November 9, 2004
To: Ron Filippelli, Associate Dean, CLA
From: Robert L. Caserio, Head, English
Concerning: English Department Strategic Plan
Authors: M. Berube, Chair, Strategic Planning Committee; J. Kasdorf, V. Lankewish, R. Schulze, J. Selzer, Members of the Planning Committee; R. L. Caserio, Head, English.
Introduction
A strategic plan for PSU’s English department has one all-important goal: improvement of the department’s capacity to realize its scholarly and pedagogical aims, and, accordingly, improvement of the department’s standing in regional, national, and even international recognition.
At the time of the writing of the last strategic plan, in 1996, the National Research Council ranked the department 42nd out of 127 doctoral programs in English, and therefore ranked the department 9th in the order of CIC institutions. In a recent (2000) U. S. News and World Report ranking of graduate English programs, the department is ranked 27th (up from 33 in 1998). If the forthcoming NRC rankings confirm U.S. News’ survey, then we will have realized a goal of the previous plan: to position the Department within the top quartile of English programs (then, in 1996, any department ranked 32 or above). Given the last ten years’ aggressive hiring of nationally and internationally known faculty, and given the last ten years’ strenuous raising of the bar that measures faculty achievements in scholarship and teaching, it indeed is probable that the improvement of the department’s standing has reached its 1996 goal. But to reach a goal is not to be sure of it. And to reach a goal, despite the satisfaction of doing so, is no cause for complacency. In the next five years the department must secure its improvement. It can do so only by surpassing its current achievement—an achievement that, not surprisingly, includes vulnerabilities.
The English department’s achievement is founded on well-known intellectual aims: analytic exegesis of texts, both literary and non-literary; analytic writing skills; rhetorical and creative invention; investigation of literatures and cultures in English, American, and Anglophone traditions; exploration of histories and theories that bear on the department’s objects of study and on the department’s historically situated intellectual discipline. The department’s pedagogical aims are to teach undergraduates, master’s degree candidates, master of fine arts degree candidates, and doctoral candidates; and to prepare all its advanced degree candidates for employment in post-graduation life.
Assembled to pursue those aims is one of the most diversely constituted departments in the College. English studies scholar-teachers have numerous special areas of intellectual interest. The department is as internally diverse as the College of the Liberal Arts is internally diverse. Such diversity—comprehending advanced scholarship in areas as different as Early Modern studies, rhetoric, and cultural studies--is its strength, and foundational to its identity. Cultivating that diversity was part of the 1996 plan to focus on “new movements” in English studies: new movements that broke down oppositions between formalist and historicist English studies, between canonical and “minority” traditions, between theoretical and practical criticism, between rhetorical and “literary” analysis, between textual editing and interpretation. That diversity has been achieved, and flourishes. Another aim of the 1996 plan was either not realized, or was let go: a desire to establish twentieth century literature and culture as a prime focus of departmental commonality and achievement. Despite the department’s great strength in 20th century studies, when the present phase of planning began in the fall of 2002, responses to a questionnaire expressed a majority resistance to any unifying sub-disciplinary emphasis that might exceed the department’s aims, or its disciplinary identity, as those are expressed in the previous paragraph. But if responses in 2002 swerve from choosing 20th century studies as a common focus, they also show continuity with a May, 1999, department document wherein the previous department Head, writing to the Dean on the department’s behalf in the course of a re-assessment of the 1996 planning document, says that “We aim to be and be perceived as one of the best English departments in the Big Ten…Those departments, like all English departments in the top quartile, are known for their comprehensive programs more than for specialized strengths….Here as in the stock market, diversification rather than concentration has been the key to investment success.” One of the benefits of the department’s comprehensive diversification has been its availability to interdisciplinary initiatives that were not part of the 1996 planning document. Our aggregation of multiple intellectual pursuits has enabled English department scholars to play roles in the formation of the new Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, the Rock Ethics Institute, the Science, Medicine, and Technological Discourse group, etc.
Despite its commitment to diversity, however, the department also has expressed (in the 2002 questionnaire cited above, and in department conversations about strategic planning in spring, 2003) a desire to intensify, as well as maintain, its unity in diversity, its commitment to an intra-disciplinary cohesion. The department’s continuing success, and its improvement across the board, depends on a balance between intra-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary impulses. That balance, which need not depend on choosing any one department specialty as a focus of commonality, is one of the department’s necessary goals. In fact, to judge by published discussions in Associated Departments of English (ADE) bulletins in 2002 and 2003, that balance is a current goal of the profession and discipline of English studies. The Penn State English department’s finer realization of that goal might contribute to its professional leadership, hence also might contribute to its improved national recognition.
The department’s current distinction results from excellent external hires at the senior level, and excellent internal tenure and promotion cases; from a general raising of research expectations and standards; from an outstanding outpouring of department publications, on an absolute scale and in relation to its competitors; and from an excellent graduate program, with a superlative placement record.
Current Programs and Projected Aims
MA and PhD programs
The success of a graduate program surely is measured by its placement of graduate students. Over the last five years, between spring, 1999, and spring, 2003, 45 out of 54 of our doctoral candidates—83%--have received tenure track placements. The last three years, measured from spring, 2001, to fall, 2003, shows an even better record: 29 tenure track placements out of 34 graduates: an 85% success rate. This is staggeringly above the MLA norms, based on placement for all English studies PhDs in the nation; it is superior to Indiana’s most recently reported placement record (70%), and superior to Ohio State’s most recently reported placement record (70-80%). Last year (2003-04) we placed 100% of our PhD candidates (those doing full, national searches) at a full range of institutions: from large Research 1 universities (Nebraska, UC Riverside, University of South Carolina, University of Rhode Island) to selective liberal arts colleges (College of Charleston, Mary Washington College. Our placements in recent years (since the last strategic plan) have been at Illinois, Indiana, UConn, Minnesota, Florida, Texas-Austin, Bucknell, Denison, and Pitt. Other graduates hold tenure-line jobs at Delaware, Eastern Illinois, Texas Tech, Clemson, Auburn, TCU, Mississippi State, Arkansas, West Virginia, New Mexico, St. Louis, DePauw, and University of New Hampshire.
Of the 45 placements through academic year 2002-2003, 12 of them (26%) were in Research I institutions; of those 12, 8 (67%) were in rhetoric. The last two years’ numbers continue that trend, because during that time eight students have been offered jobs in rhetoric.
Over the past two years (2002-2004), approximately 30 African-American males received PhDs in English, according to the Modern Language Association. Six of those are PSU English graduates—hence fully 20% of the national total. Our African-American male doctorates now hold tenure-track positions at Auburn, Syracuse, U of Southern Illinois-Evansville, West Point, UC Riverside, and the University of South Carolina. At least 18% of our current graduate student body belongs to traditionally underrepresented minority groups.
Between 1998 and 2002 our graduate students had thirty articles published or accepted for publication while those students were still in the program, before they received degrees. That work appears in major journals, including department assessment indicators: PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in Philology, African-American Review, Cultural Studies, College Composition and Communication, Genre, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, College English, Journal of Advanced Composition, etc.
Since 1998 students who graduated with PhDs have published eight books, at such assessment indicator presses as Cambridge, Southern Illinois, Routledge, U of Virginia Press—but this is not a full count.
The department insures its graduate students’ preparation for excellent teaching as well as scholarship. It does so by offering a battery of English 602 courses that mentor students about how best to teach composition, remedial writing, and literature.
Professor Kit Hume regularly teaches a course preparing student essays for publication.
Departmental mentoring of job candidates is thoroughgoing and rigorous: each candidate receives at least two mock interviews to rehearse for the job market. Interviews take place after a candidate’s job application materials have been scrutinized and improved.
Our newly enrolled students have an average GPA of 3.83. Their GRE scores average 1367, and 5.5 (new test) or 2097 (old test). Our graduate student GRE score averages meet and exceed the PSU graduate school’s guidelines for special, CLA-wide “top-off” awards (1360 and 2100). Since 1997 our students’ average GRE Verbal scores have climbed from 645.8 to 653.8; their average GRE Analytical scores have climbed from 647.3 to 701.2. Between 1997 and 2002 the average GRE scores for newly enrolling students have climbed more than 100 points, and the 2003-2004 average was higher than 2002-2003.
Students in graduate programs are all but fully supported (90% of students were fully supported in fall, 2002). The teaching assistant course load is five courses over two years. That load is superior to Indiana’s TA load of six courses over two years, and to Ohio State’s, which alsois six courses over two years.
The student time-to-degree and completion rates have been improved as a result of our TA workload’s superiority to Indiana and Ohio State, and also as a result of a department commitment of resources to permit each PhD student a semester off from teaching (after a student has submitted an approved thesis proposal) in order to work solely on his dissertation.
Strategic Planning Aims for MA and PhD Programs
A. Plans in relation to maintaining successful graduate student placement:
1. We will seek continuing improvement in our completion and time-to-degree records (our goal is 6 years beyond the BA). We expect to continue to produce about a dozen PhDs each year.
2. In the next five years we will aim to maintain a minimal 90% placement record in tenure line jobs for PhDs, and additional improvements in the quality of placements.
3. We will track MA and MFA post-degree placements, in jobs or other universities and colleges, and seek to further improve placements for both. (For a current MFA placement record, see the section on the MFA program below.)
4. We will aggressively pursue preservation of our status as a leading producer of minority doctorates in English.
5. Our leadership in production of minority doctorates, and our success in job placement, both in the past and currently, have depended to a great extent on our excellence in rhetoric and composition studies, the area that has bred most success for our new doctorates (see above). Despite their specialization, however, their placement success has everything to do with a training that comprehends intra-disciplinary conversation: as the chairperson of English at Indiana recently said, “Penn State doctorates in rhetoric and composition are unusually trained, because they are trained to speak beyond their special area, in intra-disciplinary conversation with all our department members.”
6. Cohorts other than rhetoric and composition must seek ways to improve full placement, and prestige placement, of PSU English PhDs who are specialists in other areas.
