Ellen Cushman
University of California -- Berkeley
Conference on College Composition and Communication
Chicago, April 1998

Universities serve those aspiring to and those already from the middle, upper, and elite classes. Professors, isolated in the ivory tower, make and teach knowledge for audiences of peers and the students hoping to be inculcated into the specialized language of a profession. Teaching in composition and rhetoric empowers those who are, to some extent, already empowered, already privileged--by mere virtue of sitting in the university classroom. Relative to the countless number of citizens who will not and do not have access to higher education, the students before us have achieved access to the promise of social mobility. What kind of curriculum allows academics to make knowledge together with those our knowledge serves? What kind of course unites university resources with those in communities where access routes to higher education have been dimly lit and remote? Outreach courses seem to offer an initial answer, but how far must one reach to be out of the ivory tower?

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