Veysey, The Emergence of the American University

Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.

Veysey’s history of the American university, which he tries to write on a middle level (not about one institution, but not oversimplified) is divided into two parts: 1. the competiting academic philosophies that shaped the American university in the second half of the 19th century and 2. the development of the university’s structure, a bureaucratic administration and the administration’s relationship to the faculty and students of the emerging university. The American university was in a crisis immediately after the Civil War: it was not a place young men went to move up the social ladder (they went to the cities to learn business, law, and medicine), and it was seen to many as an archiac institution. The available conditions at the time – the promise and potential of European universities, the presence of new capital and philanthropic giving, and a desire to keep the university as an important part of American life – helped turn the university around, so that by the 20th century, it was as influential as the Church was in the 1700s. The modern American university is a distinct system, not directly modeled after the German research university. It is an institution that is not coherent or cohesive, but its tensions allow for constant negotiation, flexibility, and vitality.

Quotable Quotes

The university administrators “might almost as easily have promoted any other sort of American enterprise.” (443).

for the faculty: “the university offered a convenient intermediate pattern of behavior, somewhere between a business career and exile” (443).

Notable Notes

four educational philosophies that competed in the late 19th century:

1. Discipline and Piety – the old college model, concerned with the soul, manly character, mental powers, Chirstianity, study the ancient classics, discipline and codes for students, little academic freedom. This died out and was replaced by the other three models.
2. Utility – practical education for a wide variety of fields, workshops, connection to the outside world, democracy, vocations, John Dewey, elective system, secular, applied science, Morrill Act, civil service and civic duty, progressive era
3. Reseach – experimentation, labs, German research model (Americans changes this into specialized disciplines), professional autonomy, research for its own sake, pursuit of knowledge, skeptism, science, not concerned with undergraduate teaching.
4. Liberal Culture – humanities in the new university, new modern classics, culture, taste, unity of all life, breadth, cultivation, character, aesthetics, Oxford and Cambridge, English models, philosophy and literature, well-rounded, humanity, Western Civ, rescue the boorish American, charismatic lecturer, successful in small colleges with research or graduate programs.

academic administrators were bureaucrats, businessmen who planned and managed the university

academic freedom – progressive era reform that allows for flexibility – move towards tolerance, a blended university that allows for eccentric intellectuals

Mentkowski, Learning That Lasts

Mentkowski, Marcia and Associates. Learning That Lasts: Integrating Learning, Development, and Performance in College and Beyond. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.

This book explains an educational theory of learning, growth, and performance that was developed through 24 years of research into the abilities and activities of Alverno College students and alumna. The goal of college education, they argue, should be learning that is lasting, and the results of that kind of learning take time to emerge, but continue past graduation. Alverno College’s entire curriculum and assessment is built around the idea of learning that lasts; students are evaluated based on their proficiencies in eight compentency areas. Students are not given traditional grades; rather, their assessment is activity-based through continuous observation, judgment, self-reflection, and feedback. Their educational theory places a large emphasis on performance: real learning does not take place until it is performed through an integration of doing and knowing, both during college and after.

Quotable Quotes

Performance – “The integration of knowing and doing – in class and off campus.” (228) not just application of knowledge

“The way graduates solve problems, interact with others, communicate, and express their values in actin tell us about hte quality of their education and how that education counts in their lives and the lives of those they touch” (175).

“From a systems point of view, the true outcomes of college occur in the interaction of the college experience with the postcollege environment” (175).

“Learning that is lasting – that is, mindful and emotional, intellectual and committed – characterizes the lifelong learner who becomes a seeker, a pligrim, a pathfinder to integrity” (1)

Notable Notes

8 competencies measured along six developmental levels

Communication; Analysis; Problem Solving; Valuing in Decision-Making; Social Interaction; Global Perspectives; Effective Citizenship; Aesthetic Responsiveness

Alverno is all-women

how do students construct meaning out of their education? sustain this meaning?

the ability to self-assess, to reflect and evaluate one’s work is a mark of intellectual maturity, be a performer and contributor in work, civic, and personal lives

move to validate the scholarship of teaching, establish a college culture and faculty that value teaching, create an environment with a constant awareness of reflection and assessment (266)

Principles of learning that lasts  – Chapter 7

four domains of learning that lasts: reasoning, performance, development, self-reflection

Phelps, Turtles All the Way Down

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. “Turtles All the Way Down: Educating Academic Leaders.” In The Writing Program Administrator’s Resource. Eds. Brown and Enos. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002.

