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This article traces a decline in CCCC sessions on language along with a shift toward more reductive definitions. It analyzes early CCCC treatment of language issues, the Students' Right document, changes in demographics and linguistics, and shifts within English departments that have left us overdue for professional reexamination of our role as teachers of language.
Inherent in the names of the English departments within which most of us spend our professional lives is a history that assumes some focus on languagenot language in general (now the province of linguistics) but the English language, not some other languages, new or old, and, at least ostensibly, not merely the "literature" of English. Yet within each of three major compartments of instruction in English departments-literary studies, rhetoric and composition, and English Education-I see a declining focus on language in the last three decades. My sense of this decline derives from years of classroom experience teaching writing (and literature), years of professional conference attendance, and years of research in rhetoric and composition, literature, and technical writing. What follows draws on a number of sources and methodologies and tells a tale sometimes circuitous but also in accord with recent historical accounts by such scholars as Richard Fulkerson, Richard Haswell, and Robert Connors, all of whom have chronicled changes that run parallel to the one I discuss here. I add my historical account to theirs with a claim about not just what we do in rhetoric and composition, but what we do in English more broadly.
Of such changes, Richard Fulkerson writes that when he earlier surveyed the composition landscape in 1990 he found hope of progress. In 2005, however, he sees the danger of a new era of wars over theory within a field of composition fragmented because we no longer agree on our goals. Richard Haswell, also writing in 2005, argues that NCTE and CCCC have increasingly allowed a war on scholarship by turning away from replicable, aggregable, and data-supported scholarship-a trend that Haswell characterizes as like "an organism attacking itself" through self-doubt and lack of faith (217). What interests me about his argument is not the methodological issue per se but the sense that our professional identity is problematic because we have hesitated to adopt some of...