debated what to do in the face of alarmingly diminishing enrollments in introductory and upper-division courses.
At the same time, despite the sharp decline in English undergraduate degrees granted during the late 1970s, English graduate programs resolutely continued to confer an increasing number of PhDs for a job market that had recently and precipitously collapsed. During the 1960s, the number of English graduate programs had increased over 50 percent, from 81 to 124 (Geckle 43), and new PhD programs continued to appear on campuses during the 1970s. At the same time, job opportunities were suddenly decreasing so that by 1977 a significant glut of doctorate holders existed in relation to the number of vacant tenure-track positions in English. Appointments in literary studies decreased by over 65 percent between 1972 and 1978; in the class of 1978, 40 percent of all English doctorates were unable to obtain any appointment, and another 20 percent were forced to accept temporary, often part-time, teaching jobs (Neel and Nelson 51–53).10 Time magazine, describing the 1977 MLA convention in its January 9, 1978 issue, noted that “Of the 1094 PhDs created last year in English and 753 in foreign languages, we learn that only 42 percent and 46 percent respectively have landed steady teaching positions” of any kind. And the future seemed just as bleak: Ernest R. May, chair of the history department at Harvard, estimated that “whereas now [1977] the humanities can expect 16,000 new jobs annually, by the 1980s there will be only 4,000 (600–700 of those in English)” (qtd. in Geckle 43). Jasper Neel, then director of MLA’s English programs, and Jeanne C. Nelson wrote that “there is absolutely no reason to believe that more than 35 percent of recent doctorates will be able to make a lifelong career of college English teaching. [. . .] There won’t be an upturn in PhD hiring in this century” (51).
Reluctantly recognizing the end of the baby boom and the resulting decrease in students, the MLA and other academic organizations arranged conferences to encourage and foster professional employment for English professionals outside of academia (one at Emory University in 1978; another at the University of Maryland in 1979), but the sense of crisis in the job market continued as the media publicized the disappearance of college teaching opportunities in English and related disciplines. By the late 1970s, the growth spurt in graduate English studies of the 1960s had therefore evaporated. After a 6.5 percent increase in graduate students between 1974 and 1975, a notable decline in graduate student applications soon followed, and many departments were hard pressed to fill assistantships with capable applicants. Dual-degree programs, combining English with a second major such as Business Administration or Library Science, became a functional solution that many universities tried (Geckle), while others (as the MLA convention program for 1977 indicates) welcomed computer instruction, technical writing, and curricular revisions that spoke implicitly of the momentum toward a more consumer-based atmosphere on university campuses.11
Two subfields bucked the trend in decreasing enrollments. One was creative writing, which maintained steady enrollments and faculty appointments at many colleges and universities. But despite strong interest in their courses, creative writers were nevertheless struggling intellectually over the relative merits of alternative pedagogies. The Associated Writing Programs (the creative writing equivalent of the MLA or CCCC) categorized the nation’s creative writing programs in their annual catalogue based on each institution’s emphasis on writing. The three categories as defined by AWP were Studio (featuring a central focus on student writing practice), Studio/Academic (emphasizing equally both writing and literature), and Traditional Literary Study and Creative Writing (offering central focus on mastery of literature). Though a preference was not explicitly stated in the catalogue, the AWP’s discussions of the three different types leaned in the direction of the studio method (AWP Catalogue 1–6). Throughout the decade, within creative writing the reading component lost ground to writing, based on the craft-centered workshop model made famous by the University of Iowa. According to that model, the “writer” (as an unproblematized, unitary, relatively autonomous consciousness) and the products of that writer remained at the center of the curriculum and the classroom. The utility of literature courses in the education of creative writers was debated throughout the decade.
The other growth area in English studies, of course, was composition and related enterprises like technical writing and business writing. Virtually all English departments experienced growth in composition courses during the 1970s, usually substantial growth. But as numbers increased in composition courses, public outcry over student writing deficiencies also forcibly tested the validity of prevailing approaches to composition instruction. Students, on the whole and on the average, were less skilled in 1977 than their predecessors, according to the available measurement tools. Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores for incoming freshmen continued along a fifteen-year slide as more and more high school graduates took the tests in preparation for college admission. Between 1977 and 1978 alone, average scores on the SAT at Penn State dropped 21 points. Over 25 percent of incoming freshmen at Penn State now tested as deficient in basic English skills and required remedial English instruction (Unsigned article). Meanwhile, the new open admissions policies of junior and community colleges were perpetuating the need for remedial composition. When CUNY began open admissions in New York, questions arose throughout academia concerning the very role of a university education in American culture, and remediation—especially in the area of composition—swiftly became a national priority for universities struggling to maintain their enrollment numbers. As the population of what would be considered traditional college students declined in general, student enrollment figures were maintained through a new student population—one that was believed to be in need of remedial help.
The call for remediation coincided with, if not outright triggered, the perceived need to emphasize and overhaul the teaching of English composition on most university campuses. Newsweek’s publication of the cover story “Why Johnny Can’t Write” in December of 1975 hammered home the case for sweeping reform and for a “back-to-basics” approach to writing instruction. In assaults from the public media, just about everyone was to blame—television, parents, teachers, universities, and methods of testing. Academic discourse on the issue surfaced in professional journals, university publications, and faculty bulletins; fluency versus correctness, speech idioms versus written idioms, and the value of literature versus rhetorical constructs were among the most prevalent topics of debate. Whatever the cause of the perceived decline in writing ability (and in retrospect it seems apparent that the “decline” was really a manifestation of the expansion of the student body), students, employers, deans, and the media had grown alarmed and moved to correct what they thought was wrong with composition. Out of that weighty tasking, the discipline of rhetoric and composition became professionalized as never before. Reaction in the field to “Why Johnny Can’t Write” solidified the existing sense of urgency and became the principle justification for reform. The prevailing responses to the article identified a need to promote literacy by increasing attentiveness to remediation, process, and individualized curricula.12
While composition was becoming the center of public and professional controversy, English as a discipline also seemed to be in crisis and transition. Although traditional literary scholarship retained much of its prestige in the field—close readings of canonical works remained a staple of PMLA and other flagship journals, and E. D. Hirsch’s brilliant books on critical theory maintained many traditional theoretical assumptions—it was nevertheless becoming clear that the New Criticism was showing serious signs of age and incompetence, and that the days were numbered when a stable canon of literary works could continue to provide the basis for English studies. The problem was that no one knew quite what to do instead of New Criticism and the study of canonical works. Semiotic, structuralist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic approaches to literary texts were prominent in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics appeared in 1976, for instance), but most scholars nevertheless remained unengaged and even confused by these critical schools. Beginning in the mid-1970s there was a move away from structuralism toward deconstruction, on the one hand, and more social forms of criticism, on the other. While Jacques Derrida had appeared at the Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism as early as 1966, his works remained untranslated and rather obscure until 1973, when Speech and Phenomena appeared in English and deconstruction began to emerge as a major subject for debate. Derrida’s Of Grammatology was translated in 1976, and
