April 4

What Is a Composition and Rhetoric Doctorate?

The discussion of graduate programs in composition and rhetoric was proceeding with a fair amount of politeness, with professors talking about their search for well rounded scholars, versed in the theory of rhetoric and the practicalities of managing writing programs.

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But a graduate student forced the discussion to get more pointed. “I find it interesting that you are all talking about how you want a wide ranging person,” said that graduate student, who is early in his program. “What I find is that I’m being pressured, encouraged to get really specific now” in the program, picking either rhetoric or composition as a clear focus, he said. “You’ve got to pick,” is the way he phrased the pestering he’s receiving from faculty members. He described himself as “floored” by the contrast between what he’s hearing in his department and the way the discussion was proceeding at the annual meeting of the Conference of College Composition and Communication, in New Orleans.

The graduate student’s comments seemed to liberate participants in the group discussion to acknowledge that the field of composition and rhetoric is frequently faced with demands “to pick” — to identify more with one part or another. This turns up particularly in doctoral programs, where there is enough of a critical mass to focus on serious theory, but where many of the new Ph.D.’s will be getting jobs focused very much on teaching undergraduate writing. If anything, the tensions over definition could be increasing, as programs increasingly seek to name themselves in different ways.

Stuart C. Brown, a professor of English at New Mexico State University, kicked off the discussion by presenting preliminary information about a survey he recently conducted about the doctoral programs, the third survey he has conducted since 1993. Results came in from 67 programs, the vast majority of those that exist, and they enroll about 1,200 students in all — suggesting that the number of programs and total doctoral enrollments in them is relatively stable. At the same time, there are signs of changes in the field, he said.

First, the stability he noted may not last. While the job market has remained strong for new doctorates in the programs, Brown said that wasn’t a sure thing to last — especially with an economic downturn having an impact at many public universities. There are already signs, he said, that some programs may not be viable over the long run. While there are about 10 programs with 60 or more students each, he said, there are 14 that don’t have even 10 students each in their programs.

Women are increasingly doing the teaching in the programs, he said. Male faculty members were the healthy majority in the 1993 survey and the numbers were relatively equal seven years later. Now, female faculty outnumber male faculty 264 to 224.

Another shift that Brown noted was in the names (and presumed emphasis) of the programs. Some composition and rhetoric programs are parts of English departments and others are free standing. But names now include “rhetoric in professional communications,” “Ph.D. in English with professional writing in new media,” “English composition and rhetoric,” and many programs that have added “new media” or “digital” to their names. The proliferation of names, he said, is a challenge in terms of the field establishing more visibility in the graduate education world.

Audience members described a variety of feelings about the various parts of the field. Several said that the more theoretical rhetoric part of the field tends to appeal more to literature professors and builds ties to English departments. But Brown noted a flip side to such ties. Some of the graduates of his doctoral program end up at community colleges, he said, and he worries that the program doesn’t do enough to train them for such work. “Do we in doctoral programs know enough about what’s involved?” he said.

While plenty of people in the audience — a mix of graduate faculty and graduate students — pledged their mutual commitment to combining the various emphases, the difficulty of doing so was prevalent in the questions from those looking at the job market.

For example, one trend discussed was the “professionalization” of positions as writing program administrators. Many doctoral students are studying these jobs and their work for dissertations and putting themselves on a track to work there. Others focus on writing programs for freshmen — similarly doing coursework and dissertations on the topic. But one person in the audience reported that even though there were job possibilities in managing writing programs, her professors strongly discouraged her from taking those jobs, seeing them as less research oriented as other positions.

Another person in the audience said she had worked for many years teaching writing to freshmen and liked it, but was afraid of getting labeled as someone who could only do such work. “You can get stuck in one area,” she said.

