nation. Penn State historian Michael Bezilla explains that the influence of the university’s curriculum was far reaching—statewide and nationally—by the mid 1980s:
One Pennsylvanian in eight who chose to enter college immediately after high school in the 1970s enrolled at University Park or one of the Commonwealth Campuses. More than 110,000 baccalaureate degrees were awarded between 1970 and 1983, along with 21,000 associate and 27,000 graduate degrees. By 1982, one in every thousand college graduates in the United States had earned his or her degree from The Pennsylvania State University.
Many people were influenced by the curriculum at Penn State during this time period—a fact that suggested to us that the history of the Penn State curriculum deserved greater attention.
Additionally, each of us wanted to know—indeed we felt ethically obligated to take up the opportunity to know—the historical conditions that influenced the composition program in which we were participating as teachers and administrators. By writing a collaborative history of our local site, we could work together to understand the multivalent strands—scholarship, culture, politics, economics, personalities, and institutional dynamics to name but a few—that entwined to form the complex and conflicted foundation upon which the current writing program at Penn State was built. We also hoped that this historical investigation might even enable us to see where curricular change was needed. In looking for these areas of change, however, we did not simply look for ways that the program “progressed” to its current state from a flawed past. As Ruth Mirtz, drawing on Robert Connors, warns in her work on the history of writing programs, “our downfall as historians [. . .] is assuming that anything that happened in the past was less effective than what we do in the present and viewing the past as the mistake that the present corrects” (122). Thus, we looked for ways in which the current program might usefully incorporate previous administrative and curricular structures. We asked both “which current program and curricular structures were the result of old battles or outworn tradition?” and “what promising administrative and curricular models from the program’s past were lost along the way?”
Our ultimate hope is that the historical details of Penn State’s writing program presented here will help other scholars, teachers, and administrators understand the recent past of their own writing curricula. Many of the struggles we recount here have been enacted at many other sites: budgetary constraints, institutional pressure, and personality conflicts are common sources of distress and motivators of change in almost every English department. We therefore offer this study as a point of comparison and contrast for those who are working at other institutions to historicize the development of their local writing programs.
The Challenges of Doing Research at “Home”
Researching one’s home department is a tricky business. Yet it is also comforting because it protects the researcher from being lulled into a sense of objectivity—what Donna Haraway has called the “gaze from nowhere” (581). As we gathered files and conducted interviews, the institutional politics and personality conflicts that operate in the daily business of a department became painfully obvious. We discovered the roots of current friendships and professional alliances, and we came to understand the origins of some continuing rifts. Some people were hesitant to discuss issues because they involved other professionals who are still active in the department or in the field. Some of the stories we heard and the historical traces we uncovered were contradictory, and the interpretations of events in the department varied widely. Some of the stories we heard were undoubtedly colored by events of the intervening years or were simply misremembered.
Rather than tidying these disparate, filtered, and embedded traces of the past into a unified story of progress that would make Penn State’s current program seem like the culmination of a steady, always admirable, and self reflective path of progress, we have tried to retain the messy traces of these conflicts within our narrative and to highlight how very unpredictable and contingent writing program development can be. To further resist a tensionless tale of progress, we have asked colleagues who were active in composition during the 1970s to read the manuscript and offer responses. Several of these responses are included as sidebars to the text; they offer telling embellishments or counterpoints, “corrections” or alternative views, of the events chronicled in the book. The presence of these sometimes competing voices does not discredit the historical narrative of the text; rather they are integral to it. The history we tell is not seamless, nor is it a tidy tale of “good compositionists and those who oppress them.” Rather, it is an attempt to resist what Mirtz calls the “ahistorical identities and false narratives” that often circulate around the development of writing programs and departmental policies (129).
In compiling this multivocal history, we attempted to uncover as many different perspectives as possible on the writing programs at the time. In addition to attending to archival sources and covering secondary materials—we hope that our indebtedness to previous scholarship is apparent in our notes and commentaries—we gathered a variety of historical traces from administrators (WPAs, writing center administrators, department chairs, directors of undergraduate and graduate studies); program faculty (literature, basic writing, composition/rhetoric, creative writing); and students (undergraduate and graduate). Official documents, such as departmental reports, program memos, syllabi, and catalogues, were perhaps the most obvious choices for study, yet we needed the memories of colleagues to flesh out our work. After all, some of the most significant decisions about how to translate composition theory into classroom practice take place in private office conversations and undocumented discussion. As Barbara L’Eplattenier explains, few histories of writing programs have been told because “administrative negotiation often occurs in conversations in casual settings, outside of the bounds of official meetings; such discussions are not recorded or are only superficially addressed in ‘official’ documentation” (133). Interviews and correspondence with full and part-time faculty who were active in the department or the field of composition at the time thus served as crucial sources for us.
Despite our best intentions and efforts, some competing voices are undoubtedly missing from this history. As in any historical project, what we found is incomplete. While we ran advertisements in the alumni magazine and scoured the old files opened to us by our colleagues at Penn State, we did not find a wealth of sample undergraduate papers and course syllabi. (We did find some.) We also had difficulty tracking down former graduate students from the late 1970s. Yet we believe the narrative told here, as we explain in further detail in the next chapter, provides an important, localized, and necessarily complex complement to broader histories of composition that have appeared in the recent past.
Acknowledgments
We could not have explored these questions with any degree of success without the help of many colleagues. At the risk of forgetting some of them, we wish to thank them here. Our deepest appreciation goes to three fellow members of the graduate seminar on the history of composition who joined us as co-researchers during the early stages of this project: Brian Lehew, Shannon Pennefeather Gardner, and Martin Schleuse. Their contributions to our conversation about historiography invigorated our thinking about the subject, and traces of their research can still be found in these pages: Brian researched creative writing pedagogies (and interviewed Leonard Rubinstein), Shannon worked in basic writing and writing centers, and Martin researched the state of English studies in the 1970s. We are also grateful to the many people who opened their filing cabinets to us, answered our many questions over email and in person, and helped us locate countless traces of the 1970s: Judd Arnold, Thomas Bayer, Wilma Ebbitt, Richard Leo Enos, Jeanne Fahnestock, Robert Frank, Diane Greenfield, Andrea Lunsford, Edgar Knapp, Martha Kolln, Ellen Knodt, Nancy Lowe, Ron Maxwell, Susan McLeod, John Moore, Douglas Park, Thomas Rogers, S. Leonard Rubinstein, Marie Secor, James Sledd, Tilly Warnock, Harvey Wiener, Tom Wilbur, and Richard Young.
We would also like to thank those who have generously read and given us suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript, including Sharon Crowley, Lisa Ede, Lester Faigley, Michael Halloran, Janice Lauer, and Richard Young. Thanks to colleagues at our 1999 CCCC presentation whose
