1985
Dean Robert King has put the department under limited receivership: no meetings of the departmental senate are held, all authority lies with the chair and the executive committee, as a new governance document is drawn up. The new departmental governance document, approved in the spring, gives voting privileges to tenured and tenure-track professors, while handing most decisions over to an Executive Committee (EC) comprised of eight tenured or tenure-track faculty including: the department chair, the associate chair, and two members appointed by the department chair. Department Chair, William Sutherland, directly petitions to the Dean’s office to postpone full implementation of the E 346K requirement due to problems with course scheduling, allegations of grade inflation, and worries about the staffing requirements in the coming academic year. The course is postponed. 50 lecturers are told that their contracts will not be renewed. As the controversy over E 346K and the lecturers continues, the department begins to consider further changes to the lower-division writing program. Most controversial is the proposal that the department no longer offer E 306 during the regular fall and spring semesters while maintaining the requirement. Four rhetoric faculty members (Maxine Hairston, John Ruszkiewicz, James Kinneavy, and John Trimble) suggest that King split the department into a department of writing and a department of literature. A department-appointed committee (the E 346K Committee) proposes a new suite of advanced lower-division courses (E 309). The E 346K Committee also proposes turning E 306 into a remedial course offered during the summer, through extension, or through transfer; and they suggest reducing E 346K into an elective that only caters to students in the humanities and the social sciences. While the rhetoric faculty’s proposal preserves E 306 and technical writing courses such as E 317 and E 346K, the E 346K Committee’s proposal erases all professional writing from the department and creates a new course E 309K Topics in Writing that allows faculty to teach literature in lower-division writing classes. The two proposals get considered, but the E 346K proposal is approved by the department.
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