1977. Brent Henze

      Preface

      Looking back at 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition, our minds entertained the sticky-soft strains of Debby Boone, the sinister visage of Darth Vader—and a few important questions our readers might have about how we came to and carried out our research for this book. While our “Introduction” provides a scholarly context for this project and explains its position within the larger field of composition studies, here we wish to explain briefly the project’s genesis and to reflect a bit on our own positions as researchers and historiographers.

      Why Penn State?

      This text originated in a graduate seminar that we shared on the history of composition at Penn State University half a dozen years ago. Yet our decision to focus on Penn State’s writing program as a way of deepening our engagement with the history of composition was not merely one of convenience. Our primary aims in the seminar were to expand our knowledge of composition history and to gain experience with research methodologies that pay attention to situated practices within that history. We began with the intention that each of us would study the local history of a particular writing program at a different college or university in Pennsylvania and would then produce a series of fairly traditional, individually authored seminar papers. We quickly discovered, though, that these individual endeavors would inevitably be incomplete and superficial because we lacked institutional and collegial familiarity with the programs and people at other schools; we just could not gain adequate familiarity with the histories of various programs in one short semester. Moreover, few of the many sources we needed in order to tell a recent history of writing program development—interviews, memos, handouts, lesson plans, student papers—were preserved in the various university archives. Program records charting institutional responses to open admissions, the “literacy crisis” of the 1970s, the process movement, and other social and scholarly developments were not readily accessible in department or university archives; they were more likely to be found in faculty offices and memories, two areas we would have difficulty accessing as relative strangers.

      At Penn State, however, we not only knew the current curriculum and its recent past, but we had already developed working relationships with many of the people who had participated in that past. This institutional and personal familiarity enabled us to access the “hidden” archives—the old file boxes in the attic; the yellowed, hand-written essays in the bottom drawers; the textbooks thankfully overlooked during the last office cleanings; the records of forgotten meetings; and the indispensable memories of departmental personalities upon which this history could be built. As at the other institutions we had considered studying, we were not able to consult finding aids or engage the help of a university archivist, for the records that we sought were not generally archived. But at Penn State we could draw on the extensive memories of our pack-rat colleagues, and these proved to be invaluable resources. In short, we discovered that we could tell the most complex and richest history about composition by focusing on our local site.

      As we read more about the history of Penn State during the 1970s and early 1980s, we came to realize the magnitude of Penn State’s impact during this era in composition history. The sheer number of students who passed through the writing curriculum at Penn State during this period suggests that the program influenced how composition was—and continues to be—viewed both in the state of Pennsylvania and across the nation. Penn State historian Michael Bezilla explains that the influence of the university’s curriculum was far reaching—statewide and nationally—by the mid 1980s:

      One Pennsylvanian in eight who chose to enter college immediately after high school in the 1970s enrolled at University Park or one of the Commonwealth Campuses. More than 110,000 baccalaureate degrees were awarded between 1970 and 1983, along with 21,000 associate and 27,000 graduate degrees. By 1982, one in every thousand college graduates in the United States had earned his or her degree from The Pennsylvania State University.

      Many people were influenced by the curriculum at Penn State during this time period—a fact that suggested to us that the history of the Penn State curriculum deserved greater attention.

      Additionally, each of us wanted to know—indeed we felt ethically obligated to take up the opportunity to know—the historical conditions