Conference on College Composition and Communications Presentation: 

What's going on with English majors? 

Historical contexts and national trends in undergraduate curricula         

Thomas Miller, University of Arizona                      return to presentation homepage

I have analyzed Payne's English in America (1895) in this excerpt from a chapter of a book I am writing on the broader history of college English studies as literacy studies.  I have completed chapters on the colonial, republican, antebellum and early professional eras that examine how the forms and strategies that were taught in English since the founding of America's first college have developed in tandem with broader changes in the roles that college graduates played in society and related changes in economies and technologies of literacy.  Learning and the learned defined each other, as did the literate and literacy, and English classes have been the places where those definitions were taught.

Table of Contents of manuscript

If you are interested in reading (and providing feedback) on the chapters on the colonial, republican, antebellum, and professional eras in the history of the teaching of literacy in college, I would welcome your comments and criticisms.   

Contact me. 

 

Excerpt from Chapter 4: How work with literacy gave rise to the profession of literature 

 

    from a draft of the second volume of my history of college English studies in Britain and America:

The Formation of College English: From the American Republic of Letters to the Information Economy  

 

.....

            In his introduction to the collection, Payne identifies the popular interest in college English with the Committee of Ten and the Harvard Reports on Composition and Rhetoric that gave "the reform movement its strongest impulse" (12). Following upon those reforms, Payne equated "the teaching of English" with "the teaching of English literature," with Arnold the lead figure in that equation, and Mill factored in to divide literary studies from utilitarian concerns (8). Such reasoning inevitably configured composition as a service function, rhetoric as an anachronism, and language studies as a distraction from the "kindling of the soul" that makes of "literature a personal message to the individual" (9). One can see how such assumptions played out in the curricula by reviewing the descriptions provided by leading professors in influential universities. These descriptions range from three to eleven pages and provide varied details on staffing, course offerings, and institutional constraints and purposes. The sample included "venerable Eastern institutions," "small colleges" (including a women's college, Wellesley, with the only female respondent in the sample), and the "state-supported institutions of the New West," which Payne perceived as having been pressed to be more innovative precisely because they had to work with "cruder material" (22-3). Contributors from more accessible institutions often did not value such challenges and in fact blamed the limitations of their curricula on the provincialism of their students. Just as Briggs complained about naive students' tendency to moralize, several respondents attributed their shortcomings to having to spend time correcting not just students' language but also their crude tendencies to read literary texts as morality plays--a tendency seen to be common among the respondents' less cosmopolitan colleagues as well.

            As such attitudes suggest, English professors were developing a less didactic and more professional sense of purpose. The turn from philological to literary studies was often pivotal in curricula, sometimes distinguishing graduate and undergraduate programs, and often setting out diverging purposes for the discipline. Like many of his contributors, Payne set out his opposition to the "intrusion of science upon a domain set apart for other, if not higher, purposes." Payne was by profession a critic and not an educator, and so he carefully modulated such judgments out of deference to the emphasis on "philological and historical science" in such premiere institutions as Johns Hopkins (20). According to Payne, the methods of linguistics had become well established, but "aesthetic criticism" was still in a state of comparative "anarchy." Nonetheless, neither "the science of linguistics nor the art of rhetoric" could any longer "masquerade as the study of literature," and they might be better off in separate departments, as was being attempted in institutions ranging from Columbia to Stanford (26-7). The distinction of literary and linguistic studies was becoming definitive. While such works as Moulton's Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Study of Inductive Literary Criticism (1888) had attempted to make criticism a science, literary and philological studies were generally set in opposition by public commentators on the profession. For example, Stuart Sherman (a New Humanist who had studied at Harvard before returning west to teach in the provinces and then becoming a professional critic) published a scathing indictment of Kittredge in the Nation in 1913. Sherman identified Kittredge's pedantic manner with "the ideal of scientific research," which entailed a "sterilizing divorce from general ideas" that threatened to impoverish literature by making it merely academic. According to Sherman, such medievalists had a studied indifference to contemporary life and letters, and the training they provided left the "newly fledged philologist" unprepared for the typical academic duties "teaching composition (an art which he has never practiced) and Eighteenth Century prose (a sea which for him was never been charted)" (rptd. Graff and Warner 150-5).

            According to Graff, such "humanistic moralists" joined forces with "aesthetic formalists" to oppose historical researchers and set out the agenda for studying literature as literature, with "much of the program of the latter-day New Criticism" already "formulated by the mid nineties" (123). As Graff discusses, the project of the New Criticism was shaped by trends in general education, and it followed from the institutional pressures in high schools that were concentrating attention on autonomous literary works that I noted in the last section (see also Applebee 55-8). As several contributors to Payne's collection stressed, "the study of literature means the study of literature, not of biography, not of literary history, . . . or anything except the works themselves, viewed as their creators wrote them, viewed as art, as transcripts of humanity" (96). A half dozen contributors took pride in noting that they taught literary texts and not textbooks. This approach to teaching had become possible with the cheap reprint series of the time, it had become necessary as a means to instill cultural discernment in students who were less likely to have a shared history, and it had become justified by the assumption that professors should lecture from their original research rather than merely have students recite received judgments. While some professors still spoke about moral sentiments, others repudiated preaching the "beauties of the poet's utterance" as a distraction from having students "systematically approach the work as a work of art, find out the laws of its existence as such, . . . the meaning it has, and the significance of that meaning" (Payne 96). How to respond to literature was still open to question because there was little agreement on the methods that would realize the "organic" unity of the elements of literature (Payne 107). However the logic that would govern the emergence of the New Criticism was clear. To instill disciplinary rigor, students were taught to focus not on evaluation but on interpretation because the merits of the canon were not in question. According to Moulton, the laws of the canon, like the laws of science, were not imposed but discovered, though not simply in the objects of study but in the responses of the ideal reader, in so far as "the law-giver and the law-obeyer are one and the same"(Moulton 1888, 62).

