After finishing Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University, my first impulse with the prospectus-looking readings was to immediately continue with Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory in order to stay with the theme of university-as-context, anticipating that I’d wrap that stuff up with Derek Bok and maybe the Academic Capitalism collection. But I’ve had Sharon Crowley’s “Historical and Polemical Essays” in Composition and the University on my shelf for a while, and Crowley offers some really terrific stuff tracing the history of the liberal education back to Rome and Cicero and Quintilian (and, no, she doesn’t cite Winterbottom either, so about par for the compositionist course), so I brought both Crowley and Aronowitz down with me on the train, and Crowley’s kept my interest in between the globalization readings. And, yeah, I’m still struggling to maintain the classed connection between composition and the economics of the information economy through the institution of the university — that’s what my goal is with Kerr, Aronowitz, and Bok — and I’m gonna see today if I can’t put into words the way I might begin to see Crowley as helping in that endeavor.
Crowley argues that “The writing done in required writing classes is an imitation, or better, a simulacrum, of the motivated writing that gets done elsewhere in the academy and in the culture at large” because “the primary motivation for composing is to supply teachers with opportunities to measure student performance” (8). I agree that the conclusion holds widely and unfortunately true (I’ve written before about my agreement with John Trimbur and Bruce Horner on the importance of making student writing matter by establishing opportunities for it to circulate), but as a pessimistic yet hopeful teacher, I’m not certain I agree with the gatekeeping function Crowley posits as the cause. Such a gatekeeping function operates only to certify that the university’s “entering members are taught the discursive behaviors and traits of character that qualify them to join the community” so that those entering members “behave, think, write, and speak as students rather than as the people they are, people who have differing histories and traditions and languages and ideologies” (9). Something that we suppose to be an equalizing instution actually becomes a homogenizing institution while at the same time casting those who cannot be adequately homogenized into the outer dark, where there will be a weeping and a gnashing of teeth.
The monitoring function Crowley points reduces the value of student writing to most abject form of subjugated exchange value, and assumes that the writing itself can hold no possible use value for the student, to the point where each essay might as well be a multiple-choice exam designed to demonstrates how many errors away from acceptability the studen’s intellect is. Me, I think writing instruction does a little more good than that, and offers a little more hope than that. The problem then becomes: how? What does writing instruction actually do?
This is also actually another way of asking what a university education does. In recapping Kerr, I pointed to his historical contruction of the way Cardinal Newman’s English idea of the liberal education, derived from the Roman model, gave way to Abraham Flexner’s German idea of the knowledge-producing research university, which in turn gave way to the American “multiversity” with the democratizing influence of the Morrill Act. The binary I draw from James Berlin of the vocational education versus the liberal education doesn’t quite line up with Kerr’s construction, but the common point of contact — the liberal education — is evident in Crowley as well, who contends that “The point of a humanist education, after all, is to become acquainted with the body of canonical texts that humanists envision as a repository of superior intellectual products of Western culture” (13), or Matthew Arnold’s “best that has been thought and said”: the liberal education model, as I’ve argued before, presumes class mobility via cultural means, though acceptance and attendance at the few schools that carry on the tradition of the liberal education requires considerable economic wherewithal.
Now: Robert Scholes, in Textual Power, differentiates the English department cultures of literary study and composition pedagogy by pointing to composition’s valorization of textual production as opposed to literature’s valorization of textual consumption. (As one might guess, Scholes proposes that contemporary capitalist culture privileges consumption over production, literature over composition, and — by extension — reading over writing.) Thing is, this kinda throws yet another wrench into my categorizations of educational function by introducing considerations of production and consumption. Nice economic concerns, definitely, and ones that might be usefully connected to an understanding of class, but they bollocks my thinking when I’m trying to sort all this stuff about what a university’s for. Furthermore, the aforementioned Bruce Horner attempts to construct a theoretical basis for de-trivializing student writing by using Marx’s categories of use and exchange value to talk about writing that writing that gets traded for a grade versus writing that serves some integral and non-alienated purpose for the student herself, and the category of exchange value would seem to line up well with either (1) Crowley’s monitoring function or (2) what Crowley calls “the reduction of composition instruction to instrumentalism” (24).
And right now, I’m gonna throw up my hands and say, “I have no idea.” Maybe I need to draw myself another picture to show myself how all these different oppositions overlap. To recap:
- English versus German versus American models of the university
- Liberal versus vocational education models of the university
- Production versus consumption of texts (note here that the German model might seem to at least favor the production of knowledge)
- Use versus exchange value of writing
But at this point, I’m feeling sufficiently scattered that I can say to myself, “Well, at least I’ve articulated some questions.”
Attaboy, Mike. You just keep on right on articulating those questions and maybe one of these days you’ll get yourself some authority figure who finally snaps and snarls, “Yes? What is it this time, Edwards?” Well, see, Colonel, I got me this large-caliber belt-fed motherfucker of a theoretical apparatus here and I got the barrels spun up and ready to rock and roll but the whole thing keeps falling apart when I try and pull the trigger ’cause I can’t get the goddamn pin for the carrier mechanism to stay in.
I’m missing the girls. I’ll see ’em tomorrow night when I get back up home.
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