Freshman English: In Whose Service?

Abstract

English departments carry the burden, and enjoy the benefits, of teaching Freshman English. It is a service they perform, in their own and in others' interests. Needless to say, these interests can sometimes conflict, as they do, for instance, when some faculty in the department view the appointment of graduate students to teach these courses as a way to ensure continued enrollment in graduate seminars, while the chairperson or the director of Freshman English views quality of teaching as the more appropriate criterion. Or the very designation of Freshman English courses as a service may affect the attitude of some faculty when they are occasionally asked to teach them; teachers have to teach composition, just as students have to take it, and although this chore might be seen as a change of pace or even as a challenge, it is rarely coveted. There is not much more to say about these attitudes, except that they are unfortunate. The situation might be made better, however, if we occasionally asked ourselves, whose service? I wish to offer here some practical and theoretical speculations on this question. In those colleges in which Freshman English is a required subject, the reason is ordinarily not because it contributes to our students' appreciation of imaginative literature or abilities in personal expression, but because the whole faculty views the skills of reading and composition as vital to its interests. The courses are required because the faculty in other departments and disciplines perceives them as service courses in which skills are taught which can be directly applied in the study of other subjects. When members of this faculty complain that We can't, for the life of see how what goes on in the typical freshman composition course can be of any use to us, they express the danger, or at least the anomaly, of teaching literature and personal writing to students who need specific skills that will see them through courses in anthropology, physics, botany, music, business, or sociology.1 But it is too easy to make the logical leap that teachers in those departments sometimes do, and assume that such skills are in their interest, to make their job easier. Those skills are, of course, in the interests of the students who will take these courses. Their interests and those of