7. Our graduate students need more exposure to department speaking guests, so that vistors can carry away with them impressions of our students that will be profitable to students’ futures, their placement especially. Currently our graduate students take an active part in engaging, assessing, and recruiting department job candidates. But they need more opportunity for exposure to visiting scholars—an opportunity that is a norm for our competitors and superiors. Robin Becker and Robert Burkholder’s “Tensions of Change” series in fall, 2003, set a precedent for such exposure; the American Women Writers series, an Early Modern series, and events sponsored by the Kelly professor, or by African American Voices, help to connect some specific cohorts of students to outside visitors. But broader, less specialized connections need to be promoted. We intend a remedy of this particular student deprivation through activities to be produced by a new Department Speakers Committee and by that Committee’s graduate student-friendly protocols for invited speakers.
8. Department-hosted conferences, on even a modest scale, can provide increased awareness of the department’s strengths and aims, and further build the reputation of its graduate students. In spring, 2005, a department sponsored colloquium or conference in honor of the publication of Bernard Bell’s forthcoming new history of the African-American novel and its tradition will bring leading African-Americanists to a Penn State English symposium on the subject of Bell’s book. That conference, we hope, will bolster our minority recruitment efforts.
9. One possible route for promoting the graduate program and its students throughout national professional and disciplinary networks is visiting professorships for mid-level professionals who have shown superlative promise in a domain of English studies. The department should explore the feasibility of such visits once every other year, if not once every year.
B. Plans in relation to recruitment of graduate students.
During the fall, 2004, stage of the strategic planning process the Department has received a mandate from the College to increase support for entering masters and doctoral candidates in English. It has become apparent that competitive market forces have eroded the College’s recently achieved advantage in recruiting first-rate students. We in English therefore must commit increased financial resources to the recruitment process, if we are to retain the strength of the graduate program. Because our program’s current ranking, and our promise of increased stature in the near future, depends on the graduate program’s quality, we of course must do everything we can to insure enduring success with recruitment.
According to the mandate, each entering student is to have grade 12 support, and each doctoral candidate is to be provided by RGSO with a semester free of teaching while writing the dissertation. Theoretically, the mandate requires that we add $40K to our workload request for 2005-2006, because each of 20 new admissions to the program necessitates a raise of $2K for each student. As we will indicate below, if necessary, we will make cuts and readjustments that might offset the first year’s costs for such a change. Meanwhile, other factors will contribute to an offset: because of previous recruitment negotiations and “top-offs,” almost half our doctoral candidates now receive an equivalent of grade 12 support. Moreover the department already has managed—for the sake of facilitating timely completion of degrees, as well as for recruitment’s sake--to provide most of its doctoral candidates with a dissertation semester free of teaching. In future, RGSO will guarantee that arrangement by providing funds for it, and thereby RGSO will help English meet the grade12 support requirement. Finally, the Provost’s Humanities Initiative funds, we hope, will help pay for the grade 12 commitment, especially if the Initiative funds are distributed in a way that is relative to the excellence English has achieved in the last decade.
Despite such offsets and hopes, however, the long-range effect of the mandate means some shrinking of the graduate program, despite the program’s current success in the College, and on the national scene (in regard to the latter success can be measured by our placement record—100% for those seeking jobs in 2003-2004, a fact that is itself another recruitment tool for prospective students).
Pending further deliberations and negotiations of the grade 12 recruitment issue, we suggest the following ways to afford the mandated increased funding next year:
1. MAs who enter the PhD program from inside the department will not receive stipendiary raises, as they have in the past.
2. We will maintain flexibility in recruitment strategies. For example, we will continue to offer grade 10 TAs, with top offs, to entering MA and MFA candidates.
3. The department will try to further reduce RA assignments, inviting faculty who are guaranteed RAs by their contract agreements to forego assistance, at least temporarily.
4. Eliminate two graduate course offerings.
5. Offer one or two less TAs in this year’s recruitment effort, and trim back a minimum of 5-6 TAs over the next four years.
6. Eliminate one assistant administrative position in the Composition office.
7. Hire one less FT1 for 2005-2006.
8. Carve resources for more funding of the graduate program out of the undergraduate program, by eliminating 20 sections of FT2 instruction in 2-4 years’ time.
9. Eliminate sections of FT2 instruction by enlarging current sections of English 100-level courses: English 100, for example; American studies courses; etc.
10. Negotiate a possible slight reduction in the number of general education courses English is currently responsible for.
11. Carve resources for more funding of the graduate program by shifting current graduate student workload commitments to the Center for Excellence in Writing, or by seeking more workload support for CEW from central administration.
C. Additional plans
1. Continuing recruitment of minority candidates is an absolute priority. The graduate office must encourage minority graduates of the program, and current minority candidates, to recruit applicants; and the graduate office must also initiate a letter-writing campaign to minority candidate referees, encouraging the latter to recruit applicants for us. Moreover, the department must decide if it can apply budgetary funds to support faculty travel to colleges and universities where minority applicants can be recruited to Penn State English.
2. NRC rankings of graduate programs depend on assessments of quality of student life as well as on quality of student education and placement. Improvement of quality of life is not easy in the closely confined, ugly spaces of Burrowes Building. Because little relief from that discomfort and ugliness can be expected, the department must find alternative ways to improve students’ working environment. Two improvements that constitute a major step forward are donations: the renovation of the Grucci Room, and the establishment of a department Journals Room. We may find that the department’s new Board of Visitors will respond helpfully to student quality of life needs.
3. The graduate program currently offers 46 courses a year, plus numerous independent studies. The department’s Graduate Studies Committee will make a slight reduction in the number of its course offerings, for the sake of permitting more research faculty to make contact with undergraduates (see this plan’s section on the undergraduate major); and a reduction in its number of independent studies. The latter reduction could well be a benefit to faculty workload, and, despite the importance of self-designed student paths-to-degree, might better build overall curricular coherence, as well as help fulfill the grade-12 initiative for graduate student funding.
4. The graduate program allows students considerable self-design in their doctoral program. Given that doctoral dissertations are the likeliest source of a post-graduate’s first book, we need to insure that our present theses, and preparation for them, are responsive to an ever-increasing demand for books with broad and widely-synthesizing topics and treatments. We need to determine anew how our time-to-degree goals can continue to produce professionally rich degrees.
5. There is a growing crisis in academic publishing, a crisis that current PhD candidates will face far more than faculty who are teaching them. The graduate faculty and the curricular design of the graduate program must be able to respond creatively to increasing difficulties and changes in the realm of academic publishing—as well as to a ratcheting up of requirements for tenure nation-wide. We need to advise graduate students about forms of scholarly and professional work that do not require teaching and a standard scholarly monograph. Our Board of Visitors, which is composed of non-academic professionals, can help with this advising.
6. The graduate program’s alumni include scholars who have made distinguished, highly successful academic careers. The department should make an annual award to such alumni, inviting them back to campus for a lecture and colloquium. We must also pursue one such alumnus for inclusion among members of our Alumni Visitors’ Board.
MFA program
Since 1996 the Creative Writing Program has made substantial progress toward its goal of becoming one of the top 15 MFA programs in the country. That goal is consonant with the graduate program’s general aim. Creative writing’s progress since the last strategic plan results partly from its having added excellent new faculty: three poets and two fiction writers. Despite the writers’ practice of different genres, almost half of our poetry and fiction faculty have a common interest in non-fiction, and have published books of non-fiction. Cross-genre practice remains a unique strength of the program and a special recruitment feature.
In an October, 2003, retreat the creative writers agreed that the program’s prime, and self-defining, commitment is to craft, not to any one exclusive aesthetic ideology. The writers also believe that the program’s geographical location, although it appears isolated to outsiders, could be presented in terms of strength: a natural site for exploring landscape and environment; a figure for creative detachment or disinterestedness.
In Spring, 1999, the department’s creative writing cohort submitted an excellent review of the MFA program along with proposals for improvements. The proposal for a program coordinator has been realized; the document contains the germ of interdisciplinary initiatives that issued in “Tensions of Change” (see below). Some of the proposed enhancements recommended by that review have been achieved: the Grucci Room is a response to the 1999 document; one of four proposed seminars is now a permanent course offering; one of two proposed one-credit graduate courses is now in the curriculum. But a great many suggestions have not made headway. In a revision of this current draft document, we will want to spell out gains and losses measured by the gap between 1999 proposals and present ones.
In the current academic year all MFA students are full-time enrollments and are fully funded: this is an MFA program “first,” another realization of a 1999 goal, and a sign of our commitment to the program’s improvement. Our funding level for MA TAships is competitive with other CIC schools, but the total number of students (18) is low. Ohio State and Indiana both have larger creative writing faculties (Ohio State has 8 in comparison with our 7; Indiana, a smaller department than ours, has at least 9).
In the current semester the MFA program, with the help of a grant from Schreyer Honors College, is studying ways to mentor MFA teaching assistants who are teaching intermediate creative writing courses.
The measure of success for MFA candidates is book publication, not job placement. Yet the two are interrelated, with academic employment tending to follow publication.
A partial count of books published by MFA recipients since 1998 lists 22 books (fiction, non-fiction, and poetry). The publishers of those books include Random House, University of Georgia Press, Delta Books, Delacorte Press, University of Illinois Press, Cleveland State University Press, Henry Holt, Ohio University Press, and University of Pittsburgh Press. MFA authors have found academic placement in the last decade at Cornell, West Chester University, Seton Hall, San Jose State, University of New Hampshire, Lock Haven University, Bucknell, University of Central Florida, University of Alabama-Birmingham, University of Utah, Columbia College (Chicago), Muhlenburg College, Northern Florida University, and Penn State (College of Earth and Mineral Sciences).
Strategic Planning Aims for MFA Program
1. A vital reading series, and a visiting writer in residence (for at least one week during the year) is an essential component of any excellent or superior MFA program. The only other MFA program in Pennsylvania, at Pittsburgh, has an annual budget of 30K for its reading and visitors series. Ohio State offers one-week intensive visits by 3 different writers each year, plus a writer-in-residence who offers students a short course. Indiana sponsors 3-4 major readings per semester. Until last year our own MFA Program has had to beg for funds for even a modest reading series. Last year, however, thanks to Robin Becker’s efforts in collaboration with Robert Burkholder and a member of the College of Arts and Architecture, $20,000 was raised to host a semester long inter-disciplinary series of lecturers, “Tensions of Change,” that included a week-long writer’s residency. Overflowing audiences, of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates, greeted the series. The series’ week long residency represented the MFA program’s interest in creative non-fiction. While “Tensions of Change” was an enormous effort, which cannot be repeated annually, it sets a precedent for funding readings and creative writer visitors, inasmuch as it successfully solicited interdepartmental and IAH support for creative writing activity. Perhaps the Honors College might help sponsor creative writing residencies, especially in light of its students’ demand to produce creative writing Honors theses, and in light of Schreyer’s facilities for temporary housing of scholar guests. Plans already are under way for creative writing visitors in 2004-2005 who will link a reading series to the inter-disciplinary Breaking the Silence: the Legacy of Slavery Project. Meanwhile, Robin Becker has been granted by the College wherewithal to host a week-long poet-in-residence for the MFA program for the next three years. The department must find a way to deliver its own budgetary resources more faithfully and fully to MFA needs for in-residence visitors.
