"At a Hinge of History" in 1963

Rereading Disciplinary Origins in Composition

ANNIE S. MENDENHALL

Universities in America are at a hinge of history: while connected with their past, they are swinging in another direction.

— Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University

In 1963, University of California president Clark Kerr delivered a series of lectures at Harvard on the state of the American university, published as The Uses of the University. In that now famous work, Kerr argued that American universities had become integral to national welfare and economic success––"a prime instrument of national purpose" (Kerr 2001, 66). Kerr employs a synecdoche––the hinge––to describe this shift as a doorway to a new era, evoking grand acts of entrance and transition. In doing so, he mirrors the way composition historians have talked about disciplinary origins. Take, for example, Stephen M. North, who, in The Making of Knowledge in Composition, pinpoints "the birth of modern Composition, capital C, to 1963. And what marks its emergence as a nascent academic field more than anything else is this need to replace practice as the field's dominant mode of inquiry" (North 1987, 15). Emergence and replacement function like Kerr's hinge, separating (but not severing) modern composition from its lore-based past. The parallels in Kerr's and North's arguments invite us to revisit the structure of historical narratives of composition and to reread how we use markers, moments, and objects to define historical transitions.

North and other early composition historians share another commonality with Kerr: the belief that the 1960s was a transformative decade. According to many historical narratives of the field, the increasing visibility of composition research in the 1960s––and in 1963 in particular––forged new legitimacy for composition. Robert J. Connors argues that during the years between 1960 and 1965, "the efforts of ... new theorists changed the face of the field forever" (Connors 1997, 205), creating the modern discipline of composition studies. Connors singles out the 1963 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) as "qualitatively changed from earlier conferences" (206). The year 1963 is also cited anecdotally by scholars, including, for example, David Smit, who calls it "the year the profession came of age" (Smit 2004, 2), and Louise Wetherbee Phelps (2010, 124) in her "Composition Studies" entry in the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. For many historians, key publications in 1963 catalyzed this disciplinary emergence––specifically Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer's Research in Written Composition (RWC) and Albert R. Kitzhaber's Themes, Theories, and Therapy: The Teaching of Writing in College (TTT). For example, James A. Berlin's (1987, 135) Rhetoric and Reality calls RWC a sign that composition was "confident of its value and its future [as a] discipline." North refers to RWC as "the charter of modern Composition" (North 1987, 17) and calls TTT "the first book-length study of college writing" (North 1987, 14). Both RWC and TTT, self-described "reports," called for scholarly attention to writing, and historians have considered them formative texts that authorized research in the field.

Reflecting on the impact of RWC, Lloyd-Jones has noted that historians viewed its publication as "a watershed for separating the old order in composition studies from the new," although the authors "considered [them]selves as doing routine status summaries of conventional empirical research as a basis for identifying sound practice" (Lloyd-Jones 2006, 18). The disconnect between the motives of researchers like Lloyd-Jones and the interpretation of historians invites a reexamination of 1963 in light of new historiographies that disrupt the idea of fixed disciplinary origins. Microhistory serves as a useful analytical stance for this project because it changes the scale of analysis from entire decades or centuries to moments and individuals. More important, microhistory attempts to account for the complexity of historical contexts by maintaining "sensitivity to the language of and the categorization made by the actors themselves" (Alapuro 2012, 141). As Simona Cerutti explains, microhistory strives to avoid "the anachronisms arising from 'received historical common sense'" and instead seeks "to construct 'relevant' contexts of analysis rather than sticking to preconceived ideas of what was relevant" (Cerutti 2004, 21). In this collection, chapters by David Stock and Brian Gogan employ a similar approach to reconstructing individual figures' contexts erased by Berlin's historical taxonomy. Here I am interested in how contexts can be erased or flattened when historians construct timelines, which, as Louise Wetherbee Phelps's study of the 1979 Ottawa Conference demonstrates, involves a seemingly arbitrary but politically, institutionally, and individually significant process of selecting (and simultaneously ignoring) a particular year as a watershed. As the quotes by Kerr and Lloyd-Jones suggest, contemporaries of 1963 saw that year as both a transformative era and a period of routine academic work. These individuals' assessments invite us to look back for a different history of 1963––a history not motivated by the desire to find an origin point but by a curiosity about what was seen as both significant and mundane about composition work at that time.

