Following up on a thread on the WPA listserv. Here's a link to a September 2009 MLA report that provides data on their Job Information List. Not surprisingly, there was a significant dip in job listings last year, about 25% in overall listings, from 1828 to 1380, and nearly a 30% drop in assistant professor, tenure-track offerings, from 877 to 626. With any luck those numbers will bounce back with the economy, though all indications I've heard are that this year will not be any better than the last.

The report looks closely at the last five years and typically tenure-track asst prof jobs (i.e those our grad students are pursuing) make up roughly 55% of the jobs in a given year.

2008-09: 626

2007-08: 877

2006-07: 884

2005-06: 806

2004-05: 850

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, it would appear we confer a few more than 1200 English PhDs per year. I doubt anyone is surprised by this disparity (which obviously does not account for the many ABDs out there). Unfortunately the numbers don't always add up. This ADE report shows 817 graduates in 2003-04, as opposed to 1207 in the NCES report. So there's certainly some apples and oranges business going on here. The ADE report also shows that 407 of the grads got tenure-track jobs. This might seem incongruent with the number of jobs offered, but of course one has to realize that new grads compete with recent grads on the market.

Rhet/comp folks might be happy to see that 72% of new grads in that field get tenure track jobs, significantly better than the 45% in Am and Brit Lit. In 2004 (the last year for which I have data here), rhet/comp comprised 29.4% of the job listings (400 jobs, all ranks) and 12% of Phd grads (89 folks). But I wonder about the continuing growth of PhD programs offering rhet/comp degrees. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next decade with those statistics. Will we see increasing specializing in degrees and jobs in rhet/comp? Who knows.

I don't have any startlingly new insights coming out of this. Certainly nothing good. I fear that if PhD production stays constant (likely), that we will have (already have) produced a glut of job candidates that could take the better part of a decade to resolve. That is assuming, best case, that the job market returns to 07-08 levels by the 2010-11 AY (which is not realistic, I fear), we will already have several hundred additional candidates on the market from these last two bad market years.

As near as I can figure, there are only two ways those jobs come back: growing undergraduate English majors and/or developing more grad/professional programs that prepare students for non-academic careers. But that's a subject for another time.

I'm documenting some of my initial experiences and thoughts about Google Wave. As I mentioned in my previous email, there is a certain vertigo that accompanies really new new media. Seesmic Video and Second Life both felt like that to me, Twitter less so. Even blogging seems strange when one first starts out. Certainly Wave is estranging. That said, it would appear that there is a typical (familiar) feeling/experience of estrangement that might be understood as a process of remediation. That is, the encounter with new new media is met with an attempt to engage according to practices of an existing media practice. In the case of Wave, it's IM or chat. This is particularly the case of a wave with synchronous users.

However, even if there was some compelling need for a better version of chat/IM, Wave wouldn't be it. Ultimately (and fairly quickly), one has to adopt a different set of behaviors.

I have read a common complaint that Google has been cryptic about what Wave is and how to use it. I get that, but at the same time the baseline description they have provided is that Wave is meant to replace email. As they explain, email is really an ancient technology (about as old as me, thanks). So in one sense Wave is "better than email" (or hoped/intended to be), but, as I see it, it is also "more than email" or email+. More is not necessarily better as we all know.

At the same time, as noted in The Complete Guide to Google Wave (by Gina Trapani and Adam Pash of Lifehacker), "Google Wave is fundamentally a document-centric system, so you want to make good-looking waves with colors, font styles, headings, and other word processor-like styles. You can attach files and create photo slide shows in your waves, and add interactive gadgets like maps, Yes/No/Maybe surveys, and YouTube videos." So, part of making "better email" is adding interactivity and media to messages. But the notion of "document-centric" seems very different from email to me.

I do recognize the practice of using emails to share a document that is being written collaboratively. And I do see how that can be a pain. But we have Etherpad and Google Docs or even wikis as "document-centric" applications. Given that we are talking about a Google-developed Wave, perhaps this begs the question why use Wave rather than Google Docs to collaborate on a document? The short answer is that Wave allows one to do a lot more than Docs does. It's perhaps closer to a wiki in its ability to incorporate media and gadgets.

