Contributors to this symposium recall and reflect on changes of mind they have experienced, noting the relationship of these to larger concerns of English studies as a profession.

Traditional narratives about composition and rhetoric in modern American universities need to be complicated through analyses of what has happened to these subjects at particular institutions. For a case study, the author examines Joseph Villiers Denney’s work in establishing and sustaining a department of rhetoric at The Ohio State University.

Empathy is a much-discussed term in the humanities these days. While some critics value it and argue that literature desirably promotes it, other critics worry that appeals to this emotion will neglect important matters of social context. In the literature classroom, the best approach is to take time to consider how texts complicate the impulse to empathize.

The author examines the circumstances and rhetoric of two petitions by Japanese Hawaiians, among them her grandfather, who were interned on the U.S. mainland during World War II. In particular, she explains how these writers were arguing for political subjectivity and voice within the discourse of their oppressors.

Reviewed are The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand and No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom by Cary Nelson.

Rather than simply invoke citizenship as an ideal for their students to achieve, writing instructors should address the various possible meanings of the term, which represent divergent traditions of political thought.

We should make the case that literary study has traditionally been, and continues to be, an effective gateway into the cross-cultural awareness that a truly global campus needs. At the same time, we should draw upon our own pedagogical history to ensure that our institutions of learning do not reinforce the neo-imperialism of cultural globalization. In fact, since World War II, calls for teaching world literature have been tied to shifting moral imperatives.

The author describes an undergraduate course he has taught on U.S. literature about poverty, but he also expresses doubt that such courses can help produce major social change.

When students write descriptions of their writing process for portfolios, they represent their experience rather than simply convey it, and their teachers can usefully analyze these representations by drawing on Hayden White’s theory of tropes.

Reviewed are Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan, and Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Alexis E. Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa S. Mastrangelo.

Although Japanese Americans’ concept of gaman has been stereotypically associated with silent passivity, several practiced this principle as a form of resistance in personal writings about the U.S. government’s incarceration of them during World War II.

The authors discuss courses in which they examined with students female rhetors’ historical presence in the public imagination, investigating how rhetorical work has inscribed these women into public memory and erased them from it.

By understanding the verbal and nonverbal manifestations of autism as a rhetorical imperative “a perspective that involves applying Krista Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening” scholars can do much to dissolve the idea of otherness that appears in discussions of this topic.

Reviewed are Academic Writing and Plagiarism: A Linguistic Analysis by Diane Pecorari; My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture by Susan D. Blum; and Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies, edited by Rebecca Moore Howard and Amy E. Robillard.

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In American ecopoetics, resonance (a term from systems theory) is in many ways a desirable replacement for the dead metaphorical commonplace reflection, but an even stronger alternative requires serious questioning of the field’s romantic and transcendentalist traditions, as well as increased attention to the physical and political contexts of writing.

Drawing on work logs kept by participants, the authors report and analyze a project at their university in which contingent faculty recorded the amount of work they actually performed during a week. The authors also recommend ways to enhance the working conditions of such faculty.

Reviewed are Basic Writing by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk; Basic Writing in America: The History of Nine College Programs, edited by Nicole Pepinster Greene and Patricia J. McAlexander; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960 by Kelly Ritter; The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley; and The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction by Shannon Carter.

The authors report on and analyze a survey they conducted of staffing in college professional and technical communication courses. In addition, they make recommendations for better treatment of contingent faculty who teach such courses.

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about contingent faculty’s relations with other faculty and with the academic institution as a whole.

First published in 1985, David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” has become perhaps the most often cited and discussed essay in composition studies. On the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary, the editor of College English interviews Bartholomae about the essay’s background, subsequent reception, and continued impact.

Drawing on their recent interviews with various scholars who were involved, the authors review the history of the highly significant Wyoming Resolution and analyze its subsequent impact on conditions for contingent faculty.

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about how contingent faculty might improve their working conditions through various kinds of alliances.

Arguing against the emphasis of traditional U.S. composition classes on linguistically homogeneous situations, the authors contend that this focus is at odds with actual language use today. They call for a translingual approach, which they define as seeing difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening.

The guest editors preview the contents of this special issue on contingent faculty and identify key concerns that have been raised by English studies’ (and the overall academy’s) reliance on such instructors

The theory of bullshit put forth by philosopher Harry Frankfurt needs to be critiqued from the perspective of rhetorical theory, which can take into account how the identification of bullshit involves analyzing speaker, content, and audience as well as the interactions of these elements. More specifically, bullshit can be seen as an indifferent tampering with conventions of politeness, which makes it the antithesis of the kind of rhetoric we should teach.

Today’s composition courses should consider rhetorical strategies historically used by working-class movements, especially because this class still exists despite popular misconceptions that the world has fully entered a post-Fordist era.

Drawing on the case of a student of his who, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, simply preferred not to write, the author argues that current celebration of technology encourages passive resistance. He emphasizes that authentic, productive classroom experiences derive from in-person interactions that directly connect in relevant ways to students’ lives.

This policy statement from a committee of the NCTE College Section identifies problems with the discipline’s dependence on contingent faculty and makes recommendations for better treatment of them.

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about contingent faculty’s relations with the profession of English studies in general.

Judy Garland’s correspondence with magazines and fans in the early 1950s serves as a case study of rhetorical strategies that might operate in celebrity life writing aimed at reparation and self-justification.

The malcliché, far from being the throwaway material of unfortunate misspeak, and far from being the ugly stepchild of something already detestable, can be a vital source of new semantic complexity as well as an unconscious artistic creation worthy of our attention.

Self-disclosure should be not given some special status in student writing or in teaching. Nor should it be employed simply because it is an alternative to more traditional academic discourses. Instead, self-disclosure should be evaluated with the same rigor and respect that we bring to those other discourses, and should be employed only when it is an equally good or better rhetorical choice.

By examining how a group of poets judged particular contemporary poems, the authors identify the aesthetic criteria that often inform such evaluations.

Recalling moments when he appeared in court or participated in similar proceedings, the author argues that English professors must be ready to defend the values they represent.

Through an account of how his own students analyzed Ira Sher’s short story “The Man in the Well,” the author calls for teachers of literature to value and attend to their classes’ misreadings rather than replace them with corrective interpretations. He argues that probing these misreadings enables one to see the limits imposed by any single correct understanding and to glimpse the richness of the potential text.

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Through an ethnographic investigation of how two different groups form biliterate relationships in the quest for legal immigration papers, the author examines how literacy and assimilation function in light of the changing writing demands of contemporary immigrant life.

Recent movies and television programs frequently depict the English professor as a dangerously seductive man associated with sexual transgression and other illicit temptations. This stereotype reveals a widespread ambivalence, a fascination intermingled with distrust, generated specifically by figures who preside over the study of literature in the academy.

In facing policymakers who are pressuring us for objective assessment of our programs, we should not assume that a narrow set of traditional scientific methods and conventions will guarantee acceptance of our knowledge claims. Nor should we assume that our methods and methodologies that fall outside those tight boundaries will be unfairly treated. Rather, we need to have at our disposal the full range of what we know and how we know it as we engage with such policymakers, who—like the rest of us—are sometimes moved in mysterious ways.