The Politics of Writing Studies

Reinventing Our Universities from Below

Robert Samuels

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781607325840
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A friendly critique of the field, The Politics of Writing Studies examines a set of recent pivotal texts in composition to show how writing scholarship, in an effort to improve disciplinary prestige and garner institutional resources, inadvertently reproduces structures of inequality within American higher education. Not only does this enable the exploitation of contingent faculty, but it also puts writing studies—a field that inherently challenges many institutional hierarchies—in a debased institutional position and at odds with itself.

Instead of aligning with the dominant paradigm of research universities, where research is privileged over teaching, theory over practice, the sciences over the humanities, and graduate education over undergraduate, writing studies should conceive itself in terms more often associated with labor. By identifying more profoundly as workers, as a collective in solidarity with contingent faculty, writing professionals can achieve solutions to the material problems that the field, in its best moments, wants to address. Ultimately, the change compositionists want to see in the university will not come from high theory or the social science research agenda; it must come from below.

Offering new insight into a complex issue, The Politics of Writing Studies will be of great interest to writing studies professionals, university administrators, and anyone interested in the political economy of education and the reform of institutions of higher education in America.

1
Contingent Labor, Writing Studies, and Writing about Writing

---

This chapter looks at two texts, one by Elizabeth Wardle and one by Wardle and Doug Downs, to examine the ways the use and abuse of contingent faculty in higher education affect the ability to implement a writing studies approach to the teaching of composition. Although I focus on research universities, many of the practices developed at these institutions are spreading to all forms of higher education in a globalizing mode of social conformity. On many levels, writing studies is itself structured by the contradictory nature of its relation to the dominant university research paradigm: while the teaching of writing challenges many of the standard institutional hierarchies, the desire for more resources pushes these composition programs to reproduce the structures that place writing, teaching, students, form, and practice in a debased position.¹ Wardle’s work is important here because she both acknowledges the need for structural change and offers a curricular and theoretical solution.

My strategy in referring to Wardle’s texts focuses on performing a close reading of her argument in order to both highlight her main contributions to the field and unveil what is still missing from her discourse. Since she is one of the most recognized scholars in the field of writing studies, her work is highly influential; however, it not my intention to argue that Wardle, or any other single contributor to the discipline, embodies the entirety of the discourse. Instead, I seek to look at the ways key texts are shaped by the political economy of neoliberal higher education. I also want to emphasize the importance of close reading and the need to avoid vague and distant summarizations. Since words and arguments matter, it is essential to look at how specific arguments are constructed by paying close attention to the unfolding of a particular text.

I also want to stress that I engage with her work through a series of ideological assumptions that concern the role higher education plays in the political economy of neoliberalism. Although many people define the current historical moment by the dominance of a conservative backlash against public institutions and progressive policies, I argue that it is also important to look at the ways liberals have actively participated in the reshaping of the political economy. For example, it is clear a conservative tax revolt has fueled an antigovernment movement, and this movement has resulted in the defunding of public universities and colleges. However, at the same time, liberal and progressive professors have helped construct and maintain a system that privileges research over teaching and individual rights over collective solidarity. Even though tenure was developed in order to protect academic freedom and shared governance, one must wonder why this system of job security has resulted in a structure in which the majority of the faculty do not have their academic freedom protected and are not able to participate in shared governance. The downsizing of the faculty and the rise of a business-oriented administration class in higher education, thus, must be tied to both internal and external forces.

In Degradation of the Academic Dogma, Robert Nisbet (1971) argues that research universities in America began to be restructured after World War II, when huge sums of government money were funneled into public institutions in order to support military and scientific research. According to Nisbet, research faculty quickly learned that prestige and high salaries could be attained by focusing on conducting funded research, and once these professors turned away from their teaching duties to focus on research, other people had to be found to instruct the students. From this perspective, the privileging of research over teaching and grant-funded professors over instructors was not the result of a decrease in public funding for higher education; instead, government support led to a change in the priorities and incentives of these universities.

Nisbet’s narrative challenges several common understandings of the relation between higher education and neoliberalism; instead of placing all the blame on the decrease of public funds and the external political push to privatize public institutions, he shows how internal practices were influenced by an increase of public funding. Thus, before the current destructive defunding of public institutions, we already see a major restructuring of higher education, and the hierarchies developed then still tend to dominate today.