Leadership education should be an integral part of any graduate student’s program, and composition and rhetoric programs are positioned to be leaders in that movement because many of their graduates will go on to quickly assume administrative roles (WPA, writing center, WAC director.) Phelps explains that the WPA straddles the “bright line” between faculty and administration, and the way to negotiate this line is to have a positive understanding of leadership. Phelps argues for WPAs to embrace their leadership roles by recognizing power as productive, ethical, and legitimate. Power does not reside with the individual; it is a force, an action that organizations depend on for survival. Phelps advocates for practical and reflective education in leadership and explains the “administrative fellow” model she piloted at Syracuse, which drew on Lave and Wagner’s theories of situated learning to allow for legitimate peripheral practice.

Quotable Quotes

“What is needed is an ethical ideal that envisions responsible, strong leadership as a conceptual possibility, not an oxymoron.” (19)

:The authority of an administrator is not a personal attribute or possession, despite those who improperly personalize it. The administrator with integrity assimilates personal motives to the social motives of the enterprise” (25) – James Madison, for the good of the office/the institution

Notable Notes

Gertrude Himmelfarb - need to recognize the good inherent in central leadership and power; distributed, collaborative power is not always good or effective. Don’t assign gender to kinds of power

new university – professionalization, recognizing administrative work as scholarship – leads to needing more faculty as leaders

systems are leaders on top of leaders (turtles all the way down) at a variety of scales

Lave/Wagner’s theories don’t account for the necessity of continued reflection and some direct learning

three spheres of activity in professionalization – the discipline, the collegium, and the workplace – WPAs negotiate their identity in all three of these, always changing and dynamic – it is an activity system

WPAs fear power from above and their own power

Horning, Ethics and the jWPA

Horning, Alice. “Ethics and the jWPA.” In Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics. Eds. Dew and Horning. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2007. 40-57.

Horning argues that it is unethical for untenured faculty members to serve as writing program administrators. She defends her claim by using the ethical arguments of W.D. Ross (who draws on Biblical teachings, especially from the Old Testament) and Kant. jWPAs don’t have the expertise and experience that they need to be cross-curricular, all-university faces of writing programs and to do the managerial duties (scheduling, changing curriculum, hiring, firing) that are required of a WPA. Veteran faculty and senior WPAs in the field need to look out for jWPAs – even those who want the challenge of the position – by issuing a national policy statement against it.

Quotable Quotes

“It is unethical with junior faculty without tenure to hold WPA positions.” (40).

Notable Notes

WD Ross – Deuteronomy 22:10 – it is unlawful to yoke an ass and ox together because of the discrepancy in the ability to work.

Ross’s ethics rely on the idea of DUTY: 1st is fidelty – Promise-keeping: A department makes promises to a new hire and needs to give them the space and time to concentrate on teaching and scholarship, which will be what they are evaluated for tenure on (also this focus is repeated in the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics)

Kant – don’t use people as a means to an end

senior faculty allowing eager junior faculty to serve as WPA is wrong – such a position is harmful to health, family life, and career – it’s like allowing a kid to pig out on candy

Phelps, The WPA’s Dual Identity

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. “The WPA’s Dual Identity: Why It’s Hard to Have It Both Ways.” In The Promise and the Perils of Writing Program Administration. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2008. 262-265.

In this short response to a chapter of essays about the working conditions and constraints of WPAs, Phelps argues for an expanded view of WPA identity, one that does not equate security with tenure. A WPA is both an administrator and a faculty member, and tenure only matters in the second part. A WPA needs to understand both the perks and the ramifications of their dual identity, realizing that any WPA position, because it is built on a shifting foundation in these two different systems, must be flexible and always-changing. A WPA who embraces this dual identity and tries to find the positive synergy between being a faculty member and being an administrator is capable of great positive change – a risk worth taking.

Quotable Quotes

“While merging the best of both systems is precisely the feat we try to pull off as WPAs, to assume entitlement to them suggests (on the part of the WPA community) a failure to appreciate that in each system there are costs, constraints, and dangers directly correlated with their rewards and advantages.” (264).

“The primary calculus of risks and rewards in teh WPA role arises from this defining effort to merge basically incompatible rival systems and functions” (264).

Selfe, Toward New Media Texts

Selfe, Cynthia L. “Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the Challenge of Visual Literacy.” In Writing New Media. Eds. Anne Frances Wysocki, et al. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004. 67-110.

A good first step in incorporating and teaching new media texts in composition classrooms is through focusing on visual literacy in print and digital texts. Composition teachers, because many are not formally trained in the applications associated with many digital new media texts (Dreamweaver, desktop publishing, photo editing), feel like they don’t have the expertise to teach and guide students in composing new media texts. The assignments Selfe offers connect visual and alphabetic literacies (which composition teachers are more comfortable with), use rhetorical approaches, not entirely Web-based, and position the teacher and the students as co-learners. Though teachers will probably feel outside their comfort zone at first, Selfe argues for the importance of bridging to visual literacies and to begin to question the privileging alphabetic texts in our society and in the structuring of our writing programs and pedagogies.