The lingo of Wave suggests that each conversation is termed a "wave" (lowercase), and within each conversation, each instance of communication is termed a "blip." One can add a blip as a reply to the wave in general (which gets added at the bottom) or reply to a specific blip (which creates branched/threaded discussion) or reply inline to someone else's blip (similar to commenting in a document) or even, more radically, simply edit another person's existing blip (which is where Wave turns into a collaborative document composing tool).

So, hypothetically, if "we" were collaborating via Wave on a document we would output eventually, we would first create a wave and invite ourselves as participants. One of us would create a blip which we would collaboratively edit to be our final output. At the same time we might add blips within the wave as inline comments to the document or threaded conversations about the document. We could add media and gadgets to our blips (and even to our output document, depending on where it was going).

That's interesting. I have often argued that humanists ought to shift their scholarly practices to be more collaborative and make use of social media networks (and that this collaboration, rather than the incorporation of video or other media, is the real rhetorical challenge we face). But right now I can't say I encounter many opportunities to do such collaboration. As such, for me, this kind of document-centric approach is a new way to work but is also simply new work in that I didn't collaborate before and Wave suggests that I might/should in the future. Perhaps this will mean less work elsewhere... or not.

But in my view, we've already strayed quite far from the "better email" business. So let me enumerate some of my common email practices:

1. Email students, either individually or by class. Generally these result in private exchanges. I don't see how Wave improves on these.
2. Collaborating on cmte work. Here the document-centric business might come into play. I actually could see this as the first place I might use Wave, if/when my colleagues get on board.
3. Organizing my kids' soccer team business. Here I could certainly see using waves, though not any time soon.
4. Listservs like TechRhet or WPA. These would be interesting cases. Right now, someone would have to create a group of listserv participants, and then anytime someone wanted to start what is now a new thread, I think that person would have to create a wave and add that group of participants. Still, it could work, and it might expand the functionality of such listservs.
5. Editorial collaboration. As co-editor for Praxis, I shift between using Basecamp (where the asst. editors discuss submissions) and email (where I communicate with non-Praxis Kairos editors and with our authors). I could see doing this work in Wave. Each submission would begin as one wave where our assistant editors review material. I could edit that wave and then share a part with the author. There could potentially be collaboration on text at that stage. Then a third wave where there would be the second stage review by our editorial board. Followed, potentially by a fourth wave where we return to the author for final revisions. I could actually see that working... somehow.

The technology formerly known as writing is/was a hack on the spatio-temporal limits of speech. In the study of said writing we have relied upon Newtonian-Cartesian notions of space-time. As we know by now (for those who have missed earlier episodes of new media: an adventure in rhetoric), these technologies have led us to rethink spatial relations, temporality, linearity, etc. It used to be that if I wrote something, the US postal service would ensure I would have at least a week to rest before having to bother with you writing back. If I were writing a journal article I would have the even more gentlemanly waiting period of several months to a year. (Actually that part hasn't changed much.)

Playing a little fast and loose with physics for metaphorical purposes, let's just say that wave theory altered "our" understanding of space and time. I put our in scare quotes b/c I'm not sure who that really includes. Generally speaking most of "us" get by just fine in the Newtonian clockwork world and Cartesian world of familiar geometrical shapes (neither of which technically exist anymore than the tenuous link I just made between physics and google wave).

But my point is that Google Wave could easily disturb one's conception of how symbolic behavior functions. Maybe it is that revolutionary or maybe it is no more revolutionary than Second Life or YouTube or Seesmic or Twitter. Any of these might have disturbed you. Anyway, here's my experience with Google Wave (after my first time): I have no idea how to do this. I consider myself a reasonably adroit rhetorician. I generally know where to put the commas. But this Wave thing is tough!

As an investigator of these emerging technologies, what interests me is the emergence of rhetorical conventions. How do we remediate past technologies? How do we take the wide range of potential behaviors and distill them to what is acceptable?

So, for example, I opened a public wave on rhetoric/composition. I tweeted about it. I posted in Facebook. And a couple people showed up. Over the period of a couple hours, we posted 80+ times. In that space, the experience of gwave is something like chat. Except that gwave is threaded, so there isn't a uniform timeline like there is in chat. Of course that is a limited concept of Google Wave b/c it is also designed to work in an asynchronous way, as an alternative to email. But even in that one possible use of Gwave, there were interesting questions. Do we write simultaneously? You can edit other people's contributions: how should we do that? People are contributing up and down the thread at the same time. As a user following one exchange, you would likely be unaware of contributions happening elsewhere.

