Russell, David R. Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1970-1990: A Curricular History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

I. The Triumph of Specialization
Before the 1870s, writing was ancillary to speaking, therefore students were trained in rhetoric and much of the curriculum was based upon public speaking. "Correct" writing was the direct outcome of being raised a gentleman who spoke "correct" English. Russell explains,

Because academics and other professionals assumed that writing was a generalizable, elementary skill and that academia held a universal, immutable, standard of literacy, they were constantly disappointed when student writing failed to measure up to the local, largely tacit, standards of a particular social class, institution, discipline, or profession by which they were in fact judging that writing. (6)

Myth of Transience
This concept was labeled by Mike Rose: "Because writing seemed to be independent of content learning, the many solutions proposed over the years tended to marginalize writing instruction and reinforce the myth of transience by masking the complexities of the task" (7).

19th Century Backgrounds
What was considered education was a single required course of study for all students and was based in the classic oratory tradition: the recitation method was standard. Writing activity centered on class notes. The second site of writing were "rhetoricals" which consisted of public oral exhibition of rhetorical skill. The students participated in these exercises outside of class in literary clubs and informal debates (forensics) among faculty and students.
Gradually, as the public demanded that higher education become more practical, the university took on the roles of research and service. Modern disciplines emerged from these new roles and conventions of discourse grew up within each discipline. However, as coursework became more specialized, this system fell victim to a "knowledge gap" wherein the faculty were not equipped to evaluate or understand students from all disciplines. "Instead of compuswide oral and written examinations, graded collectively by the faculty or by outside examiners, the elective curriculum brought course specific examinations, graded individually by each instructor" (48).
As the university became more complex and was subject to dramatic growth, while serving the dual gods of research and service, the mission and values of academe changed. The elective curriculum and departmental organization made a specific place for composition courses where there had been none before but no place for collegewide writing requirements outside the course structure. As writing became one more subject among many, it ceased being a central part of all of them. Despite pious pronouncements about every teacher being an English teacher, responsibility gradually shifted from the whole faculty to the English department. But even English departments' values increasingly lay elsewhere, in literary teaching and scholarship, so the burden actually fell to the junior faculty and, more commonly, teaching assistants . . .this shift in responsibility without a corresponding increase in status had a chilling effect on writing across the curriculum. Faculty had a license to complain about poor student writing but an institutionally sanctioned excuse for not devoting time to their undergraduates' writing. (63)

Writing and the Ideal of Research
Through the introduction of the German model of higher education, research took a leading role in the university. Sites of writing were class notes, the research paper, and the laboratory report. Since these models valued evidence and discovery of verifiable facts, the skills of rhetoric were devalued with the same arguments Plato preserved: a good man speaking well was respected less than the speaker who revealed the Truth. With the decline of wide forums of intellectual discourse, "students and faculty had no curricular mechanisms for seeing the differences in the ways disciplines pursued and represented truth, or, in rhetorical terms, their different heuristics and conventions" (73). Hence, also, came the tradition of "academic writing" in private sites out of the context of authentic experiences of audience; student writing was conceived in the image of faculty writing, and distance between student and faculty became greater.

Writing and the Ideal of Utility
The ideal of utility, or service, arose from the culture of professionalism, or Fordism, during the Progressive Era. The ideal of utility sought to make education more like "real life." The goal of writing instruction was to give students the skills necessary to follow instructions or speak for the system: credentialing. A key figure who emerges from this era is Robert Grosenver Valentine, who encouraged students' language development as a means to "hack their way to power." He advocated rhetorical skills that negotiated the complex relationships of subject, reader, and point of view--crucial skills in the new industrial order.

II. The Search for Community
"Tacit traditions remained tacit because academia had no shared vocabulary, no institutional forums for discussing discipline-specific writing instruction" (132). The three models of writing instruction sought to improve student writing through general education, but there was not consensus on where, when, how, or why it should.

Writing and Social Efficiency
The Social Efficiency paradigm educated students with specialized knowledge for specialized labor claiming that unity would come from a diversified citizenry, all working for the common good. Writing was taught is a variety of courses for "functional performance" (140). Writing was reduced to a set of skills, independent of social or disciplinary factors, which could be taught by mechanical drills. This model introduced remedial writing instruction.

