Urges compositionists to reframe Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) to reach beyond university boundaries. Reviews calls for an expanded conception of WAC, describes a program that carries writing instruction and literacy research beyond university boundaries, and suggests problems and benefits that may accompany this change of orientation for writing programs.

Argues a need to reposition Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) theory. Examines current myths about WAC. Discusses what WAC is, what it does, and what it can become.

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Literacy instruction or the lack of it has a wide range of social consequencespolitical, economic, cultural. These consequences are most obvious when the members of some community are forbidden by law to learn to read-as, for example, blacks were in states of the antebellum South-in order to prevent them from raising their social standing and posing a political, economic, or cultural threat to the dominant community. More subtle but equally pervasive consequences stem from restrictions on advanced forms of literacy. In modern urbanindustrial society, less visible barriers to achieving advanced literacy also preserve the integrity and status of existing communities and limit access to coveted social roles. That process, however, like modern society itself, is much more complex than the crude legal bans on literacy common in agrarian societies.

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In the new world of writing across the curriculum, English departments are still trying to find their role. They have been in charge of writing instruction for so long that they often feel that they should institute, or at least lead, writingacross-the-curriculum programs. But I want to argue that the English department should have no special role in writing across the curriculum-no unique leadership role and no exclusive classes to teach-not even freshman composition. Instead, a writing-across-the-curriculum program should be designed, administered, and taught equally by all departments. True writing across the curriculum should be based on dialogue among all the departments, and, in this dialogue, the English department should be only one of the voices.

I am coming on my twentieth year of teaching composition to college freshmen, and my fifteenth administering a composition program. These anniversaries incite me to think about the circles we who teach writing have perambulated in that time-to count the ways we have, for worse and better, changed how we shape composition programs, how we manage those programs, and how we teach the courses in them. From the fifties through my days as a student and then as a new teacher, rhetoric-meaning the analysis and presentation of arguments-dominated college composition programs. But at many colleges then, the English requirement included a literature survey, and composition programs often and awkwardly stirred rhetoric and literature in one pot. For example, research papers were on literary topics, an approach that encouraged publishers to produce hundreds of excellent casebooks, all recycled long ago. The rhetorical lion and literary lamb did not get on amicably, however. They tussled. The lamb often turned wolfish. The experiential programs of the early seventies-with their emphasis on narration and description, on journal writing, on films and visual arts as aids to invention-were a victory for the literateurs, and their last hour. For then came graduate programs in composition, and the gospel of process was heard in the land. Rhetoric-now meaning heuristic strategies-ascended. Literature became, and has remained, a negligible part of most composition programs. And today, as the slogan Writing Across the Curriculum is blazoned on textbook covers and eagerly mouthed by deans who see a way to save a buck, literaturemeaning the study of fiction, drama, and perhaps even (though that's radical) poetry for their own sweet sakes-dwindles to a thin shade in freshman writing

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