There’s a useful debate happening at Inside Higher Ed and at One Flew East over William Major’s article on the teaching of composition in the academy. What it really looks like is a pissing match. Professors Gerald Nelms and Tim Mayers chide Professor Major for supposedly not knowing the important literature relating to composition and rhetoric studies. Mayers even goes so far as to accuse Major or being ignorant of the work being done in the field. Nelms provides a catalogue of where he thinks Major goes wrong.
Major responds that Nelms seemed to have read a different essay. He points out that by moving some of the literature professors into the classroom they might take a new appreciation for the teaching of writing (and learn something along the way). More importantly, they would have to move out of the lofty graduate seminar and into the trenches. This might, Major argues, leave us with fewer Ph.Ds and more jobs.
One gets the sense that the rhetoric/comp folks are a little sensitive about the matter. I’m not sure–and it’s not clear from the article–what Major knows or doesn’t know about rhet/comp theory. But Mayers and Nelms would seem to have some kind of institutional ax to grind (as well as being able to read minds). They may be feeling that they aren’t getting their due, that as composition experts their ideas are still being ignored–especially by literature folks. Maybe they are secretly tired of the whispers in the hallway that what they’re doing really isn’t worthwhile (the same way that professors of education have to swallow it).
Some of the books Mayers cites as evidence of Major’s ignorance make the point–as Major does–that writing departments have historically been relegated to the back of the bus. It seems to me that Major’s article wants to change this fact. Too bad Nelms/Mayers and others didn’t get it.
Addendum: Mayers replies to The Grumpy Academic here.
