Writing Wrongs : Funding Cuts Threaten UCLA’s Composition Courses for Struggling Students

The composition assignment was straightforward: Write about why you are in college.

UCLA writing instructor Jeff Smith had read hundreds of essays on the topic, but this one stood out: Its author couldn’t spell the word “college.”

“As I sit here, in my collage dorm room, attempting to articulate why it is I am in collage, I am forced to think back to when I was younger,” began the essay, written by a UCLA freshman earlier this year. “Part of the reason I come to collage was to discover and shape my adult self.”

What followed was a confused string of repetitious phrases, incorrect word choices and odd verb tenses--just the kind of flawed and flabby prose that the UCLA Writing Programs were founded 16 years ago to improve. But today, as the renowned research university struggles to rebuild after years of budget cuts, these programs may be in trouble.

The Writing Programs teach freshman composition--the only writing course all UCLA students must take--and several classes that seek to prepare upperclassmen to write more effectively in their chosen disciplines.

But under a “worst-case scenario” unveiled last month, UCLA’s 28 full-time slots for professional writing instructors--a staff that already has dwindled from a high of 43 in the mid-1980s--could be cut again over the next four years to just 15.

Some upper-level courses have already been canceled. And some instructors are worried that the quality of UCLA’s 10-week freshman composition course is in danger.

UCLA administrators downplay the threats to quality, saying they are now at the beginning of a restructuring process that they hope will result in more and better writing instruction--if not by the current nontenured staff, then perhaps by tenure-track faculty or the graduate students who study with them.

“We are committed to offering the richest instruction in writing that we can to our undergraduates,” said Pauline Yu, UCLA’s dean of humanities. Even if the Writing Programs are not cut, Yu said, “the only way we’re going to be able to continue to improve writing at UCLA is to involve more faculty.”

But writing experts who are familiar with UCLA say it is unlikely that many of the university’s tenured or tenure-track faculty--who already must juggle teaching and scholarly research--will eagerly take on the additional labor-intensive job of improving students’ writing. And those who do may not be very good at it.

Today, as has been true for years, many smart, accomplished students arrive at UCLA and other elite colleges with bad habits: sentences that don’t have a point, overreliance on jargon, disorganized arguments and careless grammar.

Every year, about one-third of the California high school graduates who enter UC as freshmen fail to satisfy the university’s writing proficiency requirement--dubbed Subject A--and must take a basic English skills course before they can enroll in freshman composition.

But even those who successfully satisfy UCLA’s writing requirement--either by passing the university’s exam, taking a community college course or scoring high enough on a standardized national test--are rarely free of writing problems. The freshman who misspelled “college,” for example, had already met the requirement.

According to Smith, a writing instructor who has taught at UCLA for nine years, students “can get to be juniors and seniors and not be quite clear on how to write a sentence.”

How best to remedy that--and whether students need instructors who are specifically trained to teach writing--is the crux of the current debate at UCLA. Some experts say that no matter how well most professors write or how hard they are willing to work, some will have difficulty helping students improve.

“It’s not easy to articulate what the problem is in a student essay,” said Cheryl Giuliano, director of UCLA’s Writing Programs. “Some faculty will do a good job. But not all.”

And why would they want to take on the challenge? Mike Rose, a professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and a national authority on writing instruction, said professors would gain little by offering to teach undergraduate composition.

“The hard, cold fact is faculty do not get rewarded for putting in the kind of time that it takes to help students write better--especially at a research university like UCLA,” he said.

Even as some administrators try to place more value on teaching, Rose said, the professional pressure to publish and do research remains enormous. “The pressure comes not only from the dean’s office. It comes from the very profession you’re in.

“If you’re an astronomer or a biologist, your scholarly journals will very rarely feature an article on teaching,” Rose said. “So who’s going to do it? Graduate students. Which raises the question: Can anybody teach folks how to write?”

UCLA, which is among the most selective of the nine UC campuses, admits largely the cream of the crop of high school graduates. So when UCLA freshmen write poorly--one recently asserted that “having a solitary life must be very suffering;” another described human interaction as “the necessary food for the developing person because it sparks the want for a person to find their identity”--it reflects badly on the entire state.

Writing, said Alexander W. Astin, director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, “is something that’s been neglected both in the home and in the lower schools. By the time students get out of high school, a lot of them are lame. And we don’t remediate it well in college because we don’t value that kind of teaching.”

The result is that the problem follows students as they move through life. Even among UCLA’s graduate and doctoral students, Astin said, poor writing is a common weakness.

