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."
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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.

Disappearing act

Having now spent two fall semesters in a row trawling the web for research and advice on the teaching of freshman composition, I have come to the conclusion that all useful thinking on the subject ceased in 1985.^*

Prior to 1985, people are thinking and writing all manner of helpful stuff; after 1985 you get the rise of the boss compositionists and the erasure of the sentence.

The compositionists are still busy erasing the knowledge we used to have:

Before: Campus Writing Program | Indiana University - grading; sequenced microthemes; pamphlets for students, etc. Good stuff.

Now:

After: Node Chairs Move Students to New Activity

Honest to God: this is Indiana University's Campus Writing Program, and they've devoted an entire page to a furniture purchase.

^* a proposed factoid that supports my hit-by-a-meteor hypothesis

Meet the new boss

The charge that their research is chaotic does not, of course, disturb the complacency of the boss compositionists. Their easy but empty response is to give chaos an honorific name. Andrea Lunsford sees the nature, the space, of composition studies as "large and loosely bounded, informed by cross-disciplinary, trans-institutional, multiply mediated, multi-geared, multi-voiced, and radically democratic principles" (11) principles which understandably do not console exploited TAs and parttimers.
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by James Sledd

Writing the Essay at Urban Dictionary

I think someone's going to be getting a Writing the Essay mug for Christmas.

AND SEE:
the boss compositionists