English Department: Then and Now

By Michael J. Ellis | Thursday, June 2, 2005

It safe to say that Peter Robinson '79, and to a lesser degree Todd Zywicki '88, owe their successful candidacies in the recent Trustee election, in part at least, to nostalgia. Alumni remember their time at the College fondly, and it is only reasonable that they would want to preserve the institution as they remember it. Robinson himself, in his candidate statement, recalled the "superb professors" as the aspect of Dartmouth that best exemplified the College: his fondest memories were Vincent Starzinger's government classes, Charles Stinson's religion classes, and Jeffrey Hart's English classes.

In light of Robinson's victory, it's well worth undertaking an examination of how teaching has changed at the College since his time as an undergraduate. One would expect these changes to have been most marked in the English department. As it was in Robinson's day, when he was a major, English is one the most popular departments at the College. Owing to the freshman writing requirement, it also annually enrolls the most students.

The state of the English department thus concerns not just the faculty, English majors, or those interested in literature, but anyone interested in how the College educates its students. I myself am a history major, and, based on extensive research and interviews, I hope to bring an outsider's perspective to the changes that have occurred over the past twenty-five years and what they mean for the state of undergraduate education at the College.

A cursory examination reveals that a great deal is the same as it was in 1980: Professor Peter Travis still teaches Chaucer, Professor Peter Saccio still teaches Shakespeare, and the course description for "English 28: Milton" remains exactly the same, word-for-word. Even then, faculty were complaining about students' poor writing skills: in a 1981 Daily Dartmouth article, Professor David Kastan bemoaned the "jargon-ridden" and "imprecise" writing that students produced.

These similarities aside, though, the changes in the English department over the past twenty-five years have been profound. Of course, many of the department's professors have changed, some classes have disappeared and new ones have taken their places, and the introduction of new College requirements like the culminating experience has changed the structure of the major.

However, there has also been a deeper shift in the goals and objectives of the English department. The requirements for majors have become more focused, the classes have become more varied in their subject matter, and the faculty has become better-published and more prestigious. At the same time, though, the English department has abdicated its responsibility of teaching freshman writing at the College, allowing its professors to instead pursue narrower specialties.

In 1980, the major requirements were loosely defined, but in a way that ensured a minimum level of competency among English majors. Any two of the courses numbered between 15 and 18—Methods of Literary Criticism; A Survey of the English Language: Chaucer to Milton; A Survey of the English Language: Dryden to Eliot; and A History of the English Language—served as prerequisites to the major. These "sophomore survey" courses, nicknamed "Norton 1" and "Norton 2," provided the groundwork for the prospective English major's education: before proceeding on to the upper-level courses, he would at least have a basic understanding of the history of English literature and a familiarity with contents of the "canon." After fulfilling that requirement, the English major would be required to take a class specializing in one early modern author (Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton) and then seven other classes from the department. The major did not require a senior seminar or any other sort of "culminating experience," nor did it require any coherent plan of study.

Today, as any English major will tell you, the requirements are vastly more stringent. Eleven courses must be taken in the department, and, while the prerequisite "sophomore survey" classes have been eliminated, a series of major classes must be taken. To complete the major, students must take two classes on literature prior to the mid-seventeenth century, two on literature from the mid-seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, one from the twentieth century, one on literary criticism and theory, one class on "special topics" in literature (which, according to Department Chairman Peter Travis, are intended to prepare juniors for their senior seminar), and a "culminating experience," meaning a senior seminar. From those courses, the major also must construct a four-course concentration, giving them a small area of expertise, whether it be on literary history, a particular genre, or a period.

The major as it stands today is undoubtedly superior to its predecessor. It is, as Prof. Travis says, "a conservative major" that believes early literature to be as important as modern literature. The added requirement of a senior seminar, as well as a historically programmatic approach to literature, ensures that an English major will have studied a variety of different time periods. A student can graduate with a degree in English without having read Shakespeare, but he would have read Chaucer and Milton, Marlowe and Spenser, or Sidney and Dryden instead.

The department also offers a greater variety of classes than it did twenty-five years ago. In 1979, there was a nascent class approaching literature from a feminist perspective and one class exploring Black American literature, but today English majors have the opportunity to take classes on Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, and postcolonial studies, among others. Of course, a few of these verge on the absurd (English 72: Victorian Queer, comes to mind), but, on the whole, their addition represents an opportunity for English majors to read a greater variety of literature.