2. Julia Kasdorf was hired expressly to forge and foster interchanges between “the writer and the community.” Although she emphatically has fostered those exchanges, her direction of the MFA program, and our insufficient replacement for diminishing creative faculty numbers, have made it difficult for her to expand community ties. More needs to be done; and here is another project that we can ask our Board of Visitors (see below) to help us with.
3. To call attention to the MFA program’s strength, in 2002 we acted as sponsors of the AWP annual convention (in Baltimore). One way to call attention to the program, and as a function of celebrating the program’s 20 year history, might be a conference in 2005-2006, on one of various subjects: contemporary American poetics; the state of reviewing, from academic-based writers’ perspective; new movements in creative nonfiction; etc. Funding for such a conference might take the path set out by “Tensions of Change,” if an appropriate interdisciplinary connection might be discoverable.
4. The MFA program needs to steadily account its students’ post-degree employments and publications, awards, etc., in order to strengthen recruitment.
5. The MFA cohort should seek ever more ways to find common cause with their strictly academic colleagues; and of course the reverse is also essential. Non-fiction, creative non-fiction, and cultural and rhetorical studies are obvious objects of common cause. If undergraduate major requirements are changed and enlarged, creative writing courses might figure as one component of a set of options that fulfil major requirements.
6. As a result of a Schreyer Institute grant in spring, 2004, Charlotte Holmes will initiate discussion this fall with the department’s Undergraduate Studies Committee about a creative writing proposal to deliver English 50 better, and more economically, in the future. The proposal seeks to restructure English 50 as a large lecture course that breaks down into recitation sessions. The proposal will provide better supervision for MFA candidates leading the recitation sessions, and it will reduce the need to assign writing faculty to English 590, a practicum for MFA candidates teaching undergraduate creative writing.
7. The MFA program is insufficiently advertised (see Advertising below).
8. Perhaps even more than humanist scholars, creative writers’ pursuit of grants and external awards is hampered by relatively small monetary amounts attached to those grants and awards. We would like to explore ways whereby creative writers who receive grants or awards that are below one-third their current salary might yet find some way of benefiting from such awards.
9. Non-academic publics, i.e, education-hungry “general readers,” are likely to identify academic English studies with creative writing (along, of course, with grammar and “correctness”). Production of contemporary writing remains one of higher education’s strongest links with public interest. We must use this link to attract members to our Board of Visitors, and we must ask the Board to help us realize MFA program aims for writers in residence, or for an adequate program of readings.
Undergraduate Major in English
President Spanier recently has renewed his call for a “student-centered university.” Responding to that call, as the following paragraphs will make clear, we commit ourselves to an improvement of the English major that we believe is the best way to execute the President’s emphasis.
We have 495 undergraduate English majors (that number includes 26 students in American Studies), an increase from 446 in 1998. If we can judge undergraduate satisfaction with a major by undergraduate assessments of teachers of that major, then our major is one of the most satisfying. For between fall, 1998, and fall, 2002, in all English courses (excluding English 4, 5, 15, 30, and 202) taught by tenure line and non-tenure line faculty our SRTE scores averaged 5.9 for quality of course and 6.1 for quality of instructor. And between fall, 1998, and fall, 2002, in all English courses (excluding 4, 5, 15, 30, and 202) taught by tenure line faculty, we averaged 5.9 for quality of course and 6.2 for quality of instructor. Since 1998 we have had multiple winners of Atherton Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Liberal Arts Outstanding Teacher Awards, etc.
Because high-quality teaching is one of our missions, it is worth noting how much of that aim is devoted to undergraduates. In 2002-2003 tenure-line faculty in English taught 48.6% of all classes (excluding English 4, 5, 15, 30, and 202); non-tenure line faculty taught 51.4% (excluding 4, 5, 15, and 30). Tenure line faculty taught 71% of courses at the 300 and 400 levels; 31% of courses below the 200 level; and 24% at the 200 level.
The major requires 36 credits, and has four one-course distribution requirements.
The major includes a number of specialized emphases, which students may choose to follow. Publishing, and African-American literature, are examples of those emphases. Despite the availability of emphases, few students follow them up: they remain mostly single-digit enrollments.
The American Studies major requires only 9 credits of required course work in American Studies per se. Because of the current low number of American Studies majors, American Studies courses in the English department are largely furnishing a minor for students in the College of Communications.
The last five years have improved the department’s relation to majors in regard to diversity of curriculum, advising, participation in the Honors College, job internships, and technology’s place in teaching.
Since our last strategic plan, diversity hires have made it possible to add two courses in Latina/Latino studies to the curriculum; and diversity hires have maintained a strong commitment to African-American curricula (there are now ten undergraduate classes in African-American literatures on the books). Advising improved with the appointment in 1998 of tenure line faculty member John Buck as head of our advising center. Buck has been succeeded by an FT1 appointment. A new department web site came on line in 2001, and provides students with information about every aspect of our program. The number of English students enrolled in the Honors College has risen, thanks to excellent advising by Michael Anesko: there were 43 English majors in Honors in 1998; last year there were 66. (That number realizes a 1997 planning goal for Honors enrollment.) Because of the work of Elizabeth Jenkins in setting up internships, a department internship program now offers more than fifty opportunities each term for majors to garner real world experience in workplaces before they graduate. Undergraduates also work as research interns for research faculty as a way of preparing for advanced work in English studies. An example of technology improvement in the classroom is Mark Morrison’s founding in 2003 of an undergraduate research e-journal Deluge, which is to be published annually.
The department gives graduating majors a written exit questionnaire assessing the major, and also arranges exit interviews with a dozen or more students as a further assessment.
Strategic Planning Aims for the Undergraduate Major:
Improving recruitment of majors, improving communication with majors, and strengthening the attraction of the undergraduate program was a goal in 1996. For the next five years a more important goal is an improvement in the overall intellectual quality and coherence of the major. Such an improvement is in line with our research ambitions and investments, for it is founded in hopes that undergraduate teaching stimulates research, and that a distinguished research faculty has a creative impact on undergraduate as well as graduate education.
In line with the preceding paragraph, and with our aim to slightly reduce graduate offering, and also to discontinue the American Studies major and minor at UP (see below), we purpose to increase the percentage of tenure line faculty teaching undergraduate courses by targeting a goal of 40% at the 200 level (up from 24%) in the next three years.
Our exit interview has been inadequate, because it asks our majors what they have liked, and asks them little about what they have come to know as a result of majoring in English. We have created a new questionnaire that was introduced last spring. It is aimed at helping undergraduates to think about their study as a progress in knowledge and an acquisition of skills.
We have commissioned the Undergraduate Studies Committee to consider ways to improve the English major’s intellectual demands and coherence, by beginning to address the following problems in 2004 and 2005:
Problems in Requirements for the English Major
1. Lack of coordination (both sequential and intellectual) among the required courses in the major that lead to the required capstone course, English 487W.
The major currently requires an introductory course (English 200), three core courses, (English 221, one course from the 200-level traditions menu of courses, one course from the 200-level forms menu of courses) and two distributional requirement courses (pre-1800 and post-1800). Students may take those classes in any order at any point in their academic careers. Those classes currently do not work together to serve any particular pedagogical scheme.
2. Lack of prerequisites for 400-level course work in English.
On the matter of prerequisites we are very unlike Indiana, Ohio State, Michigan-Ann Arbor, and Wisconsin-Madison. Michigan has two prerequisites for the major; Indiana has two introductory courses to the major; Wisconsin requires 6 credits of writing- intensive literary history as prerequisite to the major; Ohio State requires a gateway course whereby teachers of the course become their student majors’ advisors until those majors graduate.
3. Insufficient supervision of English 200 (Introduction to Critical Reading).
A required introduction to the major, English 200 is infrequently taught by tenure-track faculty (n.b. tenure-track faculty teach only 24% of 200-level courses; 3/5 of required courses for the major are 200 level courses). We have discovered that tenure-track faculty largely do not know English 200 course content or aims, so that upper level courses don’t much refer to English 200. And students take the course belatedly, because 200 is not designated as a prerequisite for the major. In order to improve English 200, we need to consider mentoring graduate students to teach it, as an assignment after they teach English 15; and we need to consider making English 200 a writing intensive substitute for English 202. (That substitution could mean 8 fewer sections of English 202.) In 2004-2005 the Head of English is regularly mentoring teachers of English 200.
4. Insufficient attention to literary and cultural history in core requirements for the major.
Exit interviews in spring, 2003, showed that most students insufficiently appreciated, or had weak memory of the content of, the one historical survey we require: English 221. That might be because majors are highly present-oriented. Nevertheless, we have distinguished faculty teaching English 221, and they garner high SRTE scores doing it. If, once majors have taken the course, majors draw on their learning in it less than they should, that is partly the result of their postponing enrollment in the required course until very late in their studies. A course intended for sophomores winds up having a large enrollment of seniors. We insure availability of English 221 to sophomores, but we must use advising or a prerequisite retirement to guarantee that sophomores not postpone the course. And we must intensify our effort to reinforce in our majors their need for broad and deep historical knowledge of culture and rhetoric. A department that has invested in a prestigious research faculty dedicated to literary and cultural history has every reason to expect, and continually to stimulate, appreciation by majors of past humanities.
5. Minimal requirements for the major overall.
English majors at superior-ranked Ohio State (where there are 1200 majors) are required to take proportionally more credits—about 45 to our 36; and are required to take three required quarters of literary historical surveys before their junior year; have five other required courses; and are required to take a minimum of 15 hours in an emphasis. Our emphases are voluntary. There is no need for us to think of requiring what Ohio State does; but we might well pursue a unique and innovative major that takes more responsibility than currently for shaping undergraduate learning.
