Origin Stories and Dreams of Collaboration: Rethinking Histories of the Communication Course and the...

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Origin Stories and Dreams ofCollaboration: Rethinking Histories ofthe Communication Course and theRelationships Between English andSpeechCara A. Finnegan & Marissa Lowe WallacePublished online: 02 Dec 2014.

To cite this article: Cara A. Finnegan & Marissa Lowe Wallace (2014) Origin Stories and Dreams ofCollaboration: Rethinking Histories of the Communication Course and the Relationships BetweenEnglish and Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 44:5, 401-426, DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2014.957412

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Rhetoric Society QuarterlyVol. 44, No. 5, pp. 401–426

Origin Stories and Dreamsof Collaboration: Rethinking Historiesof the Communication Courseand the Relationships Between Englishand SpeechCara A. Finnegan and Marissa Lowe Wallace

Scholars exploring the history of collaboration between English and Speech have studied the“communication courses” that emerged in the twentieth century and combined instruction inspeaking and writing. The history of the Verbal Expression course at the University of Illinoischallenges our dominant narratives about the origins of these courses. For example, while mostscholars pinpoint their origins to World War Two, our study of the Illinois course shows that itemerged as a result of the Great Depression and the general education movement. We offer acorrective to previous histories by showing how local, institutional structures and pressures oftenhave as much influence on pedagogy and collaboration as do external disciplinary structures.We argue that such correctives are especially valuable at a moment when rhetoricians in Englishand Speech are becoming more invested in combing the past for ideas about how best to collaboratein the present.

During the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, U.S. rhetoricalstudies increasingly has become interested in exploring and learning from its dis-ciplinary past. While today the field appears to be bursting with new opportunitiesfor meaningful and sustained collaboration between rhetoricians in English andSpeech/Communication, historians of the field recognize that such moments ofengagement are rare in our shared history. Indeed, the field of Communicationproudly traces its disciplinary origins to a moment of rupture or, as RoxanneMountford puts it, “divorce,” when in 1914 speech teachers from the National

Cara A. Finnegan is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,702 S. Wright Street, MC-456, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Marissa Lowe Wallace is Doctoral Student of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,702 S. Wright Street, MC-456, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

ISSN 0277-3945 (print)/ISSN 1930-322X (online) © 2014 The Rhetoric Society of America

DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2014.957412

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mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

402 Finnegan and Wallace

Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) left that organization to form the NationalAssociation of Academic Teachers of Speech (now, the National CommunicationAssociation) (“Century” 409). While scholars such as Steven Mailloux, WilliamKeith, Herman Cohen, and Pat Gehrke may differ on the reasons for and resultsof the “divorce,” they also recognize that the disciplinary split did not end interac-tion between English and Speech teachers in practice. Thus they and others havereturned to our shared past in earnest, using archival research to flesh out keyaspects of the history after the “divorce.”

Building on the work of composition historians such as James Berlin, rhetoricianssuch as Mountford, Mailloux, Keith, and Sharon Crowley have returned to variousmoments in the field’s twentieth century past in order to, among other things, seekout past moments of cooperation or collaboration. While these narratives mostlyhave been told by scholars from English rather than Speech/Communication, inthe last decade and a half Rhetoric Society Quarterly has served as a vital sitewhere rhetorical scholars from English and Communication dialogue about our(contested) shared histories and look to the future of the interdisciplinary studyof rhetoric. For example, in two issues of RSQ in 2000 and 2004, Michael Leff,Mailloux, Keith, Gerard Hauser, and Andrea Lunsford all express similar hopes fora rapprochement among English and Communication scholars studying rhetoric.In the 2000 exchange, Leff argues that while he values Mailloux’s vision for “therhetorical achievement of an enlarged and improved community . . . . This is atask that demands historical narrative” (84). More recently, Keith, Mountford, andtheir RSA Institute colleagues drafted the “Mt. Oread Manifesto” which emphasizesthe pedagogical need for collaboration between teachers of Communication andEnglish as it argues for a “unified vision of rhetorical education” (2). As rhetoricscholars today explore the joys and challenges of cooperation across disciplinesthat still frequently seem separated, many seek guidance from the past on how toproceed.

In his discussion of the potential for collaboration between English andCommunication, Keith speculates, “A truly local case for interdisciplinarity wouldhave to emerge, I think, from how all this would filter down to the basic coursein both fields” (“Identity, Rhetoric” 104). Indeed, one place scholars have lookedfor examples of historical cooperation is the so-called “communication courses” ofthe middle twentieth century. The broad narrative, offered with varying degrees ofspecificity by Berlin, Robert Connors, Crowley, Diana George and John Trimbur,Mailloux, and Mountford goes something like this: these courses, which emerged inthe World War Two era, combined instruction in written composition and pub-lic speaking and, as a result, provided opportunities for teachers in Speech andEnglish to collaborate. Their rise primarily was fueled by an urgent wartime need forcommunication instruction that was pragmatic and skills-based. After the war, thefounding of the College Conference on Composition and Communication (4 C’s)in 1949 appeared to solidify the place of the new “communication” courses in thetransformed post-war, GI-bill university. Yet that influence was short-lived; many

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Origin Stories and Dreams of Collaboration 403

of the courses disappeared in the fifties and sixties, partly as a result of changes inthe composition field which caused the “fourth C” of communication to lose influ-ence. As we discuss below, this narrative is more nuanced than what we have looselysketched out here; however, what is indisputable is that numerous rhetoric scholarshave zeroed in on the mid-twentieth century communication course as a key site forexploring the historical question of cooperation between the disciplines of Englishand Speech/Communication. Mountford, for example, sees the rise of the com-munication course in the 1940s as a compelling moment of collaboration betweenSpeech and English, one institutionalized via the founding of the CCCC, in which“for a brief period, the fields were reunited in service of a common cause”: wartimeeducation (“Century” 411).1 Mailloux, by contrast, terms the relationship betweenSpeech and English in the same period as one of “non-cooperation” and lamentsa lost opportunity for the development of true collaboration among English andSpeech scholars in advancing the “interdiscipline” of rhetoric (Disciplinary 4, 33).

Missing from these histories so far is substantive attention to a single communi-cation course at a particular institution.2 Our essay illustrates the value of such alocal example by exploring the first decade of one of these courses at the Universityof Illinois. The course—a two-semester sequence in writing and speaking taken byfirst year students—has been on the books at Illinois since 1940, when it was knownas Verbal Expression and was a key component of a new Division of General Studieslaunched in the fall of 1940. On paper, at least, the Illinois course would appear tofit squarely within the narrative outlined above: a university course devoted to thepragmatics of writing and speaking, emerging during the World War Two era, seem-ingly offering the possibility for collaboration between those in English and Speech.Yet when we began to investigate the history of the course in campus archives, whatwe found was quite different. The Illinois Verbal Expression course originated not inwartime fervor but in the middle 1930s, partly in response to institutional anxietyabout student retention during the Great Depression. In addition, the course washoused separately from English and Speech in a newly formed Division of GeneralStudies, which faced its own institutional pressures that stood apart from disci-plinary conflicts in English and/or Speech. Furthermore, for most of its first decadethe course was taught largely by faculty in Speech, who were housed in the Englishdepartment in a Division of Public Speaking.

