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CHAPTER 1
The Politics of Contemporary Writing Centers
A Critique of Conservative and Liberal Ideologies and Practices
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
— Elie Wiesel
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Many writing center directors are familiar with the ways our work over the past century has been marked by significant shifts in how educators view the text and the production of texts, how we understand the origins and processes of knowledge creation, and how we therefore approach educational practices as they relate to the teaching of writing. The stories that tend to circulate in our field about our work are primarily told through one of two instructive lenses: (1) the histories of educational spaces — that is, the evolution of writing labs across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (e.g., Lerner 2009) and the student-centered and "diversity"-driven practices compelled by the civil-rights movement and open-admissions era of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond (e.g., Carino 1996); or (2) the composition praxis that has been shaped by those histories — that is, the evolution of writing pedagogy from current-traditional rhetoric to expressivism to social constructionism to postmodernism and so forth and the attending iterations of collaborative learning practices or metaphors inspired by these theories (e.g., Gillespie and Lerner 2008).
Building upon these important lenses, in this book I center an explicit consideration of another prevailing influence I argue is critical for the field to name: politics. To be sure, Jane Nelson and Kathy Evertz (2001) offered a valuable edited collection addressing the Politics of Writing Centers some time ago, but whereas the politics explored by the pieces in that collection fell under a range of definitions organized topically (from the negotiation of conflict generally to the preservation of writing centers in various institutional contexts specifically) and offered a range of conclusions and proposals in response, this book seeks to achieve something quite different. Specifically, this book engages with a very particular definition of politics and builds an argument in favor of a uniquely radical vision for writing centers.
So what do I mean by politics? I am not referring to national partisan politics (e.g., presidential elections or Republicans and Democrats) or classical political philosophy (e.g., the musings of Plato or Aristotle). Instead, I use the term politics to refer to the different ways people interpret, exercise, and value power. In other words, politics encompasses both ideologies and the practices that emerge from and reconstitute those ideologies. Similar to George Lakoff's interpretation of a political model characterized by a "cluster of ... assumptions" (2002, 21), my use of the term politics in this book refers to thinking and behavior as opposed to individual people or political parties.
As I argue in this book, writing center work has up until now emerged out of politics I describe as conservative and liberal. Strongly critiquing those political frameworks, this book builds an emphatic case for reinvention within a radical political framework. It may be helpful, though, to consider my definition of politics — using Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee's terminology — as "commonplace"; my conclusions "may not apply at all times and in all places to people who identify themselves as liberals or conservatives" (2004, 115) or radicals.
This distinction is important because the political frameworks I discuss are merely idealistic — they seldom manifest consistently or "purely" in any real individual. As humans, we are complex and even contradictory beings who defy narrow categorization. While we may resonate strongly with the ideals of a certain framework, our values, beliefs, and behaviors often span many ways of being and doing. We move in dynamic ways across space and time. The particular political frameworks I offer here, despite my critiques of their various shortcomings and opportunities, are not meant to indict any one individual. Certainly, not all self-identified conservatives are authoritarian foundationalists (even though I build a case against conservativism itself for containing within it the blueprint for this possibility), and not all self-identified liberals are pluralists to a fault (even though I build a case against liberalism itself for the failures inherent in that quality). Rather, these political frameworks provide a set of lenses for understanding forces that shape people's thinking and explanations for certain behaviors.
To those ends, important in this definition of politics is the notion that our politics are not necessarily conscious. As human beings full of flaws, contradictions, and good intentions, we are each a work in progress. We differ in the extent to which we are aware of our own feelings, perceptions, fears, and desires. We do hold many explicit — or conscious — beliefs and values (e.g., "I believe I should love my neighbor"), but we also possess implicit — or unconscious — biases resulting from our socialization (e.g., "I am fearful of those people"). Our behaviors are an extension of these internal beliefs, both explicitly derived (e.g., "Because I believe I should love my neighbor, I volunteer at the local food bank") and implicitly motivated (e.g., "Because I am fearful of those people, my heart will pound involuntarily when they pass me on the street"). Often, our explicit values contradict the behaviors motivated by our implicit biases, as the example above reveals. As a result, we might profess a particular politics but in practice enact something different. Most of us who desire self-awareness and integrity seek to bring our values and practices into greater alignment, and this text offers tools for doing so.
