Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language

Class Politics

The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language

2nd Edition

Stephen Parks

Parlor Press

Anderson, South Carolina

www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA

© 2013 by Parlor Press

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language was published in a first edition by the National Council of Teachers of English in 2000.

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parks, Stephen, 1963-

Class politics : the movement for the students’ right to their own language / Stephen Parks. -- Second edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60235-418-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-419-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-420-3 (adobe ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-421-0 (epub)

1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching--Political aspects--United States. 2. Academic writing--Study and teaching--Political aspects--United States. 3. Education, Higher--Political aspects--United States. 4. College students--Political activity--United States. 5. English language--Variation--United States. 6. College students--United States--Language. 7. Interdisciplinary approach in education. I. Title.

PE1405.U6P3 2013

808’.042071173--dc23

2013014400

2 3 4 5

Cover photo (letterpress) @ 2012 by Clint Hild. Used by permission.

Cover design by David Blakesley

Printed on acid-free paper.

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email editor@parlorpress.com. Contents

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments (2000)

Acknowledgments (2013)

Introduction: Class Politics, 2013

Introduction: Rediscovering Class Politics

1 Tracking the Student

2 New Left Politics and the Process Movement

3 Black Power/Black English

4 Locking Horns: The NUC Encounters the MLA, NCTE, and CCCC, 1968–1972

5 The Students’ Right to Their Own Language, 1972–1974

6 A Coup d’Etat and Love Handles, 1974–1983

7 Ozymandias—Creating a Program for the SRTOL

Appendix 1: Students’ Right To Their Own Language

Appendix 2: To the CCCC Executive Committee

Bibliography

Index to the Print Edition

About the Author

to lori

(still)

Foreword

Richard Ohmann

Professor Emeritus, Wesleyan University

Stephen Parks restores politics to the history of composition studies. As he says, scholars have located its formation as a discipline and a profession in the 1960s but have passed lightly over its connections with the social movements that made that decade a pivotal time in our history: civil rights and Black Power, New Left, antiwar, and women’s liberation chief among them. Parks retells a story of great interest, which climaxed in the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s 1974 approval of The Students’ Right to Their Own Language and played out in professional skirmishes long after that date. Here was an organization staking out a new academic domain, amassing the dignity and authority that such a project seeks, yet endorsing a position on dialects and usage that might seem to undermine the standard professional claim to a special body of insider knowledge. Compare the earlier public and self-definition of English as guardian and arbiter of standard usage and grammar. (Are you an English teacher? I’d better watch my grammar.) If every student’s language is well formed and legitimate as is, what does the professionally trained instructor have to contribute? Yes, there were obvious and principled answers: invention, organization, style, and rhetoric’s array of knowledge-based skills. Nonetheless, it strikes me as notable that in the moment of its early ascendancy, the profession’s leaders (and many in its rank and file) relinquished a ground of authority the lay public had largely ceded: that writing instructors knew what was correct, in speech and writing, and could bring the grammar and usage of their clients (i.e., students) up to a recognized standard—curing incorrectness as physicians cured illness.

And the story Parks retells is anomalous in a still more obvious way, set against most other narratives of professionalization. The field of economics was typical. When it organized itself during the first wave of academic professionalism, the American Economic Association distanced itself from the great battles of the time (this was 1886, the year of Haymarket), offering to advance human progress through its research and other practices and help make peace in the conflict between capital and labor (Coats 1988, 358). The founders included partisans of both camps, but the ideal of neutrality prevailed. By 1900, most members of the new profession would have endorsed the view of Arthur T. Hadley of Yale, who in his presidential address held that economics must maintain a dispassionate and critical attitude, that its mission was to be representative and champion of the permanent interests of the whole community, in face of conflicting claims from representatives of temporary or partial ones (Coats 1988, 371). Such language could serve as a touchstone for professional ideology in general. It might then at first seem normal that composition’s most notable public statement, at the time of its professional consolidation, asserted the integrity and equality of all dialects and held that stigmatization of any dialect amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. But in historical context the universalist rhetoric clearly amounted to a defense of African Americans, other minorities, and working-class people, against white, middle- and upper-class domination. I think that’s surprising.

