The Battles of Texas: Adjuncts, Composition, and Culture Wars at UT Austin, by Nate Kreuter and Mark Garrett Longaker

One of the surprises of the history of higher education in the United States is that, after World War II, when the undergraduate project could have moved wholly in the direction of specialized knowledge and technical job training, it did not. Instead, the 1940s and 1950s were a golden age for “general education,” common coursework for students’ holistic development. Few disciplines benefited more from this state of affairs than did English; at many schools, students took a year of freshman composition and a year of sophomore literature—four semesters, a tenth of the undergraduate program. Even after Sputnik, English kept pace. By the mid-1970s, it had retained its central place in the academy.Fifty years later it is hard not to look back and see the discipline diminished. Requirements in writing and literature have been reduced, fewer students major in English, and many departments are half the size they were. True, the field of composition-rhetoric grew during this period, becoming more specialized and diverse. As for first-year writing, what was once a universal requirement met by a uniform syllabus is often today a suite of options delivered in a variety of ways, a project both more sophisticated and more marginal.What happened to the “industrial” project of English composition? According to Nate Kreuter and Mark Garrett Longaker, in The Battles of Texas: Adjuncts, Composition, and Culture Wars at UT Austin, the answer is twofold: economics and politics. As university enrollments ballooned in the 1970s, public funding for higher education began its long decline. Afterward, universities could not afford to teach so much writing to so many students, nor could they continue to teach writing in the same way, for the same ends, to all students. As Kreuter and Longaker note: “The universal requirement required too much labor, and the uniform curriculum invited too much controversy” (144).The authors tell this story through a case study of the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), setting of two of the most dramatic events in higher education in the twentieth century: the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1985, when fifty full-time lecturers in English were let go in one fell swoop, and the “Battle of Texas” in 1990, when a syllabus for first-year writing created such a firestorm that it broke the English Department in two. The episodes reverberated for years afterward, such that Texas became a byword for trouble in composition-rhetoric. At the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Tampa, a twenty-fifth-anniversary panel on the events at UT Austin was packed. The appetite for the story had not been slaked. It is a story that should also be of interest to communication scholars because of its implications for the study and teaching of rhetoric at UT Austin. Indeed, given what it says about the design and administration of general education in the modern American university, the story should be of interest to a wide academic audience.Thanks to Kreuter and Longaker, we finally have a comprehensive book about all this, one that aims both to be true to the events themselves and to amplify their echoes in the present. In the discussions that follow, my fellow reviewers take more penetrating looks at the project. Here, I summarize the story itself, as told in the four body chapters of the book.Chapter 1 introduces us to UT Austin in the mid-1970s, when undergraduates took nine hours of writing in their first three semesters: rhetoric and composition (English 306) in the fall of freshman year, an advanced writing course in the spring, and a writing-intensive literature survey in the fall of sophomore year. This was a major undertaking: some 4,500 students met each of the three requirements every year, 13,500 students total (26). The heart of the effort was English 306, the only universally required course on campus, taught via a “current traditional” approach that focused on grammar, form, and correctness.Fortunately, a new discipline was emerging that offered alternatives. The key figures involved in that discipline at UT Austin were James Kinneavy, a neoclassical rhetorician, and Maxine Hairston, a champion of the “process” paradigm. Kreuter and Longaker write admiringly of the two, who, in their view, tried to accommodate student demands for economic credentials while still steering writing instruction toward civic goods. Around them was a growing community of writing specialists, including John Ruszkiewicz, Lester Faigley, and Steve Witte, overseeing a writing center, a computer lab, a graduate program, funded research projects, and a new journal, Written Communication: “In the early 1980s, rhetoric and composition was riding high at UT Austin” (42).But, as Kreuter and Longaker show, the writing program was unsustainable. One 1980 report recommended remedializing English 306 and giving students a choice of writing courses, including courses based in their majors. But English wanted centralized control. Kinneavy proposed spreading the three requirements over three years, keeping English 306 in the first year and literature and writing in the second but adding a new writing-across-the-curriculum course in the third year: English 346K, taught in four varieties, all through the English Department.When Kinneavy’s proposal was approved, the staffing pressure on English only increased. In 1982, the department was offering 559 writing classes. Tenure-stream faculty taught few of them, and they taught even fewer when their teaching load was reduced from nine to six hours per semester. At the same time, the academic job market collapsed, so that hiring more graduate teaching assistants was not feasible. This was the run-up to the Saturday Night Massacre (covered in chap. 2).English began to hire more full-time lecturers, who were given a four/four teaching load and short-term contracts. In 1982, there were fifty-eight of them. 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