by Amy J. Wan
Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center
For those of us in rhetoric and composition who are interested in archival research and history, the Dartmouth exhibit represents the kind of project that we should work to produce more often. Alongside contemporary framing, interviews, and resources, this digital exhibit provides open access to historical documents that once were only available if you had the means to travel. In addition to creating a sense of how the event influenced the trajectory of the field, the value of this exhibit is that it allows researchers to access these documents without needing to travel, responding to the current conditions of scholars—not just those with research budgets but also those of us who aren’t faculty at research institutions, contingent faculty, and graduate students. Who can speak and tell the histories of our field relies on who has access to these kinds of documents. And these same questions about access is central to thinking about Dartmouth as part of the histories of US composition, ones that have been tracked and traced and analyzed by scholars like Carmen Kynard, James Berlin, Robert Connors, and Sharon Crowley, among many others.
When I was a graduate student, Joseph Harris’s A Teaching Subject was one of the first texts I was assigned and read back in 2002 or it might have been 2003. Dartmouth provided a contemporary starting point for the field, and this was the first time that I had ever heard of its existence. As someone whose first teaching experience was at SUNY-Binghamton as a master’s student, the lineage of present-day composition that I had learned was about basic writing and open admissions. Dartmouth was completely new to me.
As I learned, the spate of histories of the field that were being widely read in the aughts when I was in graduate school were about solidifying the narrative of the field as one with a history and therefore, legitimacy. Centering the Ivy League through Dartmouth seemed like a continuation of Harvard and other elite institutions as the center of the field, although, as the documents will tell you, the location had more to do with convenience to both US and UK participants, as well as a desire to keep the proceedings distraction-free.
The familiar narrative told by these histories is a cyclical one about new students who come in and don’t know how to write. This narrative began at Harvard, continued in the late 1960s and 70s during open admissions, and was certainly happening in the mid-20th century during the post-war boom of students, which fueled the conversation at Dartmouth in 1966. The proposal for the seminar, which is included in the exhibit, talks about how both the US and UK share concerns about “disadvantaged children who have not been able to develop the command of language which they need for normal social and educational motivation” (4). The new students, whoever they are in each era, provide a catalyst for thinking about who belongs, who is prepared, and as a result, rethinking what writing teachers are doing. During this time, the burgeoning civil rights movement and the growth of numbers of people of color, of international students, of people who were emergent bilinguals in higher education all began to influence who these new students were.
But relatedly, I’m interested in the investment being put into higher education, into the teaching of English and writing, and how this was part of a movement to connect literacy and nationalism and citizenship in higher education, to move higher education away from being an elite resource and more of a public good. My 2022 self is shocked by the idea of the Carnegie foundation contributing $150,000 to fund a four-week seminar (the equivalent of $1,371,162.04 today), especially in today’s world of tiny grants for humanities. Grants of that size seem only to drive STEM projects these days (although the exhibit also tells us in the headnote of the 1977 report that Carnegie spent more than a decade trying to get a final report out of the organizers so maybe that gives us a clue). The importance of this kind of consolidation, a centralized and sponsored meeting, says much about the role and influence of higher education as an institution, as well as the potential and import of writing itself as a practice/skill. It is hard to imagine this kind of centralized concern about coherence of the way people are writing and being taught to write that would bring this level of funding today. Imagine an equivalent seminar that would happen, one in which people were brought to think through the purpose of our field and the way we teach in a sustained and collaborative way, not atomized into 20-minute conference presentations, each speaking to 5-30 people.
Of course, this kind of centralized event means that some people participate and some people don’t. A similar symposium today would not look like the way Dartmouth did. One way to imagine the Dartmouth seminar and its continued importance is parallel to the way it’s important to study whiteness and other dominant cultures–how did the main narratives of the field come to be? Which ones were the ones given power, space, and influence? And this exhibit gives an opportunity to try to answer those questions in relation to our field at its foundations. I appreciate Annette Vee’s context in her introductory essay to the exhibit, that what happened at Dartmouth shouldn’t just be taken at face value and as a space where the field was consolidated and moved forward. This is what history and historiographical work is. She cites her interview with Paul Olson, which is part of the exhibit, who described Dartmouth as “a lively gathering—lubricated by alcohol, strong personalities, ideological commitments, longstanding disagreements, and even romance” (Paul Olson interview with the author, 6/2/20): this sounds like the David Lodge campus trilogy novels—a reminder of the clubby place that academia was and still is and the ways that the bringing in of new voices can be painful and also needs to be intentional.
When I look through the exhibit, it’s a fascinating glimpse into what higher education was but also what the higher education of today is built on. These values of nationalism and neocolonialism still hold today but they’re just expressed and practiced differently. These questions and contrasts are things I might underscore to graduate students as they look through these documents—the proposal for the seminar itself and the way it self-described its value is fascinating and revealing. And as people who are part of the institution—whether as a student, a faculty member, an administrator—we would be wise to know what that history is, to understand how these values continue undergird what we’re up to today.
Works Cited
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966. New edition. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012.
Kynard, Carmen. Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies. Albany: SUNY Press, 2013.