What Should Colleges Teach?

By Stanley Fish

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.

As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research. Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which last week issued its latest white paper, “What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and Universities.”

Click on the square at top right to read the paper.

Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure colleges and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.

The battle between those who actually work in the academy and those who would monitor academic work from the outside has been going on for well over 100 years and I am on record (in “Save The World On Your Own Time” and elsewhere ) as being against external regulation of classroom practices if only because the impulse animating the effort to regulate is always political rather than intellectual.

It is of course true that political motives can also inform the decisions made by academic insiders; the professorial guild is far from pure. But the cure for the politicization of the classroom by some professors is not the counter-politicization urged by ACTA when it crusades for “accountability,” a code word for reconfiguring the academy according to conservative ideas and agendas.

Nevertheless, I found myself often nodding in agreement when I was reading ACTA’s new report. In it, the 100 colleges and universities are ranked on a scale from A to F based on whether students are required to take courses in seven key areas — composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and natural or physical science.

It’s hard to quarrel with this list; the quarrel and the criticism have been provoked by the criteria that accompany it. These criteria are stringent and narrow and have been criticized as parochial and motivated by nostalgia and politics; but in at least four of the seven areas they make perfect sense. Credit for requiring instruction in mathematics will not be given for linguistic courses or computer literacy courses because their “math content is usually minimal.” Credit for requiring instruction in the natural or physical sciences will not be given for courses with “weak scientific content” or courses “taught by faculty outside of the science departments” (i.e., the philosophy or history of science). Credit for requiring instruction in a foreign language will not be given for fewer than three semesters of study because it takes that long to acquire “competency at the intermediate level.” And credit for requiring composition will not be given for courses that are “writing intensive” (there is a significant amount of writing required but the focus is on some substantive topic), or for courses in disciplines other than English and composition (often termed “writing in the discipline” courses), or for courses in public speaking, or for remedial courses. In order to qualify, a course must be devoted to “grammar, style, clarity, and argument.”

The rationale behind these exclusions is compelling: mathematics, the natural sciences, foreign languages and composition are disciplines with a specific content and a repertoire of essential skills. Courses that center on another content and fail to provide concentrated training in those skills are really courses in another subject. You can tell when you are being taught a mathematical function or a scientific procedure or a foreign language or the uses of the subjunctive and when you are being taught something else.

Things are not so clear when it comes to literature and history. Why should the literature requirement be fulfilled only by “a comprehensive literary survey” and not by single-author courses (aren’t Shakespeare and Milton “comprehensive” enough), or by a course in the theater or the graphic novel or the lyrics of Bob Dylan (all rejected in the report)?

With respect to science, composition, foreign language instruction and mathematics, ACTA is simply saying, Don’t slight the core of the discipline. But when the report decrees that only broad surveys of literature can fulfill a literature requirement, the organization is intervening in the discipline and taking sides in its internal debates. Why should trustees and alumni have a say in determining whether the graphic novel — a multi-media art that goes back at least as far as William Blake — deserves to represent literature? (For the record, I think it does.) This part of the report is an effort to shape the discipline from the outside according to a political vision.

This holds too for the insistence that only the study of American history “in both chronological and thematic breadth” can fulfill the history requirement. Here the politics is explicit: such courses, we are told, are “indispensable for the formation of citizens and for the preservation of our free institutions.”

Indispensable I doubt (this is academic hubris); and while the formation of citizens and the preservation of our free institutions may be admirable aims, it is not the task of courses in history to achieve them. The question of how best to introduce students to the study of history should be answered not by invoking external goals, however worthy, but by arguing the merits of academic alternatives; and I see no obvious reason why a course on the Civil War or the American revolution or the French revolution (or both of them together) would not do the job as well as a survey stretching from the landing at Plymouth Rock to the war in Iraq. (At any rate, the issue is one for academic professionals to decide.)