But Parks nicely explains it, and much more. He weaves the story of the 1974 resolution together with that of composition studies as a professionalizing field and sets both against the larger history of 1960s movements, the liberal welfare state, and the Cold War. Working from the fertile hypothesis that more than other disciplines, composition studies owes its current status to counterhegemonic struggles waged around access to higher education, he takes us through the Student Power, civil rights, Black Power, and New Left movements, both as they fought against and tried to extend the principles of the Great Society and as it sought to contain their challenges. He shows in satisfying archival detail that composition was by no means sealed off from these movements. Aside from the broad influence they exercised on university politics throughout the period, they were carried into academic and professional debates by activists trying to remake the university as part of an imagined egalitarian and democratic society. In particular, Parks explores the efforts of the New University Conference to radicalize the professions, and how its work in the CCCC intersected with work already underway by unaffiliated liberals and progressives in the organization. One result was The Students’ Right to Their Own Language. But Parks’ analysis surrounds that particular struggle with a complex and enlightening study of how dissident and radical movements changed academic discourse and—within limits—gave the new profession a shape it would not otherwise have assumed. This is a very different history of composition from the kind that retraces internal contests among rhetorical schools, the evolution of the process movement, and so on, without much reference to racial conflict, Vietnam, and the breakup of postwar liberalism. Parks has made a fine contribution to the history of the field and to academic political history more generally, as well as providing a basis for thought about how and where we all might go from here.

Before I come back to that last subject, a few more reflections on the formation of composition studies. In the pre-professional phase of the field, up through the early 1960s, the CCCC’s main journal (College Composition and Communication) admitted virtually no political discussion—not on anticommunism and the academic witch-hunts, free speech, the Cold War, nor the atomic bomb. But before the end of that decade, when the NUC first entered the lists at CCCC meetings, the journal was addressing a range of issues from the noisy arena of national politics: two-year colleges and egalitarian education, racial oppression, the question of dialect and power, campus uprisings, student power, the rhetoric of confrontation, and almost everything except for Vietnam itself. Furthermore, these political energies spilled over into discussion of teaching practices, classroom hierarchy, standards, grades, and even whether composition can be systematically taught at all. In short, the conventions of authority and dignity a profession would ordinarily call upon to set practitioner apart from client were all interrogated, and in the core venues of the discipline (see Ohmann, in press, for fuller discussion). Class Politics helps explain why. Because the field’s clients included the broadest range of students newly coming into higher education, because many practitioners worked in community colleges and other non-elite institutions, and, I would add, because the CCCC was fighting its way up and out from a subordinate and derogated position within the parent field of English, much support existed there for populist leaders such as Ken Macrorie, Walker Gibson, and Wally Douglass, while new progressive leaders such as Liz McPherson and Greg Cowan emerged directly from the ranks of community college instructors—an institutional circumstance that set composition studies apart from almost every other academic discipline (e.g., computer science) that was professionalizing at this turbulent time.

As for the outcome of Parks’ story so far: The Students’ Right to Their Own Language remained for some years a field of contestation between egalitarians and more traditional professionalizers within the CCCC and NCTE—amended, never abandoned, yet for practical purposes relegated to the archive from which Parks has retrieved it. I am more cheerful than he about the consequences, over time, of this old battle. Although SRTOL never became the foundation on which official CCCC policy would be built or pedagogies developed, the class politics around it have made writing instruction very different from the policing of correctness that stood at its heart in 1960. And in the professional debates that partly constitute composition studies today, left and feminist concerns are respectable, even central, as witnessed by the prominence of scholars and activists such as the late James Berlin, Patricia Bizzell, John Trimbur, Ira Shor, and many others. This not to say that the CCCC is in the vanguard of social change, but to this observer it seems more engaged with questions of justice and equality than other such organizations, and not just at the level of theory. Yes, professional institutions swallow up and co-opt radical energies, but the institutions change as they do this. Hegemony is always to some degree unstable and open to challenge, as Parks well shows.

What encouragement and cautions are there in his study for those composition professionals who would like to work in the antiracist and democratic tradition of SRTOL now? I think he is right that such activists need an organization that spans the academic professions (a coalition of radical caucuses?), has an institutional home, and is capable of the growth and continuity that eluded the NUC. Certainly he is right that composition professionals would have to imagine and create alliances with people from their several communities, based in common interests and political outlooks. To say that, however, is to repeat what we have known and largely failed to achieve for thirty years. Does anything in the economic landscape make its achievement more likely now?