6. Varying course requirements at varying levels.
What are appropriate reading and writing requirements, and what consistent requirements should there be, at 100, 200, and 400 levels? We do not seem to know; nor do we seem to know what constitutes student readiness for one level of course study rather than another. Should courses begin with readiness assessment tests for determining forward progress? Might such tests be a way of substituting for prerequisites?
7. No requirements in the major for courses in African-American or other “minority” literatures, or in world Anglophone or post-colonial literatures.
Despite our hiring in such areas and despite the disciplinary importance of those areas, we still fail to emphasize them in our major. This must be corrected by way of a requirement that majors take at least one course in such areas before graduation.
8. No alternative to the English 15 requirement for English majors.
We need to explore the possibility of an alternative, both for the sake of prospective majors, and for the sake of reducing FT commitments to English 15. One alternative would be the English Freshman Seminar.
Problems in the Distribution of Faculty Teaching Resources:
9. Entropy of the American Studies major and minor, and its drain on tenure-track teaching assignments.
We have already decided, with the Dean’s approval, that we no longer need to invest in a program which is better owned elsewhere. By 2004-2005 we intend to phase out our relation to the major and minor, and to offer the content of American Studies courses as regular English department listings. By phasing out American Studies we can liberate 7 sections of 400-level tenure line faculty from American Studies teaching requirements. Those faculty can be re-directed to teaching English majors in a newly productive ways, and in other courses. Those other courses will absorb the content of current American Studies offerings.
10. Undue expenditure of teaching energy on General Education courses
At the same time we ought to consider reforming our commitment to General Education courses: 100-level classes that are not writing classes. Not counting English 50 we offer 25 classes in GE per term; in contrast, Indiana offers 9, Michigan and Wisconsin 5. Given our commitment to composition, why do we have this additional commitment? 100-level classes, taught by fixed-term faculty and graduate students, should undergo a change that further increases their size, turning them into very large lectures on general topics taught by charismatic research faculty, aided by graduate assistants. Simultaneously we must drop some small GE offerings altogether. The result would be a better economizing of resources—less FT2s and FT1s, more tenure-track teachers in more undergraduate classrooms, and a more focused undergraduate curriculum.
Issues of General Content and Quality in the Major:
11. Insufficient guidance of English majors to professional schools and post-graduate work.
We plan to enhance present guidance considerably, and to set a goal of steering a minimum of 10 majors per year to graduate schools in CIC institutions. But we must do this starting, at the latest, early in the fall semester, with the help of graduate student input (including by all means minority student input), and with the help of persons who know something about law school, business school, medical school, and other professional school application processes.
12. The current major does not appear to promote student opportunity to think about the object of their study, or to see it as a model for convergence with other studies: cultural studies, multicultural studies, language studies.
We must do more to promote more conscious reflection on what major in English studies, rather than majoring in history, sociology, or psychology, means.
13. Cultural studies and other examples of recent scholarship are being taught under the rubric of “Special Topics.”
These courses need to have their own clear and prominent place in the curriculum, and—should emphases become more than the nominal matter they are at present—constitute an emphasis of their own. Course numbers and titles for those courses should be created.
14. Is the current English major less than a quality major; i.e., “too easy”?
Our exit interviews turn up relatively few students who have been accepted into post-graduate programs of any kind. Is this because we are allowing students who are top students, but not Honors students, achieve less than they might? A senior thesis is required of Honors students, but not of non-Honors majors. But a requirement that “ordinary” majors take two junior-senior seminars, one of which would demand a major piece of writing, might be practicable. It appears that writing requirements vary widely from course to course, irrespective of level—another aspect of why the English major might be less rigorous than it might, or should, be. (See item 9 above.)
15. Electronic textuality and literacy must become more prominent features of the major.
Although we might be superior to Indiana in this regard just because English at Indiana has no wired classrooms, we need to find a space suited to computing in the humanities, in order to further World Campus initiatives, etc.
16. The major’s senior seminars should enhance research possibilities and better coordinate with internships.
17. A required research seminar for majors in their junior year might lead to better preparation for their senior year courses and their graduate school plans. Several faculty report that majors who take English 478W in spring of their senior year are, given their proximity to graduation, no longer motivated in ways that match senior honor seminar demands.
18. Advanced undergraduate creative writing needs to undergo curricular and pedagogical strengthening.
We have already initiated last spring, with a grant from Schreyer Honors College under the supervision of Charlotte Holmes, an address to this matter.
19. As a rule undergraduate majors appear to have no relation, or little relation, to visiting department lecturers and guests.
Fortunately, last year’s “Tensions of Change” series of interdisciplinary visitors broke the rule. We need to find more ways to break it.
It will be said that we have insufficient reason for making the changes listed above: student satisfaction in our teaching is so high that it calls for no improvements; moreover, such improvements are of no relevance to our desire to move up in rankings by NRC or U. S. News and World Report. Nevertheless, a combination of complacency and incoherence (the major requires an intro to critical reading which tenure-track faculty don’t know the content of, and infrequently refer students to in their advanced classes) is a sign of drifting attention that has undermining effects on all our programs and commitments, including our highest research commitments. One test of the latter’s importance (not the only or exclusive one; but one nevertheless) is our ability to communicate the excitement and results of research to a general intellectual public, whose prime constituents are our undergraduates. And our undergraduates are a future public: the public that will finance us, either indirectly or as donors. The future of our enterprise lies in a combination of our rankings and our attractiveness as an object for endowments. Our English major needs improvement on many grounds: on self-justifying ones; for the sake of improved undergraduate education; for the sake of future donors; and last but not least for the sake of showcasing the major to the new department Board ofVisitors, a sine qua non of the department’s next five years (see below).
Composition
We deliver instruction to two required writing courses that all Penn State students must complete: English 15 (or 30), and English 202 (offered in four versions). We also staff a Writing Center, Center for Excellence in Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, and Graduate Writing Center. SRTE ratings show high student satisfaction with the teaching of those required courses. FT1 and MYFT supply stability and experience to course teaching; closely mentored graduate students supply fresh energy and excellence to its pedagogy. The demand for sections of these two courses is a constant weight. We have improved FTCAP placement, so that we now offer only a fraction of the 25 or so sections of English 4 that we used to provide; but the demand for sections still puts stresses on the system.
What also puts stress on the system is “information overload,” a result of ubiquitous information in media and digital environments. Skills of close and attentive reading, and of consequential argument, encouraged by traditional English studies and rhetorical curricula, have withered as students become browsers rather than readers. But we are fully aware that digital environments increasingly will affect present and future students. We must learn how to teach students to develop skills in reading and argument that will be maintained, and will engage with, such environments.
Strategic Planning Aims for Composition
The Department’s Composition Committee must address the following:
1. English 15 needs to be revised to accommodate strengths of post-1996 faculty hires (Glenn, Selber, Gilyard, Richardson, Stark); and also to articulate the course in terms of a required course that students must complete in Speech. The revision should be part of a broad effort to reflect innovatively on our teaching of writing; and should incorporate more current thought and practice about technologies of writing (see below).
2. The administrative structure of the composition program and the Writing Center requires re-examination. Should FT1 lecturers serve as the Writing Center’s assistant directors; or should a tenure-line Associate Director?
3. How can we improve the orientation program for new TAs? Should the current one-week orientation become two or three weeks in length? Where will funding for a lengthened orientation come from?
4. We need to outsource English 202 wherever it might be possible and appropriate. It is essential to develop alternatives to English 202 that will alleviate the weight on English of bearing the full burden of instruction. We propose that for English majors English 200 or senior seminars in English substitute for English 202.
5. English 15 should develop instructor-tuned or thematically-tuned sections, so that freshman can choose courses that match their special interests.
6. In spring, 2005, the Director of Composition intends to intensify efforts to control potential for grade inflation in English 15.
7. There are signs of falling enrollments in Summer English 202 sections. If the fall is not a temporary one, there can be serious effects on department revenues and graduate student teaching assignments. The Composition office and the department must decide whether cutting back on spring semester English 202 sections might boost summer enrollments.
8. The Composition Committee must investigate possibilities of producing a combination of textbook and technology design for English 15 and English 202 so that the department can use profits to fund program enhancements for the entire department.
9. We must find ways to improve the professional life we offer FT1s, MYFTs, and FT2s. Last year we instituted a competition-based offer of travel support to the annual English Institute at Harvard for FT1 faculty, and a department prize for best teaching by non tenure-track faculty. But these are minute, perhaps indiscernible improvements.
Technology
Ohio University’s English Department includes among its administrative officers a technology and media director, who receives a reduction of two courses a year for his work. Penn State English leaves its commitment to technology to the extra-curricular individual enterprise of interested faculty who are trained in technology, or who are interested in technology’s bearing on pedagogy, writing, and reading. Before we turn to the benefit of such individual enterprise, however, we should not the weakness of relying on it when it comes to planning. That weakness is intensified, of course, by lack of funds. Given a continuing dearth of dollars for investment in technology, perhaps an affordable modest step might be taken in the following way. The department should seek to hire as an FT1 a person whose training emphasizes humanities technology. Such a person could have full-time responsibility for educating each English studies faculty in the best full use for teaching and research of digital humanities environments. The same person might also have as his duties continuous supervision, construction, and updating of the department’s websites. Those latter activities have been left to ad hoc corrective fiddling by well-intentioned individual efforts. PSU English is way behind the efforts of the following schools to operate and maintain a facility for the specific purpose of supporting work at the intersections of technology and English studies: in addition to Ohio State, U of Illinois, Purdue, U of Texas-Austin, Syracuse, U of Florida, U of Maryland, U of Oklahoma, and Colorado SU.
We are grateful for individual efforts, nonetheless, in our digital realm. Thanks to such efforts—Professor Stuart Selber’s, for prime example—we have the benefit of the PSU Computers and Writing Initiative. The Initiative organizes effort in English to make intersections of literacy and computers more visible to colleagues and students. Graduate students attached to the Initiative provide orientation to faculty members on ways to integrate technology into writing classrooms. The Initiative supports graduate degree candidates who also want to work towards a Teaching with Technology Certificate, sponsored by the Graduate School. Three of seven students who have earned the Certificate thus far are from English.