For me there are a few key questions, which really might be asked of any new technology.

• What activity does this replace or supplement? I.e., what would you have done elsewhere that you will now do here?
• What new activities will we generate? What new responsibilities, powers, obligations? E.g., responding to student emails or creating status updates.
• What ethos will result? What new questions of behavior must we answer?

Perhaps this doesn't require a great deal of imagination in the sense that these things already exist in the form of MyCompLab, YourCompClass, Insite and so on, to say nothing of the thousands of online composition courses offered in Blackboard, Moodle, etc. So perhaps the question is what would you (or I) put into such a platform?

It's a question on my mind as UB is moving with some greater intent into the area of online composition courses, specifically in the summer. For myself, the answer has always been to roll my own online pedagogical environment, but I don't see that as a good programmatic answer. The DIY approach demands a lot from instructors in terms of exploring and evaluating various social media options. Also, there is something to be said for the content that is available through vendor sites.

Not surprisingly I have little (actually no) love for the CMS. I see these essentially as devices built to serve large lecture sections of bio or psych or whatever. They are meant to appeal to professors who will upload notes and powerpoints, perhaps devise some self-assessment quizzes, and use an online gradebook. Whenever I am in these environments I keep expecting some old geezer animated gif to appear and say "Get off my lawn!"

But I digress. The point here is what would I envision for online FYC. Clearly the answer to that begins with one's core philosophy regarding the course and writing. I see writing as a material, networked, socio-cultural activity. I see FYC as a place where students should be composing often for each other and for larger publics. I'm also pretty sure that FYC is a place where students study writing/composition, and the last time I checked, that means some introduction to the methods of rhetorical analysis.... Yep, just checked again, and that basic answer is the same as it has been for the last 26 centuries.

So how does that translate into an online platform?

1. Students should have some real ownership over the look, feel, and content of their environment. This isn't a place for them to be "managed," nor is it primarily an instructor-owned space for content delivery. It is instead the techno-material means by which students will compose and communicate. Identity formation is a key part of developing an online community. Community is integral to composition pedagogy. How do you do that in Bb? Can't. Wouldn't want to.
   
   One of the basic lessons of social media is that if you want buy-in from students, instructors, employees, etc, then you want to make the system as open as possible. So what if students start a group to discuss a favorite tv show? And maybe they wouldn't want to do that. But there's something in knowing that you could if you wanted to.
2. Content. Content. Content. Yes, composition is about student writing. But it is also about teaching students how to study writing and develop their own writing practices. In the FTF classroom, that means textbooks, discussions, and lectures. Online, it can still mean text, but text comes off somewhat impoverished online. There are other options (or should be). Instructors can clearly participate in online discussions, and they can produce their own multimedia materials. But wouldn't it be great if there was already a large library of materials for them to draw upon? If only there was something like, oh I don't know, a giant web where all this material could be found.
   
   Obviously the challenge is finding the good stuff. Vendor sites offer a lot of materials. A good composition platform would include a way for instructors to rate and comment on materials, upload their own stuff, and share open access web resources.
3. Here comes every comp student. There's a good reason for keeping FYC classes with low student-faculty ratios. It's labor intensive stuff, no less so online. That said, there are economies of scale involved in online education. And as we can deduce from Clay Shirky, there are whole new areas of activity that we can pursue in a program-wide platform. So a composition platform should facilitate communication and collaboration among students and instructors beyond individual sections.

I'm not going to add this as part of my numbered list, but what goes for social media networks in general goes for an online composition platform. It has to be usable, modular, modifiable, customizable.

So I'll let you know how it goes.

One of my colleagues shared Menand's article in Harvard Magazine on "The PhD Problem." In many ways it is a familiar story, or at least it should be by now.... familiar enough that we probably can't call it a "crisis" anymore. Too many doctoral programs, too many grad students, too many PhDs, not enough jobs. Menand points his finger at "specialization," and I can see his point. With almost hyper-specialization and the proliferation of scholarly production (two trends feeding into one another), writing the dissertation becomes an increasingly esoteric act, and increasingly disconnected from the actual work that most assistant professors will do.