We argue in this essay that such differences make a difference. They challenge thefield to adjust current narratives about the history of the communication courses.In particular, the early history of the Illinois course invites the historian of the fieldto consider the implications of shifting the exigency for such courses from World

1Mountford erroneously names that “common cause” as World War Two by suggesting that it was the U.S.Army that prompted the creation of the basic communication program (“Century” 411). Mountford has sinceacknowledged this error. See Mountford, “Around 1914.”

2Crowley’s study of the freshman course at Iowa comes closest, but our analysis offers a more in-depthtreatment of the course itself. See Crowley, Composition in the University. More recently, David Gold has dis-cussed the recent rise of studies of local examples of rhetorical education, although these do not include thecommunication course specifically. See Gold, “Remapping.”

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War Two to the Great Depression and the general education movement. And itreminds us that local, institutional structures and pressures often have as muchinfluence on pedagogy and collaboration as do professional associations and jour-nals. Ultimately, the example of the Illinois course offers a corrective to previoushistories of the communication course, a corrective that is especially important ifrhetorical studies continues its interest in mining the history of collaboration in thefield for clues to the ways we should collaborate in the present. In short, if we are tolearn from and emulate elements of our histories, we need to be sure that we knowwhat those histories are.

The essay’s argument unfolds in the following manner. First, we offer a narra-tive history of the first decade of the Verbal Expression course at the Universityof Illinois, highlighting its origins, content, and institutional location on campus.Next, we put our history of the Illinois course into conversation with other his-tories of the field by outlining three themes unearthed from the Illinois historythat challenge current interpretations of the mid-twentieth century communica-tion course: the course’s origins in the Great Depression, not World War Two; thecourse’s institutional location in a Division of General Studies; and the question ofEnglish/Speech collaboration in the course. Finally, in the conclusion we considerthe value of the local example itself, and urge historians of the field to recognize thatour desire to tell particular stories about the past may say more about the status ofrhetorical studies in the present than it does about the histories we are writing.

The Origins of the Verbal Expression Course at the University of Illinois

In the early 1930s, many colleges and universities began to explore the benefitsof general education for their students. The general education movement, whichencouraged cross-disciplinary learning, citizenship skills, and democratic values,acted as one impetus for a “group of leading faculty men” at the University of Illinoisto begin examining the need for a general education program in 1933 (Herrick,“Revival” 8). In 1934, Arthur Cutts Willard, the newly installed president of theuniversity, publicly critiqued the emphasis on specialization in education, argu-ing instead that what was necessary was “more emphasis on versatility” and “moreattention to fundamentals common to many fields of human activity, so that thestudent always can use what he has been taught almost regardless of the situation inwhich he may find himself upon completion of his formal education” (Neidhardt7). A year later, Willard advanced these interests by formally requesting that theUniversity Senate consider the “‘desirability of requiring all freshmen to take certainprescribed courses regardless of the college or school in which they may be initiallyenrolled’” (Herrick, “Revival” 8). By early 1936, Willard had appointed a specialcommittee on an “Educational Program for Freshman and Sophomore Students” toinvestigate how a general education program might be instituted at the University ofIllinois (“History” 1). To guide the process, the Provost’s office hired an educationalconsultant to examine how general education programs functioned in different

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universities. These included Stephens College and the University of Minnesota,where the programs were “based upon extensive studies of the needs and activi-ties of everyday life” (“Programs” 5). These schools’ course offerings emphasizedthe applicability of knowledge gained in the classroom to students’ roles as citizensand in their future careers. According to the consultant’s report, the overall purposeof general education was “to provide for the student’s broad educational needs ascontrasted with preparation for his more specialized or vocational objectives” (1).The consultant argued that general education programs might vary depending onthe type of student the institution wanted to attract. For example, institutions mighttarget students in three specific groups: students who only had two years to devoteto higher education, “inferior and delinquent students” who wanted “some collegework,” or “superior students” who sought “to break the lock step of time-servingrequirements and to progress at an accelerated rate” (2). At Illinois, the focus of thequestion of general education was squarely on the first of these: providing sufficienteducation for those who would not stay in college for four years.3

The University of Illinois’s Division of General Studies (DGS) was born out ofboth pragmatic and philosophical concerns rooted in the rise of the general educa-tion movement and the challenges posed by the Great Depression. Pragmatically,the administration was worried about “student mortality,” because nearly halfof incoming freshmen in the class of 1935 left after two years (Senate 1). Onelikely reason for the high “student mortality” rate was the Great Depression.A 1937 unemployment census, for example, counted nearly 340,000 Illinois citi-zens as “totally unemployed,” with another 163,000 registered as “partly employed”;furthermore, the number of “totally unemployed” had risen by over 100,000 since1930 (U.S. Department of Labor 189; “Unemployment”). It was likely the case thatmany students who left after two years did so in order to seek employment and helptheir struggling families. This pattern obviously threatened student retention, butbeyond that administrators worried whether these students were really receiving aneducation that they could use in all contexts, given that many of them did not staylong enough to become specialists in a given field. Thus the general studies pro-gram at Illinois developed with a desire to “meet the common needs of all types ofstudents,” preparing them for daily life beyond college, no matter what their careerinclinations (“Programs” 2).

Philosophically, others on campus shared Willard’s concern about the dangersof specialization itself. For example, by requiring only narrow disciplinary study,the university might neglect education that fostered students’ citizenship skills. In a1939 letter to College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty on the importance of

3“A Study of Undergraduate Academic Mortality of the Class of 1935” done by the Bureau of InstitutionalResearch deemed that the group of students who dropped out of the university before obtaining a degree—theproblem the committee called “student mortality”—included many that were considered to be “compe-tent students.” Thus, the general division was devised as a way to keep those students enrolled rather thandecreasing standards for “lack of ability.” See Senate Educational Committee 1.

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general education, and in a passage worth quoting at some length, Dean MatthewT. McClure argued:

We have been accustomed to think of education as the handmaid of democ-racy. That is a noble conception. But what kind of education? Many thousandsof students have gone to college seeking an education in the hope of achievingmaterial success. They have come to think of the university as a glorified employ-ment agency. But a difficulty arises. It arises out of the discrepancy between whatthe student prepares himself to do while in college and what he finds in the wayof occupational opportunity when he leaves college. Considering the current sta-tus of unemployment and the hazardous gamble of securing an adequate positionafter graduation, one is likely to think that he is preparing himself for a world thatdoes not need him. Many students have seriously questioned the value of educa-tion because they have found no occupational outlets commensurate with theiracademic training. The reasoning is about as follows: Men go to college to preparethemselves to get jobs. They graduate, and there are no jobs available; hence, col-lege education is a failure. The only reply I can make to this criticism is to convincethe student that there is more to going to college than getting a job. The only wayto convince him is to give him the kind of education that will be self-convincing.The needs of a democratic society cannot be wholly described in terms of occu-pational demands; they are described in terms of men and women who are able toenter into responsible discussions of topics other than those requiring technicaland professional skills. (Memo 2)

In a world where dreams of “material success” quickly fade to “hazardous gambles”for only “adequate positions,” or “no jobs” at all, there must be other reasons to goto college. For McClure, the philosophical reasons for general education outweighedthe pragmatic with an emphasis on fostering democratic values and moral fortitude.Thus education, McClure argued, needed to be “self-convincing”; that is, through auniversity education students would come to recognize for themselves the value ofacquiring knowledge beyond the “technical” or “professional.”

