Patricia Bizzell
College of the Holy Cross
Conference on College Composition and Communication
Chicago, April 1998

It is my impression that there is a prevailing view in composition studies that our work should serve a left-liberal political agenda. A powerful force for creating this prevailing view, I believe, has been the influence of my generation of composition scholars -- a generation who went to college and graduate school in the late sixties and early seventies, and who wanted to see their professional work as contributing to that era's progressive political causes, such as Black civil rights, women's liberation, and the anti-war movement, with which they had been involved as students. Presenting myself as an example, I can say that I entered the teaching profession with that kind of idealism.

Now, though, while it may be that the left-liberal commitment sets a certain tone, there are also plenty of people in the field of composition studies, older, and especially, younger than my generation, who find it quite annoying -- mainly, I gather, because they think that people like me are kidding ourselves if we think our professional work can indeed have any liberatory social significance. It seems that we are just tired old "tenured radicals."

I am particularly susceptible to this revisionist critique because I am temperamentally suited to believing that any negative criticism implicating me is probably right. And when I see the dismal state of the world, it's certainly hard to feel that I have done enough, or that any of us have done anything truly significant to make things bette. The pain of this feeling of failure is sharpened by my persisting commitment to a political agenda that would change society in the direction of greater equality and democracy.

Please remember, I am offering myself as an example. I really don't like to talk about my own feelings, but I am doing so because I believe they are shared. I'd like such feelings to be part of today's discussion, because I believe they function in how we respond to the questions posed by my fellow panelists and how we evaluate teaching and learning generally. Also, I want this preamble to create a climate of skepticism, in which I now present some of my ideas about teaching writing as a means for social change, because I am going to suggest, in spite of my attraction to the revisionist position, that my generation's idealism was not and is not entirely misplaced, and that teaching writing can do some good in the world.

First: I believe that no academic discipline is better than composition at helping students learn how to develop their ideas more complexly and reflectively, and to express them more vividly and completely. No discipline is better at helping students develop a critical self-awareness of their own intellectual processes. I believe that the development of this kind of self-awareness constitutes growth, the unfolding of each individual's human potential, and therefore a benefit to him or her. The sum total of these benefits makes the world a better place, the more students are helped to such self-awareness. I am willing to place my faith in this human development regardless of the political direction in which it leads students. While I would like to believe, I don't think I can prove that such development more or less automatically leads in progressive directions -- although such a view has been asserted by some scholars, notably, perhaps, Paulo Freire.

What I would rather say is that there is a second kind of benefit that can accrue from composition instruction, in tandem with the personal growth benefit, and that is the benefit of discovering that the left-liberal political agenda is in fact the best one, more morally correct and more practical for securing the greatest (material) good for the greatest number. How do I know it's best? That's only one of the lengthy arguments pendant to the brief list of assertions I am sharing here. Let me just say that I am prepared to talk further about where I think I get the right to try to open students to left-liberal values, and about what kinds of writing assignments help to do so. I would then argue that the world becomes a better place when more people are motivated for egalitarian and democratic social change.

Is the writing classroom the best place for such personal growth and political motivation? Probably not. It's certainly not the only place. Venues where more is at stake to the individual make more of an impression. However, I do think it's one of the best places in the academy to do so. I don't think it's totally self-deluding for academics to believe that they can benefit the world in these ways from their classrooms.

Is that all we should do? No doubt it is not. I'd like to talk more today about other things we can do to foster progressive social change. But I'd like to talk to focus specifically on our roles as academics, not our roles as parents, local residents, or whatever. I think there's a sort of bad faith in pretending that you have to stop being an academic in order to do anything effective. If you believe that, get out of the profession. To discuss what we can do as academics might well involve the other roles we play, but let's acknowledge, once again, that as teachers, we might possibly do some good.

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