Two Reasons Why This Report Matters (an Admittedly Small-Minded Response)

Abstract

It was March of 1997, and I was wandering through the book fair at the CCCC convention in Minneapolis. I'd nearly completed my first year as a faculty member at a small college?a job I'd dreamed of throughout my graduate years?and though I'd enjoyed it, I'd been looking forward to this conference for weeks, for the opportunity to meet up with old friends, the chance to reinvigorate my teaching and writing by catching a good panel or two, and the opportunity to load up on a year's worth of reading. For me, CCCC had always been my home away from home. That year, though, I was feeling something different: browsing through the titles, skimming the tables of contents?indeed, even flipping through the conference program?I felt a growing sense of unease, like looking into a mir ror and seeing someone else's face. I recognized the language of these works and the validity of their arguments. Nevertheless?and it took me a while to articulate this, even to myself?very little of what concerned these authors seemed relevant to my own life; to the challenges I'd faced in the last seven months at my new job; and to the joys I'd discovered working at an institu tion where my relationships with students went beyond the classroom, where my best friends were in the sociology and music departments, and where, if I needed to talk to the college president about an emergency, all I had to do was call her house, and her husband would give me her cell-phone number. In the next few years, I learned that I was not the only small-school academic feeling this sense of?well, alienation, for what else can you call