During the initial planning for the DGS, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences(LAS) gathered faculty input regarding course offerings. These courses would serveas the framework for what the University considered to be the essentials of acollege education. There was much discussion about which courses should beincluded. A 1938 memo reveals that, early on, neither “Verbal Expression” norany such course with a verbal communication element was suggested on record,even though “Rhetoric or Composition” did appear as a potential course offering(Senate 3–4). While we have not been able to pinpoint precisely when or why VerbalExpression emerged as a core course, we do know that two universities mentionedas models in the educational consultant’s report, the University of Minnesota andStephens College, had such courses: the “Literature, Speech, and Writing” courseoffered at Minnesota and “Oral and Written Communications” at Stephens College(“Programs” 4–5). Thus it seems reasonable to assume that at some point thoseat Illinois may have become interested and decided to add something similar. Theeventual addition of the course in Verbal Expression elicited support from some

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faculty in the English Department. An Assistant Professor in Rhetoric, J. R. Travis,wrote to Dean McClure, “Regarding the general course in Verbal Expression, I amimpressed with the need of vocabulary study so obvious among freshmen, and withtheir deficiencies in grammar. They lack also fluency of speech or the ability to thinkon their feet” (1).

In late 1938, the Senate Committee on Educational Policy officially recommendedthat the university pursue the creation of a general division within LAS, and by1939, the final plan was approved by the Board of Trustees, with Verbal Expressionlisted as one of the seven core courses (replacing, it appears, the earlier possibilitiesof Rhetoric or Composition) (“Meeting of the Board” 347–349). The committeemembers tasked with preparing the Verbal Expression curriculum designed it as ayearlong course that would serve the goals of the DGS by focusing on written andspoken English as an integral part of a general education. The course was meant tomake explicit intellectual connections to other courses in DGS, such as History ofCivilization and Biological Science. Students were to gain situational understandingthrough their exposure to a variety of disciplines and the training to adapt theirown responses to various audiences and contexts. In other words, as would laterbe noted by University of Illinois Professor D. W. Gotshalk, the DGS and VerbalExpression specifically encouraged a “habit of mind”—a habit, Gotshalk described,as “going to the more comprehensive and underlying aspects of situations . . . toobserve, to infer, to judge, to read and to write, to analyze and to reflect with aneye to the general and the more fundamental” (5). Students were then to apply theknowledge gained in the classroom to their own daily lives and to society at large.As we can see from this origin story, Verbal Expression at Illinois was born in theideological climate of the general education movement of the 1930s and amid theeconomic constraints of the Great Depression, thus making it different from latercommunication courses developed during and after the war.

The Division of General studies officially launched in Fall 1940 with an enroll-ment of 123 students and the anticipation of 250 students the following year(McClure, Memo 1). It began as a four-year program, with the first two yearsformulated as an introduction to various fields. In the first year of the program,students took two semesters of Verbal Expression and History of Civilization, andchose additional courses from among a group of six that included Biological Scienceand Foreign Language. DGS publicity materials for the Verbal Expression coursedescribed it as striving to “train the student in such use of the spoken and writtenword as may be called for by his teachers in other subjects and by the people forwhom he will work or with whom he will live after he leaves college” (2). The cam-pus newspaper, the Daily Illini, reported that Verbal Expression was created to dealwith “oral and written communication, use of the library, and the study of wordsand their meanings” (Blaiser 5). Early descriptions of the course emphasized VerbalExpression as a course meant to assist students in their other coursework, in theirpost-college lives, in their careers, and in their roles as citizens.

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The Content and Structure of the Verbal Expression Course

The first sections of Verbal Expression were taught in the fall semester of 1940.The university’s archive offers numerous examples of early syllabi, assignments,and exams for the course. While these materials are at best rough guides to class-room activities, and not necessarily indices of actual practice, they do providerelatively detailed evidence of what those designing and teaching the course atleast hoped to achieve. In the first semester of Verbal Expression, students focusedon improving vocabulary, grammar, reading aloud, listening, and writing outlines.Students would be taught to “listen intelligently, that is, understandingly and crit-ically, to what others say—to class-room lectures, to political speeches, and to theinnumerable kinds of information, and misinformation, which he hears from theradio, from the lecture platform, and from his associates and friends” (Herrick,“Verbal Expression Syllabus” 1). In addition to teaching students grammatical skillsand vocabulary, the course promoted rhetorical analysis and encouraged studentsto engage contemporary media critically in ways that we explore in more detailbelow.

According to Marvin T. Herrick’s spring 1941 syllabus, during the secondsemester, students studied “kinds of discourse, and methods of exposition,” meth-ods of reasoning, writing letters and reports, and preparing formal and informaloral reports (2). Here, the course title “expression” proved well-suited to the coursematerial. Herrick’s syllabus contends that students would be taught “to enunciateclearly, to pronounce correctly, and to select his words judiciously” (1). Ultimately,Herrick’s syllabus argues that completion of the course should have “increased [thestudent’s] power to speak well the language which is his most useful tool, to speakit extemporaneously” (1). Language, or rhetoric, was a “tool” that could be usedin a variety of contexts; students practiced speaking in front of groups in differentformats to foster their extemporaneous speaking abilities. Across both semesters,exams evaluated students on vocabulary, sentence structure, summary writing, andexpository writing (General Division 1). However, no suitable public speaking testcould be devised; a 1941 memo notes, “Obviously it was impractical in the timeavailable for the staff to attempt to test every student’s ability with oral English;but oral English has been stressed throughout the semester, along with writing andreading” (“To the Staff” 1).

Early on, there seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of the coursedirector to differentiate the course from a more “traditional” rhetoric course. Forexample, course director William D. Templeman urged labeling written assignments“papers,” not “themes” or “rhetoric” because, as he put it, “we want the studentsto feel that this is not a traditional rhetoric course” (“Letter to the Member” 1).While it is not entirely clear what Templeman meant by “traditional rhetoriccourse,” Connors says that most “modern composition-rhetoric” courses in thatperiod emphasized “formal and mechanical correctness” over what today we would

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recognize as a more rhetorical framework (13).4 It might be that Templeman wantedto highlight Verbal Expression’s different sensibilities, or that he felt it was impor-tant for the course’s success for students to understand it as part of the larger effortsof the DGS. Early materials make it clear that Verbal Expression was meant tofunction as “a medium of integration” with other courses in the DGS curricula.5

Templeman wrote several letters to Verbal Expression staff members in order to clar-ify the need to subordinate their classes to the objectives of the Division of GeneralStudies. For example, he distributed syllabi from the Biological Science and Historyof Civilization classes to Verbal Expression staff for integration purposes. In doingso, he expressed hope that Verbal Expression staff would encourage paper topicsthat reflected the course material in other general division courses (Templeman,“Letter to the Member” 1). Templeman’s hopes were realized in some studentassignments. Some written work by Verbal Expression students appeared in TheGreen Cauldron, a Freshman literary magazine published quarterly by the Rhetoricstaff. This honorary measure allotted some prestige to students, and Templeman waspleased that papers would appear as they had been written for the Verbal Expressioncourse (“Letter to Members of VE Staff” 1). Most of the Rhetoric students whosework was published in this magazine wrote fictional pieces, poems, or literary cri-tiques. In contrast, Verbal Expression student essays were non-fiction pieces ontopics including a local political battle in one student’s hometown, the relation-ship between comic book sales and juvenile delinquency, and hybrids (plants andanimals)— this latter topic likely a direct connection to the DGS’s other core coursesin Biological and Physical Science (Francis; Gurnee; Watson). In addition to theseexamples of written work, some sections of Verbal Expression performed on theuniversity radio station, WILL. That archive also illustrates the course’s efforts atintegration. Extant audio files of the broadcasts show that students spoke on a vari-ety of topics including Egyptian history, adaptive characteristics of mammals, theeconomic importance of forests, and Queen Elizabeth I (“Students Reading”).

