You may remember the homeroom class in junior high or high school. Homeroom
began with school business, roll call, announcements, the pledge of allegiance, and summons of
the sick and the mischievous to the office. School administration depends upon the ability to
reach through classroom walls by way of an intercom. In all other classes, the squawk of the
office intercom is a source of alarm if not annoyance. The homeroom teacher, however, is
surprised when the intercom remains silent. There is a tacit understanding among students and
teachers that the homeroom is open to administrative intrusions, whereas other classrooms are
closed, protected by academic privacy.
First year composition, more than any other college or university course, serves as
the de facto homeroom of higher education. At my own university, the "summer book program,"
initiated by student affairs, is a required part of the composition curriculum. The captive
audience of freshman composition attracts presentations from the learning resource center and
the library. In addition, there are unspoken expectations. Surveys and substance abuse screening
somehow falls in the lap of most instructors. When high school seniors tour the campus, a sure
stop is a composition class. A recent discussion among Writing Program Administrators, in the
following section, suggests my experiences are not unique.
The composition classroom's function as homeroom raises issues that directly
address Lisa Coleman and Lorien Goodman's question: "was rhetoric gone in name only" or
"indeed missing in action?" The question, 'what happened to rhetoric' is embedded in another
question posed by Sharon Crowley in 1988; 'who owns composition?'[1] It is hard to imagine a history or chemistry
professor posing similar questions of his or her discipline.
If the discipline of rhetoric and composition studies possessed the composition
courses in which we teach, a full-throated expression of our work, thought, and pedagogy would
be as diverse as the debates at our conferences and as dynamic as the research in our journals. As
it is, we find ourselves in the homeroom trying to incorporate administrative oversight and
ideological intrusions. Or, we find professors teaching composition who simply are not prepared.
In the composition homeroom, as in the high school homeroom, intrusions have been so common
for so long that they are simply accepted as part of the course.
The easement, or administrative right of way, that makes intrusion possible also
makes the composition homeroom valuable real estate. At a time when institutional health is
pegged to the first-year experience and student retention, initiatives such as First-Year
Experience (FYE) gravitate towards the composition homeroom and the access to the student
body it provides. For now, composition remains within the homeroom, and rhetoric, as Susan
Jarrett among others has said, "continues to thrive in several corners of academic public space"
(Jarrett). However, rhetoric does not thrive in the composition homeroom, and soon we may ask
what happened to composition.
It is commonly understood that oversight and intrusions are possible because, as
Crowley argues above, composition instructors have always lacked power. Obviously, power,
and the lack of it, explains a great deal. But power does not explain everything. Before research
universities took root in America, no discipline or professor, other than theologians, could lay
claim to the denominational colleges' classroom. The German university model privileged some
disciplines and professors but not all. Privilege does not explain why professors of
entrepreneurship, for example, can make a castle of their classroom while composition is the
homeroom of the university. And power denied does not explain why rhetoric has been pushed
out of composition. The issue at hand is not simply one of power, but also place.
The goal of this paper is to propose a new topography for the composition classroom
and rhetoric's place in it. Instructors, WPAs, rhetoricians, composition specialists, labor
organizers, and unions have been trying to redraft the space within the homeroom for years with
limited effect. Moving out to form departments of our own, beating back the humanist pedagogy,
joining unions, or filling composition homerooms with tenured professors will not change
composition's topography. As long as we don't block the administrative easement, we can move
the furniture inside the homeroom all we want. If we are going to put rhetoric back in
composition pedagogy and secure a place for all aspects of our discipline, we must build new,
resilient classroom walls that resist intrusions and incursions from administrators, unprepared
instructors, and external ideologies.
