I read the following quote today in June’s edition of Harper’s, from Thomas Frank’s “Easy Chair: The Price of Admission”: “[David] Graeber relates the story of a woman he met who got a Ph.D. from Columbia University, but whose $80,000 debt load put an academic career off-limits, since adjuncts earn close to nothing.  Instead, the woman wound up working as an escort for Wall Street types.  ‘Here’s someone who ought to be a professor,’ Graeber explains, ‘doing sexual services for the guys who lent her the money.’” It was a fitting conclusion to a week spent quizzing composition lecturers and…

In their 2001 bibliographical essay, “Cultural Studies and Composition,” Diana George and John Trimbur contribute to the text A Guide to Composition Pedagogies (Tate, Rupiper & Schick) by chronologically mapping the rise and themes of cultural studies in the composition classroom.  They end with a call to hold a key contradiction in sight as cultural studies within the field of composition studies continues to develop: contributors, such as the authors, who create theory and methods for teaching writing through cultural critique engage in “the production of scholarly commodities” at the same time that their work aims to critique the rhetoric…