            In critics' discussions of how masterworks work, one can see how the profession continued to value disciplinary rigor as a means to shape character even while setting questions about morals aside as a naïve concern of readers who had not learned the distinction between evaluating and interpreting. If students persisted in asking such ethical questions after being given a "lashing" at admission, they learned to assume more restrained standpoints in historical surveys that generally began with medieval philology and ended in eras before students were born.[1] Payne praised the Committee of Ten for recommending that teachers have students read literature rather than textbooks, but like several contributors, he deferred to the "instructor's individuality" to answer practical questions about teaching (16). Such deference to experts in the field worked in concert with the rest of the professionalization process to place teaching methods beyond scholarly deliberations. As a result, the profession systematically ignored the work that most practitioners did most of the time. Little attention was paid to how students were to become "intimately acquainted" with literary works by "reading them critically" because such intimate matters inevitably seem unprofessional, even crude, when stated openly (Payne 30). For example, in one of the discussions of teaching that were still included in the profession's leading journal at the time, Fruit discussed how an author "disindividualizes" his or her character to become "the vent of the absolute mind" (1892, 33). Few of the contributors to English in American Universities are so crudely explicit about the values of reading literary masterpieces, but most center on a consistent canon of historically organized texts that were read as individual representatives of cultural epochs. This approach formed literature into a teachable subject by formalizing a body of knowledge and modeling what its mastery would make of students, though that model tended to be tacitly conveyed rather than explicitly articulated in ways that might have opened it up to critical deliberations upon its purposes.

            The need to establish an autonomous discipline distinct from the basic work of the profession helps to explain why some of the most broadly appealing areas of study were given so little attention in curricula. One might expect an emerging field of study to center on areas generally seen to be engaging, but few contributors to English in America considered students' interests or needs in explaining the structure or emphases of programs of study. In fact students often had to begin with the least accessible and most difficult area of study--medieval philology. At the emergence of the discipline, such studies had been enlisted to make English as rigorous as ancient languages by such figures as Francis March at Lafayette College, as discussed in the last chapter. In his contribution to English in America, March took pride in how his institution had gained international recognition for philological study, even though he acknowledged that few students had much use for it (Payne 81). One need not accept Sherman's argument that the emphasis on medieval studies limited the public relevance of the discipline to ask why the sorts of readings that bring so many students into English classes have had so little standing in them. Most of the curricula that are described in detail included a single course in American literature, and contemporary literature was given less attention than some commentators felt it deserved.[2] As at other access points, restricting gateway courses to the most onerous areas of study served purposes more complex than simply limiting access or shoring up scholarly credibility. As with college entrance requirements, beginning with mechanical elements helped ensure that students  learned to distinguish the concerns of the discipline from the interests that had brought them into it. After a semester tracing the etymological sources of a work of literature, students would have tacitly understood that whether they liked the book was irrelevant, and that questions of character had to be defined in highly formalized terms to avoid naively connecting literature and life.

            So little attention is paid to pedagogy in the curricular descriptions collected in English in American Universities that any mention at all is noteworthy. Even in the rare case when a contributor discusses how coursework is organized to develop students' understanding, such as Martin Sampson's description of the curriculum at the University of Indiana, the prevailing assessment seems to be that "each instructor teaches as he pleases," or as Barrett Wendell of Harvard noted "each teacher's best method is his own" (Payne 95, 48). Sampson recognized that the methods and purposes of teaching were changing: "to one teacher it meant to fill the student full of biography and literary history"; to another "reviewing critics' judgments; and to others "literary parsing" or "the moral purposes of the poet or novelist; anything, in short, except placing the student face to face with the work itself, and acting as his spectacles when his eyesight was blurred" (95). While such differences had been common, the rising professionalism was apparently seen to ensure that "our ultimate object is the same": to teach students "to read sympathetically and understandingly" (95). As long as the discussion stayed with such vagaries, professors could remain tacitly assured that they were teaching the same thing. The matter was seen to be more complex than that by the several contributors who did publish on pedagogy such as Genung at Amherst. Genung set out "workshop" methods to treat students' writing as literature in the making, as I discuss in the next section (Payne 112). While many programs described efforts to clarify methods of study, methods of teaching were generally ignored at precisely the time that the teaching of English was being professionalized. Chicago offered a course on the teaching of composition that included rhetorical theory and history, and a course in the "theory of literary teaching" was offered at Nebraska, where complaints were raised that students lacked "literary traditions or taste or training, or interest in pure literature" (126). One need not accept such characterizations of the challenges of public education to wonder why they were so systematically ignored by a discipline so intent on professionalizing its work.

            The institutional economy that governed the assignment of teaching helps to explain why professionals studiously avoided raising questions about it. As I have already suggested and will detail more fully in the next section, a professional pyramid was being built up that was placing the heaviest teaching loads on graduate students, junior faculty, and lecturers, who were more likely to be women and less likely to be paid professional salaries (see Connors 199-200). This institutional hierarchy freed scholars from worrying about teaching, and left teachers with little time to worry about anything else. Of the twenty institutions included in English in American Universities, only Harvard, Amherst and Michigan had coherent composition programs with any institutional standing, and even at Amherst, Genung had to acknowledge that first-year composition had long been a "bugbear," in part because it had been taught by "incompetent and inexperienced teachers" (Payne 111). At Michigan and other institutions with a separate composition program that reported enrollments in detail, fewer faculty and more instructors taught more students than in other areas of English studies, where the loads were sometimes as low as six or eight classroom hours per week. The contributor from one of the institutions with the lowest loads detailed how they had been achieved. Melville Anderson from the newly established Stanford University discussed how admissions standards had been raised to reduce the "inundation of Freshman themes" that had threatened to sweep away "all the literary courses" (52). An interesting exchange between the contributors from Stanford and Berkeley over who had instituted the higher admissions requirements provides a telling example of how such issues defined the standing of departments, and through them, their respective institutions.[3] Universities such as California that had adopted the certification system also hoped to use it to raise their standing, though by working with rather than restricting access from public schools. For example, in Nebraska arrangements had been made with fifty-five certified schools to give advanced placement credit for their surveys of literature, and the contributors from Minnesota and California described outreach programs that included manuals on teaching composition and literature. Such programs provide models for working with needs that the profession still largely ignores in ways that reduce its learning capacities and undermine its institutional base, as discussed in the next chapter.