Quotable Quotes

“By adding a focus on visual literacy to our existing focus on alphabetic literacy, we may not only learn to pay more serious attention to the ways in which students are now ordering and making sense of the world through the production and consumption of visual images, but we may also extend the usefulness of composition studies in a changing world.” (72)

Notable Notes

faculty feel like they lack the necessary skills to teach new media literacies, to help students compose with it – the faculty has an illiteracy that they have to come to terms with, will “force us to acknowledge gaps in our own literacy sets” (72)

change “author” to “composer/designer” and the reader to “reader/viewer”

assignments include a visual essay, visual argument, visual exhibition, and a text re-design and re-vision for the Web

composition studies needs to continue to be relevant to our students, so we have an obligation to learn about them and use them (new media literacies) in our classrooms as we ask our students to compose

McLeod, The Foreigner

McLeod, Susan H. “The Foreigner: WAC Directors as Agents of Change.” In Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing Programs. Eds. Joseph Janangelo and Kristine Hansen. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. 108-116.

McLeod surveys five metaphorical models for viewing the role of the WAC director, ultimately arguing that the best model is that of a change agent, a director that uses collaboration and conversation among the university-wide faculty to enact change in the college curriculum and in individual teachers’ pedagogy and teacher theories. The other four models that WAC directors often adopt – the conquerer, the diplomat, the peace corps volunteer, and the missionary – position the WAC director in a negative light, either by appearing top-down and combative, by acting like writing is the sole concern of a single department or unit (usually English), by decreasing the WAC director’s authority and effectiveness by having no budget or support, or by approaching writing instruction with a sort of moral authority, not allowing for dialogue about writing across the disciplines.

Quotable Quotes

WAC directors need “to invent their role with care as they venture into new territory”, make their “foreignness” work for them, not against them. (108)

WAC as a “quiet revolution” (look at Fulwiler) (115)

Notable Notes

Importance of securing a budget for director time release, clerical support, student support (peer tutor), and faculty workshops and follow-up for a successful writing across the curriculum program

WAC must be a faculty-owned, university-wide goal for it to be successful

Build a WAC advisory board or an all-university writing committee

Importance of an outside evaluation to get faculty support and budgetary support for a WAC program

Council of Writing Program Administrators, Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration

Council of Writing Program Administrators. “Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration.” The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators. Eds. Irene Ward and William J. Carpenter. New York: Longman, 2002. Appendix F. 366-378.

First published in the 1996 Fall/Winter issue of WPA, this statement builds on the MLA Report “Making Faculty Work Visible” and argues that five specific areas of writing program administration work are intellectual work (dependent on faculty expertise, research, and knowledge, and worthy of tenure and promotion.) The five areas include program creation, curricular design, faculty development, program assessment and evaluation, and program-related textual production. The statement includes guidelines to evaluate this work, pointing out that not all work by every WPA should be considered intellectual work; only work that has produced knowledge which results in activities and products that can be peer-evaluated (whether that knowledge is innovation, improvement, dissemination, or empirical research results) should be considered scholarship. The goal of the Council is to prove how academic service, which consumes a WPA’s daily existence, is just as important, rewardable, and scholarly as faculty research and teaching.

Quotable Quotes

Administration “has for the most part been treated as a management activity that does not produce new knowledge and that neither requires nor demonstrates scholarly expertise and disciplinary knowledge” (366).

Goal: “refiguring writing administration as scholarly and intellectual work,” it is “worthy of tenure and promotion when it advances and enacts disciplinary knowledge within the field of Rhetoric and Composition” (366)

Notable Notes

exchange value and use value of teaching & research v. service

three tenure case studies of faculty who have concentrated in research, teaching, and service

not all service counts as scholarship – just that work that involves disciplinary knowledge (theory informing practice)

Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered

McLeod, The Pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum

McLeod, Susan. “The Pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum.” 149-164.

The literacy “crisis” of the 1970s, coupled with open admissions policies, led college administrators and writing instructors to discussions on how to improve students’ writing. One solution, pioneered by Barbara Walvoord and informed by British and American curricular movements spearheaded by James Britton and Toby Fulwiler, was writing across the curriculum, which has two complementary agendas: writing to learn and writing to communicate (often called WID, writing in the disciplines.) A WAC coordinator has the tricky job of modeling the pedagogy they are trying to get the faculty, who hail from all different disciplines, to teach: not to dictate what is correct and incorrect writing (rather, invite a discussion); have faculty write themselves; and encourage opportunities for faculty to talk with each other about their expectations and reactions to student writing. Some of the benefits of WAC and WID is that it increases students’ awareness of the conventions of different discourse communities and genres, it shows them that different fields (and workplaces) write differently based on their fundamental theories, missions, and values; and it highlights the fact that good writing is important in all disciplines.