In the context of this book, politics therefore refers to the collection of our views and practices — conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional, consistent and contradictory. We cannot escape our politics because all of us have perceptions and practices that stand in some kind of relationship to power, whether we realize it or not, care about it or not, or like it or not. We might, therefore, come to understand our politics as our complicated relationships to power: as negotiated potentialities. This book, however, is not simply about our individual politics. It is about our collective politics — the politics of the writing center field, our educational institutions, our communities, and ultimately the world.
Why examine the politics of writing centers? Doing so enables us to understand the ideologies that have informed the evolution of our theories and practices, and it is therefore a vital factor, as I will argue, in helping us set out a purposeful, effective, and — most important — ethical path for our future. This book is a call for the field to reexamine, redefine, and commit anew to writing center work through an explicitly political lens. Most important, this book puts forth an unapologetic case for privileging a radical politics of writing centers. But to get to that point, we must first examine where we have come from and where we are now.
The political frameworks I am using emerge out of debates that have persisted in the field of education across at least the past century, both in the United States and globally, among teachers and scholars who have found these frames useful in articulating educational philosophies, devising purposeful practices, and locating the reason for dissonant views. Notably, these frameworks have helped educators define and defend their views on the world, the function of education, and the ideal relationship among the student, the teacher, and society. Educators have found strength in the clear statement of virtues, knowledge, behaviors, and skills in service of a greater good that conservativism aims to offer through its fidelity to righteous truths, as well as in the opportunities for engagement with different views, enhanced critical thinking, and global citizenship liberalism aims to offer through its pluralistic reading of the world. When read purely in black-and-white terms, however, either of these frameworks is vulnerable to critique.
For those reasons, to complicate matters further, I also invoke the language of ethics throughout this text, which we might understand as the various means by which people come to make judgments about what is right and wrong. In the field of applied ethics, which examines ways in which people can create an equal and just society, philosophers observe that most people are not clear about the reasons for their own beliefs and indeed that our beliefs can overlap and diverge depending on context. This field of philosophy implicitly makes clear the sticking point of engaging conservativism and liberalism in binary terms: subscribing purely to relativism (a key tenet of liberalism), in which claims of right or wrong are prohibited given its valuing of diverse perspectives, can result in defeatism in the face of real-life problems; subscribing purely to universal truths (a key tenet of conservativism), in which our view of what is right renders other people stupid and wrong, can lead to domination via violence. Are we thus limited to only these two options?
How do we construct an ethics outside this binary? Some philosophers argue for alternative models — a third way (which becomes a binary itself). Others suggest that their models in fact resolve the binary. Materialism, for example, draws on the best of both political frameworks by suggesting humans do in fact have common needs even across cultures (such as love, food, shelter) that should be met while still valuing the diversity of views, contexts, and practices that shape our lives. The educators who have inspired me similarly offer an alternative politics — radicalism — which I simultaneously advocate as superior given my personal beliefs about right and wrong (recognizing, of course, that doing so makes me vulnerable to the same criticism leveled against conservativism) but which I propose for the whole writing center community because more than simply a third way, radicalism offers, I believe, a continuum of possibilities drawing on the best of both other frames (a confident assertion of values and an openness to difference and the unknown). What is important therefore is not the theory for its own sake but what the theory opens up for us. The following discussion explores the ways our prevailing politics have shut down opportunity for creating a just society.
An Explication and Critique of Conservativism in Writing Centers: Or, Writing Centers Are Right and Good (Except When They're Not)
Drawing on definitions found in both education and philosophy, conservativism in this book is defined as follows: a politics that (1) interprets power as a commodity or possession that enables access to an ultimate truth, (2) acquires power through absolute submission to authority, and (3) values power as something intrinsically positive. If we take each of the above components in turn, we can gain a fuller picture of conservative politics and understand how writing center work emerged from and continues to be influenced by this ideology.
The Commodification of Truth
The first component above maintains that conservativism interprets power as a commodity. In other words, power is understood as a thing one can acquire, seize, or hold. The function of power, in this model, is recognized as the means to identifying and actualizing the truth. Power is the authority to define, a window to view, a ticket to gain entrance to, or a weapon to defend that truth.