Another byproduct of the emphasis on catering to English majors has been grade inflation. In 1975, the "English Drama to 1642" class reported an average grade of "B," and students commented that its instructor, Professor David Kastan, "treated papers fairly… he is not only a superb teacher, but a gifted advisor who goes out of his way to know students." Today, the same class, taught by Professors Lynda Boose and Alexandra Halasz, has an average grade of "A-."

However, even as it has provided an improved major, the English department has virtually abandoned the instruction of freshman writing. English 5, now called "Expository Writing," has long been mandatory for freshmen. In 1979, it was called "Literature and Composition" and aimed to "increase the student's capacity for clear thinking and good writing." The course description also stated that "no student will receive credit for the course until he or she has demonstrated the ability to write satisfactorily."

Today, that requirement is gone. English 5 used to be taught by all of the members of the department, with Paradise Lost as the standard text. Although even in 1979, a certain number of freshmen (Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Hart estimates 15 percent) were exempted from English 5 to immediately take their freshmen seminars, the vast majority of freshmen took the class and had a shared intellectual experience.

Today, the situation is dramatically different. With the reduction of humanities professors' course load from five per year to four per year to allow for increased research and publication, the teaching of English 5 has been outsourced to adjunct and visiting professors. Prof. Travis insists that Dartmouth is not unique in this respect, citing the statistic that 45 percent of courses at universities nationwide are taught by adjuncts. Still, though, Dartmouth's claim to focus on undergraduate education demands better.

Even junior faculty members have little incentive to teach freshmen writing: under increasing pressure to publish one, if not two, books before being considered for tenure, they have no reward for teaching English 5. And without enough faculty to teach English 5, more and more of the freshman class has been exempted from the class and cast in to freshmen seminars their fall term.

Starting next year, English 5 will be replaced by a class called "Writing 5," which will fall under the supervision of a new Director of Writing, Thomas Cormen; a professor of computer science, Cormen is hardly an obvious choice for the position. Many English faculty will still teach the freshmen classes, but the English department will have absolved itself of the responsibility of teaching first-year students how to write.

The cumulative result of these changes is the balkanization of writing instruction at the College. Without any incentive to teach English 5 and grade weekly student essays, professors do their best to shirk the duty. Some English professors reportedly teach only in the spring and summer so as to avoid the class. Instead of reading Paradise Lost, students read books at the instructor's whim, or, in the case of Prof. Shelby Grantham's class, attempt to end world racism [see TDR 6/11/04]. Rather than learning how to write coherent and well-reasoned arguments through literary analysis, students are taught the basics of mechanics and composition, if that.

The outsourcing of writing instruction from the English department and its dispersal throughout the College has led to professors who, in the words of a 1998 internal report, Writing at Dartmouth, "express concern about their ability to teach matters of grammar and style effectively." The same report also notes that "most faculty and administrators believe that the English department is best equipped to teach composition" since they "are more likely than their colleagues to be sensitive to the various nuances and uses of language, making them better readers of (and responders to) student prose." The report made a variety of recommendations, including establishing "upper-level writing opportunities" and providing adequate resources for writing support services. While some recommendations have since been implemented, it is unclear why the English Department has continued to abandon its responsibility for freshmen writing. According to several other sources within the English department, another report was produced several years ago by an external committee of professors from Harvard, Brown, and Cornell that found the state of Dartmouth's writing program to be sub-par. However, Associate Dean of the Faculty Lenore Grenoble has refused to make the report public.

Over the past twenty-five years, the English department has improved its undergraduate teaching for majors and those interested in literature, while simultaneously ridding itself of the responsibility to teach writing to the College as a whole. Undoubtedly, this arrangement is preferred by English professors who can focus on their own research rather than bother correcting freshmen grammar. But how will the writing skills of the student body fare when Writing 5 becomes the new English 5? It is far too early to tell, but recent events are not encouraging. While it may be unreasonable to expect that all freshmen read Paradise Lost like they did in Robinson's day, it should not be too much to ask that students be taught how to write by Dartmouth's scholars of the English language.

Review Staffer David Glovsky, a freshman at the College, also contributed to this article.

English Department: Then and Now

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