Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Mon, 14 Sep 1992 08:40:29 --500
From:         SLATIN@UTXVM.BITNET
Subject:      Re: (Fwd: *C&CD*) Splitting comp

Gail, the question of who initiated the split of Rhetoric & Comp from English
is complicated.  As I understand it (and I was away last spring so I may have
missed something, though I fear not), a campus-wide Committee on the
Undergraduate Experience formed to address a number of concerns (quality of
teaching, availability of classes, etc) first recommended the split; the
President (who as of September 1 is now the Chancellor of the UT System)
endorsed the recommendation in two separate issues of the faculty newsletter.
Apparently there was no response from the English Department, either to the
initial report or to the President's endorsement-- although Jim Kinneavy and
Lester Faigley did go (separately) to the Dean to argue against the idea,
obviously to no avail.  The memo the Department received was in three parts:
(1) a very terse note from the Dept Chair describing the material he was
passing along; (2)a letter from the outgoing President/incoming Chancellor to
the Dean of Liberal Arts, written on his last day as President, effectively
instructing the Dean to proceed with creation of a new Division of Rhetoric &
Composition; and (3) an anonymous document, apparently hastily composed,
outlining the functions, structure, staffing, and responsibilities of the new
Division.

The Division (I'm not certain what kind of entity a Divisision is at UT; we
have things like Departments, PRograms, Centers, Colleges, Schools, all of
which have specific organizational identities or at least characteristics; I
don't know how Divisions are defined, though somethings are evident
contextually) will exist in a difficult relationship with the English
Department: the Division will be headed by a Director, appointed by and
reporting directly to the Dean of Liberal Arts; the Division will have a
budget (size unspecified) and a staff and some faculty lines (number
unspecified, source of funding unspecified), to be recruited (according to the
proposal we received) by the Director and appointed by him/her, presumably in
consultation with the Dean (although the Dean, according to people who;ve
spoken with him recently, has indicated that there will be some sort of
executive committee within the Division); the Division will be responsible for
all undergraduate writing courses (including of course the now-famous 306),
which will continue to be taught primarily by graduate students from the
English Department-- these latter to be admitted by the English Department but
assigned to their teaching posts and trained by the Rhetoric & Comp division.
The Division will also be responsible for teaching the two pedagogy courses
(one for grad students teaching writing for the first time, the other an
undergrad course for prospective high school teachers); otherwise, members of
the Rhetoric & Comp faculty will continue to teach in the English graduate
program.

The Dean at the end of last week said he wanted to move quickly to appoint a
Director and establish a committee to advise on details of the implementation.

This doesn't answer your question, exactly, does it?  Or maybe it does: the
proposal originates with the outgoing President, now the Chancellor, though
for practical purposes (ie from the Departmental perspective) it emanates from
the Dean's office.  So far as I can tell, the department chair is taking no
public position at all; the last two memos we've received from him have been
documents that, like Marianne Moore poems, consist primarily of quotations
from other sources (though in his case there's only one source, and I suspect
he alters the original less drastically than Moore tended to do).

John Slatin
UT Austin
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