One educator with much experience as a teacher and director of composition at a state university believes that academia simply has to have independent writing programs. Her conviction rests on two issues: the nature of the curriculum and the professional/psychological well-being of writing/rhetoric faculty. The process movement in writing pedagogy…

Lists guidelines to help department administrators reduce their liability and strengthen their position when faced with grievances or lawsuits. (AEA)

Describes program proposals submitted by college English departments to the National Endowment for the Humanities and recommends that future programs provide for building relationships between higher education and the public, commerce, and elementary/secondary schools. (AEA)

Argues that tenured English teachers at small liberal arts colleges want several things from prospective new faculty members, including the capacity to share authority among equals, and the ability to give up some radical intellectual independence in order to collaborate (not compromise or capitulate) professionally. (RS)

Presents the experience and concerns of a black graduate student in an English department. Considers that diversity and mentoring help create an optimum psychological environment in which the black graduate student can be productive. Concludes that a diverse student body fosters diverse scholarship and allows for paradigm shifts that stimulate new…

Women who wish to assume full voice in their writing have no choice but to raise questions regarding their status and the status of creative writing within the academy. Tillie Olsen and Elaine Showalter have documented the bias in texts taught at the university in which women have little place, if at all. The effects are devastating: if the voices…

The accomplishments of Janet Emig constitute perhaps the most influential contribution to the study of how humans compose discourse and how teachers should help them. Her background prepared her for her initial goal of becoming a medical doctor, but she determined to study literature because of its enduring interest to her. As a graduate student…

A graduate student who was the only composition person in a two semester teaching seminar experienced the dilemma of defining and establishing that identity in the midst of a classroom struggle between cultural studies and literary theorists on one side and creative writers on the other. The factious teaching seminar mirrored the fact that English…

The trajectory of an English professor's scholarly interests has always involved emotion. From the simple question she asked herself during her graduate study (what do we feel?), she moved to the beneficial psychological effects of writing, then onto empirically identifying the emotions involved in writing, to discussions of social emotions, to an…

Ever since the publish-or-perish era began sometime ago, academics in the humanities have experienced a widening gap between their two primary obligations, teaching and research. Bad enough for tenure-track junior faculty, the tension between the demands of writing, delivering, and publishing papers is even worse for graduate students because of…

When budget cuts affected the English department at the University of Georgia in 1991, the writing program was never cut sharply but did suffer in three important ways: class sizes in the freshman program went up, the department replaced full-time with part-time faculty, and a new assistant professor of rhetoric was not hired. Now most freshman…

The situation of the lecturers in the English Department at the University of Nevada Reno (UNR) is relevant to discussions of the conference on College Composition and Communication's Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing. A "second-tier" solution was implemented in 1981, and in 1993 the…

A survey examined the attitudes of lecturers in the English department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in an attempt to better define the role of the lecturer in the department. Twelve responses were received from 13 full and part-time lecturers. Results indicated that: (1) most favored a committee appointed by the chair using…

The study analyzed the six reputational rankings of Ph.D-granting English departments that have been published since 1925. The major finding was that most of the highest-ranked departments have been at private universities despite the fact that almost two-thirds of degree-granting departments are located at public institutions. In addition, of the…

This study expands an annual survey conducted by George Worth from 1967 to 1982 for the Association of Departments of English Bulletin of average salaries in 92 English departments listed in the 1970 Roose-Anderson "ACE Rating of Graduate Programs." The present study includes the 106 English departments listed in "An Assessment of…