A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became
alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could
manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else)
fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students
were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly
be going on in their courses?
I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them
and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other
100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not
their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV
shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration,
globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they
should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truthin-advertising.
As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that
unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised
administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar
and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the
composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing
about current trends in research. Now I have received (indirect) support from a source
that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni,
which last week issued its latest white paper, “What Will They Learn? A Report on
General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and
Universities.”
Click on the square at top right to read the paper.
Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is
“an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence
and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the
form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure colleges and universities
to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA
website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which
means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state
of higher education.
The battle between those who actually work in the academy and those who would
monitor academic work from the outside has been going on for well over 100 years and I
am on record (in “Save The World On Your Own Time” and elsewhere ) as being against
external regulation of classroom practices if only because the impulse animating the
effort to regulate is always political rather than intellectual.
It is of course true that political motives can also inform the decisions made by academic
insiders; the professorial guild is far from pure. But the cure for the politicization of the
classroom by some professors is not the counter-politicization urged by ACTA when it
crusades for “accountability,” a code word for reconfiguring the academy according to
conservative ideas and agendas.
Nevertheless, I found myself often nodding in agreement when I was reading ACTA’s new
report. In it, the 100 colleges and universities are ranked on a scale from A to F based on
whether students are required to take courses in seven key areas — composition,
literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and
natural or physical science.
It’s hard to quarrel with this list; the quarrel and the criticism have been provoked by the
criteria that accompany it. These criteria are stringent and narrow and have been
criticized as parochial and motivated by nostalgia and politics; but in at least four of the
seven areas they make perfect sense. Credit for requiring instruction in mathematics will
not be given for linguistic courses or computer literacy courses because their “math
content is usually minimal.” Credit for requiring instruction in the natural or physical
sciences will not be given for courses with “weak scientific content” or courses “taught by
faculty outside of the science departments” (i.e., the philosophy or history of science).
Credit for requiring instruction in a foreign language will not be given for fewer than
three semesters of study because it takes that long to acquire “competency at the
intermediate level.” And credit for requiring composition will not be given for courses
that are “writing intensive” (there is a significant amount of writing required but the
focus is on some substantive topic), or for courses in disciplines other than English and
composition (often termed “writing in the discipline” courses), or for courses in public
speaking, or for remedial courses. In order to qualify, a course must be devoted to
“grammar, style, clarity, and argument.”
The rationale behind these exclusions is compelling: mathematics, the natural sciences,
foreign languages and composition are disciplines with a specific content and a repertoire
of essential skills. Courses that center on another content and fail to provide concentrated
training in those skills are really courses in another subject. You can tell when you are
being taught a mathematical function or a scientific procedure or a foreign language or
the uses of the subjunctive and when you are being taught something else.
Things are not so clear when it comes to literature and history. Why should the literature
requirement be fulfilled only by “a comprehensive literary survey” and not by singleauthor courses (aren’t Shakespeare and Milton “comprehensive” enough), or by a course
in the theater or the graphic novel or the lyrics of Bob Dylan (all rejected in the report)?
With respect to science, composition, foreign language instruction and mathematics,
ACTA is simply saying, Don’t slight the core of the discipline. But when the report decrees
that only broad surveys of literature can fulfill a literature requirement, the organization
is intervening in the discipline and taking sides in its internal debates. Why should
trustees and alumni have a say in determining whether the graphic novel — a
multi-media art that goes back at least as far as William Blake — deserves to represent
literature? (For the record, I think it does.) This part of the report is an effort to shape the
discipline from the outside according to a political vision.
This holds too for the insistence that only the study of American history “in both
chronological and thematic breadth” can fulfill the history requirement. Here the politics
is explicit: such courses, we are told, are “indispensable for the formation of citizens and
for the preservation of our free institutions.”
Indispensable I doubt (this is academic hubris); and while the formation of citizens and
the preservation of our free institutions may be admirable aims, it is not the task of
courses in history to achieve them. The question of how best to introduce students to the
study of history should be answered not by invoking external goals, however worthy, but
by arguing the merits of academic alternatives; and I see no obvious reason why a course
on the Civil War or the American revolution or the French revolution (or both of them
together) would not do the job as well as a survey stretching from the landing at
Plymouth Rock to the war in Iraq. (At any rate, the issue is one for academic
professionals to decide.)
But if I have no problem with alternative ways of teaching literature or history, how can I
maintain (with ACTA) that there is only one way to teach writing? Easy. It can’t be an
alternative way of teaching writing to teach something else (like multiculturalism or
social justice). It can, however, be an alternative way of teaching history to forgo a broad
chronological narrative and confine yourself to a single period or even to a single worldchanging event. It is the difference between not doing the job and getting the job done by
another route.
This difference is blurred in ACTA report because it is running (and conflating) two
arguments. One argument (with which I agree) says teach the subject matter and don’t
adulterate it with substitutes. The other argument says teach the subject matter so that it
points in a particular ideological direction, the direction of traditional values and a stable
canon. The first argument is methodological and implies no particular politics; the other
is political through and through, and it is the argument the authors are finally committed
to because they see themselves as warriors in the culture wars. The battle they are
fighting in the report is over the core curriculum, the defense of which is for them a moral
as well as an educational imperative as it is for those who oppose it.
The arguments pro and con are familiar. On one side the assertion that a core curriculum
provides students with the distilled wisdom of the western tradition and prepares them
for life. On the other side the assertion that a core curriculum packages and sells the
prejudices and biases of the reigning elite and so congeals knowledge rather than
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