Parks conjectures, in his thoughtful concluding chapter, that universities may no longer be the principal site of knowledge production. I think he identifies a deep change here. Yes, corporations are undertaking more and more in-house training for their employees and also subcontracting that work to other commercial providers of job-related education. They and their workers buy credentialing knowledge from for-profit institutions such as the 100-campus University of Phoenix and from burgeoning on-line providers. They are intervening more aggressively in the research and curricula of traditional universities through innumerable partnerships. These universities themselves, in their efforts to make up for a long decline in public funding, are privatizing the business of knowledge in ways too numerous to mention here. And as is old but still painful news to likely readers of this book, universities rely ever more on an army of casual, low-paid, un-benefited teachers with very different work patterns from the careers that professionals seek. In this context, the academic professions are unwillingly surrendering their privileges, and the walls they built a hundred years ago to differentiate and defend themselves from workers with less intellectual capital are crumbling. The situation of doctors, lawyers, and other nonacademic professionals is similar (see, for instance, Krause 1996).

Perhaps the NUC’s hope of persuading college teachers and graduate students to see themselves as embattled workers and citizens will make more urgent sense in the first decade of the new millennium than it did in 1970. We are already seeing alliances that would have seemed strange only a short while ago: graduate students with hotel and restaurant workers at Yale, teaching assistants with the United Auto Workers in California, academics with other intellectuals and trade unionists (Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice), perhaps radicals across the disciplines (a project of Parks himself, through Teachers for a Democratic Culture). What about academics and corporate knowledge workers or freelancers? Academics and students? Or academics in the sort of community alliance Parks imagines? Time and political work will tell.

Finally, to return to the local terrain of The Students’ Right to Their Own Language: Gramsci once pointed out that when language becomes an explicit political issue, we can be sure we are in the presence of intense and shifting class conflict—to which one might add, for the United States, racial conflict. Parks traces this dynamic at work thirty years ago. Now, with battles over bilingual versus English-only education, phonics and whole language, political correctness in language about gender and race, high-stakes testing for high school students, usage and grammar tests used as disqualifiers for K–12 teachers, and—in a replay of SRTOL—Ebonics, we can be sure that the analysis offered in this book remains pertinent.

References

Coats, A. W. 1988. The Educational Revolution and the Professionalization of American Economics. In Breaking the Academic Mold: Economists and American Higher Learning in the Nineteenth Century, ed. W. J. Barber. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

Krause, Elliott A. 1996. Death of the Guilds: Professions, States, and the Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to the Present. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Ohmann, Richard. 2000. Professionalizing Politics. In History, Reflection and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963–1983, ed. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet. Stamford, Conn.: Elsevier.

Acknowledgments (2000)

In writing these acknowledgments, I need to begin with my family. Without Carole and Clinton Parks, Lois and Joseph Ryan, Chris and Mark Dusch, Greg and Dana Parks, Jessica, Greg, Keri, Kelsey, and Kevin, this book and my current career would not have occurred. Over two hundred pages of academic writing is small recompense for your labor and friendship, but thank-you.

I am also indebted to a working class ethic that valued success in college. Much of my graduate career was marked by short- and long-term engagement with the service economy. While I am not personally responsible for the billions and billions sold, I certainly am not guiltless. I am grateful to all the managers, schedulers, and co-workers who, seeing the possibility of a different life and hoping I would not forget their actions, cut me slack, let me read at work, or covered for me. I am also grateful to Lori Shorr, Carol Kay, and Christine Ross for the political activism which produced affordable child care at the University of Pittsburgh; they made graduate school affordable for me and many other working-class student-parents. I hope that they will all see their values represented.

I have often said that without Gayatri Spivak coming to Pittsburgh, I never would have finished graduate school. She was my first true teacher. Without Jonathan Arac, I would not have wanted to finish graduate school. He was my first true colleague. As I moved into composition studies, David Bartholomae saw how my work could fit into the field. His support has always been a valued part of my graduate and professional career. I am also indebted to supportive friends and colleagues who helped out in countless ways during my time at Pittsburgh: Jim Seitz, Annette Seitz, Arjuna Parakrama, Lisa Schwartz, Sherry Cleary, Carolyn Ball, Nancy Glazener, Valerie Begley, John Groch, Johnny Twyning, Mark Smith, Pia Basudev, David Sidore, Kate Nolan, Donna Dunbar-Odom, Annette Galluze, and Sandy Russo.