The attention to mediated communication illustrates another way in whichVerbal Expression set itself apart from the traditional freshman course. VerbalExpression student recordings made between 1941 and 1944 included a series ofbroadcast reading and writing exercises in which multiple students read the sameprepared text as well as offered readings of expository essays on topics of their choos-ing (“University Station” 4).6 Division of General Studies head Herrick responded

4While Connors repeats the error of calling the communication courses a World War Two phenomenon(160), he also describes the “communications movement of the 1940s” as “deeply rhetorical” in ways thatcomposition-rhetoric courses were not (96).

5We do not know if other DGS courses integrated their curricula, but as we show below, it is clear thatDGS leaders looked to Verbal Expression as a course suited to the application of knowledge gained from othercourses.

6The University of Illinois Archives holds a handful of audio recordings, and we have listened to all of them.Based on their content, we determined that several of them date from the fall of 1941. Combining the campusnewspaper’s report from 1944 with these earlier recordings, we know for certain that teachers in the coursewere using radio between 1941-1944 at least. See also Templeman, “Letter to the Member.”

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positively to the broadcasts of student voices, noting that they were “very promising”despite some audible nervousness from the students (“Letter” 1). In his corre-spondence with Dr. C. H. Shattuck, a Verbal Expression faculty member, Herrickrecommended that students work on the “naturalness” of their reading (varyingpitch and tempo) and the content of their reports (1–2). The Verbal Expressioncourse involvement in WILL seems to have involved not only efforts to build “mod-ern” public speaking skills among students in the age of radio, but also to publicizethe course and DGS.

From its earliest manifestations, then, Verbal Expression was a written and oralcommunication course whose designers continually sought to distinguish it fromthe university’s public speaking and composition courses through its engagementwith different media and subject matter.7 In doing so, they seem to have sought tocarve out an institutional place for the work of the course inside the Division ofGeneral Studies but apart from whatever was happening in the speech and rhetoricclasses. As course director, Templeman was tasked with the duty of insuring that thecourse represented the interests of the DGS, but he also needed to be sure that it waswell regarded alongside Rhetoric and Speech as their academic equivalent.

Early reports illustrate the success of Verbal Expression. In a 1941 letter to aDGS advisor, William Templeman reported that Verbal Expression students per-formed as well as Rhet 1 students on objective tests (“Letter to Sidney Glenn”).Templeman also announced that he had received requests for information on thecourse from several colleges and universities in the Midwest that were considering acourse like Verbal Expression. If other universities were looking to the Illinois VerbalExpression course as a model, then its staff could argue for its value both withinDGS and to the university as a whole. Financially, the course proved to be econom-ical as well. A 1944 review of the Division of General Studies, which produced somemajor changes in the division’s curricular structure, reveals the budget of VerbalExpression to be $8,600/year with an enrollment of 250 students. However, thecourse actually had a net cost of only $2,600 that year because it was viewed ashaving saved the need to teach nine sections of Rhetoric (“Budget Report” 2–3).

Before we go on to explore how themes from the history of the Verbal Expressioncourse challenge other disciplinary narratives about the history of the communica-tion courses, one question remains: Who taught Verbal Expression? The Divisionof General Studies hired its own instructors, but we do know that teachers weredrawn from the English department, where it would be easy to find trained instruc-tors of rhetoric and public speaking; during this period the Division of Speech washoused in the English department, not yet in its own separate department. It isapparent that teachers with both English and Speech backgrounds began teachingthe course in 1940; however, there is evidence of a shift over time to primarily speechinstructors. By the mid-1940s, it appears as though most Verbal Expression facultywere speech teachers housed in the English department’s Division of Speech. In the

7The term “communication” was not implemented until 1948, as we explain below.

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1945–46 annual DGS report, its head Marvin Herrick argued, “In view of the largeamount of speaking, as well as writing, in Verbal Expression, the employment ofteachers trained in speech has proved more satisfactory than the employment ofteachers of freshman rhetoric, and I recommend for the future that the course inVerbal Expression be manned by competent teachers of speech. The present cor-dial relations between the Division of General Studies and the Division of Speech(within the Department of English) should be encouraged” (Herrick, “AnnualReport” 3).

Just a few years later, however, Lee Hultzén, who became both the course’s direc-tor and a faculty member in the newly separate Department of Speech, expressedconcern about the apparent perception of the course as one emphasizing speech overwriting. In 1949 he wrote to Professor James McNab McCrimmon, then a facultymember in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Galesburg,inviting him to take over as director of the course. Hultzén explained,

The course needs to be removed from such close association as it has in my personwith the Department of Speech. The removal is partly needed for the good of thecourse itself. I.e., there is probably in it, in spite of the nominally exact balancebetween reading-writing and listening-speaking, a trace too much of the speech-maker, however much he is a democratic speechmaker rather than a dominatorof men. The correction of emphasis can, I think, be more easily made by a per-son who is by previous experience inclined to the other side than by the reformedme—and I shall have to go at reforming me if I remain in charge. The removalis partly needed to correct the suspicion in the public, local public, eye that thecourse is much more speech-directed than it actually is. Not only am I known toteach in the Department of Speech as well as in DGS, but all the other members ofthe staff have come to be associated with Speech by appointment or as graduatestudents. (“Letter” 1)

The letter invites speculation on how, exactly, the “suspicion” that the course wastoo “speech-directed” emerged, and who exactly might have had concern aboutthat. The archive has not yielded anything on this point, but we may produc-tively read between the lines a bit. One possibility is simply that some may havevoiced concerns that time spent speaking was time spent not doing other things,such as working on written composition. Another possibility, not exclusive of thefirst, is the notion that speech instruction is somehow less ethically defensible if itfocuses too much on teaching students how to “dominate” others; note Hultzén’saside defending his own instruction as more about “democratic” speechmakingthan “dominating” speechmaking. Either way, Hultzén deems it more reasonableto bring in someone from “the other side” rather than having a go at “reformingme.” McCrimmon, a compositionist best known today for Writing With Purpose, atraditional composition textbook still in publication, was hired as course directorin 1949, and later served as head of the Division of General Studies at Illinois until1962 (Miller 27).

