We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is "simplistic in method and impoverished in content" by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a…

Student resistance to critical thinking emblematic of a liberal arts curriculum is often painfully obvious in freshman writing classes that impose a process-based approach to writing and thinking. Criminal justice students, like their peers in other majors with strong vocational orientations, often resist taking any more than the required liberal…

Details the facts of power for administrators or writing programs. Discusses positions of power within writing programs; enemies of writing programs; wielding power in relation to the writing staff, the English department, and the administration; and how to become of aware of the power relationships and to use this power for the good of the…

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative seeks to provide students with discipline-specific skills they will need in order to succeed, first in the university, and eventually in their chosen professional careers. This goal is accomplished in an egalitarian framework: all students are educated in the conventions of "academic writing" in a…

Examines writing assignments, articles, textbooks, and other expressions of faculty thinking from courses about relationships among education, writing, and society in philosophy, English, history, and sociology at Howard University, a historically black university. Finds writing assignments at once conservative, subversive, and creative, in a…

Overviews the 20-year history of the English Composition Board at the University of Michigan, an independent unit directed by a policy board until it was effectively ended by being placed under the English Department in 1997. Describes its early cooperative and later collaborative approach to management style. Argues efforts to institutionalize…