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With the retirements of John Mayher, Marilyn Sobelman, and Gordon Pradl, the NYU program in English education marks the end of an era. To reflect on and celebrate that legacy, we organized a session at, appropriately, the New York NCTE Annual Convention in November 2007. Featuring the retiring faculty and a random collection of our alumni whose current email addresses we had, the session was celebration, reunion, and sober reflection on the past, present, and future of NYU's program. The selections below speak mostly to the past and don't recognize all of the voices who have contributed to the dialogue. We apologize for the omissions and invite you to join our reconsiderations of what an English education program can mean to its faculty, students, alumni, and, above all, to the students of our students.
Practicing Uncommon Sense at NYU
John S. Mayer
From 1969 to the end of the millennium, Gordon Pradl and I had an extraordinary opportunity to shape and advise the English education doctoral program at NYU. We had colleagues who helped-especially Marilyn Sobelman and Harold Vine; an administration that gave little support but even less interference; and above all, the opportunity to work with wonderful students-but in retrospect it is amazing how free we were to follow our own creativity as teachers, scholars, and curriculum designers. There were institutional constraints on admissions and schoolwide doctoral curricular requirements in such things as foundations and research, but these proved to be minimal in practice and easily manipulated in a system designed to support the faculty's professional decision making as to who we would teach and what they should learn.
A description of my first day at NYU will give you an idea of the de facto if not always de jure autonomy I enjoyed. I was sitting at my desk during the first day of advising when a student came in, introduced herself as Sophie Wechsler, and said that I was her advisor. "Oh," I said. "What program are you in?" "Applied linguistics," she replied. So I excused myself and rushed into the office suite next door to ask my program director, Roger Cayer, what to do. He said he was sorry that he hadn't mentioned this, and then he went to the file...