Harriet Malinowitz's questions about composition's status in the academy, coming from a WAC perspective, dovetails nicely, for me, with Patricia Bizzell's comments on what value we can bring as academics to the need for social change.

Composition studies, based on my cursory reading of the history, began as an effort to cover the perceived deficiencies of incoming students. We exist still, in many departments and programs, to fulfill that role--getting students to the point where they can write well enough so that our colleagues in other disciplines do not have to address, too often, the writing per se. The implicit and explicit claim always has been that writing well is important--something one needs to do, for success in college, in life after college, and in civic discourse (along the lines of Marilyn Cooper's statement).

Becaues we've been viewed as teachers who bridge deficiency, the assumption we inherent is that we accept and understand what the standard is; we don't question it.

But the questions asked here put on the table the need to actively work against that assumption, to declare that we teach writing to lead students to help effect social change, and as Patricia Bizzell notes, in this context, positive social change means supporting a left-liberal agenda. Or at least the above is how I see and understand what I've read.

We will need to find someway to work both inside and outside the hegemonic structures Harriet Malinowitz describes. We can't simply move outside--the ultimate outside being to leave the academy--to make social change, to teach writing as an agent of social change. We need to find someway to be part of the hegemony, and apart from it.

How can this happen? Happily our field is not monolithic, not agreed on the value of this or any other issue. That is, there will be some programs which can form the types of alliances that Malinowitz suggests because they'll have faculty who care about those things, or enough tenured faculty who care and can take the risk. There will be some programs who follow models like Carnegie Mellon's _Community Literacy Center_ project; there will be some who work in conjunction with unions, offering extension and college courses *at* the union hall or in the auto plant (Marcy Bauman's involved in such a project); there will be others where WAC means a writing program, as consultant to the WAC, or as part of the teaching in the WAC program will simply adapt and support writing for social change because that's part of the curriculum.

In that case, the political argument is easy: "Look, we have a women studies program, and this is what they do with writing in these courses, and of course we'll support that, just as we support engineering for the kind of writing engineers do." The question might be, how many of these marginalized programs do exist, how do they define writing? Is there, even in these programs, a radical critique of writing and world views?

On the other hand, how can we become advocates and practioners of writing for social change beyond the walls of our classrooms or the scope of our programs? How can we speak about these issues beyond forums such as this? To whom do we speak?

This comes back, I think to Patricia Bizzell's observation about the need to believe that what we do matters beyond our own walls. Getting out into the community, crossing boarders, working with writers in other settings, on issues that matter and have a consequence beyond the 'mere academic,' beyond practice in a writing class that prepares one for an essay yet to be assigned in future courses, these practices begin to give a teacher a sense of purpose.

The next step, and this comes back to Harriet's questions about advocacy, is taking these questions (all the questions assoiciated with this roundtable) and the positions we develop on them beyond our own conferences and journals and email lists to wider audiences both within (to support other marginalized programs/studies) and outside the college or university walls. Making the argument first inside to other departments and colleagues makes sense because we'll hear many of the same objections and confusions that will come from the outside.

But ultimately we need to find a voice out in the general populace, where images and cliches about what goes in college writing classrooms remain skewed, caricatured by a conservative press as tenured radicals (see articles by George Will or John Leo, for example). And almost every journal I've seen, from conservative to left (the Nation), has, correctly in many cases, dismissed academics in English departments as being bizarre-talking postmodern elites who do not speak in everyday English. That is, when we speak beyond our circles, we need to cease using the specialized language our discipline requires and we need to find a voice that others can hear and understand.

We need to explain what it is we do and why. We need to make the argument that teaching writing for social change, change that follows a left-liberal political agenda *is* good and will be of benefit. That means becoming a public, rather than only an institutional, academic; it means writing for journals other than academic journals, speaking at conferences and to audiences other than academic conferences and audiences.