Strategic Planning Aims for Technology
The English department’s fundamental task each year is to help 10,000 Penn State undergraduates learn excellence in writing and argumentation in two composition courses required for graduation. The first required course introduces freshmen to university writing standards. The second course aims to improve upper-level composition and argument for four groups of students: in humanities, in social sciences, in technical writing and in business. Teaching written rhetorical argument on two levels and to multiple groups, with no more than 25 students in each course section, is a strenuous job. It’s increasingly so, because of “information overload.” “Awash in ubiquitous information,” our director of composition Richard Doyle writes, “students read less and less….Skills of close and attentive reading…have withered as students become less readers than browsers.” Skills in argumentation wither alongside. But it’s our job to reverse withering tendencies; and to do so nowadays not by opposing digital environments but by teaching reading and argument within them. We hope to expand digital components of our composition classrooms, and simultaneously to win new powers of mind for our students, despite their information overload.
One thing we should develop is a facility that will accommodate the work that we do in English studies specifically. The design of the facility should support physical as well as virtual space. The physical space would support writing-intensive classes and collaborative work, and would be flexible enough to be used for lectures and presentations. The virtual space would be designed to support literacy and literary activities as opposed to engineering or scientific activities. The result of this humanistic design approach would be an inviting pedagogical and social space for faculty and graduate students who are apprehensive about moving their courses and work into online environments. Right now most of our technology efforts are fragmented or isolated, in large part because Burrowes is less than amenable to generative conversation and collaborative work.
Fortunately, thanks to Professor Stuart Selber’s initiative and the generosity of the French department and other language units, English has opportunity to develop the kind of space described above. English will receive a part share in a new computer classroom in 215 Burrowes, one that becomes available because of the exit of Political Science from the building.
The new facility is one of the best current practical hopes for technological innovation in English. Unfortunately, we have been notified that 215 Burrowes will not be renovated and made available for use until 2006. But we also have more to hope from efforts along innovative technological lines by Professor Doyle.
Professor Doyle proposes that we use a web presence called a “wiki” to enhance our teaching of rigorous argumentation in a digital context. The wiki makes possible a combination of teaching traditional heuristics with more interactive student writing and editing. Wiki text is easily incorporated into Eportfolios. In the fall, 2004, semester, 12 sections of English 15 are experimenting with digital curriculum. The Composition Office would like to migrate some courses to online wiki presences by fall, 2005. But a full utilization of wiki will require a wireless campus and wireless laptop adoption. The University, not just the department of English, would have to commit itself to this innovative development for its 40,000 students. There is an opportunity here for the University to gain national prominence for establishing an innovative digital curriculum.
We understand that in an environment that retards even the renovation of 215 Burrowes for years, our plans for a digitalized future for composition appear utopian. But that appearance must not become an excuse for an absence of effortful transformation. Here is yet another potential priority for presentation to the Board of Visitors. Members of that Board might well have the business experience and savvy that could direct us to the best ways of raising money for help with digital environments.
We should mention here again what we have proposed in the previous section: one modest step in the direction of improved technology would be the hiring of an FT1 whose domain would be humanities technology, and who would function as a department webmaster.
Advertising
The department’s advertising is inadequate, and well might be responsible for its potential for attracting even better graduate student applications than it does.
The department has no entry in the Peterson’s Guide to Graduate Study, a standard reference; its creative writing program managed (thanks to newly granted money from the department’s operations budget) only last academic year and this one to place a single advertisement in AWP, the journal of academic writing programs; the African American faculty brochure, produced years ago, is out of date; the department has no general advertising brochure.
The department’s web pages are not sufficient substitutes for advertising, partly because there is no department webmaster who can update all the department’s many pages. (For a possible repair of this lack, see the previous section.)
The major reason of this advertising failure is cost. The Peterson’s Guide entry costs the better part of 2K. We can just afford the single advertisement in AWP; yet we also should advertise in Poets and Writers, another journal consulted by writing programs, and in American Poetry Review. University printing office regulations make it difficult for us to find advertising designers who might produce what we need less expensively than the University design office. Although we requisitioned temporary budget funds for an advertising brochure for the department last year, we did not produce the brochure, because we ought to wait until the planning process is finished before we do. But we must produce one, just as our peers do: Ohio State’s new glossy product makes its program look highly attractive.
Given the scarcity of budgetary funds for advertising, it looks like we might have to ask our Board of Visitors to help us realize our needs here.
Hiring and Intra-disciplinary Community
The department continues to build on traditional strengths while developing new ones. We are one of the very few departments in the nation with significant faculty profiles in almost all the diverse areas of literary and cultural intepretation. Notable faculty specialties include textual editing and the history of the book; rhetoric and composition; all periods of British and American literature (with unusual strength in medieval and Early Modern British literature, in all areas of American literature, and in Anglo-American modernism); contemporary criticism and theory; creative writing; cultural studies; and African-American and Latino/a literature and culture. In this respect, we stand as compelling evidence that disciplinary change in English does not have to be a zero-sum game in which newer fields advance only at the expense of established fields, or vice versa.
The 1996 plan focused attention on separate cohorts of department specialties. The present plan, without in the least subordinating or minimizing those cohorts, focuses on general departmental scholarly and pedagogical aims. It does so because the profession of English studies, and the field or discipline of English studies, continues to undergo change; each of its changing intellectual components and sub-fields, its specialized cohorts, borrow initiatives and inspirations from others. Intra-disciplinary community, rather than intra-disciplinary competition, is therefore an important guiding principle of department planning. Moreover, the ever-changing market of scholarship and publishing demands that we keep learning new ways of approaching our studies; and we need to learn those ways increasingly from each other, pace our specialties.
As part of its attempt to foster intra-disciplinary community, and to build such community into its strategic planning, in spring, 2003, the Planning Committee initiated a department-wide conversation about hiring priorities. The intention of that conversation was to change the usual method of making decisions about those priorities. The usual method has been to assume that the loss of a member of one specialized department cohort should lead to the replacement of that loss, in a one to one fashion; the usual method has also assumed that hiring priorities should be led by the claims of one group rather than another, on the basis of the needs or prestige of any one group. (Again, such an assumption appears to have guided the writing of the 1996 plan.)
But the present Planning Committee solicited a department discussion in spring, 2003, for the sake of discovering department priorities that department members could think of as serving the growth and distinction of the department as a whole. Sudden departures or retirements might complicate this collective planning, to be sure; and of course it is often necessary to replace key faculty in specific areas for specific area reasons. But we believe our recent track record demonstrates that it is not necessary for the department to think about hiring in terms of “replacements,” just as we believe that our track record shows that we do not need to try to engineer a group of specific hires in one targeted “initiative.” Our faculty’s collective reputation will improve over the next five years, but not because we will embark on any concerted effort to move up in the U.S. News rankings through a specific hiring strategy. On the contrary, we hope to move up in such rankings by enhancing our faculty’s collective reputation—and our capacity to make collective hiring decisions.
The 2003 hiring discussion led to a list of ten top hiring priorities. Two of them—specialization in Victorian studies, and specialization in sex and gender studies in relation to literature and culture—have been filled. The remaining eight priorities called for three hires in areas of rhetoric and technology, one in creative writing (non-fiction), one in post-1950 American poetry and poetics, one in medieval studies, one in African-American studies, and one in ethnicity and cultural studies. The current year’s job searches will fill two positions in rhetoric and composition, and a position in creative writing non-fiction.
As a preliminary exercise in intra-disciplinary community, the Department constituted last year’s sex and gender search committee with regard to the committee’s general intelligence and intellectual standards, not with regard to its members’ “specialties.”
As a further intra-disciplinary exercise the Department has constituted a new Speakers’ Committee. For the first time in memory this year visiting lecturers have been chosen in advance by a group that represents the department’s variety, for the sake of collective occasions for intra-departmental intellectual exchange. Until now only job candidate talks primarily have exerted a claim on the entire department’s attention.
In 1999 the department’s creative writers reviewed the creative writing program’s needs. In doing so, in what now appears as an intra-disciplinary aim, the writers proposed a to create a multicultural poetry annual. The result was “Mixed Blood,” a reading series whose content has been published in 2004 in a collection by the same name, under the editorship of Cecil Giscombe. The future of “Mixed Blood” is subject to financial constraints, at the very least; and it is not clear if it should be viewed as a project of the creative writing wing or of the department’s cultural studies curriculum. Perhaps its continuity under both auspices would be most in line with attempts to foster intra-disciplinary community.
Inter-Disciplinary Community
Renewed intra-disciplinary community is not to take place at the expense of any inter-disciplinary initiatives. Indeed our commitment to fostering the Rock Ethics Institute; an emerging Disability Studies group and center; the Science, Medicine, Technology and Culture group; the Heritage of Slavery project; and the American Women Writers group should continue, and even expand. We are expanding in this direction with our present search for another research chair professor; and recent departures from the history of science cohort in the College history department suggests that our own analysts of science discourse have all the more reason to assume leadership of SMTC activities. In the domain of rhetorical studies our hiring priorities—one current rhetoric and composition search highlights rhetoric of science, medicine, and technology--make room for that leadership role.
We need to make a priority of additional inter-disciplinary or inter-unit activities. We have untapped possibilities of co-operation with Pattee Library. The Kenneth Burke archive is a prime opportunity for collaboration (see CALS, below). Collaboration with our colleagues in rhetoric in the Department of Speech and Communications is in order. We have every reason, especially in light of a continuing crisis in academic publishing, to forge a better working relation with Penn State Press, as a minimal way of supporting University press operations at home as well as abroad (i. e., with presses on our assessment indicators list).
The department’s collaboration with IAH must continue; and, following the lead of “Tensions of Change,” we should make a priority of building bridges with other arts programs and art-related programs in other colleges: with art history and visual arts, perhaps especially.
Competition for Research Funding
The College is increasing its mandate that faculty at every level steadily and intensively pursue external funding for scholarly work. We must respond fully to that mandate.