Temple University has also proved a wonderfully rich place to develop as a professional. Susan Wells, Eli Goldblatt, Dennis Lebofsky, Dan Tompkins, Lynda Hill, Evelyn Tribble, Dan O’Hara, Robert Caserio, Richard Shusterman, August Tarrier, and Vanessa Allen-Smith have provided unwavering and enthusiastic support. I have also been fortunate enough to encounter and learn from a set of talented graduate and undergraduate students: Rob Callahan, Shawn Christian, John Drake, Suzanne Henderson, Meera Nair, Brian Sammons, Alima Saffell, Mike Carter, Ribu John, Fred Barrett, and Robyn Wilcox. I am also grateful to Dean Carolyn Adams for allowing me to direct the Institute for the Study of Literature, Literacy, and Culture—a site where many of the pedagogical and political ideals in this book are being worked out. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my friends at Teachers for a Democratic Culture: Richard Ohmann, Donald Lazere, Paul Lauter, and Karyn Hollis. They have offered valuable insights on what it means for academics to organize politically.

The book itself would not have been possible without the active help of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Almost from my opening involvement with CCCC, I was fortunate enough to meet individuals such as Richard Lloyd-Jones. At my first CCCC conference, I sought him out to ask a quick question. That quick question turned into years of intellectual support and conversations. I am grateful as well to the many Students’ Right to Their Own Language and New Left participants who have answered questions, supplied documents, and shared insights. The archival staff at NCTE has also been extremely helpful in hunting down lost documents. Steve North was responsible for the draft of these materials being seen by NCTE. Zarina Hock, Michael Greer, and Karen Bojda provided calm and insightful insights on how to pull all of these materials together into book form.

Finally, I want to express my love for Lori, Eliot, Sadie, and Jude. For the past twenty-five years, every day of my life has been happier and more fulfilling than I could ever have imagined. I don’t suppose they will ever fully understand how much I have learned from them and their way of being. Kindness and spiritual calm are rare commodities. They have brought both to my life. I think of my life with them and feel blessed.

Acknowledgments (2013)

Since the publication of Class Politics, I have benefitted from the wisdom and insight of many individuals – some of whom are cited in the new introduction to this book. I want to highlight my colleagues at Syracuse University from whom I have learned tremendously over the past eight years: Lois Agnew, Patrick Berry, Collin Brooke, Kevin Browne, Margaret Himley, Krista Kennedy, Rebecca Moore Howard, Iswari Pandey, Minnie-Bruce Pratt, Eileen Schell, and Tony Scott. I am also fortunate to have encountered and worked with students, such as Brian Bailie, Collette Caton, Tim Dougherty, Ben Kuebrich, Justin Lewis, Katie Navickas, LaToya Sawyer, and Rachael Shapiro. More broadly, I am grateful for the friendship and spirit of collaboration the following individuals have brought into my life: Linda Adler-Kassner, Jonathan Alexander, Adam Banks, John Burdick, Shannon Carter, Ellen Cushman, Jay Dolmage, Diana George, Dala Ghandour, Brian Johnson, Cristina Kirklighter, Kevin Mahoney, Paula Mathieu, Beverly Moss, Deborah Mutnick, Malea Powell, Nick Pollard, Elaine Richardson, Tiffany Rousculp, James Seitz, Ira Shorr, Tiffany Steinwert, John Trimbur, Bill Thelin and Morris Young.

Finally, I am grateful beyond words to Janine Jarvis, Kristi Johnson, Kristen Krause, Chris Palmer, Louann Payne, Faith Plvan, George Rhinehart, and Beth Wagner for their help in managing the many many projects I bring their way.

Introduction: Class Politics, 2013

When I published Class Politics in 2000, I wanted to argue that a conservative disciplinary dust had settled over the activism of the 1960’s, covering over and masking many of the radical actions that had enabled Composition and Rhetoric to establish itself as an independent entity within colleges and universities. As a consequence, the field had become too narrow in its aims and too distanced from the publics and populations that had animated its remarkable growth. Such a distance seemed extremely short-sighted in an era of conservative politics, when many of the programs and initiatives which had resulted in large numbers of non-traditional students entering college, often with federal aid or subsidized student loans, were being slashed. As I have written elsewhere, these policies seemed particularly present in my life as peers and classmates found themselves slowly unable to afford college. In such a context, our field’s focus on disciplinary identity seemed misplaced.

