The disdainful embrace: The rhetoric of remediation and the Subject A requirement at the University of California.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Remedial writers, like the poor, are always with us. In its 150-year history in the American university, composition instruction has been called upon to combat so many crises of illiteracy, so regularly, that scholars have been able to map these events onto a larger American topography, correlating periods of perceived—and importantly, widely announced—crisis with periods of broad social change. The rhetoric of crisis affords purchase on a particularly delicate array of tensions around class, race, entitlement, and access to higher education. Students' ability to deploy correct grammar and appropriate diction in service to their ideas has been routinely elided with their capacity to exercise taste, refinement, or even moral probity. Harvard's Charles William Eliot expected, in 1869, that lessons designed to remedy students' errors in punctuation and paragraph structure would also erect for them a “moral superstructure.” Nearly a century later, Berkeley's Clark Kerr, noting comparable sins of syntax, called for instruction in “the decencies.&rdquo.
“The decencies,” it would seem, have been inadequately observed at Berkeley from the beginning. Every year since the University was established in 1869, a large number of entrants (sometimes as many as 55%) have been deemed improficient in entry-level English composition (later called “Subject A”), even though these students had fully satisfied the University's entrance requirements, and had qualified for admission in every respect. In “Alternatives to Remedial Writing: Lessons from Theory, from History, and a Case in Point,” Glynda Hull (1999) characterizes this peculiar institutional ambivalence regarding the students “held” for Subject A as “welcoming them and marginalizing them in the same breath.” The present work argues that, like breathing, this ambivalence has been critically necessary (and autonomic) to Berkeley. Similarly essential has been the construction of the remedial student. This work proposes that the remedial student performs a significant duty for this University in that the publicization of his or her ‘illiteracy’ (or later ‘deficiency’ or later ‘need for remediation’ or currently ‘underpreparedness’) does important political—that is to say rhetorical—work for the institution, and for California herself.