At the same time that we respond we might note how peer institutions coordinate such a mandate with increased access to non-competitive opportunities for research. Ohio State’s mandate is accompanied by weekly notices to the English department from its central Research Office notifying faculty of grants and fellowships they should apply for. The consequent incitement to research intensifies faculty’s temporary departure from teaching. Despite that intensification, however, Ohio State English’s research leave policy is generous. Junior faculty teach only four courses per year for four years; because Ohio State is on a quarter system, that means that junior faculty are free to do research for the better part of six months per year. Tenured faculty compete for sabbaticals, and are required to compete for external support simultaneously. They are not penalized if their bid for external support does not succeed. Tenured faculty also compete for special research assignments; i.e., for one course release from a 2-2-1 quarters system workload. Successful competitors thus teach only two out of three quarters in one year. Banking of course reductions is permitted, provided a faculty member teaches his overload before he benefits from banking. At Indiana University English faculty may apply for a semester free of teaching once every three years. Sabbaticals are almost automatic. Thus in both peer institutions stimulus to research combines internal and external competition with increased possibility for success if the requisite competiton does not succeed.
At Penn State, competition for research opportunities among English faculty has stimulated remarkable productivity. As the assessment indicator charts at the end of this document make clear, Penn State English publishes more work in top journals and with top presses than do their Big Ten peer departments. That extraordinary fact remains as yet insufficiently recognized, both at home at Penn State and abroad, in the national network of universities. One downside of our success, however, is the increasing lack of interest in department service and administration that research competition incites. Ohio State and Indiana give department administrators roughly the same number of course releases we give ours (although Ohio State also gives a one-course a year release to editors of journals); and both departments feel a need to stimulate service more effectively. Indiana’s department is considering weighing service as grounds for promotion to full professor. Indiana also requires English faculty to serve on two committees each year, on a rotation system, not an election system.
We should explore the rotation system here.
Relation of the English Department to the 2004 University Survey of Employee Attitudes and Practices
The Department is committed to furthering the upward progress of faculty satisfaction and pride in Penn State, as documented in the 2004 survey. It is clear, however, that work remains to be done in improving the climate for diversity, and improving relations between administrators and others. The department’s hiring and recruitment initiatives are the most immediate and efficient way to create improvements in diversity, provided the initiatives are co-ordinated with the department’s intellectual and programmatic needs. Most worrisome in the survey is the relatively small numbers of persons who trust that they will be fairly treated if they appeal unfair treatment at work, and of persons who believe that promotions go to those who best deserve them (38% and 29%, respectively).
The Department of English is currently advising with its administrative and personnel committees to see if these survey results match the English faculty’s general sense of things; and, if so, how to improve confidence about appeals and promotions.
THREE NOVEL WAYS FOR REALIZING PSU ENGLISH STRATEGIC PLANNING AIMS
I. Outreach, World Campus, Textbooks
Our Outreach activities have barely been constituted, although NEH Institutes and Seminars (led by Susan Squier and Garrett Sullivan, for examples) provide us with a model, as do Robert Burkholder’s ground-breaking, and profit-making, Outreach offerings in environmental and landscape since 2000. Elaine Richardson’s annual Read-In Chain, and her African Americans Mentoring for Cultural Literacy Project, also significantly contribute to Outreach. Within the next five years we must try to package department specialists—in science studies; in disability studies; in multicultural studies; in environmental and landscape studies; in linguistical, rhetorical, and composition studies—as consultants to public and private initiatives. The interdisciplinary aspect of such studies is one of their marketable possibilities. We must provide such consulting opportunities in order to fund strategic planning aims that have otherwise no means of support. And we must increasingly attempt to reduce the amount of our temporary budget, given the College and the University’s increasingly strained resources, thanks to public irresponsibility towards higher education.
Stuart Selber’s design for a World Campus technical writing course has begun to yield profits. We also have asked the World Campus to advise us on the result of surveys attempting to discover what new English courses might be attractive to World Campus students. In 2004 FT faculty have developed new versions of courses in article writing and in American literature since 1865. (We ourselves have suggested that an introduction to reading poetry course; a folklore course; and a science fiction course would be worth design monies.)
In the next five years we must not fail to produce profits from World Campus revenues. However, before we can do so, it is imperative that we have a much more clear idea of a. what revenues actually come to us from World Campus; and b.whether or not World Campus offerings have no deleterious effect on Resident Instruction and on our control of quality of instruction.
In regard to b., we know that since spring, 2001, World Campus has offered 30 sections of English 202C to 665 students over the course of 12 semesters. The average is less than 3 courses per semester. In spring, 2004, of 56 students who took 202A, 23 or 41% were also enrolled in RI courses; of 24 students who took 202C, 11 or 46% were in RI courses; and of 91 students who took 202D, 51 or 56% were in RI courses. The Composition office, and the Graduate Office as well, in consultation with World Campus, must decide on the revenue and educational benefit, or the lack thereof, resulting from such offerings, and from RI use of them.
There are signs of falling enrollments in Summer English 202 sections. If the fall is not a temporary one, there can be serious effects on department revenues and graduate student teaching assignments. The Composition office and the department must decide whether cutting back on spring semester English 202 sections might boost summer enrollments.
The Composition office must secure from World Campus evaluative data for sections World Campus offers in the name of English. And it needs to be sure that English teachers of resident instruction are not draining their time and energies by simultaneously offering World Campus instruction.
The Composition office and the Head of English must explore the possibility that World Campus might fund an English 602 as a practicum for World Campus instructors, so that English can be guarantee quality of instruction for World Campus courses.
Meanwhile, in regard to outreach, we should note that the English department makes no profit from Continuing Education sections of 202, and should discontinue offering such sections. The department should replace Continuing Education composition offerings with English offerings in the evening, whenever possible.
Economics and Comparative Literature have produced textbooks for courses in their departments. In Economics sales of its self-produced textbook for Econ 351 produces a profit of $9 per book on 300 sales per year. Again, in order to fund our annual programmatic activities, we must explore the possibility of self-producing a textbook for English. (With the aid of an interested publisher, such a textbook could also be sold elsewhere, with the proviso that the lowest price for the textbook would be reserved for Penn State sales.) Such self-designed textbooks require an on-line or computer component; hence their production perhaps will need to involve our technology initiative (see above). Despite budget shortfalls, in the current year we hope to produce a modest conference in spring, 2005, that is intended to energize instructors to produce the beginnings of a textbook.
II. Center for American Literary Studies (CALS). (Please note: the following description of the Center is adapted from a prospectus for donors.)
A. Penn State’s History in American Literary Studies
Penn State was the first academic institution to name a professor of American literature. Professor of English and Rhetoric Fred Lewis Pattee, who joined the faculty in 1894 and whose name also graces Penn State’s largest library, was one of the first scholars to teach and write seriously about American literature as its own distinct object of study. Until Pattee, the academy widely accepted the premise that the study of American literatures was simply a minor offshoot of the study of English literature. Pattee set a precedent for Penn State’s leadership in the field of American literary studies, and he also set a precedent for Penn State’s leadership in the entire field of literary studies in the U.S. Other Penn State faculty whose innovations shaped the field include Harrison Meserole, who initiated the MLA International Bibliography.
Since Pattee’s era Penn State has been a home to scholars who are precedent-setting critics and editors. It has also been a home to creative writers who have shaped recent American literary tradition. The scholar who first studied Ernest Hemingway and made Hemingway studies a viable field in American literature, Philip Young, spent his career at Penn State, as did his collaborator, Charles Mann, a distinguished authority in rare books and the leading force behind the development of Penn State’s rare books holdings. Theodore Roethke, one of the twentieth century’s important American poets, taught at Penn State (and coached tennis) for seven years. The novelists John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Paul West produced important fiction at Penn State.
Penn State’s University Libraries hold the papers and effects of another giant of American literature. The Kenneth Burke archives—one of the most visited places in the entire University Libraries—contains the largest single collection of writings and books of the man whom many believe is, like Pattee, one of the most important, precedent-setting American literary scholars of the twentieth century. And Burke was also the most important American rhetorician of his age. Late in his life, Burke spent several semesters teaching at Penn State, and agreed to donate the majority of his papers to Pattee. The University Libraries are now in negotiations with Burke’s estate to purchase much of the rest of his papers. The Burke Archive in Pattee is an inspiration for scholarly thought about the intellectual and public importance of literary and rhetorical studies.
Continuing traditions set by Pattee and the others we have named, today’s faculty at Penn State numbers leading scholars in American and British literary, historical, rhetorical and cultural studies; scholars who have made national and international reputations as practitioners of literary and rhetorical studies in general; and leading editors of English and American classics..
All in all, the history of literary studies at Penn State has given the College of the Liberal Arts and the Department of English an important momentum. A decade ago, the Department of English was ranked in the lower half of the Big Ten, behind such schools as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, schools with top programs nationally. Thanks to improvements made in the last ten years, the Department of English reasonably expects to be near the top of the Big Ten when new National Research Council rankings appear in 2006. The surge in Penn State’s strengths in American literary studies and rhetoric, and in British literary studies, gives us great momentum towards improved ranking. As an aid to that improvement the establishment of a Penn State Center for American Literary Studies—for studies of American literature, rhetoric and culture; and for studies of literature, rhetoric and culture in America-- could be a transformative moment in the department’s upward fortunes.
B. Working Toward A Distinguished Center
Building on its compelling strengths in American literature and in literary and rhetorical studies generally, the Department of English will seek endowed support over the next three years for a major initiative: a Center for American Literary Studies. Penn State is the right place for such a concentrated effort. One reason is the University’s storied past in this area. Another is its current scholarly and artistic strength. A third reason is a present opportunity to assume national leadership in renewing the meaning and value of American literary studies and of literary and rhetorical studies in general. It is an acknowledged fact among scholars of American, English, and rhetorical studies that constant innovations in their field have issued in a need to take stock of change, and to re-define and consolidate, their object of study. Just as Pattee led the way in his historical moment, Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies can lead the way in a contemporary effort at disciplinary redefinition, and can accordingly have a significant impact on students, scholars, and the public. The Center will focus its work on re-thinking and renewing American literary studies in two senses: studies of American literature and rhetoric, and studies of literature and rhetoric as they are practiced in higher education in the United States.
To accomplish its work the Center would support permanent fixtures, including but not limited to lectureships, director’s funds, and professorships (for both visiting professors and professors in residence). The Center also would include features to allow for annual or biannual support of new research. Such features might include competitive research awards for faculty and graduate students, and funds for visiting scholars and writers.