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From “Verbal Expression” to “Verbal Communication”

In 1944, the university formed a committee to review the Division of GeneralStudies. Its recommendations included eliminating the four-year curriculum infavor of a two-year curriculum; this change, although opposed by DGS head MarvinHerrick, was implemented by the 1945–46 academic year. Each of the division’scourses was reviewed as well, including Verbal Expression. The language used by thereview committee to describe the course and its mission is markedly different fromthe language used to establish the course just seven years earlier, and in our viewmarks an institutional shift in the way the university understood the value of thecourse. The committee maintained that Verbal Expression “needs to be regarded asan ‘instrumental’ or ‘tool’ course, directed towards the acquisition of skills of com-munication and interpretation needed in all successful study.” Lamenting that onewould hope that “such training” would have been received by students during highschool, the committee concluded that it was best to “classify the course in VerbalExpression (and courses in Rhetoric) as belonging to a preliminary level of ‘basic’(instrumental) education. But it understands, naturally, the University’s obligation,pending improvement in the high schools, to undertake such instruction” (“Report”46–47).

The language used here is striking; terms like “preliminary” or “basic” wereexplicitly denied by those who had established the Division and its courses, for theyemphasized that the Division of General Studies was not for “remedial” studentsbut rather for students seeking a more general education that integrated variousdisciplinary modes of study to prepare students for academic and citizenly engage-ment. Whether the seeming shift in language describing the course suggests a shiftin the institution’s sense of the course’s purpose, or whether it is simply the casethat the DGS had one view of the course and the university had another, is difficultto determine. It is also possible that the language of “skills” and “basic” “commu-nications” emerged in the review because of its rise in other institutions wherethe “communications skills course” was becoming a key post-war phenomenon.Regardless of the reasons, this lexical shift did eventually manifest in a decision torename the course. Beginning with the 1948–49 academic year, Verbal Expressionbecame Verbal Communication. Course Director Lee Hultzén suggested that theterm “communication” would have been a better label earlier, but claimed it wasnot previously in wide use. By the late 1940s, though, the term was in very wideuse outside of the Illinois campus (Hultzén, “The Course” 114).8 The course at thisstage retained many of its earlier features, but increasingly emphasized its commu-nicative ends. A 1948 course description states: “The principal end of the course isto develop such skills that, at the receiving end of any verbal communication, thestudent may be able to interpret more efficiently, more fully, and more judiciouslywhat he reads or hears, and that, at the initiating end of any verbal communication,

8According to Crowley, between 1943–1944 “a half dozen courses or programs called ‘CommunicationSkills’ were put in place in American universities” (169).

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he may be able to write and speak more clearly, more pertinently, and with more justemphasis” (“DGS Verbal Communication” 1). Although this reads as more commu-nication “skills” than “citizenship” based, the description also states that studentsshould be concerned with “communications as pertain to their affairs or such asany member of an American community, in his capacity of citizen and man of cul-ture, may be called upon to pass on to his fellows” (1). Additionally, the secondsemester of the course was oriented toward topics for deliberation including some“currently unsolved question[s] of public policy (FEPC, Federal Aid to Education,Compulsory National Health Insurance, etc.)” (2). Thus the revisions to the coursestill reflected many of the philosophical goals of general education proffered earlyon by Willard and others, but they also reveal how the post-war moment may havecontributed to an adjustment in approach. Hultzén argued, “not all men need beliterary critics, although all should be able to read literature; whereas all men in ademocracy do need to be critical of persuasions, of what is called propaganda whenthe other fellow puts it out. We deal with writing and speaking only, or almost only,on the practical level. Few of our students will ever be professional writers or speak-ers, whereas all will have to write or speak in order to be good workers and goodcitizens” (“The Course” 114).

Reading the Example of the Illinois Course Through the Field’s Histories

The previous sections of this essay outlined the origins of the Verbal Expressioncourse in the mid-1930s as a response to the enrollment crisis, the Great Depression,and the push to institute general education. As we have seen, the course combinedinstruction in writing and speaking, engaged modern communication practicessuch as radio, attempted to integrate its content with other courses taught in theDivision of General Studies, and was both institutionally separate from and also toa certain extent still connected to instruction in English and Speech. In this section,we want to focus in on three themes that emerge from the Verbal Expression course’shistory and articulate how they intersect with, challenge, or even contradict othernarratives about the communication courses told by others in the field. Ultimately,what we highlight below is not simply the differences between the local story we aretelling and stories told by others. We want to explore what difference those differ-ences make in terms of the stories that we have been telling ourselves about originsand disciplinary collaboration.

What About the Early Courses? General Education and the GreatDepression

A strange paradox haunts accounts of the rise of the communication course.Although a number of hybrid speaking and writing courses were launched in the1930s – recall that the Verbal Expression course at Illinois was likely informed bythose at Stephens College and the University of Minnesota—historians of the field

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have spent hardly any time engaging the 1930s in their histories of such courses.In some of the origin stories that they tell, the presence of early, pre-war courseslike Verbal Expression is acknowledged, but then set aside in favor of a narrativethat emphasizes the courses’ development during the Second World War. Other ori-gin stories do not mention these early courses or their 1930s origins at all. Whenthe decade does appear, it is primarily in the form of a brief cameo in which the1930s are recognized primarily as a moment in which the philosophy of generaleducation was on the rise. Of the major histories we have studied (those by Berlin,Connors, George and Trimbur, Crowley, Mailloux, and Mountford), only Berlinand Crowley acknowledge to any appreciable extent the role of the general edu-cation movement or the pre-war courses in the rise of the communication course(Crowley 161–168; Berlin 92–97). The result of such curious absences and asides isthat we have acquired a series of origin stories that may actually fail to address theorigins of many of the communication courses.

In his study of the history of composition courses in the university, Berlin linksideas about progressive writing instruction to John Dewey’s philosophy and statesthat “the most significant curricular development in American colleges between1940 and 1960 was the mushrooming of the general education features of “mostgeneral education programs” (92). Yet while he considers at length the ways thatthe freshman writing course reflected goals of progressive education throughoutthe twenties and thirties, he offers no similar discussion of the communicationcourses that began to emerge at the end of that same period. Instead, Berlin tracesthe intellectual and institutional development of the communication course to thewar, where, for example, he ties the intellectual foundations of the communicationcourse to the General Semantics movement and the work of S.I. Hayakawa, whichwas not imported into speech and writing instruction until during and after the war.Furthermore, he claims that the communication courses emerged during and afterthe war as responses to the needs of overwhelming numbers of returning veterans(96). Both origin stories ignore those early courses like Verbal Expression whoseemergence predated the war. Indeed, of these courses Berlin only notes that “theirposition was not secure until after the war ended,” though he offers no informationabout them, nor does he provide evidence for his claims about their relative securitybefore or after the war (96).

For her part, Crowley similarly acknowledges the importance of the general edu-cation movement and Dewey’s influence, which “held that learning occurs by meansof engaging students in activities that induce them to reflect usefully and creativelyon their experience (16).9 Yet in the same breath, Crowley devalues the general edu-cation movement as a prominent exigence; noting courses developed in the thirtiessuch as those at Stephens College, the University of Florida, and the University of

9Keith skillfully traces Dewey’s influence on the field of Speech through speech teachers who studied withDewey or his students, but his primary focus is on the ways Deweyan philosophy and pedagogy was imple-mented in the new “discussion” courses of the 1920s and 1930s; he does not reference general education per se.See Democracy as Discussion, 89–110.

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Illinois Verbal Expression course launched in 1940, Crowley writes, “While all ofthis activity was no doubt stimulated by professional interest in general education,the emphasis on communication itself was a direct result of the rhetoric of war” (169,emphasis added). While she recognizes that a few communication courses existedbefore the war, Crowley places “interest in general education” in the backgroundand, like Berlin, lumps these early courses in with those that emerged during andafter the war. Due to a lack of attention to the courses that emerged before the war,both Berlin and Crowley (as well as those who do not address the issue at all) missan opportunity to consider other possible avenues for the emergence of these earlycourses.