This new topography of the composition classroom takes us back to the term's roots;
a place (topos) for writing (graphia) that will also summon a place for rhetoric in the discipline's
curriculum. Fortunately, we do not have to construct this space from scratch. Obviously,
classrooms that are resilient to outside intrusions surround us. The first step is to reclaim and
then build upon the foundations in place. These foundations date back to the nineteenth-century
battle for privacy, the twentieth-century codification of academic freedom, and the 1970
extension of privacy to contingent instructors by the AAUP. The existing foundations and
protective structures can be used to build a place for writing.
One month after Pound was appointed to the AAUP authoring committee, he
published the first installment of an influential essay detailing the social interests of individual
privacy entitled "Interests of Personality." In this essay, Pound argued that privacy was not
merely a personal concern. Society in general has an interest in the privacy of an individual,
because individual privacy "is also closely connected with a social interest in free belief and free
expression of opinion as guarantees of political efficiency and instruments of social progress"
(Pound 453). In plain words, Pound argued that society benefits when privacy is respected. Both
Pound's essay and the "General Report" argue for privacy, but not simply as an individual
indulgence. Individual freedom to believe and express opinions is necessary to an individual's
"full moral and social life." More profound is society's interest in free and efficient public debate
and social progress that is made possible by the right to individual privacy (Pound 453).
The call for legal recognition of the right of privacy began as the complaints of
noteworthy individuals hounded by amateur photographers. By the time the nascent AAUP took
up the issue of academic freedom, the debate had matured beyond the interests of an individual
to a discussion of the social benefits of the right of privacy. The AAUP took up the justification
for individual privacy as a social benefit and argued that the professor, and not the university,
was the agent ultimately responsible to students and society.
In the initial codification of American academic freedom, the AAUP emphasized
professors had very public obligations; however, meeting these obligations required the security
of seclusion, intimacy, and above all privacy. The 1915 "General Report," and the AAUP's
restatement in 1925, not only defined a professor's responsibilities, freedoms, and privileges, it
also defined the professor's relationship with the university, the public, and the students.
Perhaps one of the boldest assertions of the time was that university trustees are not the
employers of professors. The 1915 AAUP committee stated,
The responsibility of the university teacher is primarily to the public itself, and to
the judgment of his own profession; and while, with respect to certain external
conditions of his vocation, he accepts a responsibility to the authorities of the
institution in which he serves, in the essentials of his professional activity his duty
is to the wider public to which the institution itself is morally amenable. (AAUP,
"General Report" 22-23)
To describe the nature of the relation and obligation between professor and university, the AAUP
drew upon the metaphor of a judge and appointing president (AAUP, "General Report" 26).
Once appointed, the judge must serve the people and remain independent of the person and
institution that provided his or her position. A professor must be "exempt from pecuniary motive
or inducement" (AAUP, "General Report" 25), free from "mental reservation" when teaching
(28), free from "dependence upon the favor of any social class or group" which includes
benefactors and parents (30-1), and free from the tyranny of "public opinion" (32).
Typically, infringement and retribution of professors for their speech came from
within colleges and universities or from their benefactors (Hofstadter & Metzger 413-508). Few
university officers and benefactors concerned themselves with the unspoken thoughts of a
professor. Infringement of inquiry and research was considered slight enough to be "disregarded
in this report" (AAUP, "General Report" 20). However, the same could not be said of teaching
and public speaking. The authors of the report were so concerned by numerous reports of
infringement upon professorial speech that they focused almost exclusively upon the student
teacher relationship and professorial privacy.
The AAUP argued student / professor relationships are exceptionally fragile,
because such relations are based upon character and integrity. The committee held, "no man can
be a successful teacher unless he enjoys the respect of his students, and their confidence in his
intellectual integrity" (AAUP, "General Report" 28). Respect and confidence in a professor may
be lost in two ways. If a professor withholds thoughts and resists speaking candidly because he
or she is repressed or intimidated by outside forces, students will lose respect for the professor
they see as an intellectual coward. Secondly, if a student senses that a professor is teaching
conclusions or findings corrupted by outside interests, the professor's character will be suspect.
