Basic Writing. George Otte
was suspect. Peter Dow Adams, outgoing co-chair of the Conference on Basic Writing, presented evidence that students who somehow escaped being tracked into BW classes actually fared fairly well in the mainstream. Tom Fox looked at the term “standards” as a kind of codeword used to justify exclusion. Jerrie Cobb Scott and William Jones examined the racism inherent in the deficit model of remediation, formed on the assumption that BW students are lacking rather than different and unassimilated. Jeanne Gunner addressed the sorry status of BW teachers, something Joseph Trimmer had already cited as keeping the field less productive and progressive than it might otherwise be. And Mary Jo Berger, a writing teacher turned college administrator, considered the chronic underfunding of BW instruction.
The one person to defend the status quo—and to resist Bartholomae’s against-the-grain tack—was Karen Greenberg, then director of the National Testing Network in Writing (NTNW), who later became coeditor of the Journal of Basic Writing with Trudy Smoke. In her contribution to the Spring 1993 issue of JBW, Greenberg wrote:
I believe in what I do. Therefore, I strongly disagree with many of the assertions made by David Bartholomae in his keynote speech at the Fourth Annual [sic] Conference on Basic Writing in Maryland. David characterized most basic writing courses as “obstacles rather than opportunities.” He stated that most basic writing programs “marginalize students” and “preserve them as different.” He also accused basic writing teachers of “merely satisfying [their] liberal reflexes” by trying to make students “more complete versions of themselves” in courses that don’t work. David was equally unimpressed with the assessment procedures used to place students into basic writing courses. He asked the conference participants, “Do you sort students into useful or thoughtful groups?” (“Politics” 65)
Greenberg answered yes to this question, but even she was careful to ground her defense of established practices for assessment and teaching in the details of her own context, the Developmental English Program she ran at Hunter College. As the only CUNY representative in the issue as well as the sole defender of current practices in BW assessment and instruction, Greenberg represented a legacy that others elsewhere were repudiating or at least calling into question.
Leading the charge was David Bartholomae, who, with Anthony Petrosky, had built a program at the University of Pittsburgh that purportedly moved the field well beyond Shaughnessy’s early vision at City College. But even their legacy was subject to critique. In “On the Academic Margins,” Deborah Mutnick wrote: “Despite the Pittsburgh program’s theoretical advances, Bartholomae and Petrosky continued to elide the political basis for excluding social groups from cultural institutions like universities; their narrative of basic writing omits the race, class, and gender inequities that pervade higher education” (191).
Redressing inequities and exclusions had been a centerpiece of Shaughnessy’s agenda in the early years, but then attention had turned to other questions, with answers sought in cognitive science and critical theory. With the fourth National Basic Writing Conference in 1992, however, the political dimension had returned with a vengeance. Bartholomae, explicitly reading against the grain of his own narrative and citing Mary Louise Pratt’s recently published “Arts of the Contact Zone,” was calling for “a curricular program designed not to hide differences . . . but to highlight them” (“Tidy House” 13). The highlighting of differences would in fact be reflected in some of the most important books of the decade, notably Mutnick’s own Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education (1996) and Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu’s Representing the “Other”: Basic Writers and the Teaching of Writing (1999).
The perceived need for a narrative of basic writing that acknowledged inequalities of race, class, and gender was also subsequently acknowledged by the Conference on Basic Writing (CBW). Though it had given up on national conferences as too expensive and logistically difficult, CBW decided to hold all-day workshops each year on the day before the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) began (Uehling). The second of these workshops, held in 1997, was devoted to “Race, Class, and Culture in the Basic Writing Classroom”; papers from it were published in another special issue of the Journal of Basic Writing, this time put together by new editors George Otte and Trudy Smoke. For all the weight these papers had and all the attention they deserved, one piece far outstripped the others in impact. It was Ira Shor’s “Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality.” In figuring basic writing as “our apartheid,” Shor claimed that the problem was structural: with students identified by suspect tracking mechanisms, BW represented a subcollegiate curricular level that would always see concentrations of students with socioeconomic disadvantages and cultural differences, always be tended by underpaid, overworked, and inadequately prepared teachers. Basic writing, according to Shor, did not need to be rethought or revised; it needed to be dismantled.
Shor’s piece kindled fires of controversy. His characterization of basic writing as “our apartheid” and his call for its dismantling provoked heated discussion at a CBW post-workshop meeting, a meeting he did not attend; the discussion was picked up on e-mail lists like CBW-L and WPA-L thereafter. A special concern fueling the discussion was that others besides Shor (and with politics very different from his) were calling for the dismantling of BW programs. Public systems in Georgia and Florida had eliminated them from four-year colleges, and plans to do the same were moving forward in states from California to Massachusetts. CUNY, so thoroughly identified with advances made in the early days of open admissions, was itself in the process of dismantling BW, at least at the four-year schools. James Traub’s City on a Hill (1994) cast City College, that seedbed of BW, as a once-proud institution devalued and dumbed-down by the admission of underprepared students. In the wake of this attack, New York’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, encouraged CUNY’s Board of Trustees to take a critical look at CUNY’s admission and placement practices and appointed a special task force to review these policies. On January 25, 1999, the Board voted to phase out all “remediation” in its four-year colleges by January 2001. Such dramatic changes were by no means confined to New York. Across the country, policy makers well to the right of Shor on the political spectrum were demanding an end to remediation as a drain on resources and an institutionalized lowering of standards.
The editors of JBW received a number of responses to Shor and chose to publish two of them in the Fall 1997 issue, both making due note of this conservative trend. Karen Greenberg, who saw what was happening at CUNY, stressed that “there are reactionary political forces currently trying to achieve precisely this barring of access and precisely this reduction in size in colleges across the country” and claimed that Shor’s proposal “would, in fact, justify the curtailment and the consequent reduction or elimination of basic skills programs” (94). Terence Collins, academic dean of the General College of the University of Minnesota, more tersely and colorfully remarked, “We who teach from the left are peculiarly fond of beating each other up while the right wing eats our lunch” (100). But he also said Shor’s argument put him in mind of “Deborah Mutnick’s warning [in the preface to Writing in an Alien World] to be careful in how we mount educational critique from the left, that in impolitic critique of Basic Writing we risk crawling into bed with the very elements of right wing elitism which access programs and many Basic Writing programs were founded to counteract” (99).
For the remainder of the decade, the Journal of Basic Writing would often include accounts of the dismantling of basic writing programs, sometimes on a statewide basis, like Gail Stygall’s account of the “unraveling” of BW at the University of Washington. What these accounts showed was that such dismantling tended to disregard pedagogical considerations, whereas Shor’s call for dismantling was in fact founded on concerns about pedagogy. Attacks on basic writing from the right took advantage of the vulnerability accompanying low-status programs for unwelcome students, whereas Shor’s critique decried that lack of status and welcome.
Still, different as these points of attack from the left and the right were, they combined to make basic writing programs seem not only vulnerable but also almost indefensible. Even for champions of BW, defending the status quo was tough; however deserving the students were of attention, the attention granted them often seemed too arbitrary in its placements, too unsure of its methods and pedagogy. The key question—what would become of BW students once BW programs were gone—was almost imponderable.