            Harvard was the exception that improved the rule by providing an example to the profession of what happened to those who devoted their careers to paper grading.[4]  As Adams has discussed, and Brereton has documented, Harvard had one of the most extensive writing curricula in the era, exceeded only by Michigan (see Scott). According to Wendell Berry's contribution to English in America (which is excerpted in Brereton), more than half of English enrollments were in composition, as seems to have been the case in the other institutions that provided detailed enrollments. Then as now, composition was largely taught by paraprofessional instructors. While Hill was a founder of the Associated Press, his journalistic background had little credibility in English departments, and he and his colleagues in composition often had to work longer to be promoted (see Simmons). According to Graff, such professors carried on the gentleman amateur tradition of Harvard literati such as Longfellow and Lowell, meaning that they were practicing critics without scholarly credentials (87). Hill and others who taught in the program published influential textbooks, and also introduced creative writing workshops that were imitated at Iowa and elsewhere. Such creative writing courses became a common part of composition offerings in the following decades. The writing workshops at Harvard were used by Frank Norris to compose drafts of McTeague, and Norris found the courses more useful than the literature courses he had taken at Berkeley (see Graff and Warner 133-35, and Adams 52-6). As in other institutions, advanced writing courses developed out of the forensics programs that had required students to deliver orations to the assembled college.[5] Harvard is but the most notable example of how some writing programs were for a time able to sustain such interdisciplinary engagements as pressures intensified to confine their efforts to first-year composition courses (see Adams and Russell). From its move to the first year in 1885, a theme writing course dominated by mechanical concerns was the base of the program. Harvard's version of composition was famous for emphasizing impromptu themes drawn from daily life that were meant to imitate how journalists learned to write by writing on the job.

            Such teaching duties carried little status. Even a national leader such as Scott complained of the "Sisyphaen labors" of grading 3000 essays a year, with many written "crudely, some execrably" (Payne 120). In his contribution to English in America, Scott acknowledged that students needed the individual attention that he felt Channing's generation had been able to provide, but "now the hungry generations tread us down" (122). Faced with too many students with too many problems, the profession understandably chose to direct its gaze to higher purposes. If it had concentrated on such duties, as many a teacher selflessly did, the discipline would not likely have gained much respect even if it had succeeded at overcoming them. Even those most concerned with driving "novices" out of the profession recognized that introductory courses presented insurmountable barriers to professionalization--for faculty as well as students. Writing and reading were generally seen as rudimentary skills that were always in need of repair, meaning that teachers would gain little recognition even if they succeeded at fixing problems that no one had ever been able to handle satisfactorily (see Hunt 84-5). However, the historical challenges of gaining professional standing for work with literacy were not confined to composition, and they were only compounded by dismissing them there because the critical potentials and intellectual leadership of the discipline were thereby divorced from the practical challenges confronted by practitioners. While marginalizing composition dispelled some of profession's misgivings about the purposes its work served, self-doubts surfaced whenever professors asked hard questions about how the rigors of Latin or calculus compared to a course in which students read a few books by Ruskin, learned "that he lived in the Lake country, loved unhappily, lectured to working-men, and became insane," and then wrote "a paper on his powers of description" (Alden 1912, 276). Unfortunately, concerns about the lack of disciplinary rigor tended to focus on students' papers rather than on professors' methods of teaching.

            Questions about teaching did not go unanswered so much as unasked, for few professors discussed their work in the classroom as a scholarly activity. This failure to attend to the institutional base of the discipline is understandable given the differing career opportunities of researchers and teachers--not to mention the complexities of representing teaching, reading and writing as humanistic modes of inquiry and not just basic skills. English departments were not alone in facing such pressures to account for what they did. The diversification of disciplinary modes of inquiry pressed all faculty to do more than recite traditional assumptions, but methods of instruction remained "much the same as those used in the universities of the thirteen century" according to Edwin Slosson's Great American Universities (1910). Slosson ignored the impact of changing technologies even while using them to describe how students filed in to "remove the expressions from their faces, open their notebooks. . . and receive," presenting "as inspiring an audience as a roomfull of phonographs holding up their brass trumpets" (rptd. Graff and Warner 169). According to Slosson, professors would have been more successful not knowing "quite so much, if they knew how to tell what they did know better." The pressures to not just "tell" but to involve students in the telling, in the composing of knowledge, were intense in English because of its expansive work with the intimacies of personal expression and professional mastery. In basic literacy courses one can see how institutions of public learning became modernized at an elemental level. According to Slosson, when academics proved unable to organize and articulate such work, an autocratic administrative class emerged to manage them. Until recently few academics have recognized how the incorporation of higher education into the market economy has defined the values of their work. The most highly administered area of English studies provides a telling example of what followed from the discipline's failure to attend to its business.

Critical Overloads of Work With Literacy

            Composition was the first area of college teaching to be consigned to "temporary" instructors--lecturers, untenured professors, faculty spouses, and graduate students who were assigned heavier loads at lower pay. The temping out of composition has shaped the development of the whole discipline and provided a model for the deprofessionalization of other areas of the academy because composition has been the largest area of work in English departments since they were founded. It may be impossible to assess whether the profession turned its gaze away from writing courses simply because correcting all those papers was so laborious, or whether it became such because the discipline failed to make it anything more. In either case, it is clear that the "creation of the underclass" of composition instructors was fundamental to the "profession of literature" (Connors 1997,172; see also Susan Miller). Professors assumed that writing would not have to be taught at all if high schools took care of such labors, and that raising admissions standards was the way to get them to do that. Such responsibilities were sometimes seen to include not just writing courses but also introductory surveys of literature, which were also to be eliminated by raising standards to force high schools to offer more rigorous general education (see Hughes 1922). This perspective looked to the German system of restricting general education to secondary schools as a model that would enable professors to divorce their work from the rest of the public educational system, especially the literacy challenges created by the diversification of professional discourses.[6] By mirroring the attitude of careerist students that general education was basically a waste of time for highly trained professionals, English professors internalized the subordination of liberal to professional education in ways that undercut their critical understanding of the potentials of their work. Exploring the alternatives available to the discipline may help us to realize those potentials.

