Discusses three fundamental questions that figure prominently in any attempt to imagine the future of English departments: What is an English department? What is the goal of an English department? and What is to be done? (HB)

Argues that computer technology has decentered high school English teachers. Describes a private high school with full computer access for every student; addresses issues this raises in the English department; describes three cyber activities used in the author's American literature classroom; and discusses the advantages of this decentralization.…

Notes that the American presence in east central European higher education is considerable and continues to grow. Discusses the ongoing struggles over the shape and the soul of universities in this region. Describes briefly representative teacher and scholar exchanges, teacher-training reforms, and combined East-West programs of study. (RS)

Raises a number of questions about the direction of the English department in light of its fundamental transformations. Asks whether the profession wants to replace the study of literature with the study of culture or critical methodology, i.e., semiotics and semantics. Looks at graduate education and the place of literature in it. (TB)

Describes the strategies and tactics that made the author's search for a tenure-track job in English a success. Describes the tenure-track position at precisely the kind of institution where faculty members were supposedly not open to the kind of work he does: the English Department at Drew University, essentially a small liberal arts college in…

In January 1986, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) issued several recommendations with far-reaching implications for Virginia's colleges and universities, namely, "that all state-supported institutions of higher education establish procedures and programs to measure student achievement." By all accounts the…

This paper provides some ideas for those searching for positions in the academic field of English (with emphasis on rhetoric/composition) at small, state-supported liberal arts colleges. It presents information about how searches are initiated and conducted and how candidates might best present themselves while engaged in a job search. Included in…

Currently, many college and university English departments are reviewing the purpose of their departments. Are they still departments of literature? A writing program is best served by staying in an English department, with the caveat that the department move towards a cultural studies curriculum--the writing program within an English cultural…

Five universities in New York State (SUNY--State University of New York at Stony Brook, Syracuse, Cornell, Binghamton, and New York Universities--are involved in a 3-year project to better prepare graduate students to become teachers. The State University of New York, Stony Brook, English Department is providing graduate teaching assistants with…

Administering a writing program has never been easy, and the issue of political correctness has added a new dimension to this difficult task. At the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), a controversy began when a cluster of statues, presented to the school by the graduating class, was attacked as being sexist and racist. According to the…

Although workshops and a study by the English Department of the University of Montevallo (Alabama) led to the conclusions that writing should be taught from a process model and that writing consciousness needed to be raised throughout the curriculum, these conclusions did not adequately address several issues: (1) process is a teaching philosophy,…

Ways that colleges and universities provide opportunities for students to improve their writing are discussed in two essays and program descriptions. In "Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition: Finding Ways to Revalue Writing," Patrick Hartwell and Greg Waters briefly describe activities at colleges that center around the rhetorical…

The home mission of the University English department is the teaching of reading and writing, and its foreign mission is the "converting" to a higher literacy of those outside the English department, especially those who teach English in the high schools and other subjects at the college level. Potential high school English teachers'…

Discusses the relationship between research in writing (i.e., research in "composition" or "rhetoric and composition") and English departments. Attempts to clarify writing research, asserting that English departments do not understand or approve of this type of research. (MM)

Discusses what is wrong with graduate schools in English, including lack of creativity, the irrelevance of much of the training for the doctoral degree, the attention paid to obscure points of literary scholarship, and the emphasis on publishing instead of good teaching. Notes the similarity to criticisms made 45 years ago. (EL)