A reply directed to George Gleason's The Job Market for Women: A Department Chairman's View," which appears on pp. 927-30 of this issue. (RD)

Argues that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and that by harvesting some very general insights from two decades of cultural critique, English departments can develop curricula that will resolve a good deal of the conflict between literature and composition and improve instruction in both. (SC)

Between budget cutbacks, fewer students, and more competing majors, English departments and faculty are in serious danger. (JH)

Describes political and economic conditions in English Departments that are being manipulated to the detriment of the writing discipline and the teacher of writing. (DD)

Discusses some of the responses to a questionnaire survey of the English Department at the University of Michigan regarding governance, constituency, scholarship, faculty, and curriculum and pedagogy. (DD)

Encourages English Department participation in preparing students to teach English in secondary schools, especially by screening English education students. (DD)

Traces the difficulties and exploitation encountered by a female faculty member beginning in the 1950s. Describes how personal voice is frustrated by the hegemonic powers of English departments and the exploitative system of part-time and untenured faculty. Concludes with a powerful affirmation of the teaching mission. (HB)

The creative responses of the University of California at Berkeley English Department to changing social and economic conditions are described and recommended as exemplary. (JH)

A departmental chairman must tactfully orchestrate the activities of widely varied personality types to achieve departmental goals.

Argues that the practices of English studies are defined not only by the obvious variety of objects and methods of inquiry but also by competing divisions of service. Calls for a reconfiguration of the geography of the discipline's service functions with the goal of developing new ways of reaching extra-disciplinary student and community…

Argues that the interaction among the various sub-discourses that collectively constitute English as a discipline can keep alive a vision of English teachers not simply as critics, composition people, or even poets, but as men and women of letters. (RAE)

Literature anthologies are part of the furniture of English departments. Like the putty or gunmetal-gray file cabinet that one might have gotten new or used, they are not a showpiece of academic decor, but it would be hard to imagine work spaces without them. Indeed, they are omnipresent, amassed on the shelves of campus bookstores, weighing down…

The dogma that art is beyond politics has cut off literary criticism from the full activities of our culture. (JH)