Our study of the Verbal Expression course at the University of Illinois highlightstwo key elements of an origin story, one downplayed in other scholarship and onemissing entirely: the rise of general education and the related exigence of the eco-nomic catastrophe of the Great Depression. Indeed, if general education is givenshort shrift in these historians’ accounts, the Great Depression appears nowhereat all. At Illinois, as we have seen, the creation of the Division of General Studies,and the Verbal Expression course within its curriculum, was not only about theincreasing role of ideas about general education. It was about how those ideas mightbe linked to the specific, local, institutional problem of “student mortality,” andthe university’s anxiety about what happened to students who left the universitybefore graduating. Recall that one reason for devising a Division of General Studieswas to respond in part to “unusual economic conditions” (Senate EducationalCommittee 1). The Great Depression lurked as a potent exigence in the Illinois dis-cussion, as administrators fretted about “hazardous gambles” and “no jobs” andpondered what to do about “those who, of set purpose or by force of circum-stance, leave the College before the end of” four years (McClure, “Letter to theMembers” 2; “Committee Reports” 5). The Division of General Studies, and theVerbal Expression course specifically, emerged out of the campus’s concern not onlyfor improving student retention, but also for providing “the optimum educationalopportunities for those students who leave the University before obtaining a degree”and for equipping students with general capacities for navigating communication ineveryday life (Senate Educational Committee 1).

If the Illinois story is more complex than previous accounts allow, then whatof the other early communication courses? What might attention to those localarchives reveal? Extant sources provide a few clues that might warrant futureresearch. We offer two brief examples here. A 1949 essay by University of Floridaprofessor J. Hooper Wise explains that that institution’s course in “Reading,Speaking, and Writing” began as part of a new general education program in1935 and was “based on the assumption that every citizen should have a broad edu-cational foundation.” Like the Verbal Expression course, it turns out, the Reading,Speaking, and Writing course was part of a “program of general education” thatconsisted of “seven comprehensive courses designed to cover the major fields ofknowledge” (157). Here we find clues to the broad interests in general education

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that animated the discussions surrounding the creation of the Illinois Division ofGeneral Studies. Further archival research at the level of the local institution mightreveal other motivations for the creation of the course. Another example comesfrom Hurst R. Anderson’s 1938 Quarterly Journal of Speech essay in which he out-lines Allegheny College’s “new first course in Speech—and English” (70). Notingthat “New Deals in the field of education are as inevitable as they are in the fieldof political economy,” Anderson advocates New Deal–like experimentation in thecurricula of writing and speaking as well. The origin of the Allegheny course inOral and Written English supports the belief that the principles of composition areessentially the same, regardless of whether they take place in writing or in speech.Anderson explains that the creation of the course was motivated in part by a desireto respond to poor student performance on composition tests and the belief that an“emphasis upon oral composition as a suitable preliminary to written theme work”may provide “a more effective basic course in the elements of English” (71). Theemphasis on “oral composition” as “preliminary” to writing offers a tantalizinglydifferent hint at how speaking and writing might have been differently valued atAllegheny, again a history that should invite further exploration.

Our narrative of the Illinois Verbal Expression course, and these necessarily briefsketches of other early courses, identify other origin stories that remain almostentirely untold in our disciplinary histories thus far. Up to now, these early courseshave been treated as outliers, or perhaps at best precursors, to the more numerousand better understood communication courses that emerged during and followingWorld War Two. Yet courses like these were thought to be viable curricular optionsbefore the war and need to be understood within the context of specific institu-tional, social, and political pressures. The example of Verbal Expression and theother early courses (each unique in their own ways, surely) thus encourages us toimagine how our histories of the communication course might be different if weactually treated the early courses as the origin of the communication courses. Whatmight happen if we did so? We offer but a few points for speculation here. First,treating the early courses as the origin of the communication course would requirea much more sophisticated understanding of the role of progressive education andthe rise of the general education movement. Rather than treating general educationas a back burner issue, we would need to move it to the front of our investiga-tions and weave it much more closely into our assessments of these courses. And wewould need to engage explicitly how the broad ideas of general education played outin specific local contexts and courses like that of Verbal Expression. We would need,as we have attempted to do in this essay, to say more about how these ideas actuallyplayed out on campuses, in syllabi, and in classrooms.

Second, we would need to recognize, acknowledge, and study the effect of theGreat Depression on American universities and on their writing and speaking cur-ricula specifically. As we saw with the Illinois example, the Division of GeneralStudies emerged not only out of a philosophical orientation, but also out of a prag-matic (and surely economic) concern for the issue of student “mortality.” While

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historians of the field have done a valuable job highlighting the myriad ways thatWorld War Two affected university education and courses in writing and speak-ing specifically, we have yet to do the same for the period preceding that. Ratherthan treating the early courses as largely ahistorical anomalies unaffected by spe-cific sociopolitical forces (if we treat them at all), those early courses, too, need tobe understood as emerging from and participating in institutional discourses abouthow best to deal with the Great Depression’s impact on universities.

Why is the War So Dominant? Amplifying World War Two in Narrativesof the Communication Course

If scholars in the field have neglected the significance of the general education move-ment and the Great Depression, they have amplified the impact of the war on theorigins of the communication course. As we noted above, scholars who have chron-icled the history of these courses, such as Crowley and Mountford, claim that WorldWar Two served as a catalyst for its creation. Extending Berlin’s argument that thewar served a primary role in motivating and sustaining the communication course(95), Mountford links the courses’ founding to the military’s desire to train officersin reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. Crowley and Mountford’s narra-tives are similar in that they each emphasize how the Army Specialized TrainingProgram (ASTP) advocated revising Freshman English to incorporate more practi-cal communication skills and less study of literature. At the direction of the ASTP,in 1942 the curriculum for freshman composition was altered into what scholarswould come to recognize as the communication course. Berlin argues that, despitesome resistance due to the new course’s neglect of literature, English faculty largelyacquiesced because the ASTP created employment for many English teachers (97).Still, according to Mountford, English faculty and newly recruited Speech facultydid not willingly join forces on behalf of the course; instead, “the army decided thatteachers of speech communication and English needed to work together to pro-duce a more holistic approach to communication for its officers” (411). This readingof the army’s impact on the course certainly parallels Mountford’s larger narrativethat English faculty viewed the influence of speech communication as an affrontto their literary traditions and teaching preferences. Perhaps adding to the tensionsbetween Speech and English faculty, Crowley notes that Argus J. Tressider, lieutenantin the naval reserves, reported that the military was more impressed with speechcommunication teachers because they were willing to incorporate more practicalmeans of communication (60). However, Mountford argues that in this moment offorced collaboration, English and Speech faculty were able to construct an innova-tive curriculum that was an amalgam of oral and written modes of expression; inher reading, the space the ASTP created set the stage for the birth of the 4C’s (412).Even though the ASTP was short-lived—it began in 1942 and ended in 1944—Crowley similarly emphasizes its legacy in the communication course (156–161).According to all of these histories, then, the ASTP provided the primary impetus

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for collaboration between English and Speech faculty that disrupted disciplinaryboundaries and emphasized the value of oral communication.