            William Lyon Phelps was of the best known proponents of the idea that it was a "hideous waste" of expertise to assign a man who had studied at an institution such as Harvard "to correct spelling, grammar, paragraphing"--a job at which "any primary school-ma'am would probably have been more efficient" (rptd. Graff and Warner 160). Phelps had converted from the ministry to literary studies (see Scholes 98, 12), and after graduate studies at Harvard, he spent a year correcting some eight hundred themes a week before becoming a professor at Yale in 1892. Yale resisted public calls to require introductory writing courses, and Phelps gained national attention when he claimed that a comparison of his current and former students' papers demonstrated that Yale's wrote better without having been taught composition. Phelps's criticisms were particularly damning because he taught at leading institutions on both sides of the "composition question," and he clearly cared about teaching. In his own classes, as in his Chataqua lectures, he reportedly startled his students by speaking in a conversational manner after observing how the "icily contemptuous" manner of Kittredge and his contemporaries took the joy out of learning. Phelps perceived that his "popularity with the students" actually lessened his chances of promotion, for he had been threatened with dismissal in 1895 for teaching the first modern novel course in America, not because it had failed but become its public popularity was demeaning to Yale's English department. At Yale, Lounsbury's philologically-grounded survey of literature served as an alternative to first-year composition courses, which were dismissed in openly elitist terms. Lounsbury (1911) haughtily noted that "there is but one way of keeping certain people from writing wretchedly, and that is by keeping them from writing at all" (rptd. Brereton 282). Lounsbury and such likeminded professors as Charles Osgood at Princeton dismissed calls in "the popular press" to teach composition because they saw it as too "technical" to be a "liberal study," and too concerned with the "worship of 'the Average" to be worth their professional time (Lounsbury 264; Osgood 1915, 233, 235). Such attitudes had a formative impact on the discipline because faculty from elite institutions came to dominate not just MLA, but graduate studies, and through them the faculties of public institutions across the country.

            When they were hired by more broadly based institutions, such graduates often simply taught as they had been taught because teaching was not directly examined in graduate studies. The prevailing approaches to teaching writing have been categorized by Berlin:

·        an aristocratic "liberal culture" approach typified by the writing about literature and great ideas courses promoted by Phelps, Osgood and other New Humanists,

·        a "current-traditional" rhetoric propounded by Hill and his successors at Harvard that served to consolidate the scientific method as a model for all communication by defining composition as a process of efficiently managing information, and

·        the "transactional" rhetoric developed by Scott and other Deweyan progressives who recognized that writing was a process of collaboratively negotiating knowledge against experience (1987 46-7).

Berlin's categories overlap with those that Russell used to characterize interdisciplinary work with literacy in general education, but Russell draws upon Cremin's distinction between "administrative" and Deweyan progressives to distinguish general education programs that emphasized efficient exams and distribution requirements from those that were more concerned with addressing social problems and fostering "organic" personal development (2003, 136). As Russell's analysis aptly details, general education programs raised pragmatic questions about how disciplines could build on students' abilities to address public needs. Historical responses to those questions can usefully be assessed against their impact on students' writing because student writing is where the distinction between what professors have taught and what students have learned becomes graphically evident. Writing makes students' learning visible in ways that challenge experts to state their assumptions in practical terms to outsiders, though such challenges are often perceived by insiders as merely a matter of students' lacking the basics.

 Such remedial work was set aside for composition courses defined by handbooks, readers, and exercise manuals that gave overworked teachers material that was easy to teach, though often pointless to learn (see Connors 1997, especially 232-40). This project had little place for a civic sense of rhetoric concerned with debating public controversies. The civic distinction between public politics and private interests became reconceived according to the modern opposition of the personal and professional. Even such pragmatists as Scott did not really sustain a civic sense of rhetoric, at least in basic composition courses. Scott and Denney's The New Composition-Rhetoric (1911) begins with the promising assumption that composition is a "social act" concerned with specific audiences and purposes, but the focus soon narrows to topics drawn from literature, students’ personal experience, and "the vocations towards which various classes of students are naturally tending," with most of the text devoted to the modes of development, leaving literature to fill the gap between the personal and the professional (iii-iv). Amidst stacks of papers to be corrected, the civic purposes of rhetoric became a footnote to the teaching of "exposition" as the model for academic discourse, as in Fulton's popular Expository Writing (1912), which remained a standard for over forty years. Fulton defined exposition as "the explanation of ideas" or "the statement of facts," as if those were synonymous matters (xiii). The "dispassionate and unbiased" style of exposition could be enlivened by signs of "the writer's personality," making it a model of self-restraint for the "impartial unfolding of any phenomenon, hypothesis or generalization to the understanding of the reader" (xix-xx). The "unfolding" of writers to readers in personal essays served as a portrait in miniature for "social" relations that had well formed places for individual experience and professional expertise (xx). Students were evaluated upon their readiness for professional studies by how well they could master the formal proprieties of personal essays, a genre that was characterized by a certain "formlessness," but which was taught in a highly formalized way (Curl 1919 233; see also Crowley 1990).