By this definition, then, conservatism relies on a foundationalist world-view — a belief in the existence of absolute, transcendent truths. Truth is immutable and intrinsically right and good. Depending on the particular community or historical moment, those named truths vary. In the United States, conservative politics has manifested in very specific historically and culturally situated ways. Truths have ranged from the devotion to a single omnipotent God, the reverence for a very particular family or social or economic structure, or the righteous fidelity to a virtue such as freedom or self-reliance. Critics of contemporary iterations of conservativism in the United States also interpret conservatism to mean that the more explicitly sinister idolization of systems such as white supremacy or patriarchy can be read as conservative understandings of truth.
Conservative politics can be read throughout the histories of the US political landscape. Relevant to our work in writing centers, we can trace that influence through the evolution of our school systems, and language instruction more specifically. Beliefs about the intrinsic rightness and goodness of Christianity, European supremacy, manifest destiny, and capitalism guided the colonization of the Americas and the systematic rape and genocide and enslavement of indigenous populations, Africans, and poor Europeans. Those same values reemerged through a rhetoric of white-supremacist beliefs in the truth of a singular American identity, religion, culture, language, and phenotype in order to justify the rightness and goodness of the postcolonial state (Horner and Trimbur 2002; Lu 2004; Yamamoto 1999). The founding of US schools and the literacy practices that have dominated those schools, for example, can be read through a conservative belief in singular truths. For example, the descendants of Puritan colonists were responsible for establishing many schools and colleges across the upper northern midland areas of the United States in order to advocate literacy as a means to reading the Bible (in English) and ultimately to salvation: that population's version of truth (Frazer 2006). At the same time, views about the righteousness of the new nation and white supremacy also motivated such atrocities as the US government's strategic policy promoting the removal of Native American children from their homes and its systematic, sometimes-deadly abuse and forced assimilation in hundreds of notorious boarding schools designed to strip those children of their culture (Amnesty 2007).
In this historical context, literacy has always been constructed as white property (Prendergast 2003) and used strategically as a tool to oppress populations who stand to threaten the idealized social order. Think, for example, of the ways African slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write; the ways English-only ideologies and legislation have spread like wildfire across state governments to the exclusion of the language practices of populations of color perpetually characterized as "foreign" (Horner and Trimbur 2002); and the ways the privileging of an imaginary standardized English in schools has been used to deny access to students of color who continue to use their various languages to wield their own power in the face of oppression (Greenfield 2011).
In writing centers, we can see how dominant composition theories at the turn of the twentieth century, and indeed in present times, have been influenced by a conservative belief in absolute truths. Current-traditional rhetoric, a theory of writing distinguished by its exaltation of the text, emerged out of a specific conservative interpretation of idealized form and mechanics. Fidelity not simply to the text writ large but to a specific kind of text — one that emulates the language practices, discourse patterns, and value systems of those who are in possession of power (i.e., white, standardized-English-speaking, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied men) — is prized by a conservative ideology as ultimately right and good. While many compositionists and writing center practitioners today reject the explicit aims of current-traditional rhetoric, the conservative ideologies that once motivated this pedagogy can still be found flourishing in our everyday practices. Our subscriptions to the necessity of particular "academic" genres of writing (and our rigid interpretations of what those are), our privileging of standardized English, our use of standardized rubrics, our values about what makes for persuasive evidence, our plagiarism policies, our preference for certain linear organization structures or thesis statements or topic sentences, and so on, all rely on a culturally determined and idealized version of what counts as a right and good text — a decidedly conservative practice.
Submission to Authority
The second component of conservativism identified above is the belief that power is acquired through absolute submission to authority. Certain people, prophets, or texts are deemed the bearers of truth, and thus deferring to and emulating that authority is believed to be right and good as well as the path to righteousness itself. Lakoff interprets this ideation of conservativism as the "Strict Father" model in which children must obey their parents (the authorities) and build character through self-reliance and self-discipline (the true and righteous path) (2002). Other analogies might be used well in its stead, including the idolization of Jesus Christ (the authority) and the following of his teachings (the way, the truth, and the life); the idolization of patriarchy (the authority) and the following of its teachings (the adoption of sexist gender roles, policies, and cultural norms); or — with respect to literacy practices — the idolization of the white, heterosexual male teacher (the authority) and the following of his teachings (literacy practices and texts constructed in his own image such as the bildungsroman, the comedy, or the explicitly asserted thesis-driven argument).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Radical Writing Center Praxis"
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