But if I have no problem with alternative ways of teaching literature or history, how can I maintain (with ACTA) that there is only one way to teach writing? Easy. It can’t be an alternative way of teaching writing to teach something else (like multiculturalism or social justice). It can, however, be an alternative way of teaching history to forgo a broad chronological narrative and confine yourself to a single period or even to a single world-changing event. It is the difference between not doing the job and getting the job done by another route.

This difference is blurred in ACTA report because it is running (and conflating) two arguments. One argument (with which I agree) says teach the subject matter and don’t adulterate it with substitutes. The other argument says teach the subject matter so that it points in a particular ideological direction, the direction of traditional values and a stable canon. The first argument is methodological and implies no particular politics; the other is political through and through, and it is the argument the authors are finally committed to because they see themselves as warriors in the culture wars. The battle they are fighting in the report is over the core curriculum, the defense of which is for them a moral as well as an educational imperative as it is for those who oppose it.

The arguments pro and con are familiar. On one side the assertion that a core curriculum provides students with the distilled wisdom of the western tradition and prepares them for life. On the other side the assertion that a core curriculum packages and sells the prejudices and biases of the reigning elite and so congeals knowledge rather than advancing it.

Have we lost our way or finally found it? Thirty-five years ago there was no such thing as a gay and lesbian studies program; now you can build a major around it. For some this development is a sign that a brave new world has arrived; for others it marks the beginning of the end of civilization.

It probably is neither; curricular alternatives are just not that world-shaking. The philosophical baggage that burdens this debate should be jettisoned and replaced with a more prosaic question: What can a core curriculum do that the proliferation of options and choices (two words excoriated in the ACTA report) cannot? The answer to that question is given early in the report before it moves on to its more polemical pages. An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.”

The nice thing about this benefit is that it can be had no matter what the content of the core curriculum is. It could be the classics of western literature and philosophy. It could be science fiction. It could be globalization. It could be anything so long as every student took it. But whatever it is, please let it include a writing course that teaches writing and not everything under the sun.That should be the real core of any curriculum.

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Robin T. August 24, 2009 · 10:00 pm

I took freshman comp in the 1970s; I taught freshman comp when freshman comp was a course in grammar and rhetoric; I now teach advanced English electives. (I’m a professional in another field with an English Ph.D., who chooses to teach college English part-time because I missed teaching and talking about literature.) Today’s students cannot write an English sentence. That goes for all of them – – the kids from middle-class backgrounds as well as those for whom English is a second language.

Moreover, learning to write is learning to think: to describe, compare and contrast, reason, argue and persuade. Young people who can’t write can’t think analytically or critically, either. They have never used to use language to identify and develop ideas.

Therefore, I completely agree with Prof. Fish on this one. “Politics and the English Language,” the classic essay by George Orwell that used to be a staple of every freshman English syllabus, made the point — and the distinction — as clearly as it can be made: without clarity of language, there can be no clarity of thought; and without clarity of thought, we are more likely to become the victims of ideology.

Doug Lind August 24, 2009 · 10:08 pm

I work for a company that scores school tests. It’s amazing that a “writing” test often is scored without regard for punctuation, sentence composition or spelling. The instructions provided by the state for scoring these essays makes it clear that these factors should be disregarded.

Martin Yanosek August 24, 2009 · 10:22 pm

I’ve found that teaching various forms of literary genres in basic composition classes helps students become better writers. Looking closely at poems, short stories and plays provides students with invaluable writing techniques that complement the nuts and bolts of grammar and argumentation. Welcome back from your vacation, Dr. Fish!

dxpiper August 25, 2009 · 12:15 am

apparently, daddy isn’t getting a decent return on his education dollar at the Harvard of the South. Can you expect a school that places so much emphasis on sport to value the written word?

Publius August 25, 2009 · 12:18 am

All of the innovation and destruction of the last 40 years have come at the hands of people who at least themselves had the benefit of a traditional education.

Once these activist professors moved on to teaching students to have the right opinions and to “make the world better” we were lost. Whole generations lost the skills to educate themselves, and to educate others.

Unfortunately, we are now in a place where students are coming to college so uneducated and unprepared, that college is part remedial school part vocational school.