            While first-year composition courses were often overwhelmed by oppressive workloads and purposes, some departments developed wider programs of work with writing. In the first decades of the twentieth century, some three hundred colleges developed writing majors or minors, with creative writing courses especially common in women's colleges according to Adams (1993), who provides a general history of advanced writing courses and an account of the spread of creative writing workshops that differs from Myers's analysis.[7] Courses in writing fiction, poetry, and journalism became a common supplement to literature and composition offerings in departments of English, and in the departments that were beginning to break off from them. The Rhetoric Department that Scott established at Michigan in 1903 was perhaps the most notable. Before being reabsorbed into English at his retirement in 1926, it developed the sort of "vertical curricula" in writing that Crowley has called for, and which has recently reemerged in independent writing programs and comprehensive departments of English (Crowley 1998, 263; see also Shamoon, et al. 2000 and O'Neill 2002). Scott's department was the first to teach newspaper writing according to Stewart and Stewart. As in other institutions, journalism courses were combined with work on the college newspaper to give students experience in publishing. Like most such programs, Scott's department was understaffed and overloaded, offering fifteen courses that included first-year composition, journalism and argument courses, as well as seminars on rhetoric and the teaching of composition (see Stewart 1992, also Berlin 1987, 55-6; Adams 65). Other notable programs existed at Mount Holyoke, which offered a major in rhetoric and some of the first courses in journalism, playwriting, and the teaching of rhetoric according to Wozniak (122-3).[8] Such sources complement the picture provided by Payne's survey to show that while some departments were coming to concentrate on literature, others were developing courses in business and technical writing, newspaper and magazine journalism, other forms of public address, and even English as a second language.

            Journalism connected creative writing with what was taught in other composition courses--at least until journalists left English departments along with rhetoricians concerned with public speaking. Already by 1893, a survey found separate speech departments and programs in fifty-two institutions (Gray 1954, 423). Coursework in speech expanded markedly after the turn of the century as speech specialists began to move beyond the constraints imposed upon them in English departments. One step in that movement was taken in 1914, when the organization that would become the Communications Association of America was founded by seventeen members of the NCTE Public Speaking Section, with twelve of the seventeen coming from large public universities in the Midwest (see English Journal 1916, 5:34; also Rarig and Greaves).The departure of rhetoricians interested in public address further isolated those who remained, and as speech departments left the humanities to take up the methods of the social sciences, rhetoric became a marginal concern on both sides of the modern divide between the arts and sciences.[9] Composition became even more divorced from public discourse when journalism followed the trajectory of speech. In texts such as Neal's Thought-Building in Composition (1911), one can see how an alternative to the literary priorities of English departments was provided by looking to journalism for models of writing on political issues for public audiences. As Adams discusses, journalism was generally seen as a trade by English professors, and then as now, those concerned with creative writing sharply distinguish it from "mere" journalism (Myers 1996, 75). Some early journalism programs offered writing courses for business and science according to Adams, but journalism departments soon rose above such service duties and joined with other "content" disciplines in looking to English to take care of the formalities.[10] The departure of journalism and speech left composition largely to be defined by such service duties, including business and technical writing courses that could be even more formalistic and less respected than first-year composition courses.

            By distancing itself from journalism and composition, creative writing became something more refined, and less useful, than what it might have become if more productive use had been made of its strategic location between literary and literacy studies. Some sense of what that might have been is provided by Myers's argument that creative writing emerged as a counterpart to creative reading in an effort to teach literature from a writer's point of view, rather than simply using works of literature as material for scholarly explications. In addition to its origins at Harvard, Myers identifies creative writing with broader trends in progressive education. According to Myers, "creative writing was first taught under its own name in the 1920s" in progressivists' reforms of junior high schools, most notably by "the pioneer of creative writing," Hugh Mearns (187).[11] Mearns studied at Harvard with Wendell, Baker and William James (who made him promise not to get a Ph.D. and become a specialist academic). Mearns was recruited to teach in the laboratory school run by Columbia's Teachers College, with which Dewey had been involved. In an era when Robert Frost clubs were helping to popularize creative writing courses, he gained a national reputation for promoting workshop methods in collections such as the Progressive Education Association's Creative Expression (1932).[12] From such sources (which he often pointedly critiques), Myers develops a rich historical context for his argument that literature raises distinctive pedagogical challenges because it represents "a fusion of knowledge and practice" that has to be experienced to be understood (12). This "constructivist" perspective on literary study is identified by Myers as a humanistic alternative to the discipline's emphasis on formal analysis. Myers's at points strains to distance creative writing from composition and rhetoric in ways that suit current disciplinary hierarchies better than his historical materials, but he is right, I think, that a more holistic sense of knowledge in the making is needed to bridge the opposition of interpretation and composition that has divided the discipline (Myers 9, 172).

            Such divisions widened when the departure of journalism left composition and creative writing with little in common (except students). The chasm that opened up between the two was paralleled by the gaps in language studies left by linguists' movement to form an autonomous discipline. Works on philology such as Lounsbury's History of the English Language (1879) had founded English studies on the history of the Anglo-Saxon, with literature largely studied to document linguistic laws. Language studies were concerned with character and culture in the general sense that "it is never language in itself that becomes weak or corrupt: it is only so when those who use it become weak and corrupt" (184-5; see also March 1893, 27). Such matters were governed by scientific laws that lay far beyond the grasp of pedagogues. As Connors has noted, "philologists wanted nothing to do with handbook prescriptivism" (1997, 151), and such applications held even less interest to linguists, who generally assumed that "the study of formal relations can and should be separated from that of meaning" (Mathews 1993, 3). Collaborations on language studies were hardly encouraged by professors of literature who stated that "there is no longer any necessary connection between" linguistic and literary studies because "one falls in the domain of science and the other in the domain of art" (Mathews 1892, 340). Other professors even suggested that "the rhetoricians of the first quarter of this century" had been better colleagues than those who cared "for nothing but rotation, palatization, and vowel absorption" (Easton 1888, 21). No surer way existed to alienate aspiring scientists than to identify them with rhetoricians, but dispelling linguistics from English studies helped New Humanists maintain a sense of cultural superiority by reducing science to an "instrumental" role (Gibbs 1922, 5; see also Babbitt 142). Linguists responded by declaring they would no longer be "subsidiary. . . to the study of literature, or paired with it as 'the linguistic side' of philology," as Bloomfield proclaimed in 1925 at the founding of the Linguistic Society of America, which drew more of its founding members from English than any other discipline.