Intellectual integrity depends upon both the courage to speak truth and the character to defend
truth from corruption. Without integrity, the professors' "educative force is incalculably
diminished" (AAUP, "General Report" 28). Understandably, the AAUP sought to define the
obligations and freedoms of the professorate. In doing so, the AAUP also defined the university
in terms of academic freedom.
According to the AAUP, the value of the university is dependent upon the
professor's relationship with those who seek his or her instruction and counsel. A university can
only fulfill its obligation to the community if a scholar remains independent, isolated from
outside pressures and is
free not only to pursue his investigations but to declare the results of his [sic]
researches, no matter where they may lead him or to what extent th[e]y may come
into conflict with accepted opinion. To be of use to the legislator or the
administrator, he must enjoy their complete confidence in the disinterestedness of
his conclusions. (AAUP, "General Report" 29)
Lacking disinterested professors freely sharing the benefits of their work, a university is little
more than "a proprietary school designed for the propagation of specific doctrines" and
professors little more than shills employed to spread the doctrines of those in power (AAUP,
"General report" 21).
It is clear the authoring committee was trying to define academic obligations and
freedoms they saw as threatened. The effect of the 1915 "General Report" was to release
academic freedom from specific spaces, architectures, and institutions and enshrine academic
freedom as a professor's assertion of a private space. Declaring the professor an independent
agent of public edification, as opposed to the university, the professor was granted the power to
define pedagogical space. In simple terms, the space of the classroom is carried in the professor's
pocket and may be deployed at any time. According to the terms laid down by the AAUP in
1915, when a professor sets to educating students, citizens, public servants, or anyone, in a
classroom, courtroom, or under a tree, the professor raises the wall of privacy protecting research
and educational relationships. A reverse example proves the case. Without a professor present,
individuals occupying a room are not protected by academic freedom.
Academic freedom is not the freedom to do or say anything. The AAUP set limits
upon the liberty of the professor by linking academic freedom to the obligations and duties of the
scholar. In the words of the authors of the 1915 "General Report,"
The claim to freedom of teaching is made in the interest of the integrity and of the
progress of scientific inquiry; it is therefore, only those who carry on their work in
the temper of the scientific inquirer who may justly assert this claim. The liberty
of the scholar within the university to set forth his conclusions . . . is conditioned
by their being conclusions gained by a scholar's method and held in a scholar's
spirit. . . . (AAUP, "General Report" 33)
The shield of academic freedom does not protect activities that do not adhere to disciplinary
standards, promote inquiry, advance human understanding, and serve the public. Moreover, only
the professorate, and not university officials, has the expertise to determine what is and is not
protected by academic freedom.
The early arguments of Warren, Brandeis, and Pound that gave force and form to the
right of privacy resonate in the American concept of academic freedom. As Warren and Brandeis
argued, an individual has the right to determine the extent to which his or her thought is
communicated to others. Pound argued society is served, more than the individual, when
personal privacy is respected. The AAUP drew upon the national debate to define what a
professor is and does. As a result, the privacy of the professor's intellectual labor was disengaged
from the classroom and made portable so both students and the at large community could be
served. Significantly, the American professorate defined its own freedoms and obligations. And
as authoring body, the AAUP reserved to itself the right to determine who can assert the private
place of academic freedom.
In 1970, the AAUP once again attempted to shape the space of the university by
extending academic freedom to contingent instructors. It is precise to say academic freedom was
extended, because composition instructors were not part of the professorate for whom academic
freedom was initially defined. The AAUP's original 1915 "General Report," the 1925
"Conference Statement on Academic Freedom," and the "1940 Statement of Principles on
Academic Freedom and Tenure" did not address the academic freedom of graduate or contingent
instructors. Things changed in 1969 when the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges
(AAC) met to discuss and clarify the "1940 Statement." The committee decided not to alter the
"Statement," but added a section entitled "Interpretive Comments." Interpretive comment
number 4, adopted as AAUP policy in 1970, represents the first attempt to extend academic
freedom to instructors. "Both the protection of academic freedom and the requirements of
academic responsibility apply not only to the full-time probationary and the tenured teacher, but
also to all others, such as part-time faculty and teaching assistants, who exercise teaching
responsibilities" (AAUP, "1940 Statement"). The freedoms and rights of professors were not
altered to meet the needs of instructors. This is understandable considering the long, hard, and
continuing battle to maintain the freedoms and rights professors enjoy. In essence, the AAUP
was trying to bring a large number of friends to a party the professorate alone had been invited.
