the issue’s “opening and concluding articles take up some of the social and pedagogical issues that hover about the subject of error” (4). The first article, Sarah D’Eloia’s “Teaching Standard Written English,” begins by unapologetically and unequivocally announcing the conviction that “teaching ‘basic’ writing is synonymous with teaching standard written English” (5). Its counterweight is the concluding article, Isabella Halsted’s “Putting Error in Its Place,” which approvingly cites the 1974 Conference on College Composition and Communication position paper “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” and argues that “a major problem our students (and we ourselves) have is fixation on Error” (77). Certainly, D’Eloia’s and Halsted’s positions were not the extremes they could be taken to; moderated by Shaughnessy’s gravitational pull, they were brought into closer orbit around her center. Shaughnessy, as Glynda Hull has noted, occupied a kind of critical middle ground in those early days, staking out
a position [that] can be seen as a sidestep, even a sleight of hand, since it shifts our attention from the overwhelming question of whether we ought to sanction through our roles as teachers the existence of a privileged language, particularly when privileged means only arbitrarily approved scribal conventions. But it can also be seen as a compelling argument, both to provide instruction on error and to include editing among those aspects of writing worth our study. (“Research” 167)
Shaughnessy had her own ways of registering what she might be sidestepping, as when (at the end of Errors and Expectations) she allows that college, for the students she cares so much for, can have a negative aspect despite its proffered rewards, “threatening at the same time to take them from their distinctive ways of interpreting the world, to assimilate them into the culture of academia without acknowledging their experience as outsiders” (292). And, of course, it is not just what a teacher focuses on but how. Hull grants Shaughnessy not only a compelling argument for a focus on error but also a compelling method: a determination “to study error from the point of view of causation” (“Research” 173). This resolve to investigate the whys of what writers did opened up new vistas for basic writing: once the question was what was happening in the writer’s mind, the answers could not stop with treatments of error, and so studies of process, cognition, and resistance ultimately came to take center stage.
But, at the time, there were also more practical concerns to be dealt with. The original pioneer in what she memorably labeled the frontier (she concluded as well as began the bibliographic essay “Basic Writing” with that figure) spent her last years not only making a beginning for the field, notably with Errors and Expectations and the Journal of Basic Writing but also fighting off what looked like its end. Maher’s biography of Shaughnessy makes especially compelling reading in its discussion of her last years as a university administrator. It was a time of fiscal crisis for New York as the city was near bankruptcy, and fledgling programs were especially vulnerable to cuts. An attempt to bring enrollments down included proposed entrance exams, which Shaughnessy opposed as “the end of the University’s Open Admissions policy” (from her memo to the Board of Higher Education, qtd. in Maher, Shaughnessy 177); as an alternative, she began work on a never-realized project of collaboration with high schools that would ensure better preparation for college. The inaugural issue of Resource, the newsletter of the Instructional Resource Center she created and directed, began, “As I write this, we are still uncertain about the kind of University the budget cutters will finally allow us, and the survey of CUNY Skills programs which we began runs the risk of being more historical than we originally planned” (qtd. in Maher Shaughnessy 179).
That was May 1976. The month before, as the keynote speaker at the first conference of the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors (CAWS), she had given a more detailed and poignant picture of what the budget cuts might mean, had indeed already meant:
These are discouraging times for all of us, most particularly for the teachers who have been working with unprepared students on basic skills. Both students and teachers are already discovering that they are expendable, and the programs they have helped to build over the past five years to remedy the failure of the public schools (and the society of which those schools are an extension) now begin to shake and fracture under the blows of retrenchment.
We experience the crisis most directly on our individual campuses:
•Our staffs are shrinking and our class size increasing.
•Talented young teachers who were ready to concentrate their scholarly energies on the sort of research and teaching we need in basic writing are looking for jobs.
•Each day brings not a new decision but rumors of new decisions, placing us in the predicament of those mice in psychological experiments who must keep shifting their expectations until they are too rattled to function.
•Our campuses buzz like an Elizabethan court with talk of who is in favor and who is out. And we meet our colleagues from other campuses with relief: “Ah, good,” we say (or think to ourselves)—“you’re still here.”
•We struggle each day to extract from the Orwellian Language that announces new plans and policies some clear sense of what is finally going to become of the students whom the university in more affluent times committed itself to educate. (“The Miserable Truth” 263–64)
Things would get worse, considerably worse. The need to curtail enrollments (and so expenses) was achieved not by entrance exams but by the charging of tuition, something the Board of Higher Education voted through in June 1976. An account of this time, LaVona L. Reeves’s “Mina Shaughnessy and Open Admissions at New York’s City College” (2002), succinctly outlines the immediate consequences: “In the fall of 1976, enrollment had declined 17 percent, making it necessary for several thousand faculty members to be laid off. As usual, the last to be hired were the first to be fired, and many of the newer minority teachers lost their jobs, despite massive student protests” (123).
Such was the turmoil that surrounded Shaughnessy as an administrator, and it made the publication of Errors and Expectations in the same academic year all that much more the “godsend” Reeves calls it (123). The honors and attentions bestowed on Shaughnessy and her book had to be gratifying, given the circumstances, but they did not change those circumstances. Only weeks after the release of the book, Shaughnessy was diagnosed with kidney cancer, first misdiagnosed as a stress-related ulcer (Maher, Shaughnessy 200). By December 1977, she was diagnosed as having a brain tumor. By November of the following year, she was dead.
The memorializing of Mina Shaughnessy, beginning with an event in December 1978 at which Adrienne Rich, Irving Howe, and others spoke, went on for some time. She was eulogized by Janet Emig in the February 1979 issue of College Composition and Communication and by E. D. Hirsch and others at an MLA conference special session at the end of that year. As late as 1985, Robert Lyons, summing up the “most widely respected authority on basic writing in this country,” stated, “In a field often marked by controversy and division, her work was invariably accorded attention and respect” (171–72). Lyons tellingly preceded his remarks with the admission that “I still find it difficult to accept her absence and to regard her as a writer and teacher to be appraised rather than solely as a colleague to be mourned” (171). By force of personality as well as intellect, marshaling support and sympathy for the students who mattered so much to her and for the instruction she believed would save them, Mina Shaughnessy had an influence on basic writing, one that the field is still learning to reckon with. In the years that were to come, Shaughnessy’s legacy was revered by some but found to be stiflingly enduring by others, as is suggested by the title of an essay published two full decades after her death: Jeanne Gunner’s “Iconic Discourse: The Troubling Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy.” But in the decade following the one she dominated, critiques of her were in fact rare, though winds of change certainly swept the BW landscape.
Maxine Hairston’s “The Winds of Change,” based on her speech at the 1978 convention of the Conference on College Composition