With this in mind, I wanted to produce a dissertation that would be an argument about the responsibilities of Composition and Rhetoric faculty toward the student vanishing from their classroom – working class and working poor students of diverse heritages. I now recognize that community colleges had (and maintain) a historical commitment to such students, however troubled that history might be in practice. Vanishing, that is, was more a phenomenon within four-year colleges. At that time, however, the intent of my dissertation and, eventually, Class Politics was to examine a previous moment, a time when activism seemed central to an emergent cadre of the field’s instructors, using it to create an historical bridge to the current period. I hoped to persuade my generation of graduate students to invest their efforts within this larger history of activism, clearing space for a new set of arguments about our professional responsibilities to emerge as a critique of the then present narrow professionalism – class politics over class curricula, student interests over disciplinary status. Clearly, this was a bit of a grandiose goal, but I thought (and still believe) grandiose goals, coupled with humility and hope, are often how movements for change begin.

I chose the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution as a topic of study because it struck me as the most radical and persuasive document about the political responsibilities of faculty for its time period, the early 1970’s, which could also speak to the then-current moment, the late 1990’s. It appeared to be not only the clearest statement about the role of Composition and Rhetoric’s commitment to students in the classroom, but also what should be our field’s commitment to the knowledges and beliefs within the communities that they call home. During the course of my research, I tried to develop a more complex understanding of the document, demonstrating how its production reflected a particular historical moment, a particular reaction to a unique set of political and social forces. I then attempted to project the initial power of the document into a call for political activism for the new millennia – with all the attendant issues of trying to make such claims on the future. Despite any hesitations expressed about the final status of Students’ Right in my dissertation and this book, as I discuss below, my memory of the initial animating moment of reading the resolution would frame much of my career.

As I began to encounter the documents surrounding the Students’ Right, I was particularly struck by Richard Larson’s phrasings in letter sent to CCCC members concerning the resolution’s origins. In an otherwise precise recounting of the resolution’s development within CCCC, Larson does not mention any of the social or political forces that might have led to the need for such a resolution. Those forces, as I argued in Class Politics, were radically orientated Composition and Rhetoric instructors, the impact and successes of the white and Black student activists, and the profound influence of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. (As will be discussed below, my framing did not include many of the other political/social movements then occurring.) The attempt to turn a product of an age of progressive and radically oriented activism into a bureaucratic sounding disciplinary narrative seemed to me emblematic of a general damping down of an unruly past in the name of professional respectability. I wanted to use this moment, then, to open up an alternative history through which to frame our field.

I made the deliberate decision to focus on the paper trail of the Students’ Right resolution. While many of the individuals were (and are) still alive, I was interested in how key tropes of the student circulated or failed to circulate across different contexts; I wanted to learn if the publications and invocations of the student generated by Civil Rights, Black Power, New Left contexts traveled to academic meetings and journals. In part, I wanted to indirectly trace how such documents – key at their time – had been erased from our collective disciplinary archive. In part, I wanted to make an argument about the need to establish a new type of archive for the field that would save these documents for future scholars. (As I discuss below, my work with Cristina Kirklighter and Samantha Blackmon on the Working and Writing for Change project represents one attempt to create such an archive.).

I also decided early on that Class Politics would move from a focus on nationally-based protest movements, such as the Civil Rights movement, towards how national faculty organizations responded. I would weave existent documents from these organizations into a matrix through which to ultimately examine how the production of one specific document, the Students’ Right resolution, framed the political role of writing teachers and the political rights of writing students. It is for this reason that the narrative of Class Politics does not ultimately move to how the resolution was implemented in classrooms across the country – as it most certainly was and is being implemented. It is also why the discussion of specific moments of the resolution’s creation are embedded within a circulation of organizational or national rhetorics of student/activism of the time period. Within Class Politics, participants served as nodal points for how national political debates were intersecting with the pedagogical and disciplinary debates within our field. That is, people stood as place markers for larger debates; not as unique individuals or, necessarily, individually located scholars. While I didn’t necessarily want to blunt the role of individual activism (or personality), I didn’t want individual agency to be seen as the driving force of social, political, or disciplinary change.