As is clear from our origin story, at the University of Illinois the war did notdirectly prompt the creation of Verbal Expression. The ASTP was active at theUniversity of Illinois, but it was a separate program with its own curriculum orga-nized under two major phases. A basic phase contained what Prof. Coleman R.Griffith called “mind-building subjects” or liberal arts subjects such as “English, his-tory and geography.” The basic course of study appears to have been unique to theASTP and designed to prepare military students for later specialization. Studentscould then specialize in engineering, medicine, foreign languages and area study,or personnel psychology (Griffith). Unlike the history of other communicationcourses, at Illinois there appears to have been no institutional relationship betweenthe military’s presence on campus and the Verbal Expression course.10 However,this is not to say that the context of the war did not affect the course. To the extentthat Verbal Expression emphasized critical analysis of contemporary controversiesand students participated in class debates and panel discussions on current issues,the war most certainly made frequent appearances in the classroom (as surely didits veterans). As previously discussed, some Verbal Expression classes participated inradio recordings at WILL, the university station. During the war, Verbal Expressionstudents produced broadcast reports on topics such as American labor strikes thatthey claimed would harm the national defense program, the growth of the Japanesemilitary, and an innovative Army division training program. One student provideda review of a new book that explored how education in Nazi Germany instilled inchildren a “hatred for America” and a “zeal to die for Hitler.” The student arguedthat teaching the value of democracy in America should be just as actively pursuedas its vilification in Germany (“Speeches by Students”).

The war and its aftermath had broader institutional effects on the DGS and cam-pus as a whole. Similar to many other institutions, at Illinois the GI bill precipitatedincreased enrollment with the general division remaining, if not progressing, in itsperceived relevance in the postwar moment. DGS head Marvin T. Herrick wrote inhis 1945–46 annual report that the “heavy increase in enrollment throughout theUniversity, added to the steady increase in the Division’s enrollment since 1943, hasstrained the present capacity of staff and classroom space.” In particular, he notedthat “many students asking to elect Verbal Expression were refused admittance,”and he reported that the dean of the College of Engineering had asked for four hun-dred freshman engineers to be allowed to take the course. Herrick added, “We hadto refuse the request because of lack of staff” (“Annual Report” 1).

Ultimately the Verbal Communication course at Illinois challenges the narra-tives offered by Berlin, Crowley, Mountford, and others who peg the origins of thecommunication course to the war. Certainly the war heightened the legitimacy and

10An exception to this can be found in the Green Cauldron, which published several ASTP student papersalongside Rhetoric and Verbal Expression students, but that is the only publication in which anything ASTP-related appears with Verbal Expression.

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urgency of the ideological and practical aims of Verbal Expression in offering stu-dents tools to be good citizens and consumers. But, in general, the major features ofthe course—its emphasis on oral and written communication, its instructors, andits orientation to social concerns—existed apart from the direct influence of the mil-itary. The Verbal Expression course at Illinois thus serves as a useful counterbalanceto the amplification of the war’s role in our histories of these courses.

What if Institutional Location Matters More? Narratives of Divorceand Collaboration in the Communication Course

As we noted in the introduction, Mountford has framed the rise of the communica-tion course as a key, though fleeting, moment of “cooperation” between English andSpeech after the now well-chronicled 1914 “divorce” between American teachers ofspeech and writing. For Mountford, as we saw above, that cooperation occurredin a timely moment of forced wartime collaboration between English and Speechfaculty through the ASTP. Yet although the disciplines “divorced” and pursued seem-ingly separate pedagogical and research agendas, the University of Illinois exampleneither conforms neatly to the divorce narrative, nor does it offer an especially clearexample of collaboration between the fields of English and Speech. Indeed, to extendthe divorce metaphor (perhaps a bit too far), if Speech and English did divorce, atIllinois they kept living together in the same house. That is, since 1906 Speech facultyand, beginning in 1926, master’s students in Speech had been part of the Divisionof Public Speaking (later: Division of Speech) within the Department of English.11

At Illinois, Speech did not become its own department until 1947.12

The presence of English and Speech together in one department might seem tolend support to the notion of cooperation between the two disciplines in terms ofthe communication course. But given the available evidence, the question of cooper-ation is difficult to answer empirically. As we have seen, the Verbal Expression courseemerged within the Division of General Studies, apart from traditional depart-mental structures. As we reviewed above, although we know that teachers of bothSpeech and English taught the course, and we know that faculty in both Speechand English eventually took on the role of course director, we also know that itwas decided relatively early on in the course’s first decade that teachers of Speechwere preferred. As a result, it is difficult to tell at any given moment what kind of

11The department’s history before that is even more complicated than its history since. According to DavidSwanson’s departmental history, in 1890 the Department of Rhetoric and Oratory separated from the Collegeof Literature and Science “and made an autonomous program outside the organizational structure of theUniversity’s four colleges” (3). After a few name changes (Rhetoric and Oratory to Oral Rhetoric, then back toRhetoric and Oratory, all in the span of a decade), in 1903 the department changed its name to the Departmentof Public Speaking (Swanson, 3–4). It was absorbed into a newly reorganized Department of English in 1906.

12Although certainly ideological reasons for the decision to separate abounded, the new department’s firstchair wrote of the choice in a more pragmatic way. Because of “the unwieldiness of the department of Englishwith Speech in it” “the administration problems became burdensomely complicated. In short, it was simplerto have a department than not to have one.” (Qtd in Swanson, 3–4).

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cooperation between teachers of English and Speech might have existed in prac-tice on campus. We do know that both Verbal Communication course directorsLee Hultzén (known for emphasizing the interests of “speech” within the course)and James McCrimmon (hired in 1949 to represent increased attention to com-position) attended early 4C’s conventions and meetings. At a 1949 Conferenceon College Freshman Courses in Composition and Communication, McCrimmonspoke on the topic, “Concepts Basic to Freshman Courses in Composition andCommunication” (CCCC Conference) and at a 1951 spring CCCC meeting, Hultzéndelivered a talk entitled “The Communication of Speech and English” as part ofa panel on Speech in the Freshman Course (CCCC Spring Meeting). Hultzén andMcCrimmon’s participation illustrates that they were indeed engaged in the newassociation. However, it is not clear how participation by a few course directors atearly C’s meetings translated to the campus classroom and into their interactionswith Speech or English instructors at the institutional level.

Yet we do have evidence of cooperation, and arguments for the value of coopera-tion, at the level of the Division of General Studies itself. As we have seen, initially theDGS sought to foster integration across the courses in its own sequence. If we wantto think most usefully about cooperation and collaboration in the Verbal Expressioncourse, then, it makes more sense to figure it as not primarily between English andSpeech but among the courses taught in the Division of General Studies. Recall theDGS encouraged the sharing of syllabi, the development of speech and writing top-ics, and the use of radio in ways that sought to integrate knowledge students weregaining in all of their first-year DGS courses.

