Harvard, Again: Considering Articulation and Accreditation in Rhetoric and Composition’s History

Abstract

First-year composition emerged at Harvard largely because of administrative attempts to address institutional, as opposed to pedagogical, issues. In particular, Harvard administrators sought to improve articulation with public high schools in order to increase enrollments, attract new populations of students, and retain matriculants. First-year composition provided a mechanism for doing so. Because of first-year composition’s value for articulation, it was endorsed by accreditation associations and consequently spread across the country as accreditation did. Articulation and accreditation were not expressly concerned with writing instruction, but they ultimately had profound effects on the development of writing instruction in American higher education.

Notes

1. ¹Many thanks to Matthew Heard, Kyle Jensen, Maureen Daly Goggin, Judy Holiday, and Rhetoric Review reviewers David Fleming and Duane Roen for their invaluable feedback on drafts of this essay. Thanks are also due to the University of North Texas’s Office of Research and Economic Development, College of Arts and Sciences, and English Department for funding my visit to Harvard. Harvard’s archivists have my gratitude for their help in locating and accessing materials.

2. ²The Harvard narrative can be briefly summed up as follows: 1869: Charles W. Eliot is appointed president at Harvard and gives his famous inaugural speech lamenting “the prevailing neglect of the systematic study of the English language” (“Inaugural” 2).1872: Adams Sherman Hill, presumptive creator of first-year composition, becomes assistant professor of rhetoric.1874: Harvard begins requiring an essay during the entrance exam. The results, which demonstrate students’ shocking “illiteracy,” provoke dismay among Harvard’s professors (Connors 129).1879: Hill publishes “An Answer to the Cry for More English,” in which he calls for “the study [of English to] be taken up at the threshold of college life” (52).1885: Harvard’s “English A,” precursor to modern FYC courses, becomes a first-year requirement to address students’ deficiencies.1900: By all accounts, “Most colleges followed Harvard [in adopting] the freshman composition course that by 1900 had taken hold almost everywhere” (Brereton 13).

3. ³Berlin also gestures to articulation, though he marks it emerging in the 1950s (107), and Arthur Applebee makes passing reference to articulation (72n29) and accreditation (41n30, 50). Berlin and Applebee see these issues as important, but only to contextualize specific inquiries into English studies.

4. ⁴Other steps included raising tuition, expanding faculty, and attracting philanthropic donations. By the 1880s Eliot was succeeding in most of these.

5. ⁵This speech was published in the Journal of Education in 1885. Page numbers refer to the published version.

6. ⁶Eliot actually considered the distinction specious (“Present” 20).

7. ⁷VanOverbeke details the developing tensions in American education. See also Cremin, American and Transformation.

8. ⁸Colleges and universities represented a remarkably small segment of American education. In 1903 higher education of any sort enrolled less than one-third of one percent of America’s population (Harris xix), and colleges and universities enrolled less than one-sixth of one percent (xiv). In comparison, elementary schools enrolled more than twenty percent of the population and secondary schools enrolled nearly one percent (xix). Enrollments do not represent the sum total of its influence, but higher education was not the driving force it later became (see Lucas, chapter 5).

9. ⁹Colleges, in general, were in danger of becoming obsolete (Lucas 149; Brereton 3; Eliot, “Address, Harvard”). There was even some suggestion around the turn of the twentieth century that colleges would eventually be squeezed out of existence altogether (see Brown 572; Brubacher and Rudy 250–51; Lazerson).

10. ¹⁰There were discussions among at least ten New England colleges beginning as early as 1858 (Hanford).

11. ¹¹Eliot described rhetoric, German, French, chemistry, and physics as “obviously matters which properly belong to the secondary schools” (“Annual Report, 1883–1884” 5), but there is no indication that composition was supposed to be abandoned. This runs counter to the prevailing belief that FYC was a temporary fix until secondary schools were upgraded, but there are a number of instances where Eliot reaffirms his belief that “the English language and literature are, or should be, studied from the beginning of the primary school to the end of the university course” (“Elementary” 35).

12. ¹²Contrary to common belief, composition remained a requirement—though not a class—throughout students’ entire course of study (see Committee on Rhetoric 2). In order to retain the elective system, composition became an extracurricular requirement. Students attended lectures and wrote several “forensics” each year. It was hoped this system would “acquire something of the character of a regular course” and enable students to “treat of subjects that have a direct bearing upon their chosen studies” and bring elective work and forensics “into close relation with one another, to their mutual advantage” (“Annual Report, 1883–1884” 84). In other words, composition wasn’t abandoned to the first year—it was separated from the formal curriculum so it could be required and tied to students’ work throughout their course of study.

13. ¹³Despite suggestions to the contrary, not all postsecondary institutions adopted FYC. Normal schools, for instance, largely resisted adopting FYC until the 1920s and 1930s (see Skinnell).

14. ¹⁴The nineteenth century saw an explosion in professional associations related to, but not coterminous with, education institutions. In New England such associations had long existed (see Hanford). For just a small sampling of such associations, see “Requirements” 457.

15. ¹⁵The commission had fifteen original members: Amherst, Boston University, Bowdoin, Brown, Colby, Dartmouth, Harvard, Middlebury, Smith, Trinity, Tufts, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale (“Requirements” 458).

16. ¹⁶The Second Annual Report offers additional points of interest. First, committee members argued that portfolios of high school writing should be considered valid evidence of college preparedness (9, 21). Second, there was much discussion about fairness on entrance examinations. Committee members argued it was unfair to expect students to be prepared for “the customary ex tempore composition.” “If an entrance examination is deemed advisable, its limitations make it unwise to ask for continuous and well-sustained thought on themes that the candidate cannot satisfactorily anticipate” (9). In short, the recommendations are resonant with contemporary conversations in rhetoric and composition.

17. ¹⁷For an example of how institutional issues can benefit writing classes, see Lester and Glau.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan Skinnell

Ryan Skinnell is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the Department of English at the University of North Texas. His research interests include rhetoric and composition histories and historiography, institutional rhetorics, archival methodologies, and modern rhetorical theory. His published work appears in Rhetoric Review, JAC, Composition Studies, Enculturation, and edited collections. He is currently working on a monograph that considers the effects of nondisciplinary institutional objectives on the development of rhetoric, composition, and literacy education during the past 150 years.