It’s tough playing the part of the ugly stepsister. Nobody knows that better than the composition professors. They toil in the shadows, correcting dangling modifiers, while their literary colleagues down the hall discuss Dickens and Derrida.
The result: bad blood.
“There’s a tendency to see the relationship between composition and literature as a bad family dynamic,” says Eileen Schell, an assistant professor of writing and English at Syracuse University. “Composition faculty are like the wives. They stay home, teach the undergraduates, raise the children, while the literature faculty reaps the rewards in the public sphere.
“But I don’t buy that narrative anymore.” Neither do many of her colleagues.
There’s nothing new about the dysfunctional relationship between literature and composition. It’s been around in one form or another for the past century. What’s changed is that people -- from elite academics to angry adjuncts -- are talking about the problem and, in fits and starts, trying to remedy it. Even the Modern Language Association has put in its two cents, issuing a report last December that contained some hard facts about the divisiveness eating away at English departments.
But the situation for some writing professors may be improving. After years of getting the short end of the departmental stick, they’re making a name for themselves as scholars, dipping into subjects reserved for literary critics, and, in growing numbers, splintering off from English departments to set up shop on their own.
That could spell ruin for those literature professors down the hall. While composition instructors -- vast armies of teaching assistants and part-timers -- work for what some professors call “starvation wages,” they’re bringing home the departmental bacon. Everything that an English department does -- from the traditional class on Milton to the controversial seminar on Madonna -- is bankrolled by first-year writing.
At least that’s what Michael Berube, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, argues in his new book, The Employment of English (New York University Press). Conservatives complain that cultural-studies courses are being used to beef up flagging English-department enrollments, but they are way off the mark, he says. Composition courses are the meat and potatoes, and everything else, he says, from Keats to queer studies, is dessert.
The danger, professors warn, is that in an era of fiscal belt-tightening, English departments can learn to live without quite so much dessert. “The largesse to teach advanced courses in literature and the funding to do it are, in a real sense, dependent on the profit we make on lower-level courses,” says Cary Nelson, a professor of liberal arts and sciences at Illinois.
Just how does the department pull in that profit? By taking advantage of teaching assistants and the swelling ranks of unemployed master’s-degree and Ph.D. holders clamoring for a job -- even a measly part-time job, professors say.
“We’re a cheap date,” says Claire F. Roof, a part-time writing instructor at the University of Hartford. She’s not kidding. One of her colleagues added up all the hours spent preparing for class, teaching, grading, and in meetings, then divided the total by the $2,000 she earns per course. Her earnings: 63¢ an hour.
That means big bucks for some departments. Mr. Nelson ran some numbers and calculated that the University of Illinois makes a profit of roughly $8,000 on each of its composition courses, which are taught by graduate students, who earn about $2,800 a class. The profit margin, he says, is even bigger at the University of Cincinnati, for example, where part-timers, working for $1,400 a course, teach most first-year writing classes. Approximate profits: $15,000 a class.
Neither Dennis Baron, chairman of the English department at Illinois, nor Russel Durst, director of English composition at Cincinnati, could confirm those figures, although Mr. Durst is not sure the profit margin is quite as high as Mr. Nelson says: “I don’t think he’s figuring in all the costs.” But you don’t need to run all the numbers, he adds, “to argue that adjuncts are badly paid and the courses are undersupported.”
“English departments have been built on the systematic exploitation of teaching assistants and, more recently, part-timers,” says James Sledd, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Texas at Austin. “But nobody does a damn thing about it, because to challenge it is to challenge the whole economic system of higher education, which smells.”
What really stinks, says Robert Scholes, a humanities professor at Brown University, is that literature scholars have no incentive to improve the situation. In fact, he says, they’ve got good reasons not to.
“The more economically you can teach those writing courses -- which is to say, the more students you can cram into them and the worse you can pay the teachers -- the better off the literature faculty is. There’s a real conflict of interest.”
Mr. Scholes has a book coming out in March, The Rise and Fall of English (Yale University Press), urging English departments to rethink the arrangement.
The irony of the situation is that composition courses aren’t just cash cows. More often than not, they’re cited as the department’s raison d’etre. When English departments are asked to justify their existence, they rarely mention a seminar deconstructing Dennis Rodman. They point to the composition courses, noting that it’s there that students learn to write.
“From the point of view of a dean or a taxpayer or a state legislator, one of the most important people in the English department is the director of composition,” says David Bartholomae, chairman of the University of Pittsburgh’s English department. “And yet that person does not travel in the same star circles as the person who does theory or film or literature.”
Why not? In part, because of snobbery about the subject matter and the workload. Composition is a service course, and, in the hierarchical world of academe, service courses are the province of the proletariat. They’re full of backbreaking labor -- lots of papers and student conferences. “You’re not theorizing about the lastest thing some French dandy said,” Dr. Sledd observes.
“As a professor, you’re not identified with something of great cultural value, like Shakespeare or the English novel,” says Dr. Bartholomae. “You’re identified with the minds and words of 18-year-olds.”
Worse than that, professors say, composition professors are tied to pedagogy, a dangerous thing in an atmosphere that still rewards scholarship over teaching. “The best scholars in literature do not regard the research of people in writing and rhetoric as serious,” says Mr. Scholes. “They don’t accept work dealing with pedagogical problems or classrooms as on the same level as literary analysis or theory.”
