A brief history of the compositionists

In this necessarily brief essay, I argue again that the supposed revolution in composition has in fact been a conventional campaign for academic status and privilege-a campaign that has eventuated in a culture richly comic. Instead of the compositionists' struggle for upward mobility in the academic pecking order, I propose 1) a meltdown of academia's detestable frozen hierarchies by the abolition of rank and tenure, 2) the formation of militant, inclusive unions of faculty with staff to battle swarming administrators in corporatized education, and 3) the serious teaching of the general-purpose prose that our students need and our colleagues want. Proposal, of course, isn't prophecy; but something is accomplished just by speaking the officially unspeakable-namely, that composition's "revolution" has left all the old hierarchies intact while producing a new group of hierarchs, the boss compositionists. I make no apologies for undignified concern with maligned Freshman English, a course whose careful teaching is infinitely more important than the further development of "composition theory."
Return to Service
by James Sledd

where is Vlorbik?

I predict V is going to LOVE this thing....

Reading that blurb closely, I take it as evidence for my conclusion that upward mobility for a minority of lower managers has been mistaken for deep change. The mobile managers-good professionals sincerely devoted to high principle-have lacked only the imagination to escape professionalism. They've made themselves upwardly mobile, but in so doing they've duplicated the wider society's division into haves and haven'ts. They now are boss compositionists, overseers (obishas) on Pomocompo, the plantation of postmodern composition. Under their administration, exploited field hands (TAs, part-timers, and untenurables) still teach the vast majority of the thousands of sections of the freshman course in writing.

Rip-roaring.