Here's an interesting tidbit though. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be a 23% growth rate in post-secondary teaching jobs between now and 2016. The same site reports 72,000 people teaching in English. This growth is predicated on expected retirements and increased enrollments. Of course, who knows how many of those jobs will be in English or how many will be tenure-track. But the point is that the BLS expects post-secondary education to be one of the main areas of growth in the near future. So perhaps the question should be how English Studies can capitalize on that.

As Menand and many others point out, the weak point in English Studies is the number of undergraduate majors, which has seriously diminished. Perhaps we make a common historical error when we imagine that our appropriate place in the university coincides with the moment when we were our biggest.  We can blame the decrease in majors on capitalism, on the increase of market forces in university culture, the privatizing of higher ed, and related forces that have led college students to leave English for business, etc. That's fine. I agree that if we lived in a culture that more highly valued English Studies then more students would major in English. I suppose one strategy is to try and change the broader culture to be more amenable to the work we already do. The mirror strategy to that would be to try to change disciplinary culture to be more relevant to the world beyond the department, conference, and academic journal. I'll leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide which strategy has a better chance of success. However, I will say that short of developing a time machine, we should imagine that turning back national values to what they were when English was more popular is not going to happen. Regardless of the strategy you choose, I suggest you select tactics that remain faithful to time's arrow.

However we slice it though, the bottom line is that without majors there are and will continue to be fewer tenure-line jobs. There may be increasing demand for general education, but that will not produce tenure-line jobs. English can fade away like the elves in Middle Earth and go to live across the sea with Art History, Philosophy, and Comparative Literature where the departments are small. It's a noble existence. English can look back on its brief historical moment when it rose to prominence in the university and then bravely turned its back on that future in order to remain true to its passions.

But if our desire is to continue to draw in thousands of graduate students and run massive general education programs, then we will need to increase enrollment in our undergraduate major.

And to me the issue is professionalization (or the lack thereof).  Menand describes our problem with professionalization in the following way:

Professors are not themselves, for the most part, terribly practical people, and practical skills are not what they are trained to teach. They are trained to teach people to do what they do and to know what they know. Those skills and that knowledge are not self-evidently transferable. The ability to analyze Finnegans Wake does not translate into an ability to analyze a stock offering. If a person wanted to analyze stock offerings, he should not waste his time with Joyce. He should go to business school. Or get a job analyzing stock offerings.

Specialization is something we know well. It is what we have done for a while now. Major in English, and you get a specialized set of skills as an interpreter of literary texts and writer of interpretive essays. Maybe you get a taste of rhetoric or creative writing. Generalization is gone. There is no general "learning to write." There is no general humanistic experience to acquire. All that is left is specialization... without professionalization. The advantage of specialization is that one does not have to ask what it is for. Specialization is for itself. This is the case right up through graduate school. Specializing in a particular author/period/whatever prepares one for nothing other than continuing to study that subject and perhaps to get a job where that specialized skill is necessary to getting hired. The funny thing is that once you get that job, that specialized skill is not going to be that important to your daily work. It might be important to publishing but the daily activities of teaching and service are often disconnected from specialization.

Menand argues that the height of that specialization and the major obstacle in graduate education is writing the dissertation.

What is clear is that students who spend eight or nine years in graduate school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available. The argument that they need the training to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching is part of doctoral education; at many institutions, graduate students begin teaching classes the year they arrive. And the idea that the doctoral thesis is a rigorous requirement is belied by the quality of most doctoral theses. If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.

One could argue that the dissertation is evidence that a grad student has the ability to write a book, but the larger reality is that scholarly monographs are becoming an economic impossibility. So maybe Menand has a point. (Besides I think it is amusing that even with English grad students the complaint that "students cannot write" remains alive. Can we just get on with it and realize that professors can't write either?) That said, I don't agree that the fact that we have TAs means that we should assume such grad students are fully qualified to teach undergraduates. The TA experience is an important part of teacher training, but if we viewed doctoral programs more as professionalization and less as specialization, we would recognize that additional coursework in teaching wouldn't hurt. This isn't to say that TAs are "bad" teachers. It's simply to say that pedagogy is something that one learns and that we can teach it.