New University Conference, an interdisciplinary organization of former New Left undergraduate student activists who had become graduate students or faculty, served as the lever through which to connect the national political activism occurring in the 1960’s with elements of radical politics within Composition/Rhetoric. In part, the fact of its emergence out of the internal dynamics of Students for a Democratic Society and its goal of politicizing the disciplines made it an important moment of academic activism. Its attempt to foster a debate about language rights within CCCC, offering one of numerous starting points for the SRTOL, also provided a means to show how our own professional organizations, such as MLA, NCTE, and CCCC, responded to such actions. More generally, focusing on NUC allowed me to demonstrate the ways in which national attempts by progressive academic organizations continually fail due to lack of funds, organization, and internal disagreements. The NUC was not a success story, then, but rather a call to turn such efforts towards more local and embedded activism both within disciplines (such as caucuses or special interest groups) and within communities (such as local activist campaigns, of which SDS’s Economic Research and Action Project was one troubled example noted in the book). This seemed an important argument to make to the field at the time.

This was not the only critique of progressive academic work. Race is a central concern of Class Politics. Throughout the opening chapters, I continually attempt to demonstrate how many of the actions of white student activists were dependent upon and learned from Civil Rights activists. This argument is expanded to include the influence of Black Power on how white progressives framed the identity of the student in their classroom. Here my central argument was that the Civil Rights movement and Black Power rhetoric/imagery were appropriated and mis-used by many composition scholars, who too often used a legacy of oppression and political struggle within the African-American community to characterize the situation of white middle class students in freshman writing – Ken Macorie being the central figure in such arguments. And here, I also note that the NUC was, in some ways, one of the generative organizers for such arguments, using racial oppression to wedge in issues of class oppression. Rather than attempting to articulate a connection that worked to voice these dual oppressions, too many composition scholars used the arguments of Black power to ventriloquize middle class angst as class oppression. Class Politics does not so much praise the NUC or such compositions scholars, but offer up such rhetoric as a cautionary tale.

I was also hoping to demonstrate that key organizing terms within this debate, such as Black English, were sites of contestation, being endlessly revised and rearticulated depending on the particular position of the writer/activist. There was, in effect, a struggle between linguists, composition teachers, community activists, and political organizations to define the literacy codes of a certain community. The impact of this struggle had both pedagogical and political implications. In this way, I wanted to suggest that one of the strengths of the production of Black English was the ability of individuals and activists to activate that term in the name of larger political struggles despite counter attempts (however seemingly benevolent) to place these literacy patterns in other contexts. Rather than see any set of literacy strategies as essentially defined, then, I wanted to highlight the power struggles necessary to take a particular speaking pattern and create a progressive context around its use. In this way, Black English also stood as a means by which to generalize the struggles required by similarly literacy rich communities hoping to secure cultural and political legitimacy.

There were strengths to this approach. A political lens was placed upon the production of our professional identity that had previously only been focused on our role as teachers/scholars. Class Politics demonstrated through archival documentation the extent to which our work reflects and refracts larger political discussions, suggesting faculty enact a dual commitment to the students’ identity and community as a place from which to base our actions as activist teacher/scholars. In doing so, the method of drawing connections between the framing of the student and such political discussions, also enabled a critique of how our progressive pedagogies had, at times, distorted or appropriated social movements for ends that were not aligned with the movement’s original broader demands for social change. Here Class Politics demanded a greater fealty to the goals of local, communal, and national politics within our classrooms. This was a tough position for faculty to enact in the 1990’s when conservative organizations, such as the National Association of Scholars, was launching attacks against even the mildest form of socially responsive curriculum and the field itself was trending toward a more conservative vision of its work. Still, I hoped by articulating a historical precedent for such roles, some support would be offered.