            As Andreson (1990) details in her chapter on how linguistics, English, and anthropology followed diverging "arcs of development" at the turn of the twentieth century, linguists' claim to disciplinary standing rested upon a conception of language as an autonomous system governed by its own laws. According to Andresen, this "neogrammarian, mechanical conception of language" assumed that language change follows a logic that operates independently of external authorities and the intentions of users (1990, 37). The purposes and contexts of language users became irrelevant to the study of language, much as the popular motivations and uses of literary study became peripheral to the profession of literature. In the literary canon, as in the linguistic system, "the law-giver and the law-obeyer are one and the same," enabling the profession to represent the public without becoming practically involved with it (Moulton 1888, 62). The practical limitations of linguistic formalism become evident when one examines how a founding figure such as Bloomfield set out how linguists' "professional consciousness" would serve the "public interest" (1925, 69). Bloomfield looked down on teachers who "do not know what language is, and yet must teach it," but when he turned to explain how making a science of language would improve its teaching, he demonstrated that he considered learning to be a transparent process that was not really worth studying (1925, 69). Ignoring matters of motivation, use and meaning, Bloomfield discussed the acquisition of literacy as a process of rote mastery to be made more efficient through "purely formal exercises,” with pedagogical activities such as storytelling dismissed because the "practical and cultural values of reading can play no part in the elementary stages" (263). Bloomfield set out this formalistic model with all the certainty of a believer speaking to the faithful and did not cite any educational research or philosophical models because "the facts which have been set forth" were obvious, at least to those who understood language to be a self-enclosed linguistic system (264).

            When linguists followed journalists and rhetoricians working with public address in departing from English, it lost contact with the less hierarchical and less belletristic perspective that had been provided by philology, and which continued through anthropology, and then cultural studies. Linguistics in turn lost its institutional involvement with the practical challenges that language learners pose to language theories. These losses are evident in the absence of linguists in the largest organization of teachers of language in North America, the National Council of Teachers of English. In the 1920s, as linguists were setting up their own departments of study, NCTE's Committee on Grammar Terminology carried on an almost endless discussion about how to discuss grammar in the classroom. In response to the overwhelming pressures on teachers to concentrate on syntactic proprieties, researchers were beginning to argue that teaching formal grammar apart from students' writing had little impact on it or them. The few linguistically informed participants aptly demonstrate the impact that might have been made if they had reached critical mass (see Connors 156-70). Most notable were three of Scott's students: Gertrude Buck (who was very involved with the NCTE grammar committees), Charles Fries (whose publications included Teaching of the English Language [1927]), and Sterling Leonard (whose most relevant work was his posthumously published Current English Usage [1932]). Leonard's "How English Teachers Correct Papers" (1923) provides an example of the sort of linguistically informed and pedagogically oriented research that was sorely needed by overworked teachers. From examining the responses of teachers and students in his teacher-preparation classes, Leonard stressed that teachers should focus on "more essential matters," and began to outline what those might be (521). Such classroom research was rare in English and linguistics departments, and without such professional support, this sort of research could not hope to redress the influence of handbooks of usage, which according to a survey in 1927 were used in eighty-five percent of a sample of twenty-seven Midwestern composition programs, with over forty percent using no other text at all (Connors 147).

            Insofar as the discipline did not prepare graduates for teaching, did not support research on it, and did not secure workloads that provided time to do research and make other contributions to the profession, college English adopted a disciplinary economy that dramatically reduced its learning capacity and public agency. The national surveys that were done show that most of the courses offered in the discipline were staffed by teachers who were "inexperienced, unfitted by nature for the work, ill-trained, and sometimes, in addition, reluctant and disaffected" (qtd. Connors 124). That was in 1918. Even as early as the 1890s teaching assistants were becoming essential to staffing composition programs in universities, and by the first decade of the last century, such programs were generally managed not by scholars with expertise in the area but by administrators whose professional priorities lay elsewhere.[13] Commentators estimated that at least three-quarters of English professors began their careers teaching first-year composition, without having received any training for "such utilitarian work." Ironically, those who did it most badly tended to be most quickly promoted to less laborious and more prestigious duties lecturing on literature (Thomas 1916, 456). Professional groups such as The Committee on the Labor and Cost of English Teaching repeatedly recommended the teaching loads that have been proposed by national studies for almost a century now: twenty-five students in a class, with the most "efficient" load being no more than sixty total students (English Journal 1913, 2:1). Connors has argued that many of the constitutive elements of composition can be directly attributed to the labor loads of teachers, most notably the emphasis on personal experience essays that could be proofread with fewer distracting vagaries than those on controversial issues. Connors concludes that such practices have been impervious to critique simply because they work so efficiently, though the work they do is not simply to teach writing, as Sharon Crowley and Susan Miller have incisively argued.