We couldn’t raise standards to where they should be without losing 1/2 of the student body of American college students. The 20% that are actual prepared for a serious college education never get it b/c of their uneducated classmates and fellow traveling professors make it impossible.

God help us, what took 900 years to build was laid low in just a few decades. How long would it take to rebuild?

Thank God for Stanley Fish and those like him. Conservative or liberal – we’re all united by a desire for real knowledge and scholarship.

Steve Kaufmann August 25, 2009 · 12:20 am

I have never taken a writing course but I write well. My wife did not go to college but she writes well. We both read a lot.

We can only express ourselves as well as the models that we have been exposed to. We need words. We need to know what words mean. We need to see and hear efficient and effective phrasing. We need to trained in a rich language environment.

We do not need a lot of English teachers trying out the latest theories about teaching “critical thinking”, “higher level thinking” and all the other “reading strategies” that have replaced just letting students enjoy reading, so that they will do more of it.

I might ad that I speak 11 languages and have a blog on language and literacy called The Linguist on Language. On the few occasions that I have been on a forum or listserv with English teachers I have been appalled at their inability to express ideas clearly, their ideological perversion and their belief that their task was to teach critical thinking, a skill which they were, as a group, largely devoid of.

Steve Kaufmann

Steve Kaufmann August 25, 2009 · 12:22 am

Unfortunately I cannot edit my two typos.

We need to be trained in a rich language environment.

I might add.

elizabeth mandel August 25, 2009 · 12:22 am

I don’t know if this observation supports or undermines Mr. Fish’s argument, but I am quite sure I did not really understand how to English write with any skill or finesse until I took a senior seminar on Milton, taught by Stanley Fish over 40 years ago.

elizabeth mandel August 25, 2009 · 12:24 am

Please correct my previous submission to read “how to write English…”

Try N Togetwork August 25, 2009 · 12:29 am

I graduated a year ago May. This is the only place I’ve used any argumentative writing. Most of my education was useless and taught for temporary memorization. I wish I knew how the economy worked, how to build things and how to program computers. Instead, I read Jane Eyre. And even worse: I BELIEVED that I would retain and use Algebra daily. It don’t matter how good you is at righting.

marik7 August 25, 2009 · 12:32 am

Give me a break.

Have you EVER read even a line or maybe two from a graphic novel that can compare in any way to a ”graphic novel” by William Blake? You insult Blake by putting him with the denizens of ”Sin City.”

Do us a favor. Give us, say, three examples of lines (not pictures) from graphic novels that compare favorably with ”Proverbs of Heaven and Hell.”

If you can, you’re even smarter than I feared.

However, if you could teach students to write like Blake by writing graphic novels, I’d be the last to complain.

I had a student not long ago who was (is) a fine artist and a devotee of graphic novels, and some of his he showed me.

His essays were better.

Other than that, you argue well. Composition is about writing, not sociology (necessarily). E.B. White’s ”The Ring of Time” shows it all.

o. r. gonzalez August 25, 2009 · 12:32 am

i think mr fish makes a mistake in his reasoning. to teach writing by teaching “multiculturalism,” as he puts it, is not to teach something other than the core subject. it is in fact a way to do what he otherwise thinks is fine to do–to teach a core subject by other means. just as history can be taught in a survey course or in a course devoted to one particular epoch, writing can be taught in ways other than how to construct sentences.

composition is not just grammar, or English as a First or Second Language. Composition is how to argue effectively. this includes how to understand arguments that are more or less effective. hence, analyzing argumentative essays about any topic under the sun is a form of teaching students how to argue, how to analyze, and how to construct said arguments and analyses in writing.

many composition courses include mechanical lessons–how to use parallel construction, for instance, or how to avoid the passive voice–but these more pedestrian topics are not as helpful in teaching students how to think. or, more precisely, these dry topics are not as engaging for the ultimate purpose of “writing” courses in college: how to think critically.

as long as the instructor is fair enough to want students to argue against, and analyze critically, whatever content he or she puts forth in his curriculum, you have the ingredients for disagreement, debate, and critical thought.

the problem is if the content is used to indoctrinate and not to maintain a pedagogical balance between opposing viewpoints.