The Center would join other programs in making Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts one of the best liberal arts colleges among public universities in the United States. It would do so because the center has the potential to increase the quality of education to undergraduates by newly patterning their education in line with the latest coherent thinking about the character, function, and intellectual value of American literary studies.
There is a fourth reason for the Center’s existence: because the University Libraries’ holdings and the Libraries’ professionals would be closely involved with CALS, its success would raise the profile of our already esteemed collections. It is a fact that the top five English departments in the nation have resources which closely ally their English departments with major research and archival holdings; hence, such a model is a proven success formula. Given Pattee Library’s holdings in American literature, and its Kenneth Burke archive, Penn State’s commitment to building a center around American literary studies in particular, and doing so as a way toward defining and leading the discipline of English studies, the Center for American Literary Studies’s alliance with Pattee Library will stand as an example of excellence and leadership distinct in the field.
C. Activities of the Center for American Literary Studies
The models for the Center for the American Literary Studies (CALS) are other successful centers and institutes in the College. Other entities in Liberal Arts have faculty who, for short terms, are associated with the centers and help foster and facilitate its goals through research, teaching, and outreach programs. They also function with a mission flexible enough to support a variety of research questions that help illuminate broad and multi-faceted areas.
The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, in our Department of History, is one good example. The Richards Center has supported faculty research on military campaigns, but also on other aspects of the era’s political and social history: nineteenth-century temperance movements; the Transatlantic Slave Trade; the nature of the party system in antebellum America; labor history in the coal industry; and aspects of Lincoln’s presidency. It has conducted summer institutes for secondary school teachers, placed undergraduates in internships at various battlefields, and helped train the next generation of teacher-scholars.
CALS would sponsor activities in ways similar to the Richards Center. Faculty studying relations between American and English literature, for instance, could apply to CALS for funds toward editing and publishing an English writer’s correspondence with an American writer or editor. A cultural critic might look at resistance movements and the use of poetry broadsides in 1950s and 1960s America. A creative writer might appeal to the Center for funds to support a large-scale project. At the same time, it is feasible that the Center can develop summer programs for high school teachers and establish partnerships with archives and libraries in Pennsylvania and elsewhere for the purpose of providing internship opportunities for students. Because the focus on American literary studies is at once broad and narrow, faculty from a variety of disciplines might find the center offers a way for them to support projects which, while innovative in a field like philosophy or cultural anthropology, may well have resonances within CALS.
In a just a few years, the Richards Center has made Penn State’s history program one of the most highly regarded in the country, and its civil war program in particular equal to the University of Virginia’s, the program long proclaimed best in the field. It has been able to support excellent graduate students, train the next generation of scholars, inspire new research, and act as a progenitor of the newest and best learning available on the subject. With the support of committed and energized faculty and alumni, we are confident that CALS can have a similar effect on the English department at Penn State, and act as a progenitor of the newest and best thinking about the meaning and structure of American literary studies.
D. The Next Step
The next step in establishing such a center depends on donors. The following section is a sketch of components of the Center for which we will seek funds from private patrons.
E. An Annotated Outline of Expected CALS Funds
Pattee Fellows Program $1,250,000
Excellent graduate students often determine the success of centers such as CALS. Because they teach and inspire undergraduates, work with leading faculty, and often take jobs at other prestigious universities and thus enhance the reputation of their alma maters, the participation and enlightenment of the next generation of teacher-scholars is critical to the success of any major scholarly endeavor. Given the resources available in teaching talent, research acumen, and archival resources, Penn State draws graduate students from the country’s top undergraduate programs and must then compete with other Big Ten and Ivy League universities to make successful offers. If CALS has a program to support up to five fellows per year—including graduate students acclimating in their first year, or working on their dissertations, or undertaking other promising work—we will be able to more effectively compete with other programs, and thus bring to CALS the kinds of talent on which the best programs are built. We suggest that fellows of such importance to CALS be named Pattee Fellows. The work of graduate fellows of the Center will be focused on new visions of American literature and new visions of the character, value and function of literary and rhetorical studies in the United States.
New Editions Project: $1,000,000
Many department scholars are leaders in the developing practice of scholarly editing. For example, Professors Jim West, Sandy Spanier, and Robin Schulze, in their work on Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Moore, seek to produce interpretations of the writer’s work that, in their expert judgment, best reflects the developing creativity of those authors. Because Hemingway and Fitzgerald were inveterate revisers, and because their editor Maxwell Perkins further revised their work, the scholarly task of producing editions of those writers is difficult and time-consuming detective work. Currently, a New Editions Project would go to support the work of Spanier and West, but as those projects are completed, the Project could support other editions that, due to Penn State’s prominence in this area, are under way or are bound to develop. The importance to American literary studies of the production of critical editions can scarcely be understated. When a critical edition of a widely-read American author appears and is of excellent quality, it is almost always adopted in high school and college courses nationwide. For instance, almost a decade ago, West worked to produce an “unexpurgated” edition of Theodore Dreiser’s masterpiece, Sister Carrie. The resulting edition, published by Penguin, is now overwhelmingly the edition taught in American schools and universities, and the edition by which students come to know and understand Dreiser. Thus, the work of Penn State scholars will be instrumental in introducing tomorrow’s students, at all levels, to The Great Gatsby, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and other classics of American literature. Similar ground-breaking innovations in curriculum and learning have resulted from Professor Carla Mulford’s anthologies of colonial American writing. But new editions are not only the province of the department’s Americanists. Our scholars in English and rhetorical studies are also producing equally important editions—of medieval drama; of the Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser; of 17th century drama; of Jonathan Swift; of modernist literary journals, to name just a few examples. The New Editions Project will comprehend scholarly production of all editions that bear on the domain of literary studies; and the Project will comprehend investigations into theories of editing; histories of book publishing; technologies of editing and publishing; relations of editing to reading and reading publics—in short to material textual objects which are essential to literary and rhetorical studies.
Kenneth Burke Lectureship on the State of English Studies $1,000,000
Because of the visibility CALS wants to achieve, the center will have an opportunity to address a present state of disciplinary uncertainty, diversity, and renewal. Assessments in recent years about the “fate of English study” or the nature of the discipline of literary and rhetorical studies in the face of competing interests has led to questioning the field’s importance and purpose. With the presence of Kenneth Burke’s papers at Penn State, it is fitting that the CALS take a leadership position, in his name, in providing a sense of direction in English studies. Burke himself, a legendary literary critic, fiction writer, poet, and editor, and one of the great shapers of our current university study of literature, rhetoric, and culture, foresaw in his work the controversial changes that have unfolded in literary and rhetorical study in the past three decades. A Burke Lectureship will annually designate a distinguished member of the discipline of literary and rhetorical studies in America to be in residence for part or all of a semester, and to deliver a series of lectures, aimed at students, scholars, and the public, interweaving some aspect of Burke’s legacy with thought about the nature and object of literary and rhetorical studies and about the state of English studies as an intellectual discipline. The lectures would be expected to be worthy of publication by a university press or a trade press. Although the lectures would be of paramount interest to professors of English studies, they also would attempt to address the broadest possible public curiosity concerning the character and importance of American literary studies.
Writer-in-Residence Fund $500,000
We feel that one portion of CALS should deal with working writers and their necessary alliance with a center focused on American literary studies. The fund would support the residency of a nationally-visible writer of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction, preferably one with a scholarly reputation as well. By supporting a prolonged visit by individuals engaged in both the making and consideration of literature, such a fund would do much toward coalescing interest around the variety of experience present in modern American literary studies as well as significantly enhancing the undergraduate and graduate educational experience in English.
Other Endowment Opportunities
CALS will have to ensure regular funding for what might be considered more pedestrian matters, but ones which will be essential to its longevity. They might include funds for travel by graduate students, faculty, and even undergraduates. Many of the department’s students currently take part in internships (up to fifty per semester, in a program that has around 500 majors), and thus often need modest support to make up for summer jobs or other funding they would have earned without the internship. While such internships seem distant from the concerns of CALS, opportunities exist at libraries, archives, journals, conferences, and, at some point, perhaps within CALS itself, which are consistent with the center’s goals. As well, CALS will need funds for acquiring library resources; for general research expenses to fund competitive short-term grants to faculty and graduate students; funds to support a journal; and more.
III. Board of Visitors
A department Board of Visitors, a select group of alumni leaders and other interested persons, representing the public whom our scholarship can instruct and serve, will help us realize many of our strategic planning aims, by providing direction and financial aid. A first organizational meeting of the English Board of Visitors was convened October 8, 2004. The initial meeting numbered five members and two potential members. The potential members subsequently joined the Board. Our next meeting, in April, 2005, will include additional members. We hope to increase the size of the Board to at least 15 members. Each Visitor pledges a five-year contribution. Some of the activities with which the Board can aid us have been mentioned above, passim; others are enumerated in the CALS prospectus.
A “vision statement” presented by the English Department Head to the Board is appended to this document. (See Appendix B.)
APPENDIX A: Publication Data. The following data provide evidence of the department of English’s leadership in the field of literary, rhetorical, and cultural studies.
A. 1. Journal Publications
[See last pages. We have changed our lists of assessment indicators since the 1997 plan, in order to comprehend both the variety and the unity of the current field of English studies. We have compared Penn State English faculty publications in regard to that list with Ohio State and Indiana University faculty. The results show us, between 1998 and 2003, far in the lead: there are 63 publications in those journals by PSU English faculty; 30, by Indiana faculty; and 27, by Ohio State faculty. A separate list of composition and rhetoric journals, with a separate count, and a separate list of literary journals, with a separate count, for creative writers, also are provided.]
2. Book Publications
[We also have changed our list of presses since the previous plan. A separate list of presses for creative writers, and a separate count for creative writers, is provided]
IU OSU PSU
Presses
California 0 0 1
Cambridge 2 3 1
Chicago 2 1 1
Columbia 1 0 0
Cornell 1 3 1
Duke 1 2 2
Harvard 0 0 0
Illinois 0 1 3
Indiana 2 0 0
Johns Hopkins 0 1 1
Minnesota 0 0 3
NYU 0 0 2
Oxford 2 1 2
Totals 11 12 17
B. Impact.
3. Awards, Fellowships, and Honors
[Please note that the NRC list of notable awards, etc., a decade ago does not include fellowships that are especially relevant to creative writers. Omission of those fellowships handicaps our count.]