And then there are two other points. First, we have an entire category of service and administrative work that can occupy 15-50% of one's job. And of course we all bitch about it, mostly because, for some reason, we don't think this stuff is part of our job, even though we all know that it is. Advising, mentoring, assessment, curriculum development, and other committee work are all integral parts of the job. One could also think about service to the discipline, like serving as an asst. editor for a journal. Yes grad students get some experience with this by sitting on committees (at least some do). And I'm not saying that necessarily there should be a course on this stuff, but it would be helpful to have some programmatic way of making sure students received training in these areas. Second is all the non-scholarly, professional writing that academics have to do: strategic plans, proposal memos, grant applications, classroom observations of junior faculty, recommendation letters etc. It couldn't hurt to get some experience in such genres in grad school.

Menand makes similar arguments about the need for professionalization. I think it is important to note that specialization and professionalization ought not to be opposed. Once upon a time, before hyper-specialization, when academic culture and demographics were very different, when the discipline itself was quite different, specialization and professionalization were essentially the same thing. But the two diverged 30 years ago or more, and we've come to a point where we almost see learning to be a professional as a betrayal of our ideological commitments to specialization.

Menand concludes:

The world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules. A lot has changed in higher education in the last 50 years. What has not changed is the delicate and somewhat paradoxical relation in which the university stands to the general culture. It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view... But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe.

This seems to be the red-baiting of English Studies: that by professionalizing, that by modifying our curriculum to reach out to students, that by making connections between the research we do and the everyday civic, social, and professional concerns of students and others, that we will "become just an echo" or that we will become pawns of transnational capitalism or something. However, I'd like to think that we are smarter than that (stroke, stroke), that we can find a third role other than inefficient, fading hyper-specialists or the desperate dupes offering classes in any pop cultural thing we think students might like. I think, if I may, that we can be more rhetorical, more persuasive, more communicative, and more pedagogical.

Why do you like to write in school?
I like to write in school because...

These heuristics "work," meaning that if you teach them to students, then, as a group, the students will produce predictable results in response to carefully constructed prompts offered in controlled testing situations.

But here's a question. In what way does writing short, boring, predictable, mechanistic paragraphs constitute a "basic skill" that is a foundation for writing something that someone would actually want to read and/or that might accomplish a real world task beyond passing a standardized test?

The answer is that I don't know. I am skeptical that there is any relation. But I don't know because I don't know what the foundational/basic skills of writing might be. I'm not sure that such things exist. I know that one can try to idiot-proof composition by creating conditions where the likelihood of going off the rails is reduced. But does that lead to writing? Does constructing a detailed assignment and working closely with students to the point where 80% of the class produces essentially the same essay mean that we are moving toward learning how to write?

The greatest, and most common, complaint/problem I hear from students is that they have "nothing to write." This occurs when one gives them a detailed assignment (and they say they aren't interested in the topic) or when one allows students to pick their own topic. Sometimes students think they have something to write, but they really don't. (This happens to all of us, too, btw.)

Yes, it is a problem of invention, I suppose. But it is also a problem of motivation and literacy. The most interesting things to write about are often the most difficult, so we must be motivated to write about them. To invent ideas, topics, arguments, etc., we must be able to recognize them when we see them. That's an issue of literacy, of rhetorical fluency. It also requires having the willingness to experiment and fail.

There's really nothing "basic" about invention. It's not like you can master invention and then move on to more "advanced" issues. But without invention you don't have writing at all. You can't bracket invention by providing students with a topic or an outline. There's invention in each compositional event/moment, in each word choice, or however you want to slice up writing.

So when my students say, "I have nothing to write," I think, now you are experiencing the life of a writer. Only writers have nothing to write. Others simply don't write. Having nothing to write, in a pseudo-zen sense, is the beginning of writing. And it isn't like you have nothing, then you have an idea, and then you write until the text is done. Having nothing to write and then something to write is like alternating current. Between each paragraph, each sentence, each word there is nothing. (You can see it, right? the negative space?) It's nothing that John Cage hasn't/has taught us.

Maybe we never have something to write. Maybe the something that is writing has us. Who knows?

Maybe having nothing to write is what is basic to writing. It's not a deficiency. It's not a problem to solve. It's not the grist for the mill of resentment and bad conscience. And if we are going to advance writing, perhaps we should advance toward nothing.