However, the AAUP's comment of inclusion, with all the persuasive force a comment can
muster, has done little to convince college and university administrations to acknowledge the
privacy and academic freedom of graduate and contingent instructors.
Composition instructors, by and large, have been unable to assert the privacy of the
classroom and lay claim to the academic freedom the AAUP declared is crucial to the education
of students and necessary to serve the public. This fact is due, in part, because of the way
American academic freedom was defined, and in part, because of the way the AAUP defined
itself. Composition instructors do not enjoy the academic freedom of a typical professor's
classroom because the American concept of academic freedom is based upon personal privacy,
not the classroom. And the AAUP can do little for the contingent instructors who appeal for
protection, because the AAUP's initial definition of academic freedom, which has long been the
standard for American colleges and universities, is limited to tenure track and tenured professors.
When colleges and universities absorbed the AAUP's 1915 definition of academic freedom, the
exclusions implied by the "General Report" were also absorbed.
If academic freedom is a necessary condition of the professor's service to students
and community, disregarding the composition instructor's assertion of a private pedagogical
space differentiates their labor and the classrooms in which they teach. While the professor
serves the students and public through exclusion and isolation, an untenured or non-tenure track
composition instructor serves the public by being exposed: their opinions unprotected and their
classrooms open to scrutiny, intrusion, and incursion. In essence, the composition classroom,
staffed with non-tenure-track employees, serves as the proprietary college the AAUP warned
higher education would become if not for professorial privacy and academic freedom.
Conclusion
One would be hard pressed to find a college or university that has a policy denying
the academic freedom of non-tenure track instructors. Then again, one would be hard pressed to
find a college or university that respects the privacy of the composition classroom. It wasn't in
the interests of the AAUP to represent the instructors of composition, because by 1915, few
professors taught composition and fewer still wanted to. Composition courses had changed long
before the American professorate organized around the battle for academic freedom. Rhetorical
instruction, the mainstay of higher education in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century
and a requirement of sophomores, juniors, and seniors, had already slid down the curriculum to
fill a literacy hole discovered in the 1874 freshman class of Harvard. To this day, the modern
composition classroom is more an institutional response to a crisis than it is a reflection of a
discipline or a professor's research, intellect, and character. Undeniably, first-year students learn
to access academic discourse through composition. Increasingly, the atypical topography of the
composition homeroom makes it possible for the institution to access the experience of
freshman.
As we have seen, composition courses, among all the courses in the academy's
catalogue, are the homerooms of the university. At base, the issue is not so much who teaches
composition, but how the space of writing instruction is defined. Composition does not possess
the classroom. The homeroom possesses composition studies, rhetoric has been nudged out of
our pedagogy, and most of those who teach composition are powerless to define their
curriculum. Even graduate level composition theory seminars can be seen as serving the
institution's need for maintaining a low cost pool of composition instructors. It is quite possible
that the years of research and practice that culminate in today's and tomorrow's composition
theory and practice may lose its place in the curriculum. Where will the difficult work of
learning to write elegantly, persuasively, and vividly take place if freshman composition
becomes "University 101?"