Jerry H. Appel August 25, 2009 · 12:34 am

Ditto Professor Fish. I’ve taught English at the public school level for 15 years, grades 6-12. I teach them the logic of linguistics, the need for standards in writing, and the rational for conventions. I also require them to practice and write in front of me, not hiding at home where they get “help” from someone else. It means more work for me, but the results cannot be denied. Students learn to think and properly express those thoughts. Imagine if Sarah Palin was one of my students!

George B. August 25, 2009 · 12:39 am

I think you may have it backwards. A class in painting should not be about brushes, tubes and canvas. It should be about landscape or nudes.

I have always found it difficult to write about writing or literature, but easy to write about things that exit in the physical universe.

So it appears to me that rhetoric and grammar should be taught incidentally as students consider other things. After all, people who are actually interested in grammar are destined to become English professors.

Or to put it another way, I always want to learn to write better, but please spare me from writing about, or even thinking about Moby Dick.

Joseph S. August 25, 2009 · 12:40 am

I completely agree with the author and Robin T. Without clarity of language, there can be no clarify of thought and so forth. Into my sophomore and junior years of college, I considered becoming an English teacher, but after reading so many of my peers’ essays in class, I knew I lacked the patience necessary to teach them, let alone children half their age.
So I became a journalist, where I have the freedom to write on topics I learn and where I don’t have to pull my hair out reading someone else struggle to put a thought together.
I can only hope that some alumni board or university president reads this and considers changing their school’s requirements for writing composition classes. Too many kids struggle to think critically or put together a coherent, concise opinion on anything of substance.

Joseph S. August 25, 2009 · 12:42 am

And then I mistype something in my own comment. How appropriate, ha!

pdxtran August 25, 2009 · 12:43 am

I feel fortunate to have had an old-fashioned writing teacher in college. The weaker students hated her because she was old, in ill health, rather pedantic, and intolerant of bad writing, but we good students appreciated her and found her to be approachable and interested in us as people.

It was from this professor that I learned what constitutes a sound argument, how to present such an argument, why grammar and register are important, how to avoid logical fallacies, and how to sound forceful instead of vague. I’m convinced that learning to write logically forced me to think logically.

Perhaps the lack of solid writing instruction is behind the dreadfully low level of political discourse in this country.

Max August 25, 2009 · 12:46 am

Perhaps I’m missing something, but aren’t grammar and composition supposed to be taught all throughout lower, middle, and high school? If some college students still need to learn grammar, then it should be taught as a remedial subject. I see no harm in letting all other students take writing intensive courses whose sole focus is something other than pure composition.

jk August 25, 2009 · 12:49 am

My experience is indirect and different. My wife is from China, where she had limited educational opportunities. We’ve lived in Brooklyn and New Jersey. She has taken courses, most of them excellent in two-year colleges in Brooklyn and NJ. Her greatest obstacle is passing writing composition. She has failed about 4 times. All courses have focused, exclusively, on writing and all have had high standards. Although she has learned a great deal, she hasn’t yet met their standards.

I’m 60 years old. I’ve heard stuffy professors like Robin T., and, to a lesser degree, Mr. Fish, since I was in college. Oh, if only they taught writing like the old days!!! If only the students were as smart as I am!!!

Jim Ouellet August 25, 2009 · 12:51 am

I completely agree that college-level students in America must master the ability to write clearly in their own native language. This means spelling, grammar and the ability to state ideas clearly and in a logical sequence.

There’s no better way to signal somebody that you’re an idiot than to send out something you’ve written that’s full of poorly expressed ideas or errors of spelling or grammar.