Back to that in a moment, but let me take a brief foray into the weirdness of translation. Google translates dispositif as "device" but also translates appareil as device. Elsewhere appareil is translated as apparatus, and is the word in French that gets translated in A Thousand Plateaus as apparatus, as in "apparatus of capture," which is a phrase that comes up in Agamben's essay, though he doesn't make the connection to Deleuze and Guattari.

But that's not all. Dispositio is the Latin translation of the Greek oikonomia, as in economics. Agamben enters this conversation from several angles, starting with Focuault, circling back through Hyppolite (one of Foucault's mentors) to Hegel and back through Heidegger. He also notes the Church's use of oikonomia in the 6th century to explain the operation of the Trinity. As Agamben explains the Church's reasoning, "Just as a good father can entrust his son the execution of certain functions and duties without in doing so losing his power and unity, so God entrusts to Christ the 'economy,' the administration and government of human history." However, as Agamben continues, "as often happens, the fracture that the theologians sought to avoid by removing it from the plane of God's being, reappeared in the form of a caesura that separated Him in being and action, ontology and practice. Action (economy, but also politics) has no foundation in being: this is the schizophrenia that the theological doctrine of oikonomia left as its legacy to Western culture."

Without summarizing all of Agamben, he comes to this observation: "we than have two great classes: living beings (or substances) and apparatuses. And between these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a subject that which results from the relation, and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses." At the same time, Agamben also notes that the apparatus is necessary to becoming human as it allows for the separation of being and action (as we see in theology). As he points out, language is the perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses, and provides us with consciousness as we know it, the ability to experience Being and the Open (in Heideggerean terms), and all the struggles of subjectification that have exponentially proliferated through the expansion of technology in the contemporary age.h?

We recognize that writing is an apparatus (or constellation of apparatuses if you prefer) and that writing pedagogies tend to gravitate toward teaching students to occupy particular subjective positions in relation to the writing apparatus. For Agamben, this seems especially wrong-headed, who argues that "if a certain process of subjectification corresponds to every apparatus, then it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it 'in the right way.'" That is to say that students (who as students are obviously already captured subjects of an institutional apparatus) are in turn captured as "composition students" then they have already been subjectified by the writing apparatus. In this scheme, pedagogy becomes an economics of apprehension in which we seek to manage/apprehend the subjectification of students in relation to writing, and this is the case whether we are talking about current-traditional "correctness," expressiveness, critical awareness, or political empowerment/liberation.

Dispositio operates iteratively with/as inventio in the composition of thought as thoughts emerge to be apprehended in the conscious, as language or symbolic action/behavior, within that apparatus of capture. It is no more at matter of escaping the apparatus (b/c we only exist as conscious beings through our relation to the apparatus) than it is the appropriate use/management of the apparatus (which is ultimately only the management of the subject). The management of the apparatus, the economics of apprehension, as Agamben notes, was once the province of the divine (of Christ in Christian theology). Then perhaps it was secured by the State. Now, who knows? Perhaps one imagines there is still some unifying force in transnational capitalism or some such, perhaps the "will to technology." Or maybe we are adrift in a schizophrenia of desubjectification, attached to a proliferation of apparatuses. This would seem to be Agamben's take.

Well this post has certainly gone on long enough. I'm going to have to think about these things some more.

Familiar, to say the least, which is not to say that the answers are easy to come by or that the answers translate directly into actually composing a text. But those are different matters (sort of) from what I'm thinking about here.

What happens when we try to think of our undergraduate curriculum in terms of purpose and audience?

Yes, I am aware that there remains a very strong notion of English (and other humanities) as a course of study that is not professionalizing, not preparing one for a particular career, but rather as providing a liberal arts education. But that doesn't mean the curriculum is without an overarching purpose, does it? Of course not. Traditionally, the goal was knowledge/appreciation of canonical literature, organized by region and historical period. Except... that wasn't the real purpose, was it? I mean, it was/is an intermediate goal with the idea that the knowledge/appreciation of the canon led to something else (insight into human nature, cultural literacy, eloquence, something). In contemporary versions, the source material has changed and the end goals might be more phrased in more political, less universalizing terms, but otherwise the mechanisms remain the same.

However, the relationships between material, curriculum, and goals have always remained quite vague, and I don't really buy the explanation. And let me be clear, that I am not singling out literary studies here, even if it does continue to dominate the undergrad major. In other areas I think we face the same challenges in articulating the relationship between the specific activities and materials of the curriculum and the putative purposes of liberal arts education.

