ComeBackZinc

Woolf being called awful has physically ejected me from this thread.

I'll go on record as saying I've read and enjoyed Ulysess, just for balance.

It's particularly hard to take seriously considering that they seem to simply list English departments as departments, when there's such a tremendous amount of difference within them based on subfield. People doing ESL are not the same as people doing creative writing who are not the same as people doing rhet/comp. And the job market is very different for different subfields.

Never read any Proust.

Grammatical=identifiable by a native speaker as a possible sentence in the given language.

I can't watch House Hunters anymore, ever since I learned that the whole act of them "choosing" a house is a sham and that they already chose the house well before the show was shot.

Cosmopolis by Stephen Toulmin

At both my masters program and my PhD program, there have been people who are as old or older than you. Nobody cared, as far as I can tell, and most of them have been quite successful.

It happens to everybody. Relax. I know I had typos in my successful apps, and I know many of my peers did, too.

Usually departments are cool about recommenders getting their letters in late. They know it's not under your control and are used to absent minded profs. In the larger perspective, you've just got to do your best to not get frustrated. This process is not fair, and never has been.

Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad

Hey girl....

University of Rhode Island

I understand. Sorry if I was snippy. My comment wasn't intended to be directed at you particularly and I apologize for being cross.

Uh, people are aware that non-Ivy universities also have busy professors, right? (Many of who develop extremely prominent and important research.) The reflexive "we're talking about an Ivy!" attitude around here is so reductive. Also, people visit departments before they are accepted all the time. There are various ways to approach this, of differing levels of formality. Yes, of course it's a bad idea to show up and expect to speak to individual professors, but who is advocating that? You can email the graduate school and ask them for the procedure about how to visit the school. They'll likely talk to you about tours and general grad school stuff. You'll find that department websites list contact info for those inquiring about the grad program. You can shoot a short, respectful, non-presumptuous email to the graduate director's office (or someone who fulfills a similar function) and say that you are interested in visiting and ask if that's possible. They'll likely be used to it. If they say no, they've said no and there's no big deal. If they say yes, work the program. I don't know why people are insisting that this is some terrible faux pas. We just had a prospective (not yet admitted) grad student come for a visit and meet some of us and some professors. It happens all the time.

Vertical integration between high school and college writing pedagogy, college achievement for minority and low SES students, institutional critique, and research methodology.

That's very well said-- and in many contexts, a master's degree is in and of itself valuable.

The majority opinion I've seen on this site and others related to grad admissions-- and please note that I'm talking about broad impressions from other people here-- is that MAPPS is a revenue-generating "condolence" program. I haven't ever attended MAPPS and I wouldn't hazard my own impression, but that's what many people say.

I would just say that transferring in graduate school, as I understand it, can be a deeply, deeply sticky process. To transfer out of a funded PhD program without the blessing of the department you are leaving strikes me as suicidal. Academe is a small world, and individual disciplines are even smaller still. People take offers and acceptances of those offers very seriously, and in fact attending some programs involves signing formal contracts about your intentions. Additionally, understand that leaving behind a funded line can often mean that the department loses that line, and you can imagine how unpopular such a thing would be. I know someone who transferred from a funded PhD program to another, but she was following her advisor, and did so with the full knowledge and blessing of the department she was leaving behind. Personally, I think attending a program with the foreknowledge that you're going to leave it, without being upfront about that plan when you apply, is deeply unethical. Your own position may vary. But I promise that in the small, deeply networked world of academics, leaving a program hanging is not a good idea for long term professional success. Second, I want to say that I think this discussion is employing a reductive understanding of what school quality means. Yes, there are indeed differences in perceived program quality, and they are very important for hiring decisions. Perhaps they can even be responsibly divided into ordinal lists. But there are heaps of complexity. Consider my specialization, rhet comp. I know of several rhet comp programs that have never-- never-- failed to place one of their doctoral students in a TT job. That's a product of a lot of factors. In large part it's a numbers game; there's much fewer of us. Partly it's institutional and political pressures on the university. In any event, a list of top rhet comp programs and a list of "top 20 English PhD programs" would look remarkably dissimilar. The point is just that talking reductively about "top 20" schools as though that's a concept separate from the individual areas of disciplinary focus, or separate from the faculty at a program, or from your individual major professor/advisor, is not productive for a discussion of who's going to get hired and who isn't. You can ask some of the many, may PhDs from top 20 programs who can't get TT jobs. They'll tell you. If the question is just whether to pursue a job as an English professor or not, the answer is probably no. The general numbers are that bad.

