Forging Independence and Innovation in the Midst of Financial Austerity: The Syracuse University Writing Program

Abstract

The Syracuse University Writing Program began in 1986 when the Writing Program split from the Department of English to form a separate academic unit. Prior to that time, the lower-division writing curriculum consisted of two courses, English 101 and 102, which were taught in six-week modules according to the Baker Essay Model.1 If students were unable to pass the first module, they were channeled to part-time instructors who tutored them until they passed. Once that task was completed, students undertook the task of writing literary analysis essays focused on pieces of fiction and poetry.Managed by Randall Brune, the Freshman English program was geographically isolated from the rest of the English department. While the English department was located in the castle-like Hall of Languages, the TAs and part-time instructors who provided the bulk of Freshman English instruction and tutoring were located in the basement of H. B. Crouse Hall, a modest brick structure located immediately behind the Hall of Languages. In the fall of 1983, thirty-nine teaching assistants and forty part-time faculty plus twelve part-time tutors, who provided three hundred hours of tutoring per week, were responsible for the instruction in 168 sections of English 101 (Davies 13-14). Of the faculty housed in the English department, only two, Margaret Himley and Carol Lipson, taught or had training in writing and rhetoric.With little or no faculty leadership and a curriculum that was seriously out of step with the theories of writing and rhetoric prevailing in the 1980s, there was a consensus that the Freshman English model was not successful. In fact, so many complaints surfaced about the Freshman English program that the University Senate took up the issue in a year-long assessment of the program led by Professor Bob Gates of the English department. Two visits by WPA consultant evaluators Donald A. McQuade and James A. Slevin took place in September and October of 1984. The report from the Gates Committee, as it came to be known, diagnosed a raft of problems: lack of investment of full-time faculty in English in the program, a restrictive and unimaginative curriculum not in keeping with current theories in writing and rhetoric, a lack ofprofessional development opportunities for part-time instructors, poor working conditions, and inadequate salaries. The Gates report, delivered to the University Senate in April of 1985, made a series of recommendations, including a four-course writing sequence spread over the four years of the undergraduate experience, the hiring of a tenure-track writing program administrator to oversee the program, and the improvement of the professional conditions of part-time instructors. The report also recommended that the writing program administrator should report to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, not the English department chair. Although the report did not explicitly recommend that the English department and the Writing Program should undergo a divorce along the lines that Maxine Hairston trumpeted in her CCCC Chair's Address, Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming our Connections (Davies 14-15), the suggestion that the writing program administrator would report directly to the dean served as the first step in a long process that led to the separation of the Writing Program and the English department.Subsequent steps further facilitated the gradual division between the two units. The arrival of Director Louise Phelps set the stage for the Writing Program's development as an independent academic unit, along with addressing many of the above-mentioned problems. The lower-division curriculum was revised and updated through the efforts of teams of parttime instructors, who were given long-term contracts with 3-2 loads and benefits that included health care, tuition benefits, and a retirement plan.After receiving our charter as an independent unit in 1987, the next step in operating as an independent, fully functioning department came with the 1997 addition of our doctoral program in composition and cultural rhetoric. …