Class Politics

Stephen Parks

Description

Class Politics The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language (2e) is a response to histories of Composition Studies that focused on scholarly articles and university programs as the generative source for the field. Such histories, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s divorced the field from activist politics—washing out such work in the name of disciplinary identity. Class Politics shows the importance of political mass movements in the formation of Composition Studies—particularly Civil Rights and Black Power. Class Politics also critiques how the field appropriates these movements. The book traces a pathway from social movement, to progressive academic groups, to their work in professional organizations, to the formation of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Stephen Parks then shows how the SRTOL was attacked and politically neutralized by conservative forces in the 1980s and 1990s, arguing for a return to politics to reanimate it’s importance—and the importance of politics in the field. “Stephen Parks restores politics to the history of Composition Studies.” —Richard Ohmann

Sujets

• Politique
• Literacy
• Language Arts
• Disciplines

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 27 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602354210
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

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.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
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 [e-mail]. 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