As I see it, we have three depressing options and one radical option. First, we could
leave things as they are. We simply continue our research knowing the importance of rhetoric
and composition in the lives of our students and our society, and yet teach in a homeroom that
undermines our discipline, authority, and scholarship. Second, we could follow Schuster's
recommendation and absorb the external initiatives that are attracting cash and gaining
momentum as they move into the homeroom. I fear, however, that this would lead to our
eventual displacement. The lease is up and new tenants are on their way in. Making peace with
the new tenants will simply mean carrying their baggage. Third, we could act on Crowley's
suggestion and imagine composition beyond the first year class. I agree that the subjugation of
our discipline to the universal requirement of composition and the humanist pedagogy has
inhibited our discipline. And, I am convinced that writing instruction, fully informed by
composition studies and rhetoric, can thrive elsewhere in the university. It may yet be necessary
to abandon the homeroom. However, before we pack our bags, we should try to exercise a fourth
option: continue to work with first-year students and build new walls to protect ourselves. Rather than
imagining our discipline free of first-year composition, I think we should imagine a first-year
writing course (part of an extended sequence) that is a full-throated expression of our discipline
and as protected as any other university course.
This fourth option, the one I advocate, has two steps. First, we encourage the parallel
yet separate development of FYE programs and freshman seminars. In short, make FYE
the homeroom of the university, remove the intercom from the composition classroom, and
reinforce the walls and structures that protect our curriculum. That way, when the student affairs
office wants to do a survey they will have a homeroom of their own to take care of business.
Above all, we must a draw a clear distinction between the pedagogy of our discipline and every
other well-intentioned initiative. However, we can only deflect intrusions and begin to
distinguish our pedagogy if FYE, or whatever comes next, takes over as the university's
homeroom. The writing courses I imagine have the same relationship to the homeroom as do
business or chemistry courses.
The second step is to make a new place in the university. Building a new
pedagogical place within the university is not as overwhelming as it seems. It is worth
remembering that at the end of the nineteenth century, the position of denominational college
professors was comparable to today's contingent instructors. In 1900, the American Economic
Association stood up for Edward A. Ross because they recognized in his firing a threat to all
university professors. Academic freedom had yet to be formalized at that time. There was no
professional organization with lawyers, lobbyists, and money, much less experience, to protect
Professor Ross. Fortunately, the AAUP is better equipped and has almost 100 years of
experience. If the increasing dependence upon contingent faculty is a threat to academic
freedom, as the AAUP's policy statement on "Contingent Appointments and the Academic
Profession" claims, then the protection of a contingent instructor's academic freedom is a
defense of the American professorate's freedom. Like the AAUP, I would prefer more tenure-track
lines; however, this line of argument is losing ground fast and cannot possibly be a defense
against the real erosion of academic freedom by way of semester contracts.
If the AAUP will not be moved to make good on the 1970 statement, we must move
them. This will mean a radical politicization of the role of the WPA. As we draw a line around
our classrooms, WPAs and tenure track professors must support and encourage competent
instructors to stand up for their right of pedagogical and intellectual privacy. The AAUP must
also be pushed to defend the academic freedom of instructors with as much zeal as full
professors. Oddly enough, this may mean that as a WPA, I could end up encouraging one of my
own instructors to file a grievance with the AAUP objecting to policies I am required to enforce.
It may also mean questioning the qualifications of tenured professors to teach composition. I am
sure every non-tenured WPA reading this just said 'count me out.' Indeed, I myself have yet to
be tenured and recognize the danger of my suggestions. Yet the tenuous position of WPAs is, for
me, evidence of the serious threat posed by the rhetorical topography where the composition
classroom serves as university homeroom. In essence, the rhetorical construction of the
homeroom has silenced an entire class of instructors as well as another class of, typically, junior
faculty WPAs. With each uncontested intrusion and incursion, the walls of the homeroom
become that much more permeable and the administrative easement that much more concrete. If
instructors and non-tenured WPAs can't speak, tenured professors and our professional
organizations must speak out for the academic freedom of the individual instructor.
