campus of Brooklyn College, English professor Kenneth Bruffee was doing groundbreaking work on peer tutoring and collaborative learning. At Lehman College, new pedagogies and programs were being developed under the leadership of Richard Larson, Richard Sterling, and Sondra Perl. At Baruch College, experiments in computer assisted instruction (CAI) were taking place. At Hunter College, faculty in the Developmental English Program, under the leadership of Ann Raimes, were developing policies and practices for the new students and also sowing the seeds for what later became known as WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum). At the same time, faculty at CUNY’s five community colleges were also developing programs to meet the needs of the new students who were pouring into their classrooms.
In the mid-1970s, the CUNY Open Admissions Conference fostered a strong community spirit, which led to the formation of the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors (CAWS), initially led by Robert Lyons and Harvey Wiener with Kenneth Bruffee as a third. CAWS gave rise to study and research groups; it also began to sponsor an annual conference and put out a newsletter, CAWSES. A variety of approaches emerged at different CUNY campuses, some of them rather distant from Shaughnessy’s efforts at City College, creating a strong hothouse atmosphere.
But these efforts developed throughout the decade. At its beginning, in 1970, Shaughnessy was faced with immediate practical problems. She had teachers to train and a program to run. She did not assume that she had a controlling theory or even an effective roadmap for how to proceed. Her own teaching approach had always been to puzzle through things, looking for patterns and possibilities. Ultimately, that would be the method behind Errors and Expectations, the groundbreaking book she published in 1977. For now, it was how she invited teachers in her program to work. She eventually codified her sense of appropriate pedagogical preparation and action, summing it up in the phrase “Diving In,” the title of her talk at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in 1975. A decade later, Robert Lyons described Shaughnessy’s approach as program administrator, a role he succeeded her in:
Instead of establishing a required curriculum for the writing program, she encouraged teachers to follow their hunches and share their insights with one another, and she encouraged them as well to engage in a wide range of research projects: studies of derailments in student prose, contrastive studies of first language interference in nonnative speakers, and examinations of perceptual problems that affect some students’ ability to proofread. She also sponsored a different kind of project that sent English teachers as auditors into introductory courses in disciplines unfamiliar to them, such as biology and psychology. Their efforts to grasp the concepts governing these subjects made them