Notable Notes

Attributes: student-centered, active learning, reflective, constant feedback loop from students to teachers to faculty

Berkenkotter and Huckin (genre theory); Elaine Maimon; Patricia Lindon; Britton (Language and Learning); Fulwiler (The Journal Book); Russell (“Rethinking Genre in School and Society”); Emig (Writing as a Mode of Learning)

WID emphasizes learning discourse conventions, genres, and the processes of acquiring knowledge in that particular field.

apprenticeship model

O’Neill, Crow, Burton, A Field of Dreams

O’Neill, Peggy, Angela Crow, and Larry W. Burton, eds. A Field of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs and the Future of Composition Studies. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2002.

Royer, Daniel J. and Roger Gilles. “The Origins of a Department of Academic, Creative, and Professional Writing.”

This chapter explains the history of the gradual separation of writing and composition duties from the rest of an English department faculty and the subsequent creation of an independent department in academic, creative, and professional writing at Grand Valley State University. Over the course a of decade in the 1990s, the English department hired eight new tenure-track faculty in rhet/comp (in a large department of 40 full-time faculty), and with this cohort of writing specialists, teamed with part-time instructors and full-time, post-doc composition fellows, the literature faculty gradually opted out of teaching the required composition courses. When the administration discovered this imbalance, they told the English chair that until more faculty taught composition, there would be no new hires, as it was clear by their attitude that composition was low on the department’s hierarchy. The faculty then were faced with three choices: give up teaching elective speciality courses so everyone could teach a section of composition, hire new comp/rhet faculty into the department to teach it, or reduce the number of sections by allowing some students to opt out of the course. The faculty, realizing that none of these solutions was desirable, agreed to allow academic, creative, and professional writing become its own department, one completely focused on the discipline of writing studies, able to branch out and make partnerships across campus without having to be moderated by a large English department that wasn’t interested in rhetoric and composition as a legitimate field of study.

Quotable Quotes

“Indeed, separate from English, writing can finally begin to see itself once again within the context of the liberal arts more generally – rather than as a ‘basic skill’ relegated to preliberal education. It can now exist alongside other parts of the liberal-arts whole, rather than beneath them, servicing them, holding them up.” (36).

Notable Notes

A rhet/comp PhD is trained to teach more than first-year composition; advertising for a job that only teaches first-year (because the rest of the faculty don’t want to teach it) isn’t going to attract quality candidates.

Developing the culture of the program – valuing writing as the central organizing concept – is essential for new departments

confidence for making an independent department worked came from developing a successful university-wide writing program and writing assessment/evaluation system.

Agnew, Eleanor and Phyllis Surrency Dallas. “Internal Friction in a New Independent Department of Writing and What the External Conflict Resolution Consultants Recommended.” 38-49.

This chapter shows the problems of a top-down administrative decision to create an independent writing and linguistics department at Georgia Southern University in 1997. The administration decided that the large, 75-faculty member department of English and Philosophy needed restructuring, and the faculty submitted three models for consideration: stay a single department with three program directors (writing, literature, graduate studies); become two separate departments (philosophy and literature, writing and linguistics); become two separate departments under a new school. The administration picked the second model, thus divorcing the faculty from each other and withholding any collaboration and collection that would have come from being part of the same school. The faculty were not consulted about what department they would be placed in, so the department of writing and linguistics inherited several literature instructors with their MAs along with new rhet/comp hires. The diversity of viewpoints about pedagogy, content, research expectations, compounded by different salaries and degrees (PhDs and MAs) created a department rife with internal conflict. An external conflict resolution team came in and suggested structural changes, such as developing two associate chair positions, and joint projects, like the National Writing Project and a new BA in writing and linguistics have united the department somewhat since.

Quotable Quotes

“The faculty in our department were polarized based largely on degree and background – Ph.D’s versus master’s, composition-rhetoric background versus literature background, new hires versus veterans. But we wonder if it is possible that the fighting and one-upping were exacerbated because of the low status, low salaries, and perception as a service department, which both groups have in the whole academic system” (47).

Notable Notes

Warning – don’t go with restructuring just because administration pushes for it. Faculty need to be on board and know what is happening, understand the identities and cultures being made and reinforced.