Abstract: Lester Faigley’s “Literacy After the Revolution”

This article was an address that Faigley made as the Chair of CCCC. He starts the address by reminiscing about the addresses of the prior years, and talks about the circumstances that allowed him, as well as everyone else in the profession, to become a member of the rhet/comp field. He explains how he, by chance, became a writing teacher—a member of the ugly stepchild of the English field.

Past addresses of the conferences had been given by people who had been heavily influenced by teaching basic writing. As teachers of basic writing, these people were aware of the power that institutions (like universities) hold that maintain, or even contribute to, social divisions. These teachers, along with teachers like Faigley, used anti-authoritarian ways of teaching writing to students: literacy as a means to participate in social and political avenues.

Faigley notes that the growth of the rhet/comp field is not without problems; the working conditions for many writing teachers still had not improved. This leads Faigley to the main point of his address—there are two forces that are changing what the people of rhet/comp do in their field: the digital revolution and the revolution of the rich. He states, “These revolutions have been described as having very different impacts—the digital revolution as expanding access and the revolution of the rich as contracting it—but we may eventually come to see them as different aspects of an even larger scale” (32).

The revolution of the rich largely has to do with the ability of the rich to control the middle/low class work force and the decline of publicly supported education. Essentially, to increase profits the powers that be found that they needed to find ways to be more flexible with their workers. (I read this to mean that they needed to find a better way to pay more people less money for more work.) This equaled many people losing their jobs. This ultimately affects universities as well:

More and more, colleges and universities are being ordered to make sweeping changes by politicians who are unfamiliar with higher education. They see colleges and universities as bloated and want to “re-engineer” higher education on the market-driven principles of “downsizing” by imposing heavier workloads, getting rid of tenure, and converting full-time jobs into “permanent temp” positions. (34)
Part-time faculty in 1991 became 35% from 22% in 1970. The majority of these positions are held by women.

The digital revolution also has had a great effect on the composition field. Faigley runs through the history of the internet, much like we read last week—as a Cold War project, the ARPANET, and eventual transition of use from military to personal. Faigley states that it is important to understand the internet’s history “before we pronounce it good or bad for our discipline” (36). (It’s important to keep in mind here that this was written in 1997.) Many students were already using the internet in the social and political ways that Faigley described early in the essay. However, Faigley also hits on one topic we already covered last week—issues of access. He states, “Even within the United States, Internet users are far from being equally distributed across the population” (39). This, of course, links back to what Faigley was describing at the revolution of the rich. The rich have access, others do not.

Faigley concludes his address by coming back to talking about the rhet/comp field. He writes, “In a culture that is increasingly cynical about the belief that schools should offer equal opportunity to education, we have remained steadfast to the goal of literacy for equality,” and “we can be confident that the need for what we teach will only increase” (41). Quoting from Berlin, Faigley reminds us that all writing teachers need to be aware of the political and economic contexts in which we teach.