— Scott Jaschik

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Comments

Assigned Reading

Old-fashioned, the last time I broached this subject in a comment at IHE, I was excoriated for my ignorance of advances in the theory of composition and rhetoric, so this time I’ll try to address the issue from a different direction. My first- and second-year college students are all marvelously fluent—they can sit down at a computer and pour out their thoughts for the full two hours of class—but their prose reveals how little they read of good writing, good books, i.e., books that make the reader think, what used to be called literature. It’s clear that they are just unfamiliar with what good writing looks like on the printed page (or on the screen); they do not know what the English sentence can do. They are not familiar with creative and critical thinking sustained over more than 500 words. What, I wonder, are the most recent ideas in the discipline regarding how to tempt (or to make) such students read course assignments and, more important, integrate the daily reading of good books into their adult lives.

Bob Schenck, at 9:55 am EDT on April 4, 2008

The Lit / Rhet-Comp Divide

My grad schooling in literature at the University of Arizona showed me the sometimes-bitter divide between departments of Rhetoric/Composition and Literature, since both departments were well-established. “RCTE” (Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English) is the title there.

Very smart people on the R/C side weren’t taken seriously with theory by lit people because of the “teaching first” philosophy emanating from R/C.

R/C students who “cannibalized” their own courses in English Comp — i.e. did research on 100-level composition courses they were teaching — were regarded even worse.

Now that I teach full-time in composition, I still wouldn’t enter an R/C program — even though it would likely guarantee a good job. I’m simply not convinced that *researching* the teaching of comp would improve my *teaching* of comp, although this probably has more to do with personality than the quality of lit vs. R/C programs.

When I research/study great writing that is called literature, it feels like I’m doing something more demanding — and ultimately more beneficial — than reading a composition studies academic journal.

This debate is a bombshell — I just wanted to get it started.

schencka, English Instructor, at 12:10 pm EDT on April 4, 2008

1) people with low salaries and poor job prospects strain to feel morally superior and intellectually powerful—we all can understand their predicament, overweening though it be; 2) what writing well does for businesspersons is so fundamental (discriminating moods, feelings, concepts, fates, assumptions among other functions) that just about any activity, however politically incompetent and overweening will have great positive impacts of these people if they get employed by a business 3) the humanties and arts by refusing to master long established competent social science research methods and grovelling in hermaneutics for centuries past its prime, by thereby refusing to investigate with competent modern research what “educatedness” effects they aim to and actually do produce (and the value of attainment of these for other sectors and institutional types in society) leave themselves unfunded and unwanted and pitied—it is their own damn fault.Richard Tabor Greene

Richard Tabor Greene, at 1:25 pm EDT on April 4, 2008

Are there people who do not write clearly and persuasively? Yes. Is this the fault of Rhet/Comp scholars and teachers? Doubtful. (People also fail to balance their checkbook. They follow too closely behind other cars on the highway. They eat the wrong things. They fail to exercise as they should…Exactly how many academic disciplines should we blame for the behavior of others? People often fail or refust to do the things they’ve been taught how to do.)

If you want to understand what the field(s) of Rhetoric and Composition are about, you’re better off reading the content available through the following venues:

College Composition & Communication (available online at http://ncte.org/cccc/pubs/ccc and through JSTOR)

College English (available through JSTOR)

Composition Forum (available online at http://www.fau.edu/compositionforum/)

Enculturation (available online at http://enculturation.gmu.edu/)

Journal of Advanced Composition (available online at http://www.jacweb.org)

Kairos (available online at http://kairos.technorhetoric.net)

Pre/Text (available online at http://www.pre-text.com/pt/index.html)

Rhetoric Society Quarterly (available online at http://www.rhetoricsociety.org/ and through JSTOR)

See the Southern Illinois University Press list of new titles in Rhetoric-Composition (http://www.siu.edu/~siupress/titles/s01_titles/rhetoric.htm> )—George

George Whitaker, at 1:25 pm EDT on April 4, 2008

commenter Greene

is either being ironic or doesn’t bother to proofread in deploring some unspecified “hermaneutic” [sic] institutional atrocity against good writing. As a rule, I deplore spelling quibbles on the informal internet, but since his point is so vague I have to wonder what/if he is thinking.By the way, I don’t have any dog in the Rhetoric vs. English fight. Reading Scholes’ ‘Rise and Fall of English’ led to aporia.