Writing and the Great Books
The Great Books paradigm of writing instruction has also been dubbed "liberal culture." It is this tradition that established the canon and looked to it as a subject of "research." This model of writing instruction modeled general education in the image of literary criticism and evoked the practice of writing within that limited discourse. The only other validated writing in this tradition is creative writing, expressively patterned on Romantic models. Rhetoric had to be excluded from higher education because it focused on classical language, oral performance, and "effective expression of received ideas rather than criticism of them" (171).

Writing and Progressive Education
Not to be confused with the Progressive Era, the paradigm of Progressive Education has as its spokesperson John Dewey. The transactional theory of composition provided for students an integrated curriculum they called "social sciences" meant to prepare students to "transform the social order into a new community, not to recapture the glory of a past one or merely to oil the gears of the current system" (200). This model was not successful due to conflicts over hard-won professionalism in the academy, parental dissention, differences among followers of Dewey's methods (expressivist individuation vs social reformism). The Deweyan model consists of correlation between disciplines which "carefully balance the interests of the learners and the demands of the discipline" (203).

III. The Postwar Era
After World War II, the growth in institutions of higher learning was staggering, the pace of change accelerated, and the explosion of knowledge multiplied and reinforced disciplinary boundaries.

The Disciplines Enter the Information Age
Upon entering the information age, writing became more transparent to faculty and less important in the classroom through machine scored tests, the proliferation of genres in response to deeper specialization (graduate schools), writing as a means of acquiring (rather than demonstrating) knowledge, specialized vocabulary, developments in business and technical writing, and the communications movement.

The Writing-Across-the Curriculum Movement
1970-1990
Writing-Across-the Curriculum (WAC) developed out of the need for greater access and greater equity. While earlier models of general education employed a cross-curricular writing component, events in the 1960s inspired a WAC movement:

1. The challenge of the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar that Americans follow a rigidly disciplinary and industrial model of higher education rather than "a personal growth model, based on principles of language in operation and creative expression" (273). The personal growth model is characterized by loosely structured classroom talk, dramatic improvisation, and personal response to literature over disciplinary knowledge and grammatical principles.
   
   
2. Ideologies of communitarian vision revived the concept of classroom as community.
   
   
3. Professional identity of writing instruction was validated in the founding of CCCC.
   
   
4. Racial integration, "open" enrollment, GI Bill students, and a growing "middle" class to whom higher education was accessible expanded and diversified the student population.
   
   
5. The need for curricular reform and faculty development (for accountability to the society that supports the institution and employs the "products").
   
   
6. Government and industry became directly involved in those social aspects of education that bore on language and culture.

Newsweek, December 9, 1975 got the fire going under a WAC movement. James Britton of the Dartmouth Seminar provided the research for a theoretical base: "While many teachers recognize that their aim is to initiate students into a mode of analysis, they rarely recognize the linguistic implications of doing so. They do not recognize, in short, that the mental processes they seek to foster are outcomes of a development that originates in speech" (277). Janet Emig supplemented Britton's theory with her investigation of writing to learn ("Writing as a Mode of Learning"). Characteristic of WAC is a student-centered pedagogy and outside funding; however, beyond that there are several experimental versions that vary: core courses, central writing centers or labs, faculty development offices, writing-intensive courses in diverse disciplines, linked courses. Russell admits in his conclusion that "WAC is not a single trend or movement" (307). The strongest resistance to WAC comes from the English department, "who see programs challenging liberal culture's view of writing as an unteachable or infringing on the department's century-old institutional prerogatives" (293). In WAC programs, knowledge and discourse are no longer controlled by disciplinary elites, but WAC exists in a structure that fundamentally resists it: it takes time and reframing of traditional pedagogies, it is not easily quantified, it is difficult to "value" the kinds of teaching and learning that WAC promotes. Writing is often seen as an additional "burden" rather than an intrinsic part of learning. Writing will continue to be transparent and the myth of transience will be powerful among those who do not understand or acknowledge the relationship between writing and the creation and acquisition of knowledge (298).