As I argue throughout this book, the privileging of research over teaching and science over the humanities has a major effect on the present and future of writing studies. Not only do these hierarchies help explain the shifting of teaching from tenured professors to contingent faculty, but we also find a debasement of undergraduate teaching and the promotion of theory and graduate education over more “practical” courses like composition and foreign languages. We shall see that Wardle is aware of all these institutional transformations, yet she tends to argue that the best way for writing studies to improve its status and funding is to conform to the dominant institutional structures.

Labor and Writing Studies

Wardle (2013) begins her “Intractable Writing Program Problems, Kairos, and Writing about Writing” by highlighting the problematic relation between the theories of writing studies and the practice of actual composition courses.

Macro-level knowledge and resolutions from the larger field of Writing Studies are frequently unable to inform the micro-level of individual composition classes, largely because of our field’s infamous labor problems. In other words, composition curricula and programs often struggle to act out of the knowledge of the field—not because we don’t know how to do so, but because we are often caught in a cycle of having to hire part-time instructors at the last minute for very little pay and asking those teachers (who often don’t have degrees in Rhetoric and Composition) to begin teaching a course within a week or two.²

Here, Wardle correctly indicates that we cannot promote new pedagogical practices, theories, and research projects if we do not also deal with academic labor issues. As she stresses, it is hard to mentor and train faculty who are hired at the last minute and may not have expertise in writing studies. This important framing of the relation between research and teaching can help us to think about the political, economic, and institutional affordances shaping the possibilities of writing studies.

A concern for the material conditions structuring higher education weaves in and out of Wardle’s article, and it is my contention that a close reading of her argument reveals a conflict concerning the ways positive change can be made at higher education institutions. On the one hand, Wardle points to large structural forces determining how writing is taught, and on the other hand, she seeks to provide a local example of how individuals at a particular location can enact new pedagogical models. The question remains whether a move to adopt a writing studies approach in the teaching of composition courses can be achieved without collective action dedicated to transforming our institutions of higher education. In other words, can new methods centered on research into genre, transfer, threshold concepts, and metacognition be applied if old institutional hierarchies are not confronted and transformed through organized collective action? If institutions value research over teaching, graduate education over undergraduate education, theory over practice, and content over form, can writing studies’ focus on researching how undergraduate students learn and write take hold?³

For Wardle, material conditions and institutional expectations help define the possibilities and limitations of classroom practices: “Often these courses are far larger than the class size suggested by NCTE, likely because of the high cost of lowering class size and of widespread misconceptions about what writing is (a ‘basic skill’) and what writing classes do (‘fix’ writing problems).” From this perspective, the determination of class size is driven by an economic concern and an institutional interpretation: not only do institutions want to save money by having larger classes, but they rationalize this expansion by claiming writing courses teach a basic skill and serve primarily a remedial goal of fixing writing problems. In response to this analysis, an important question to ask is whether economic concerns are driving pedagogical expectations, or the reductive understanding of writing is producing a rationale for money saving. To be precise, are economics producing cultural understandings, or is culture determining the material conditions?⁴

The Rhetoric of Power

As academic thinkers and people invested in the power of rhetoric, we often believe culture drives social institutions, so the best way to change a system is to change the culture. However, what if we have it backward and economic forces produce cultural interpretations? For instance, behind some of the recent pushes to focus on a writing studies approach to the teaching of composition is the implicit argument that the best way to increase resources for these programs is to enhance the cultural respect for the field. According to this logic, if writing studies can be seen as a legitimate discipline with established research methodologies, theories, and concepts, it will be treated with the same institutional respect as other research-oriented disciplines. Yet, one must still ask whether this approach is too focused on a rhetoric of logos and ethos. Furthermore, if the major forces structuring the distribution of resources i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Contingent Labor, Writing Studies, and Writing about Writing
• 2 The Politics of Transfer: Grades, Meritocracy, and Genre in Anne Beaufort’s College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing
• 3 Metacognition and Cynical Conformity in Writing across Contexts
• 4 Genre as Social Conformity: Charles Bazerman after Postmodernity
• 5 Writing Theory, Ignoring Labor: Sid Dobrin and the Posthuman Subject
• Conclusion: Collective Action to Reinvent the University
• References
• About the Author
• Index