While we say that we oppose "professionalization," I think one could easily argue that professionalization is exactly what we are doing. When we teach students to do humanistic research, to interpret literature, to conduct rhetorical analysis, to employ "theory," to write essays, etc., we are teaching them the practices of our profession. It's fairly obvious, right? We are professionals. The knowledge we are certified to teach is that of our profession. What else are we supposed to teach?

As I've discussed before, according to an MLA report, 3.8% of English majors 91-99 are post-secondary English teachers. (And let's be clear that certainly a significant majority of those are people teaching first-year composition.) So maybe one or two students in the average English class is bound for a career in our profession. The largest portion are high school teachers. The next largest group are really writers of various kinds. But I digress. We aren't preparing them for careers, but if we were, we obviously wouldn't be preparing them for jobs like ours, right?

There is a way out of this, though, and thinking about audience/purpose isn't a bad start, even if it isn't easy and doesn't lead directly to an answer. Grads of English programs seek out professions where they can communicate, educate, and persuade. They rely upon their cultural literacy, their ability to analyze media, and their skill as composers. We ought to ask who our undergrads are, not just our majors, but students across the campus. We ought to recognize how our majors are seeking to use their education and respond to that. We all know that, nationally, English needs to communicate its value to undergrads more effectively than it has. How do we communicate with those students? What is it that we expect students will do with the curriculum that we provide them?

I'm not saying we need to abandon the things we teach or the expertise we have. Not at all. I'm confident we have something valuable to share with students. I just think we need to be more rhetorical in the curriculum and pedagogies that we build upon our disciplinary knowledge.

One of the truisms of composition pedagogy asks the teacher to think about his/her own experiences learning to write and his/her own development of a writing practice. It is an approach that is fraught with all kinds of problems, though that depends on what one makes of the insights.

My development as a writer was essentially outside the classroom. My FYC course was thoroughly nondescript, in part because I remember almost nothing from it, except that I got a C+. Most of the writing I did while an undergrad took place off the campus: technical/professional writing for my job in the pc industry, creative writing, and writing music.  I had a couple creative writing classes that were useful, but otherwise there was no discussion of writing in my undergrad majors (English and history).

If I were to look at my early writing experiences, I would identify three contradictory practice.

1. For academic writing assignments that were uninteresting (i.e. most of them, not that there were many) my strategy was to take the path of least resistance. My English lit classes were all New Critical. I think there was one course where I needed to do library research.  No process; no rough drafts; no revisions; barely any proofreading. And in return I would get a few checks in the margins with a comment like "Very Good" and then a letter grade. Looking back, I'm sure I was in a series of co-dependent literacy relationships where no one was paying much attention.
2. For interesting classroom assignments and the creative writing I was doing, I would essentially follow my own instincts and interests. I would experiment. And I wouldn't care too much about the reception of the piece or the grade I received. Plenty of rethinking and playing around, but not for any extrinsic purpose. Only for my own pursuits. I'm not suggesting, btw, that this is a practice to imitate. But that's what I did.
3. And then all the technical and professional writing I did, where I was writing to meet another person's standards and the point was effective communication undertaken in an efficient manner. Here the idea was to avoid revision if possible, to work quickly, to operate within recognizable genres, and to steer away from unnecessary complications. In other words, in many respects this writing was opposite to the expectations of academic writing.

In thinking about my academic career, many of these trends have carried forward. In my research (and in my blogging) my writing follows my interests and answers the intellectual demands I encounter through writing. Much of my writing is instinctual in the sense that I have a strong hunch that certain disparate ideas belong together or that some insight is lurking, and I write until I discover it. It's not an efficient process. I seek out the difficulties and contradictions and pursue them. It's not a process of internal discovery. I envision writing as an exploration of a symbolic field/network.  I just keep going until I get somewhere. Of course there's a lot of revision that follows on that.

I often get the sense that this is the kind of writing practice we seek to teach students in FYC: writing as an open-ended process of inquiry that eventually comes to take shape as a rhetorical, communicative text.

