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As writing across the curriculum (WAC) has matured and diversified as a concept and as an organizational structure in U.S. higher education, there has arisen a need for accurate, up-to-date information on the presence and characteristics of WAC and writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) programs. Following on the only previous nationwide survey of WAC/WID in 1987, new data from the U.S./Canada survey of the International WAC/WID Mapping Project indicate that the presence of such programs has grown in U.S. institutions by roughly one-third. Moreover, clear patterns emerge regarding the formal components of these programs, their intra-institutional relationships, funding sources, reporting lines, and characteristics of leadership (e.g., faculty rank and length of service). Further, a comparison of data from all reporting institutions with those from well-established programs indicates some patterns of sustainability.
I. Introduction
How alive and well is WAC in 2010?
David R. Russell's history of writing across the curriculum in the United States explains that explicit WAC programs in higher education emerged in the 1970s out of a serendipitous meeting between democratic social forces and a new paradigm of the developmental link between writing and learning, this intellectual ferment occurring in an educational climate ready for curricular experiment. As higher education struggled to provide ever-greater access to an increasingly large and diverse population (Russell 271-76), even as academic disciplines diversified and grew more powerful, the ground was ready for a theory of writing growth that linked literacy education with disciplinary study.
Building on the psycholinguistic theories described and adapted by James Britton, Janet Emig, and others (Russell, 276-79), a community of writing teachers from colleges and universities worked with their faculties across disciplines to design assignments and methods of response to writing that would help students learn and apply disciplinary ways of knowing. Rather than assuming writing instruction to be a "transient" need that could be met for all time for all students in precollege or first-year courses (see, e.g., Rose), these teachers understood that writing instruction would continue as genres and demands became more specialized.
Aided by federal, state, and foundation grants, the number of WAC programs proliferated into the 1980s, despite, as Russell described them, the many factors that always threatened to subvert such efforts: the "institutional inertia" of academic hierarchies, the failure to...