More immediately for my colleagues in the field, I hoped that the methodological focus on politics – as both a classroom and activist practice – might support discussions about how our then existing histories of the field were narrow in intent and exclusive in their sources. In Class Politics, I offer a critique of Berlin’s histories, pointing to how neither of his texts fully engage with the political terrain in which our field emerged, relying more on scholarly connections then political activists to explain our origins. I wanted to expand the possibilities. By focusing on some of the largest political movements of the 1960’s, then, I was also attempting to stake out territory which would support the work of other scholars, those attempting to show that the field was not just the result of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and the New Left, but the result of other national efforts, such as the Native American Movement, United Farmworkers of America, the Stonewall Protests, ACT-UP, and the Equal Rights Amendment, among others. I was aware that each of these movements had their counterpart within NCTE and CCCC in the form of Special Interest Groups and Caucuses—organizations such as the Latino Caucus, Queer Caucus, Native American Caucus, Labor Special Interest Group among others. By creating a broad framework of national politics linked to local professional activism, I hoped to support such future historical work.

In retrospect, I can now see that by not actively including these histories within Class Politics, I reinforced a narrative which fosters the exclusion of these identities from our field, a narrative which positions them as not fully central to the essence of our work as teachers, scholars, and activists. While I want to maintain that the methodological framework would have enabled (and demanded) such a broad focus, I do not want to let my book slip out so easily from accounting for such an absence. Instead, I would want to argue that while I tried to create arguments which would open up debates about our political responsibilities of our field, I was also a product of my time period – a period in which there was insufficient attention paid to how our history was multiple in origin, how a focus on published scholars, professional organizations, and committee reports would actually re-instantiate an absence which was being actively confronted outside the official discourses of our field. I rested too easily in critiquing elements of white progressivism, missing other blindnesses inherent in the argument I was creating within Class Politics.

That is, by focusing too exclusively on political and institutional moments which had some traction in the field (there were at least suggestions of how the Civil Rights Movement enabled our current work), my book did not support the scholars/activists trying to further expand and legitimate equally important historical connections. As I came to this realization, I made a conscious decision to not revise Class Politics. Doing so struck me as both engaging in a bit of convenient hindsight revisionism as well as missing the need for a more systemic revisionism within our field. That is, revising my book struck me as overvaluing one book in the face of long-term and systemic historical neglect.

Instead, with Cristina Kirklighter and Samantha Blackmon, I have put my efforts into creating Working and Writing For Change, an archival effort which creates on-line documentary records, video shorts, and audio interviews of activist as well as organizational efforts by C’s caucuses, special interest groups, and committees. This effort represents one way to situate our field within a broader sense of its political origins. Accompanying this on-line record will also be a series of published histories on individual activists and caucuses. Our first book, Listening to our Elders will soon be followed by a republication of Marianna White Davis’ History of the Black Caucus of The National Council of Teachers of English, after which will follow a history of the Asian/Asian American Caucus, culminating with additional histories of other caucuses. My hope is that when the publications of Working and Writing for Change are placed next to other histories, such as Class Politics, a more enriched vision of the work of our elders will be presented and a stronger argument about our role as disciplinary and community activists will be articulated.

The Working and Writing for Change project also grew out of the response by the Black Caucus to Class Politics. When my book was first published, the Black Caucus sent a letter to NCTE Press arguing Class Politics failed to represent the significant role the caucus had played in the development of the Students’ Right. Moreover, by focusing on the NUC as an origin for the Students’ Right, they argued my book did not account for the longer history of the Black Caucus advocating for an expansive respect and support of a student’s language. As detailed by James Hill, in Listening to our Elders, Writing and Working for Change, as well as Marianna Davis’s History of the Black Caucus, one of the impetuses for the Caucus was the appearance of white scholars at NCTE and CCCC, often possessing few credentials, talking about Black English and African-American identity to the exclusion of African-American professors who had this knowledge and experience. Given this history of exclusion, I understood how my book, published by NCTE, could be read as part of this historical context.

The Black Caucus requested the book be removed from circulation or a note be added that Class Politics did not represent an official history. NCTE defended the book on the grounds of academic freedom, refusing to meet their requests. I only heard about this debate months afterwards, just prior to the C’s annual meeting. When Caucus members sponsored a panel at CCCC that year, detailing their critique of the book, I made sure to be in attendance and, to varying degrees of success, responded to their concerns about the methodology of the book, while also offering to support their broad concerns about NCTE and CCCC. I do not want to claim the Caucus was satisfied on either account. Personal responses cannot address systemic claims. From these critiques, a debate soon ensued in scholarly journals on whether my book had adequately accounted for the role of the Black Caucus, but also