KVS August 25, 2009 · 12:54 am

Hallelujah! I’m a professional writer and back when I was in school, a while back now, I tutored writing. I actually DID tutor people in writing; although most called me just to write their paper for them, I wouldn’t do it. I made them sit down and go through the process of understanding how to write the paper and get it done. I must admit, I was appalled at how many people could barely read, much less write and comprehend the material. One kid, for instance, who did not understand Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” informed me proudly that, in fact, he had just read his very first book that very week: the biography of a pro basketball player. Oh, heavy heart. And here he was in his SECOND semester of college. What on earth had happened during the FIRST?

I suggest that it would help if entry standards were stiffened to include a writing component at all schools—most public universities rely on a simple algorithm of scores.

Or, for those broad-minded enough to want public universities to educate the public, requiring remedial courses in writing and comprehension would help, too. Then again, maybe high schools should be teaching writing…. and on down the line.

The bottom line is, our society no longer values argumentation, rules of evidence, syntax, grammar, wordplay, or poetry. There is so little required to graduate from junior high and high school these days, it’s a wonder that students even bother showing up. If anyone is looking for who killed the newspaper, I’d say we all did, and this is how.

Stephen August 25, 2009 · 12:56 am

As a former writing teacher at a name-level college, I have two major problems with Professor Fish’s essay.

1) He characterizes writing as solely a matter of grammar and rhetoric. “Writing” includes many other activities, such as learning how to formulate a suitable topic for a paper, learning how to organize the content of a paper, learning what counts as evidence and how to incorporate evidence into a paper, and learning how to present material clearly in a way that builds to a larger whole (I suppose the latter might fall under a broad definition of “rhetoric.”) I’m also inclined to think that basic research skills are suitable material for a writing course, since we don’t want students who can write flowery sentences devoid of content.

Speaking of content….

2) Students have to write about something, and preferably something that they understand in sufficient depth to write deeply. This requires writing courses to include some content, lest we teach students to write without content.

Professor Fish is dead wrong on this one. If he took a closer look at the courses he decries, he’d probably find a lot of actual writing instruction in them.

A bigger problem is that you cannot expect a single semester of college composition to teach students what it takes a lifetime to learn.

elderly prof August 25, 2009 · 12:57 am

There is no such thing as “writing.” There is only writing about something.
Students need something to write about. So take your composition course and give it a topic that students are interested in. Teach writing; that’s your goal. But not writing about “how I spent my summer vacation” or “how I downloaded a bunch of fake facts from the internet and changed the syntax enough to make it look like mine.”

The best job I’ve ever done as a writing teacher, and the best student writing I’ve ever received, was in a freshman seminar that the students chose because of their interest in the topic. My students had views that they wanted to express, and the readings in the course gave substance to their views (and, in some cases, changed those views). Of course I used supplementary materials to help the students learn the conventions of academic writing. Some students needed serious help with elementary points, while others needed to take their sophisticated skills and try to get back to simpler style with greater punch.

The course demanded a great deal of me. The teacher needs to help the student rewrite papers by making comments that are questions about intention or meaning or clarity or syntax, rather than make comments that are judgmental or prescriptive. This is hard to do. It’s easy to write “unclear” or “didn’t you learn to spell in high school” or “you should use such-and-such a word instead.” It’s hard to write a comment that makes the student think the sentence or paragraph or organization through on his or her own. But the students cared about getting their points across because they cared about the topic. And that made all the difference.

Jerry Glover August 25, 2009 · 12:57 am

Lynne Cheney — and Stanley – have their eyes set on universities for definite political reasons. Stanley may complain about “gay & lesbian studies”, as I’m sure the Cheneys do, too, but the answer is not more writing classes in tertiary education.

Basic writing ought to be taught by junior high schools, and kids ought not to get as far as high school graduation without good writing skills. But they do.

Rather than attacking high schools for what they should do but don’t, Lynne Cheney has chosen to attack universities for not teaching her kind of agenda, and Stanley has fallen for her line.

I am appalled at the lack of good writing skills amongst college students too, but the answer is not to narrow the curriculum to match the minds of the likes of Lynne Cheney.

Take secondary education to task, please.

Blago August 25, 2009 · 12:57 am

Prof. Fish, here’s a quick Composition 101 tip: CONCISION!