In this essay, I revisit composition's disciplinary origin narratives through an analysis of TTT and RWC––texts frequently cited but rarely analyzed in detail. What makes these texts compelling for a microhistorical analysis is the way they have functioned as markers of an interest in disciplinary research with little attention to the sponsorship and aims of that research. They have been used as signposts in macronarratives, but the texts themselves provide valuable information about individual scholars and research projects. When I began this project, I wanted to know how composition research operated at the time and whether Kitzhaber and Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer saw themselves as participating in a disciplinary movement. What were their goals? Who sponsored their research? How were these texts published and distributed? To answer these questions, I examine what Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó refer to as the "textual environment," in other words, a text's paratext, sponsorship, and discursive connections to other contemporary texts (Magnússon and Szijártó 2013, 135). Attention to the textual environment (and what it suggests about actors' institutional relationships and perspective on their own work) is part of what microhistorians refer to as contextualization. Identified by Magnússon and Szijártó as one of microhistories' key commitments, contextualization is especially valuable for scholars trained in rhetoric who already possess a rich set of tools for analyzing texts and attending to the rhetorical and situated ways individuals and groups use language. Adapting microhistory to a rhetorical approach, I reread the field's research turn in 1963 as a response to a national investment in education research rather than a concerted disciplinary movement. As I show, these prominent research reports emerged as part of a larger push in American culture and politics to fund education research promising to improve the stature of the nation's citizens during an era when the government and public were increasingly concerned with America's global reputation.

In constructing the textual environment of TTT and RWC, I understand context as "networks, ties of alliances and solidarities, and the mutual dependence between individual behavior and institutional relations" (Alapuro 2012, 139). To analyze the relationship between individuals and institutions, my approach to contextualization employs what Risto Alapuro calls "critical distance" to draw some connections people may not have known or articulated in 1963 (142). I see this critical distance as inescapable and necessary. Because our understanding of historical context is always mediated through texts, we can never completely reconstruct context from the perspective of individuals who lived it. But the point of contextualization is not to construct a complete account of history; rather, this approach seeks to bring texture to grand narratives of the past by studying "events or persons in context, that is to say, within the complex interplay of free choice and constraint where individuals and groups perform in the interstices of the contradictory pluralities of the normative systems that govern them" (Levi 2012, 126). The work of contextualization proves particularly useful for rereading disciplinary history because disciplines function as normative systems impacted by a web of individuals, organizations, and governing bodies. Given their complexity, the application of a broad concept like discipline or disciplinary origin to the past always simplifies and obscures the motives of individuals and differences across fields of knowledge.

To contextualize the work of Kitzhaber and Braddock, Lloyd- Jones, and Schoer, I begin by discussing how English responded to the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA) with the publication of The National Interest and the Teaching of English in 1961 (Squire et al.). This earlier document frames my analysis of research efforts in composition by showing how English appropriated the discourses of scientific research to argue for funding and to call public attention to the need to improve writing instruction at all levels. Such efforts benefited from the hope that education in English, like science and math, could contribute to national advancement during the Space Race era. Both RWC and TTT employed this discourse to construct a research agenda for composition, but in different ways. Even as RWC and TTT differed in approach, each text also presented ambivalent visions of writing as a field of study and teaching subject. These texts were written during a time when several invested parties with differing motives wanted a better definition for English and for composition as a key component of English. Rather than showing a concerted movement toward disciplinarity, a history of 1963 demonstrates that early research efforts in composition raised questions we still grapple with today––questions about composition's lack of clear definition, its complicity with the assumptions of literacy crises, and its ambivalent relationship to English studies.

