He was professor emeritus of English at Brooklyn College, where he taught for many years and at various times directed the first-year English program, founded and directed the writing center, and directed the Scholars Program and Honors Academy. He is an exemplary figure for writing center and composition scholars because he was instrumental in establishing and conceptualizing peer tutoring in the teaching of writing. Bruffee began experimenting with peer tutoring in the 1970s as a response to the open-admissions policies that almost overnight brought hundreds of underprepared students to City University of New York campuses. Peer tutoring, he discovered, worked surprisingly well in that context. Properly prepared and situated, undergraduate student tutors

A Short Course in Writing provides a good occasion to ask what makes a textbook in rhetoric and composition a classic. The fact that Bruffee's book is among the first to appear in the Longman Classics in Rhetoric and Composition series cannot be attributed, after all, to its commercial success. In his review of the original manuscript of A Short Course , Richard Beai, the most prominent English editor at the time, told Paul O'Connell, who published the first edition at Winthrop in 1972, that Bruffee could either alter the book and sell a lot of copies or publish the book as is and make history.1 What Beai predicted has indeed come to pass. As A Short Course appeared in subsequent editions (the 2nd from Winthrop in 1980; the 3rd from Little Brown in 1985; and the 4th from HarperCollins in 1993), it has influenced, far out of proportion to its sales, the actual practices of writing instruction and, more broadly, of educational reform in U.S. college composition.

most people associated with writing centers have devoted most, if not all, of their time and energy to keeping their programs alive and healthy. But in the future we predict that writing centers will assume a more prominent role in researching not only writing and writers but also more general undergraduate research issues, such as retention and assessment. It is our hope that writing centers will also increasingly be viewed and valued as sites for research. We sincerely believe that writing centers are poised to assume a more prominent role in the institutions and communities in which they exist. Increasingly, writing centers are no longer seen as supplementary but as programs that are central to the mission of the school and essential to its being competitive in terms of attracting and retaining students. Opportunities for fund-raising, grants, and community involvement frequently accrue to writing centers. Some writing centers have begun literacy projects that might, with concerted effort, lead to a network similar to the National Writing Project. Thus, in the future, writing centers could have a synergistic effect on literacy nationwide. Clearly, our vision of the future of writing centers is optimistic, but we believe it can be a reality. The years of existing in the margins, struggling to survive, may not be completely over for every writing center, but certainly most writing centers are now enjoying the fruits of those early years of labor. Writing Center Work: An Ongoing Challenge

When we teach, we tell a story to our students and to ourselves, a story about the acquisition of knowledge. The telling of this tale is what we usually refer to as pedagogy. A syllabus, in this view, is a kind of fiction inhabited by nonfictional characters who journey together through the plot of the story. Every syllabus, of course, tells a slightly different tale. However, when a syllabus is codified into a textbook-that most maligned of literary genres-it begins to resemble something more akin to what Jean-Franvois Lyotard calls a master narrative, a story around which other are constructed. According to Lyotard, even in an age of science, narration is the quintessential form in which how-to knowledge is established and transmitted. I would argue that in the largely literate and institutionalized societies of the West, textbooks provide us with many of these culturally essential of knowledge. In this essay I propose to anatomize the stories that four influential composition textbooks tell, both to reveal their pedagogical and epistemological suppositions and also to uncover the master narratives that give their theories of writing consequence and shape. The four texts are Rhetoric: Discovery and Change by Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike; ForminglThinking/Writing by Ann Berthoff; Teaching Composing by William Coles; and A Short Course in Writing by Kenneth A. Bruffee. In the case of these four, at least, the tale told follows the ancient pattern of heroic adventure, a pattern of separation, initiation, and return. Joseph Campbell's comparative study of eastern and occidental mythologies, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, identifies a basic form of this heroic story, the monomyth.

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