Award Name 1993-1996 2000-2003
Guggenheim Fellowship 1
Fulbright Fellowship 2 2
ACLS Fellowship
Huntington Fellowship 2
Residency at the National Humanities Center
Residency at the Getty Center for Humanities and Arts
Amercian Academy of Arts and Sciences
Humboldt Fellowship
NEH Fellowship 5
American Antiquarian Society Fellowship
New Berry Library Fellowship
*3 NEH Summer Stipends received (1993, 2000, 2001)
*Fulbright Summer Fellowship received (2003)
Journals: Social Differences Cultural College Callaloo Boundary Arizona American 20th Modernism/ Modern ELH Am Lit PMLA African Critical
Text Critique English 2 Quarterly Literary Century Modernity Fiction S. African Inquiry
History Lit Review
Universities Totals
PSU 1 0 1 6 4 1 0 2 1 8 2 5 6 6 20 0 63
University of Iowa 0 0 0 1 3 0 0 4 1 1 1 0 4 2 2 0 19
University of Illinois 2 0 0 4 1 1 1 1 2 9 5 2 7 13 13 0 61
University of Wisconsin 0 2 1 7 4 1 2 4 1 4 4 2 2 6 0 1 41
Michigan State University 0 0 0 1 2 0 3 0 0 1 1 1 1 3 3 1 17
OSU 0 0 1 2 3 2 0 3 0 1 2 4 4 2 2 1 27
University of Indiana 0 0 3 5 3 1 1 0 0 2 1 1 10 1 0 2 30
University of Minnesota 0 0 17 2 3 2 0 1 0 2 1 0 4 8 0 3 43
University of Michigan 2 0 1 5 13 0 0 6 0 7 5 2 2 6 5 1 55
Northwestern University 1 1 0 0 1 5 2 2 0 13 1 5 1 4 1 3 40
Purdue University 0 0 1 7 0 0 3 0 2 0 30 0 0 0 1 0 44
Totals
Journals: College Composition Journal of Advanced Rhetoric Society
and Communication Composition Quarterly
Universities Totals
PSU 5 23 8 36
University of Iowa 3 4 0 7
University of Illinois 1 1 3 5
University of Wisconsin 2 5 4 11
Michigan State University 2 4 0 6
OSU 5 5 1 11
University of Indiana 0 2 0 2
University of Minnesota 1 4 13 18
University of Michigan 1 2 1 4
Northwestern University 0 0 1 1
Purdue University 3 6 0 9
Creative Writing Presses and Journals
Presses IU OSU PSU
Coffeehouse 0 0 0
Dalkey Archive 0 0 1
Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux 2 0 0
Graywolf 0 1 1
Milkweed 0 0 0
Sarabande 0 1 0
U. of Georgia 0 2 1
U. of Pitt 0 0 2
W. W. Norton 0 1 0
Totals 2 5 5
Journals
American Poetry 1 4 12
Antioch 0 6 3
Callaloo 0 0 1
Chain 0 0 1
Georgia Review 1 10 1
New Letters 4 4 10
Paris Review 0 8 11
Ploughshares 7 1 5
Poetry 4 3 1
Prairie Schooner 7 6 8
The Sun 2 1 2
Tin House 0 0 1
Totals 26 43 56
APPENDIX B: Statement by Robert L. Caserio to the Board of Visitors Organizational Meeting, October 8, 2004.
When Dean Welch asked me two years ago to become Head of the Department of English at Penn State, I was honored and excited, and couldn’t possibly refuse. Admittedly, the job entailed a few daunting responsibilities. A Head of English is answerable for a department that includes 60 tenure-track faculty (and an additional 30 tenure-track faculty on campuses outside University Park), employs up to 200 additional teachers and staff, instructs 20,000 students per year in 717 courses or sections, and is in itself larger than the entire College of Communications and the Institute of Technology and Science put together, and is just as big as the College of Education. But prospects more important than daunting ones persuaded me to sign on. In 1996 the National Research Council had ranked Penn State’s department of English 42nd out of 127 programs, and 9th among Big Ten departments; but by 2000 U S News and World Report situated the department 15 places higher, at 27th place. The rapid ascent from 42 to 27 owed itself to the department’s application of Dean Welch’s high standards in hiring and promotion. By 2002, I expect, Penn State English already had become one of the country’s top 25 departments. Where we now rank will be judged authoritatively when a new National Research Council survey gets under way next year. I believe our upward ascent continues, because Penn State English faculty now publish more scholarly articles in top-quality journals than any other English faculty in the Big Ten. And they also publish more books at prestigious academic presses than colleagues in our peer English departments at Ohio State and Indiana. I hope the National Research Council doesn’t overlook that fact next year!
Why does an ascent in academic ranking matter to our scholarship and teaching, and certainly to our undergraduate program? The ascent matters because it is not about status but about excellence. We can’t depend on what the National Research Council sees or doesn’t see; we must depend on our own commitment to distinction. We intellectual workers still think that labor is dignified, and redeemed, by excellence in its accomplishment. Accordingly we have a duty to foster every prospective excellence of mind and creativity in ourselves and in our students.
I’m sounding lofty, however, so I will return to basics. The English department’s fundamental task each year is to help 10,000 Penn State undergraduates learn excellence in writing and argumentation in two composition courses required for graduation. The first required course introduces freshmen to university writing standards. The second course aims to improve upper-level composition and argument for four groups of students: in humanities, in social sciences, in technical writing and in business. Teaching written rhetorical argument on two levels and to multiple groups, with no more than 25 students in each course section, is a strenuous job. It’s increasingly so, because of “information overload.” “Awash in ubiquitous information,” our director of composition writes, “students read less and less….Skills of close and attentive reading…have withered as students become less readers than browsers.” Skills in argumentation wither alongside. But it’s our job to reverse withering tendencies; and to do so nowadays not by opposing digital environments but by teaching reading and argument within them. We hope to expand digital components of our composition classrooms, and simultaneously to win new powers of mind for our students, despite their information overload.
Our aim to subordinate browsing to reading and writing is essential to any vision of the impact of English studies on undergraduates. We must continue to deliver to undergraduates the enduring value of reading great classics; and we also must continue to develop the last 30 years’ expansion of newly valuable curriculum. English studies covers a greater multiplicity of materials and interests than it used to. But we have the means to deliver both the old and the new more richly than ever, thanks to our faculty’s ability to integrate such diverse interests as writing and rhetoric; past and present literature and criticism; present-day culture; scholarly specialization; and address to non-academic audiences.
Integration of diverse studies is what I think our department’s version of English studies ought to model, and does powerfully model, for undergraduate minds. Our scholar-teachers in American literature are good examples of what I mean. Striving towards comprehensive analyses of literature and culture, the Americanists desire to reach out equally to scholarly audiences and to general ones. Most of our undergraduates, most of our majors too, are our future general readers; and we must address them in that prospective public role. A consummate example of outreach to public audience is the work of our Paterno Family Chair Professor of English Michael Berube, whose expertise in American literature and culture, and whose cosmopolitan concerns, earns his writing a regular place in The New York Times Magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Not just our critics but also our creative writers affect general readers. Josip Novakovich’s new novel was warmly reviewed in The New York Times last month; Robin Becker’s new poems were the cover story of The American Poetry Review last spring; and Julia Kasdorf’s poems were read by Garrison Keillor on his National Public Radio broadcasts three times in 2004. Our undergraduates, who are crazy about creative writing, share the excitement of their teachers’ worldly prominence.
Our scholarship and creativity’s place in the public world remind me of other notable outward extensions. One affects Penn State undergraduates outside the College of the Liberal Arts. Mark Morrisson, who won the University’s highest teaching award last spring, will team up next year with a member of the Chemistry Department in the Eberly College of Science to co-teach a new course on the development of modern chemistry and physics—including atomic science. As Mark has begun to point out, unlikely contexts shape scientific progress. Between 1880 and 1914 English literature’s ties to the occult, and even to fantasies about alchemy, were among atomic science’s inspirations. Thanks to Mark and his colleague in chemistry, English majors and chemistry majors together will freshly grasp science’s literary and cultural history. Another outward reaching-effort is Associate Professor of English Robert Burkholder’s courses about literature and landscape. Bob complements his students’ reading of great writing about the outdoors by taking his students into the outdoors they read about. That inspires his students to become themselves creative analysts of natural and cultural landscapes.
My vision of the department’s excellence keeps returning to coherence, to an integration of diverse components. So I’ll end with a few further notes about integrative aims and agents. One of our aims is to help undergraduates integrate their English major with their post-graduate lives. Mark will talk more about this important matter.
Another vital integrative agent is our graduate student population. A distinguished faculty attracts ambitious young scholars: maintaining faculty excellence means maintaining graduate student excellence, and vice versa. Because the two excellences are indivisible, undergraduates benefit from both. Graduate students conjoin the scholarship of their research faculty teachers with their own projects, and transmit the combined results to multiple classrooms. How well our graduate students teach can be measured by their stunning success rate in completing their programs within six years, and in finding tenure-track employment. Despite a depressed national market for PhDs in English studies, last year we had a 100% placement record, with students going to jobs at such institutions as the University of California, Riverside; West Point; the University of Texas, Austin; Syracuse University; the University of South Carolina; and the Rhode Island School of Design. Many of the jobs are in composition and rhetoric. One of our points of pride in the doctoral program concerns minority recruitment and retention. Over the past two years, of the 30 African-American males receiving English PhDs nation-wide, six are ours.
In the next five years I see a need to enrich the English major further, intensifying every major’s sense of the inner coherence and outward thrust of English studies. I also see that we must strengthen recruitment of top faculty and top graduate students, so that we can defeat competitive market forces. Observing our success, they now want to steal it away. Above all, we need to secure Penn State English as a department which scholars and writers across the national academic network want to join, and will look up to, for its steady intellectual leadership. One way we can build such leadership is through establishment of a Center for American Literary Studies. We can’t achieve these needs and visions entirely on our own, however. We’re enlisting you in the realization of our priorities because you are friends who know us from the inside, and because you stand for our responsibility to the public and the future. I think of you as the newest agents of the effort to maintain, and intensify, our excellence; and I hope you think of yourselves in the same way.