            The ideological work of composition (and many other English classes) was concentrated in formal analyses that served as a means to character formation. Hill and the endless line of textbooks that methodically repeated his categories taught that "a methodological habit of mind constitutes the most important difference between a well-educated and an uncultivated man" (Hill 1878, 182). To master such differences, students were taught to model their thinking on essays from collections such as Fulton's popular Expository Writing, which included Arnold's "Racial Elements of English Character," Brander Mathews' "Americanisms," and Darwin's "Evolution of the Scientific Investigator" along with essays that applied evolutionary doctrines to "Progress and Poverty" and "The Migration of the Races of Men." William James's frequently anthologized "The Social Value of the College-bred" encapsulates how such courses helped aspiring professionals who were not well bred learn how to appear well educated. James advised students that a college education would enable them to make discriminations, the highest of which was "to know a good man when you see him"--to be able to "smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men" (rptd. Fulton 25). According to James, "as a class, we college graduates" must be able to distinguish ourselves to serve as models for the less educated, and thereby ensure that "our" culture "has spreading power" (30). The workings of James's essay (which was taken from McClure's Magazine) become more telling when its own "spreading power" is considered, for it circulated from the pinnacle of American higher education through one of the popular magazines that spread cosmopolitan tastes among the middle classes, and then it was anthologized as a touchstone of liberal culture to teach students in diverse institutions the power of discernment. James notes that the distinguishing function of higher education was being appropriated by the very magazines that circulated his essay because they had become a "popular university" with "new educational power." As a Harvard don lecturing the public on the virtues of the educated, James's essay provided students with a model for how to distinguish themselves from the less literate in a class where they would be evaluated on how well they could do just that.[14]

            Expository writing was, and is, the model of academic discourse, but it is also a neutered genre that presents students with a highly formalized but purportedly transparent set of conventions that value self-restraint, polite discernment, and critical disengagement. Yet even within such incapacitated forms lay pedagogical possibilities. One of the textbook writers most responsible for promoting such modes of development, John Genung, articulated some of those possibilities by representing rhetoric as "the constructive study of literature"(140). In The Study of Rhetoric in College (1887), Genung rejected more restricted views and expanded literature to include not just journalism but also students' essays, which were "to be treated not as school-boy task-work, but as earnestly meant literature," as they were intended to be and might well become if treated as such (156). Genung is often condemned for popularizing formalist models in textbooks that were among the most widely adopted of the time (Connors 224; Wozniak 145), but he also promoted "laboratory" methods for literary study that at least in principle treated students as authors rather than running them through exercise routines. My point is not that Genung has been misread, but that his works document the historical possibilities of work with literacy that need to be valued even as we critique the purposes to which it was often put. As an ordained minister and a German-trained Ph.D. whose handwriting was so elegant that it was reportedly used in the manufacture of typefaces, Genung was one the generation of professors who made the transition from preachers of sentiment to critics of literature. From an oratorical sense of literature that included journalism and composition, Genung held forth the possibility of viewing a student writer as "an originator, not a mere absorber, of thought." Such possibilities arise whenever teachers of literacy recognize that "other studies are something to know; this is something to do" (135). While that "something" is often confined to basic skills, the inability of such categories to encompass the arts of literacy is what gives work with them such power, and possibility.

The Pragmatics of Making a Difference

            In this section I will consider those possibilities by examining the disciplinary alternatives arising from broader changes in higher education, particularly in those institutions that served student populations that differed from elite institutions. In English as in other disciplines, teaching became subordinated to research, but the rise of research to become the chief distinction among classes of institutions and faculty was not as inevitable as often assumed by researchers. Research was less important than teaching in the workings of higher education, even in the development of "research universities." Even those universities that the profession has looked to as centers of its development were largely serving to prepare educators for other schools and colleges because even in the sciences there was little demand for researchers as researchers until after the first world war (see Burke 223-8).  The research hierarchy provided a reward system that disoriented professors in disciplines such as English from coming to terms with their pedagogical duties, which often differed dramatically from those assumed by the leaders of the profession. As the most broadly based of disciplines, English graduate programs were guided by professional priorities that were particularly ill suited to the possibilities that arose as higher education expanded to include underrepresented groups, particularly the normal schools that were evolving into colleges. As literature became defined by less didactic and more professional purposes, teaching largely remained identified with character formation, which was understood to be women's work, and therefore professionally insignificant. While the discipline has tended to define its history by the professionalization of literature, it is the failure of teaching to achieve professional standing that has had a more decisive impact on practitioners in the field, and on their students, especially those who came from backgrounds quite different from those valorized by studies of the Anglo Saxon character of English literature.

            While professional spokesmen such as Phelps noted that it was a waste of expertise to assign highly trained researchers to teach introductory courses, most saw that as a problem not in graduate programs but in teaching assignments. As the research paradigm gained authority, some did perceive the research institutions that prepared graduates had little to do with the duties those graduates faced in more broadly accessible colleges. The most famous reaction against the requirement of the PhD for college teaching jobs was William James's "The PhD Octopus" (1903). According to James, requiring PhDs for teachers in colleges without a research mission was merely an advertising ploy. James's response resonates with Burke's research that the reformation of colleges as research institutions was not simply an effort to secure outside funding.  Such funding was quite limited outside such areas agriculture until after the first and second world wars of the twentieth century, while the cost of building research infrastructures was quite high. The higher educational market itself included structural incentives to ignore teaching, for an emphasis on research helped universities distance themselves from teaching institutions, and thereby compete for students with higher aspirations, while also enabling faculty and administrators to position themselves above mere teachers. These institutional economies gave rise to conflicted professional value systems, as can be seen in the deliberations of the Pedagogy Committee of the MLA, and after it was closed, in Scott’s work with the Central Division of MLA and then the NCTE. An editorial in the second volume of the English Journal signed F.N.S notes that PhDs are "as a rule elaborately mistrained for the subject they are fated to teach" because they are "trained as if they were to lecture on obscure problems of English literature to small groups of graduate students" (1913, 2:456). One of the projects that was begun in the Central Division of MLA in 1912 and then completed by the NCTE was The Committee on the Preparation of College Teachers of English, which surveyed fifty-two heads of graduate departments, eighty-seven college presidents, and one hundred and ninety recent PhDs (with 28, 87, and 135 responding). A majority of recent PhDs felt that basic changes were needed. While department heads were more satisfied with the status quo in the discipline than college presidents, forty percent of the former and fifty percent of the latter agreed that more attention to teaching was needed (1916, 4:63).  Why then was it not granted?

