Harvard's Influence on English Studies: Perceptions from Three Universities in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

For some years, particularly among composition and rhetoric specialists, it has been an article of faith that late nineteenth-century Harvard's influence on the teaching of writing in the twentieth century was bad. No one has put the case any better than Albert Kitzhaber who, in the conclusion to his frequently cited doctoral dissertation, Rhetoric-in-American Colleges: 1850-1900, charges the Harvard people-specifically A. S. Hill, Harvard's Fifth Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, his colleague, Barrett Wendell, and the authors of the famous Harvard Reports of the 1890s-with (1) reducing writing instruction to a concern for superficial mechanical correctness, (2) greatly increasing an unproductive and debilitating fixation on grammar instruction, (3) dissociating student writing, through such formulas as Wendell's Unity, Coherence, and Mass, from any meaningful social context, and (4) contributing significantly to the division between composition and literature people in English departments, a division which saw writing instruction increasingly become the responsibility of intellectually inferior members of English department staffs.' My own research into these matters has confirmed Kitzhaber's observations about the Harvard program repeatedly, but I have always been troubled by the fact that we have not yet definitively proved, in the way Warner Rice of Michigan once challenged me to, that Harvard men actively spread impoverished Harvard ideas about writing instruction in the departments to which they went. Such an effort would require several steps: (1) tracing the Harvard men to the colleges and universities where they settled; (2) examining syllabi for the writing courses they taught; (3) correlating their written statements about writing instruction with precepts from books by Hill or Wendell; (4) examining