Abstract
Tracing the literature on writing conferences during four tension points in higher-education enrollments--the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1970s--the author suggests that conferences have been championed primarily at those moments when students were both more numerous and more diverse, an urge countered, however, by faculty working conditions. Looking at the present, then, he argues that the need for conferencing and the pressures that preclude extensive one-to-one work seem an amalgam of these earlier eras and continue to threaten the teaching-learning ideal that conferences represent.