            Alternatives were being set out for what graduate programs might entail. For example, in an NCTE session in 1912 on "The Preparation of College Instructors in English," a Harvard composition professor outlined a course that worked in tandem with first-year writing courses to prepare graduate students to run workshops, respond to drafts, and conference with students, while also working to improve their own writing (see Greenough 1913). One respondent from a small college criticized the research orientation of graduate studies, and the other respondent from a Midwestern university proposed changes in fellowships, hiring, and promotion that promised to reform the system. They didn't. Nonetheless, this session and other articles in English Journal show that people recognized graduate programs were ignoring most of the work of the field, that promotion systems penalized those who attended to teaching, and that some responded with careerist opportunism and others became professionally alienated. As one of those articles noted, "teaching is likely to be looked upon as an avocation" that provides a scholar with "an opportunity to follow his vocation" (Cox 1913, 208).[15] Given the actual duties of most professors, such identifications of the real work of the profession are rather curious, though understandable. While the consignment of composition to questions of efficiency tended to reduce discussions of teaching to , specialized publications aimed at other experts need not have become the only model for the scholarly work of the discipline. In addition to the writings of professors in journalism and creative writing, the articulation efforts of some public universities had yielded publications on teaching, and other models were put forward for applied scholarship that served to articulate the values and methods of literary studies to broader audiences. In an article in English Journal in 1916, Noble outlined how graduate students could be prepared to research literature courses, historical introductions to texts, and other scholarly materials aimed at general readers. Rather than fostering specializations in minor areas, such a research agenda were intended to help graduate students work from their positions as disciplinary outsiders to develop materials to promote the contemporary relevance of the humanities (670).

            This public mission was ill-served by the professional priorities that emerged, for they limited the potentials of practitioners in the field by ignoring its basic educational functions, as is most evident in those colleges that were evolving from teaching to research institutions. Along with college entrance exams, normal schools were a major point of contact between higher education and the rest of the public educational system. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, "normals" evolved from two-year to four-year institutions with college level curricula. Normal schools and teachers colleges opened up access to women, people of color, laborers, and foreign-born students (see Burke 228), and they made it possible for most high school teachers to have college degrees--up to ninety percent according to a national survey of four hundred and fifty teachers in 1915 (English Journal 4:328). As they evolved into state universities, the traditional purposes of teachers colleges came into conflict with their academic aspirations (see Borrowman 1956). The impact of these conflicts is detailed in Jewett's examination of the development of English curricula in teachers colleges in the first quarter of the twentieth century. From her own surveys of catalogues from 1900 and 1925 and reviews of studies from intervening decades, Jewett documents how the professional priorities of the discipline were imitated by colleges with broader purposes. Most courses were in literature. Instruction in rhetoric virtually disappeared as composition courses became relentlessly practical, with courses in argument offered by less than twenty percent of the seventy-one colleges in the 1925 sample (1927, 151-2). What Jewett found most problematic was the lack of attention to preparing students to teach. Few methods courses were offered, and few course descriptions even mentioned teaching. In Jewett's assessment, this inattention to students' professional needs undermined the standing of the discipline. As an English education specialist, her vision of the field centered on teaching, rather than on the literary hierarchy that came to structure the discipline as it set out higher purposes than the professional preparation of students, including even those who planned to join the profession practiced by professors themselves.

            The alienation of the profession from the pedagogical processes involved in sustaining it is evident in how teaching remained largely a mystical matter of character formation even after literature began to be characterized in more rigorous terms. In the early PMLA issues that I have already discussed, some of the first professional advocates of the "aesthetic standpoint" discussed literature in moralistic categories drawn from Ruskin and Arnold, but those modalities quickly changed as the objects and methods of study became more clearly demarcated (Fruit 1892; see also Graff 1987, 81-118). Discussions of teaching began in a similar modality with exhortations to serve as "ministers to the soul of the inner man" (Fruit 29). Sorting out oratorical modes from discussions of the teaching of literature was difficult because literature had long been identified with didactic purposes, and professors did after all teach for a living, often to students without the sort of cultural sophistication presumed to be a prerequisite for literary studies. To avoid getting too explicit about teaching (and thereby sound like educationalists), professors often fell back on the eloquence of the selfless teacher, much as earlier accounts of the literary studies had relied on the characters of authors to constitute the canon. The tendency to valorize the vital personality of the teacher remained common among progressivists as well as humanists, as for example when Scott opposed "Efficiency for Efficiency's Sake" (1914) by identifying the personality of the teacher as what got lost when one became too methodical. Even as professors adopted the professional personae of scholars and critics, they often continued to characterize teaching as a calling "akin to the ministry" (Scott 55).[16] On this and other points, one can see the historical effects of the lack of a well developed civic category that was needed to complicate the distinction between the personal and the professional and articulate the values of the literary, linguistic, rhetorical, and pedagogical dimensions of the discipline.

            While the tendency to represent professors of English as preachers of virtue had much to do with how the values of literature were characterized, preaching and teaching had a broader historical association that was complicated by two factors in this period. As detailed in Burke’s study of the social backgrounds of faculty and students, teaching had replaced preaching as the principal means for lower-class students to gain social status through education, while at the same time such service work was feminized as professions distinguished between such areas as social science from social work, psychological research from counseling, administering medicine from nursing, and professing from teaching. These disciplinary distinctions were a reaction in part to the fact that minorities, laborers, and women were entering higher education in rising numbers, often to become teachers. Most Morrrill Act institutions had become coed by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the highest concentrations of women were often in teacher preparation departments, which contributed to a fifty percent increase in the number of women in college in the last decade of the nineteenth century.[17] According to Williams's "The Intellectual Progress of Colored Women" (1893), "thousands" of women of color were able to gain an education in order to become educators: "it is almost literally true that, except teaching in colored schools and menial work, colored women can find no employment in this free America" (rptd. Ritchie and Ronald 185).  As Adams (1993) has discussed, these professional choices expanded somewhat as the demand for writers increased. Those options had also begun to change with the Second Morrill Act in 1890, which had specific provisions for funding African American institutions, though those provisions had a vocational emphasis that may have actually dampened the development of more academic programs.