English departments is not uniform. Many departments still exist with traditional notions of inquiry and curriculum and ignore community engagement or understand it in narrow ways. For a variety of reasons, writing courses and compositionists more easily than literature scholars and creative writers can embrace current concepts of community…

Contends that the academy has forgotten the origin of the dissertation and has turned it from a substantive contribution of scholarship to an instrument of evaluation. Argues that continuing to treat the dissertation in this way maintains an unequal power hierarchy of "masters" and initiates--it should be seen as the first serious scholarly…