But I don't do all my writing that way. I don't write grant proposals or strategic plans or program policy memos that way. In those cases I'm back in the realm of technical and professional writing. Now let's be clear. There is plenty of technical writing that presents significant intellectual and rhetorical challenges. And if you think it's easy to write an effective sales letter, then please write one selling English as a major. And anyone who would like to write a magic strategic plan that will get me all the resources I need can feel free to email me.

These are all demanding, rhetorical tasks. But I don't think the writing practices associated with humanistic inquiry are of much value there. And I expect we know that. Isn't that what we mean when we say that writing "skills" are not particularly transferable?

Of course I have a fondness for writing as inquiry and experimentation. I've been reasonably successful at it. I often enjoy it. I think most folks in English Studies have similar experiences. But I also think that the further one gets from English, the humanities, and higher education, the less common that experience becomes. So it is unsurprising that we want to pass along our particular writing experience, views, and habits to our students. And it is unsurprising that when we think of "writing," we think of (and value) the particular kinds of writing we tend to do. But I don't know that it makes particular sense to make FYC a course in humanistic writing. I don't have a problem with a course in humanistic writing; I just don't know that it needs to be a mandatory part of everyone's education. And if it is/should be, then it certainly shouldn't be billed as a course in "how to write" or even "how to write 'academically.'"

But all of that is the danger of looking to our own writing experiences as a basis for FYC.

I don't think that anyone would be so very surprised by these disconnections. However, as I see it, close reading is at the heart of these disconnections. Close reading, if you don't know, comes out the 30s and 40s with New Criticism as a kind of scientific method for literary analysis. It manages to survive the postmodern shift into theory and cultural studies, so that today we continue to advocate "close reading" without perhaps meaning the specific practice the New Critics called for. Btw, I think this is largely the case whether one is in a literature or composition classroom. Needless to say, while literary interpretation suggests a wide degree of openness in the meanings a reader might uncover in a text, close reading serves as a significant limitation on practices of reading and interpretation, and the compositions that might result.

Arguably, close reading is a practice predicated on a scarcity of texts. It's time consuming. Indeed, close reading might be said to follow upon a self-imposed, selective scarcity: the literary canon. Now, of course, we have an explosion of media. Furthermore, the discipline has departed from the selectivity of the canon. In short, there are more texts than ever to study. Yet we continue to cling to close reading because, I think, we have confused method with objective. This is, we have come to point where we might say that the objective of English Studies is to conduct close readings of texts. There appears to be a sense that intellectual work, at least in the humanities, can only function through close readings, that critical thinking requires close readings, and that other cultural-textual practices are anti-intellectual. Now, let me say that there's nothing "intrinsically" wrong with close reading. It is just simply a limited methodology that literally and explicitly closes reading and, indirectly, the composition practices that we insist must follow upon it.

Franco Moretti's distant reading methods are certainly one response to this condition. Moretti plays on the switch between close and distant. Here I'm switching close and open. I've played with this term before. One might draw connections with "open" in Heideggerean terms or in relation to the Black Mountain School or even in terms of "open source."

How would English classrooms operate if they didn't function as lectures/discussions of close readings of texts? What would English students write if they weren't writing interpretive essays based on close readings? What happens when we separate "critical thinking" from "close reading"?

In part, and certainly at the start, the answer would be non-deterministic. That is, one would not want to switch one overdetermined genre and practice for another. I think this is key. The heavy hand of judgment runs through our discipline where we imagine that we know how others should write (and what they should read and even how they should read it). I think this is a serious error in thinking. Typically, English faculty know very little about appropriate writing practices outside the narrow genre that results from close reading. To our credit, I don't think most English faculty believe they should be teaching students to write for these foreign discursive contexts, but in some strange paradoxical way, we still seem to believe that we know how students should write.

In this situation, I think the methodological answer is to examine extant writing practices and approach the development of new compositional practices in an open, experimental way. Communication takes place around the clock without close reading. People fall in love; fortunes are built; innovations are developed; discoveries are made; knowledge is composed and disseminated: all without the benefit of close reading.

Open composition, in the absence of close reading, is the situation of the text in an open field of networks and contexts. It's not about ignoring the specific intentions of the text; to the contrary ignoring intentionality is the hallmark of close reading. And certainly contemporary scholarship has plenty of examples of self-interested, careerist or politically-motivated readings of texts. In fact, open composition might have a stronger ethic of listening to the text and an awareness of the situated and distributed process of reading.