Seeing the Frame: The Context for Composition Research

So many of the hopes and fears of the American people are now related to our educational system and particularly to our universities––the hope for longer life, for getting into outer space, for a higher standard of living; our fears of Russian or Chinese supremacy, of the bomb and annihilation, of individual loss of purpose in the changing world. For all these reasons and others, the university has become a prime instrument of national purpose. This is new.

— Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University

What made composition research gain recognition in the 1960s? Or, put differently, what made historians look to the studies of the 1960s as a marker of interest in composition research? A brief glance through the archives of College English, English Journal, or CCC reveals that composition research existed prior to 1963. In fact, RWC contains no original research on writing but instead catalogs five hundred prior studies of written composition. For North, a desire to replace lore seems to be the significant difference. For Berlin, it's an aura of confidence. For Connors, it's a qualitative feeling of change. RWC and TTT tell a different story, a story beginning with national funding sources that made book- length academic publications possible.

In the 1960s, research became an increasingly predominant function of university work, entangling that work with federal and corporate sponsorship in new ways. The influence of nationalistic and entrepreneurial discourse contributed to the sense that the university was now what Kerr (2001, 5) calls a "multiversity" driven by different and often competing interests. According to data cited by Kerr, economist Fritz Machlup claimed in 1962 that 29 percent of the gross national product (GNP) came from the knowledge economy, which was growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy (Kerr 2001, 66). Yet the research boom did not benefit all areas of the university equally. Federal funding of university research in 1961, for example, largely went toward three areas: defense (40 percent), science and technology (20 percent), and health (37 percent) (Kerr 2001, 41). Funding for English projects was comparatively small but was substantial if the project could contribute to public education. A 1964 call for proposals posted in the ADE Bulletin by the Cooperative Research division of the US Office of Education (which funded RWC) noted that funds of $11 million were available for teaching-related research in English and indicated as much as $17 million might be available the next year (Fisher 1964, 2).

The prevalence of federal funding for research was in large part due to the NDEA of 1958. As Wayne J. Urban shows in More Than Science and Sputnik: The National Defense Education Act of 1958, the NDEA catalyzed a period of unprecedented federal investment in higher education by capitalizing on media hype over the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, which became "a story of educational deficiency for the American public by the media" (Urban 2010, 116). Urban argues that the Eisenhower administration was skeptical about the media's portrayal of American deficiency in science and technological advancement but passed the NDEA as a temporary measure to reassure the American public (80–81). However, the NDEA became a major achievement for politicians and educators seeking to expand federal funding to education. After it passed, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) sought NDEA funding by publishing The National Interest, which led to the development of the Project English curriculum research centers and increased the availability of federal money for general and applied research studies.

TheNational Interest served an important role in positioning composition's work as having tangible effects on the improvement of the nation and its citizens. As others have noted, the extension of the NDEA to English disproportionately impacted composition over literature because it emphasized literacy skills and teaching methods, two areas seen as directly applicable to national welfare (Gallagher 2002, 113). But the NDEA, and NCTE's response to it, also set the precedent for how composition research would be framed in this era. The NDEA argued that national security depended on "the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women" and "the mastery of modern techniques developed from complex scientific principles" (NDEA 1958, 2). NCTE's arguments hinged on the claim that English could use scientific methods to conduct research and improve curricula, establishing an explicit parallel to the STEM disciplines. TheNational Interest aligned the problems of science and math education with English but highlighted the difference in the public's view of those problems: "In English the disparity between what specialists and research scholars know and what the school teaches is even greater than it was in science, but no dramatic orbiting of a linguistic satellite draws public attention to this disparity" (Squire et al. 1961, 75). This claim invokes the Space Race to imply a "disparity" not simply between research and teaching but also between the literacy skills of other countries and of the United States; just as the United States was surpassed in the creation of satellite technology, so too it had been surpassed in its citizens' literacy skills. This analogy allowed NCTE to transfer the exigency for funding from STEM to English.