Spotlights one site where the new curriculum calls the English department at Louisiana State University toward further change: the juncture between the undergraduate and graduate curricula. Illustrates the benefits of adopting a document that articulates curricular goals. Describes a five-year curriculum revision process. Attaches excerpts from a…

Discusses the obligations of spending donor money at the university level: stewardship, donors' expectations, how to get maximum benefit from the money, and best projects to support. (PA)

Offers some perspectives drawn from a recent experience in making a transition from faculty to dean in the hope it will be of some help to other chairs considering crossing the "great divide." Discusses the decision, the preparation, the application, the search itself, the "rules of the road," and the results. (SG)

Suggests that the valorization of Emerson in English departments has been behind the split between fiction and nonfiction, and between creative writing and composition. Suggests further that the values Emerson places on contemplation versus action degrade argument and persuasion. (TB)

Offers a utopian vision of what the place of rhetoric should be in a department that thinks of itself as literary. Argues that a Ph.D. in English that encompasses both literature and rhetoric works because it is really a degree in rhetoric. (TB)

Argues that English departments may have to eschew parochialism and in the very same move find a shared purpose not by looking to a national disciplinary mission or identity but rather by developing a very pragmatic, opportunistic sense of what a given set of faculty members in a given set of circumstances can accomplish in its local situation.…

Discusses how the University of Chicago is one of the institutions clinging most tenaciously to the monastic ideal, and the new administration's "focus on budgets and bottom lines was a sign of unwelcome worldiness." Suggests that more leadership from humanists is needed. (SG)

Shares some things about the author's career in the English profession, in a confessional mode. Notes that as a profession in a highly competitive and commodified society, educators encourage "hypocriticism"--intellectual bluff and bluster, self-promotion and one-upmanship. Recounts some episodes from an academic life of "lazy idle little…

The trouble started when an anonymous e-mail alleged abuse of power at Centennial High School in Howard County, Maryland. Each week, the local paper reported new developments in the investigation. On top of that, the family of a Black student reported that a culture of racism existed at Centennial. At the end of the year, members of the community…

Traditionally, college English departments have resisted granting undergraduate internships a central place in their curricula. Many of these departments do little more than allow students to pursue internships as loosely supervised independent studies. An internship practicum course such as Purdue University's, however, enables students to…

In 2004 the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) created a task force to examine current standards and emerging trends in publication requirements for tenure and promotion in English and foreign language departments in the United States. To fulfill its charge, the task force reviewed numerous studies, reports, and…

Even a quick tour through the professional literature of composition and rhetoric reveals that the profession has failed to bring about any real change in first-year college composition. The truth is that today the political and material conditions of first-year composition programs are not much different from that they were over a half century…

An outside evaluator can help an institution open up dialogue and bring about change by focusing the attention of top administrators, faculty, and students on goals seen as important by groups within the institution. Bringing in an outside evaluator to colleges and universities, English departments and writing programs, can be a touchy, often…

Suggests that Ph.D.s in English can find job opportunities in business and tells how to apply for such positions. (RB)

Presents the results of a survey on the salaries paid by English departments with established Ph.D. programs of nationally recognized quality. (RB)