505 Teaching First Year Composition 591 History and Theory of Composition Pedagogy 605 Computers in Language and Rhetoric 680 Writing Program Administration: Seminar in Assessment

Having lived in Lafayette (right over the bridge from West Lafayette and Purdue's campus) for several months now, one thing I want to point out that I never would have expected is that the area is really surprisingly easy to get around in without a car. My girlfriend and I don't have one, but we've found it perfectly easy to operate, get groceries, get to shopping, bars and entertainment, etc. There's a good city bus system, a free trolley, and adequate bike infrastructure. Plus downtown Lafayette is very walkable, as is the immediate campus area in West Lafayette. We've really been thrilled about this and didn't expect it from a small city in the midwest.

Just a couple of quick points on what are probably stale questions: I agree with the above that you shouldn't draw too much from any individual article. I do think, however, that you should understand that any rhet/comp program is likely to require you to read a lot of pedagogical and composition theory that some find quite dry. Note too that our discipline straddles the boundary of the humanities and the social sciences, and as institutional and political pressures exert themselves, you may find yourself in a specialty that is moving more and more towards empirical research. I'm biased-- my own methodological interests are quantitative and pedagogical. But it seems hard to argue against the idea that quantitative methodologies, or at least more conventionally empirical ones, are making a comeback after being quite out of fashion. Rhetoric and composition is flourishing in part because administrators see our field as being able to provide a certain degree of validity and reliability in asserting our value. There are probably lots of political and intellectual assumptions in the thinking of those administrators that I would reject, but the fact is that they are the people who keep the lights on. At the very least, expect to read a lot of composition theory, and be prepared to read many articles that are similar in tone and content to Bartholomae. Also understand that the pressure to understand things like standard deviation and p-values is likely to grow. (Although, again, I'm biased.) That said, this is indeed a dappled discipline. Runonsentence seems to me to be much more rhetoric-aligned than I am; I am heavily tilted towards composition pedagogy. That itself is rhetorical, of course, as the rhetorical axiology is the dominant intellectual framework in our field. I don't know if Runonsentence's interests speak more to the scholars working at the (outstanding) program at Cincinnati or the individual poster's interests. There are many, many ways to approach this field. As for the original question, at my institution we are required to take at least two subfields in which we will invest significant coursework. These include but aren't limited to subfields in WPA, ESL, linguistics, technical writing, professional writing, literature, feminist approaches, theory and cultural studies, digital writing and rhetoric, multimodality, history of rhetoric or composition, and others.

Rhode Island just hired a new TT faculty whose focus is environmental rhetorics and ecocomposition. http://www.uri.edu/artsci/writing/faculty/GottschalkDruschke.shtml

I thought that this thread could use some cites to good journal articles that deal with historical and epistemological issues in the field, so here goes. Just my random sampling. Lauer, Janice M. “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline.” Rhetoric Review 3/1 (1984): 20-29 Fulkerson, Richard. “Composition Theory in the Eighties: Axiological Consensus and Paradigmatic Diversity.” College Composition and Communication 41. 4 (1990): 409-429 Berlin, James A. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories.” College English 44. 8 (1982): 765-777 Kopelson, Karen. “Sp(l)itting Images; Or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.” College Composition and Communication 59.4 (2008): 750-780

Consider this thread: I attended the University of Rhode Island for my MA in Writing and Rhetoric and I adored it. A small program, but a true Writing department (separate from English) with a dedicated faculty in the specific area. The hire rate for their doctoral students is unblemished. As far as big schools go, Purdue, Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, Syracuse, Michigan State, Arizona....