A great deal is at stake. We are not talking about the loss of a single instructor's
freedom. We are talking about generations of graduate students that will have to work as
homeroom instructors or future professors of rhetoric and composition who will manage
homerooms. If we cannot draw upon the composition classroom to feed our research or to serve
as an expression of our research and theory, our very discipline is threatened. For fear of
overstating my case, allow me to temper my concerns with the following question. Since the
middle of the twentieth century, when the AAUP reached its zenith as a powerful political body,
has the academic freedom of American colleges and universities gained breadth and muscle or
has it diminished?
I can't point to a single person or group who is responsible for this atypical, power-inhibiting
place in which my instructors and I find ourselves. I can't even tell you who owns
composition. And that is the problem. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the freedoms
and obligations of the American professor coalesced around the battle for personal and
intellectual privacy. The fate of the composition instructor, on the other hand, was tied to the
pedagogical space that remained undefined. In the simplest terms, composition emerged as the
universities' homeroom as the American concept of academic freedom emerged from the battle
for privacy. I can, however, point to the organization that once asserted a private intellectual
place called academic freedom and may be pushed to do it again. The AAUP should hear us
knocking.
Notes
AAUP. "1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure with 1970
Interpretive Comments." American Association of University Professors. June 2002.
http://www.aaup.org/statements/Redbook/1940stat.htm
- - - . "Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession." American Association of
University Professors. November 2003.
http://www.aaup.org/statements/SpchState/Contingent.htm
- - - . "General Report of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American
Association of University Professors." AAUP Bulletin 1 (1915): 16-56.
Barefoot, Betsy O., and Michael J. Siegel. "National Survey of First-Year Co-Curricular
Practices: Summary of Findings." The Policy Center on the First-Year of College. 2002.
Brevard College, Brevard, NC 14 Nov. 2003 1-6
http://www.brevard.edu/fyc/survey/cocurricular/
Coleman, Lisa and Lorien Goodman. Introduction. "Rhetoric/Composition:
Intersections/Impassess/Differends." Enculturation 5.1 (Fall 2003):
http://enculturation.net/5_1/intro.html
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays.
Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998.
- - - . "Composition is Not Rhetoric." Enculturation 5.1 (Fall 2003):
http://enculturation.net/5_1/crowley.html
Hofstadter, Richard, and Walter P. Metzger. The Development of Academic Freedom in the
United States. New York: Columbia UP, 1955.
Dickson, Chidsey. "Outside Pressure?" Online posting. 7 April 2003. Writing Program
Administration List. 7 April 2003. http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html
Jarratt, Susan. "Rhetoric in Crisis?: The View from Here." Enculturation 5.1 (Fall
2003): http://enculturation.net/5_1/jarratt.html
Kyburz, Bonnie. "Outside Pressure?" Online posting. 7 April 2003. Writing Program
Administration List. 7 April 2003. http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html
Mensel, Robert E.. "'Kodakers Lying in Wait': Amateur Photography and the Right of
Privacy
in New York, 1885-1915." American Quarterly 43:1 (1991): 24-45.
National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience & Students in Transition. "2000
National Survey of First-Year Seminar Programming." National Resource Center for
The First-Year Experience & Students in Transition. 2000. University of South
Carolina, Columbia. 31 December 2003.
http://www.sc.edu/fye/research/surveyfindings/surveys/survey00.html
Pound, Roscoe. "Interests of Personality." Harvard Law Review 28.4 (1915): 343-63, 445-56.
Roberts, David H. "Outside Pressure?" Online posting. 7 April 2003. Writing Program
Administration List. 7 April 2003. http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html
Schuster, Charles. "Confessions of an Associate Dean." WPA: Writing Program
Administration 24.3 (2001): 83-98.
Warren, Samuel, and Louis Brandeis. "The Right to Privacy." Harvard Law Review
4.5 (1890): 194-219.
Peters, K. J. "A New Rhetorical Topography:
How the Composition Classroom Became the University Homeroom and Where to Draw the
Line." Enculturation 5.2 (2004):
http://enculturation.net/5_2/peters.html