“Our [graduate] students come from Amherst and Stanford and UC Berkeley and UCLA--it’s not like they’re coming from Podunk U.,” he said. “And probably the majority of them have serious writing problems.”

The question, then, is how to solve those problems, and the answer arrived at by UCLA administrators will probably determine the future of the Writing Programs. Lecturers who teach in those programs worry, however, that the hierarchical nature of research institutions will work against them.

The teaching of writing, they say, has long been considered a “service field” in higher education. During the past decade, that has begun to change as several of the nation’s best state schools have started programs in rhetoric and composition, hired tenure-track faculty in the field and begun to treat writing as a legitimate scholarly endeavor.

But at many elite research universities, including all nine of the UC campuses, writing instruction remains largely the domain of temporary lecturers. At UCLA, writing instructors say they are not as valued as tenure-track, or “ladder,” faculty.

“It’s a class issue--writing [instruction] here tends to be seen as remedial . . . and has come to have the taint of low-class status,” said Jeanne Gunner, the assistant director of the UCLA programs. She calls “preposterous” the idea that any smart person can teach writing. “I have teeth. Do you want me to be your dentist?”

Rose, the writing expert, agreed.

“It very much is an issue of class and intellectual caste,” he said. “The teaching of writing is seen as a very low-level pursuit, one that doesn’t require much intellectual weight.”

UCLA administrators reject this characterization. Yu, the humanities dean, acknowledges that the teaching of writing “has become a discipline of its own. It is professionalized. There are [scholarly] journals.”

Nevertheless, Yu insists that professional writing instructors--the ones who read those journals, compose writing textbooks and attend conferences in the field--are not the only ones who can teach writing well.

“One shouldn’t assume that people who are not trained as writing instructors are either going to be completely uninterested in or unable to take part in the project of writing,” she said.

In 1980, when UCLA’s Writing Programs were born, founders worked under the supposition that fundamental writing problems were unlikely to be solved in content-based courses such as history or English literature. Even if those courses assigned a lot of writing, the thinking went, papers would largely be graded on factual content, not grammar or structure. To address those more basic issues, UCLA hired trained instructors to teach writing as a separate discipline.

But today, as UCLA embarks on a multiyear restructuring of the undergraduate curriculum, administrators say they are intrigued by the idea of integrating writing so fully that courses that focused only on writing could become obsolete.

“We’re facing the fact that students do come to us with various levels of preparation,” said Brian P. Copenhaver, provost of UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, which serves the vast majority of UCLA’s 23,000 undergraduates.

“One reasonable response to that is to gather students in relatively small groups to talk about the act of writing. Another way to do it is to . . . put our resources into making that experience more common across the curriculum.”

Like Yu, the dean of humanities, Copenhaver stresses that no final decisions have been made. In the end, he said, UCLA’s Writing Programs could remain at current funding levels.

“But what’s also conceivable is that there wouldn’t be any [writing courses] at all,” he acknowledged. “If writing was pervasive enough in the rest of the curriculum, there wouldn’t be any point.”

Financial constraints will play a role in the decision making. Since 1990, UCLA’s College of Letters and Science has lost 13% of its state funding, or $13.5 million. During the same period, the ranks of the college’s tenured faculty shrank from 835 to 702.

Now that state funding appears to be stabilizing, UCLA is seeking to rebuild that faculty--in the humanities division alone, 15 new professors have been hired for the 1996-97 school year. But such hiring requires the college to find other places to cut. Programs like writing that have low student-to-teacher ratios and are staffed by temporary lecturers, not faculty, are getting special scrutiny.

If UCLA decides to cut its Writing Programs, it will not be alone. UC Santa Cruz has already cut its writing instruction budget for next year by 8%, or about $50,000, and a similar cut is expected for the 1997-98 school year.

“I know that UCLA is not alone and neither are we,” said Jorge Hankamer, UC Santa Cruz’s humanities dean, who said other UC campuses have already cut their writing faculties by 20% to 40%. “The timing may not be the same, but the effect is--there will just be less work done.”

It is unclear how much input--if any--students will have in deciding the fate of UCLA’s Writing Programs. Earlier this month, nearly 400 students signed a petition to protest the cancellation of “Topics in Rhetoric and Writing,” an upper division composition course that had an emphasis in social and political history. The course remains canceled.

One student who sent an e-mail to the humanities dean stressed that classes like the one being canceled helped prepare students for the realities of the professional world. The student, a neuroscience major, kept his protest brief, but its message was clear in ways the author had and hadn’t intended. In three paragraphs, the student composed just under 200 words. He misspelled three of them.