Dirk, at 8:50 pm EDT on April 6, 2008

CompRhet, Lit, and What It’s All For

A few points:

1. Perhaps folks talked about this at the CCCC session, but it seems to me that there’s a huge subject of research left out of the simple binary of (a) literature versus (b) composition teaching: all other writing. I.e., any writing that’s not literature or produced in a comp class. People like Bazerman, Brandt, and McCarthy, among others, have been researching writing in all sorts of contexts and genres for the past 20 or 30 years. Debates aside about the quality or aesthetic value of, for example, the kinds of writing a clinical psychologist uses (from McCarthy) or the scientific research report (from Bazerman’s research), I think it’s safe to say that these genres of writing have significance in the ways they shape professionals’ lives and thus our lives.

Whether these are more valuable to research or less so than Shakespeare or Woolf seems to me like a silly question. What’s useful about this debate, other than an attempt to impose one’s preferences onto others?

2. schencka and Bob Schenck (assuming these are two different people) valorize literature without, I’d argue, making a case for what it can do that’s better than other kinds of writing—other than Schenck’s claim about making “the reader think.” Surely lots of writing makes readers think, right? Or is “literature” the only kind of writing that makes one think? That’d perhaps be a fine definition, provided we’re clearer about what one thinks when they read literature and why that’s good. Is it good for civil society? Does it make us fuller humans—better able to understand our own lives and others and thus act more ethically?

3. Related to #2—i.e., the value of literature—I’m personally dubious of arguments that rest on incredulity or love of a bygone era. Maybe it’s truly unfortunate that we don’t have a shared cultural literacy or that these kids today don’t love their literature, but I don’t think anyone who believes that, like schencka and Schenck seem to, is going to change anything by arguing without explicit warrants and grounding for what we lose when fewer and fewer people love and respect literature (the latter claim’s accuracy tabled for the time being).

My own sense is that literature is something that’s valuable because of its ability to allow one human consciousness to experience another’s in an intimate and sustained manner. As many have said some version of—good literature can disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. It can make me feel less alone (someone else thinks/feels what I do...). I can also travel to places and experiences I could not otherwise and thus understand more about the world and my fellow people.Literature in the U.S., though, is also a part of a system of social stratification based on class, manners, and behavior. Sitting and reading requires the time to do it. One’s familiarity with literature is valorized by certain people with specific class identities. This doesn’t make literature bad—it’s just something I think might best be acknowledged, again explicitly, by the pro-literature people if they want to make a complex and reasoned argument for why literature is a valuable thing to study and devote higher ed resources to.

Enough for now. I claim CompRhet not in some sort of debate versus literature, but because of what it is without comparing it to something else. I’m drawn to understanding how we use writing in all sorts of ways to shape our lives. Why would anyone diss that endeavor? Sure, maybe you’d prefer not to teach comp students, but that’s not the extent of what’s called CompRhet (or whatever new name it’s getting).

Much love and respect,mp

Matthew Pearson, at 12:05 pm EDT on April 7, 2008

Please advise

I find this debate very interesting, if a little off-putting. I’m a FYC instructor at a large university. I have an M.A. in English (2005) and have been very happy outside the academy “doing something practical” with my degree. Having just returned from 4Cs, though, I’m slowly warming to the idea of a Rhet/Comp Ph.D.— but I’m sort of confused about what that degree really means and what it will do for me in the marketplace. I’d really love to gain some insight from folks who are enrolled in such programs (or who have recently earned a Ph.D. in R/C).

Lindentree, at 11:40 am EDT on April 10, 2008

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What Is a Composition and Rhetoric Doctorate?

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Comments

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The Lit / Rhet-Comp Divide

commenter Greene

CompRhet, Lit, and What It’s All For

Please advise

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