What’s more, the field has a pragmatic bent -- a kiss of death in academe. “Historically, universities have condescended to grubby, practical activities,” says Gerald Graff, a professor of English and education at the University of Chicago.
Condescended is right, says Peter Elbow, director of the writing program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Composition’s reputation has improved, he says, “but if you make a study of teaching, it still isn’t considered scholarship.”
That mindset helps justify the decision to staff those courses with teaching assistants and adjuncts instead of tenure-track professors. “First-year writing has a long history of being considered remedial and below what full-time faculty are supposed to be dirtying their hands with,” says Ruth Mirtz, head of the freshman writing program at Florida State University, where all of the composition classes are taught by graduate students and part-timers.
The M.L.A.'s Committee on Professional Employment issued a damning report in December showing how skewed the composition work force has grown. In Ph.D.-granting English departments, it found, 96 per cent of the first-year writing classes are taught by graduate students, part-timers, or full-time, non-tenure-track professors, compared with 64 per cent in departments that grant no more than master’s degrees and 50 per cent in departments that grant only bachelor’s degrees.
Marshall Kitchens used to be one of those statistics. He taught composition in Connecticut, eking out a $20,000-a-year career with part-time posts at the University of Hartford and other institutions. He turned his back on that life two years ago and enrolled at Wayne State University in a Ph.D. program -- in composition.
“I realized I wouldn’t find full-time work without a Ph.D.,” he says. “And I thought composition, with an emphasis on information technology, was more marketable than a dissertation on Carlyle.”
He may be right. At a time when literature Ph.D.'s are begging for work, people with composition degrees are sitting pretty. “People are not only getting Ph.D.'s, they’re getting jobs,” says Andrea Lunsford, an English professor at the Ohio State University. “We’ve placed 100 per cent of our graduates in composition.”
More than 30 per cent of the jobs advertised in the M.L.A.'s 1997 “Job Information” list were in composition, and the proportion keeps climbing. “Most jobs advertised have a writing component,” says Charles L. Ross, head of Hartford’s English department. “Universities are looking for a generalist who can leap tall buildings and teach writing with both hands.”
Still, not all of the writing positions listed with the M.L.A. are tenure-track, and even if they were, composition scholars would have a tough time breaking into the ranks of the elite. Their research is often misunderstood by literature professors, and their administrative duties and pedagogical work still don’t carry as much weight as a book on James Joyce.
That said, things are looking better for some composition professors. The intellectual luster reserved for literature scholars is beginning to rub off on them. Instead of dwelling on punctuation and grammar, they’re delving into topics with sex appeal, like gender, class, and identity. Some 70 graduate programs in composition have opened their doors in the past 25 years, respectable journals have cropped up in the field, and a generation of tenured writing professors has built up a body of scholarly work that is winning nods of approval.
Not everybody thinks those developments are a good idea. Composition professors are being sidetracked by cultural studies and neglecting their real job -- to teach kids how to write, Texas’s Dr. Sledd says. “We have a simple, utilitarian function, but an important one, and it’s that function which these professors have rejected scornfully. Why? Because it makes composition a service course, and you don’t get promoted for service.”
Yes, he says, the theorizing and professionalizing have made the lives of some composition professors better, but it may be making the lives of others in the field -- those slaving away in menial posts -- worse. For years, he explains, composition professors complained that they were at the bottom of the food chain. Now they’ve created another hierarchy -- this time in their own discipline.
“It’s an academic plantation,” he says. The teaching assistants and part-timers are the “field hands,” and the tenure-track writing professors play the part of “boss compositionists.”
That kind of talk makes a lot of people in composition bristle. “I don’t think his rhetoric helps,” says Mr. Elbow, at Massachusetts. “When directors of composition hire part-timers, they don’t want to do it. They’re fighting for better funding. They feel anguished.”
More than a few composition programs are trying to deal with the problem by splitting off from English departments and opening departments of their own. Hartford has a separate department devoted to composition. So do the University of Texas at Austin and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which set up its department last year.
“These separations are a way for composition people to take away some of the prestige and money and political power from literature,” says Richard Ohmann, a professor emeritus of English at Wesleyan University. Doing so doesn’t guarantee respect as a scholarly pursuit, he adds, but “once they have their own budget and program, they have to be respected in the other sense. You have to deal with them. You can’t ignore them.”
Nobody’s ignoring the fiscal realities of such splits. The English department at Hartford lost tens of thousands of dollars when it parted company with the composition program, Dr. Ross says. If English departments aren’t careful, Mr. Scholes warns, they’ll go the way of classics departments, turning into small operations, with an even smaller student clientele.
But the bigger issue, professors insist, is the intellectual impact of these schisms. “In the long run, it will be a bad thing for both the teaching of writing and the teaching of literature,” argues David R. Shumway, an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. “It institutionalizes the divorce between them.”
From Ms. Roof’s vantage point, it doesn’t matter much if she’s slaving away in Hartford’s English department or in a separate department of composition. Either way, she’s earning the same pennies per hour.
Come April, she plans to air her grievances on a panel at the annual “College Composition and Communication” conference. The title of her talk: “The (Ab)use of Adjunct Labor in Freshman Composition.” She’s paying her own way to the Chicago meeting. Part-timers don’t get travel perks.