The Illinois story of collaboration suggests that two reorientations to histories ofthe communication courses may be necessary. First, perhaps we need to considerrevising the assumption that what is important about the communication coursesis the relationships they did (or did not) foster between Speech and English. Whilethe question of collaboration between rhetoricians from the two different fields maybe a question of our time, perhaps it is not useful to think of it as a question for anearlier time. Perhaps this narrative is one we have imposed from the present ratherthan one that had much meaning in the 1930s and 1940s. Second, more broadly,perhaps we have made a category error by assuming that disciplinary disjunctures(such as the “divorce”) mattered more on a local level more than they actually did.As the history of the DGS and the Verbal Expression course hints, perhaps campusopportunities for collaboration had less to do with disciplinary distinctions thanwith institutional structure. That is, if teachers within the Verbal Expression coursewere focused on the question of collaboration with other teachers, the course’s insti-tutional location within the DGS suggests that the most logical and probable placefor that question of collaboration to manifest itself was within the relationships withother DGS courses, not necessarily other courses or instructors in either English orSpeech.

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Conclusion: Institutional Histories and Dreams of Collaboration

As we have seen, a number of features of the Verbal Expression course challengethe origin stories told in other histories of the communication courses. The Illinoiscourse’s history prompts us to make a case for the value of revising our origin storiesin order to better attend to the role of the general education movement and the GreatDepression. In addition, the pre-war origins of the Verbal Expression course serve asa productive counter-example to the way existing scholarship overemphasizes WorldWar Two’s influence on the rise of the communication course. Finally, the particu-lar institutional location of Verbal Expression in the Division of General Studies,and the complex and often indeterminate avenues for cooperation that locationproduced, suggests that perhaps disciplinary collaborations may sometimes be lessimportant than other institutional relationships. Our study of the local example ofVerbal Expression, then, is valuable in part because it serves as a historical correctiveto other scholarship. But we believe there are two broader implications to be drawnfrom our study of this local example as well—implications that are important toaddress as we continue to write and revise our histories of the field and look towardfuture collaborations between rhetoricians in English and Speech.

First, the study of a local example like the one we offer here mitigates a tendencyto house the history of U.S. rhetorical studies in a study of its journals and disci-plinary associations. Berlin, Cohen, Gehrke, George and Trimbur, Maureen Goggin,Mailloux, and others have written valuable histories of the various fields that inter-sect with rhetorical studies, but they focus almost entirely on a disciplinary archive.As a result, this work not surprisingly tends to be more invested in engagementwith disciplinary causes and effects than with other potential influences. Yet, as ourcase study of Verbal Expression at Illinois has shown, local, specific, institutionalconstraints very much matter. They shape the creation of programs, courses, andpedagogical frameworks and therefore should not be ignored in our histories of therelationships between Speech and English. As Thomas Benson writes in his mas-terful chronicle of the demise of the Cornell school of rhetoric, attending to “thematerial existence” of academic units “reminds us of the crucial importance of localcircumstances in the shaping of disciplines that themselves have no institutionalidentity” (3). We are not arguing for a wholesale shift from a focus on disciplinesto one on institutions, however. Rather, we urge greater attention to local examplesas a way to differently illuminate aspects of disciplines within a richer historicalcontext. Following Gold’s lead, we do not wish to offer a local history so sepa-rate from the global that it narrows to the point of obscurity (24–26). Instead, wehope to describe the converging forces of economic constraint, institutional pol-itics, and pedagogical ideals. In this vein, we have noted areas where more workmight be done to illuminate such institutional relationships. To offer yet anotherlocal example from Illinois as a brief illustration: Charles Woolbert is widely con-sidered to be one of the founders of the field of Speech/Communication. He was

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one of the seventeen scholars who left the NCTE to form what is now the NationalCommunication Association, and he is widely recognized as the field’s foundingsocial scientist. Cohen, Mailloux, Leff, and others have chronicled Woolbert’s long-standing desire to establish separate departments of speech. Yet Woolbert spent hisentire career at Illinois in the public speaking division of an English department.His hopes for his new discipline chafed against his institutional location, or what hetermed in a 1916 Quarterly Journal of Speech essay “the peculiar circumstances ofmy position.” Woolbert elaborated, “I think I have had to canvass this issue morediligently than most of my colleagues. While I am responsible for all matters per-taining to public speaking and oral expression at Illinois and hold an appointmentas a member of the department of English, yet personally I am uncompromisinglyof the notion that the two things do not belong in the same department at all”(64). Woolbert’s example—a figure whose institutional and disciplinary identitiesopenly clashed—highlights the value of writing histories of the field that recog-nize the inevitable oscillation of people, programs, and pedagogies back and forthbetween the local institution and the broader discipline.

The second broader implication of this project relates to the theme of collabo-ration in recent research on the communication courses. The idea of collaborationlurks under the surface of this work as a kind of unarticulated dream or desire.As we developed this project, we repeatedly asked ourselves, why are historians ofthe field so invested in identifying past moments of collaboration? Ultimately, weconcluded that interest in histories of collaboration has as much to do with ourpresent moment as it does with the past. Over the past decade, from the conven-ing of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies (ARS) meeting in 2003 to the most recentRSA Institute’s well-attended and lively weeklong workshop on disciplinary histo-ries in Speech and English (led by Mountford and Keith), rhetorical studies scholarshave grown more and more invested in thinking about ways to engage with theircounterparts in the “other” discipline. Indeed, Rhetoric Society Quarterly itself hasserved as a key site for this dialogue. As rhetoricians who increasingly feel less athome at 4C’s and NCA find more in common with one another, scholars are seekingout avenues for cooperation and collaboration on research. In terms of pedagogy,transformations in the ways we compose and communicate have given rise to newprograms and courses in oral and written communication (often integrating digitaland visual rhetorics as well) on campuses across the country; these programs offerconcrete opportunities for rhetoricians in Communication and English to collabo-rate on rhetorical education.13 Keith, Mountford, and colleagues argue that now isthe time for even more such pedagogical collaborations: “Now in the twenty-firstcentury, a unified vision of rhetorical education is both more important and realiz-able then at any time since Speech filed for divorce from English” (2). The theme ofcollaboration has emerged as rhetorical studies seeks to locate itself as an interdis-ciplinary field with the power to remake humanities education and research in its

13See, for example, the Rhetoric and Civic Life course at Penn State and the Composition andCommunication course at University of Kentucky.

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own image. Yet such engagements often are not seamless and, if they are to workwell, require understanding of the “other” discipline’s norms and assumptions.Mountford argues that this is why it is so important to know one another’s histo-ries: “so that we may more fully—and respectfully— collaborate” (419). We agree.However, as our history of the Verbal Expression course reveals, discussions of“divorce,” “affairs,” and “splits,” and subsequent interest in “rapprochement” and“reuniting”—to use just a few of the terms that have been used to describe the rela-tional history between English and Speech—may not fully reflect the histories weseek to write.14 When we look to models of the past for insight into how (or hownot) to conduct ourselves in the present, we should recognize that those modelsmay be more complex than they seem, and we should acknowledge that our yearn-ing for particular stories may ultimately say more about us than about the modelswe describe.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Illinois doctoral student Daniel M. Larson and the staffof the University of Illinois Archives for research assistance with this project. Thanksalso to University of Illinois rhetoric workshop participants Donovan Bisbee, DavidCisneros, Katie Irwin, Paul McKean, Anita Mixon, Matt Pitchford, Kelly Ritter andRohini Singh, who generously shared their feedback on an earlier draft.

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Origin Stories and Dreams of Collaboration: Rethinking Histories of the Communication Course and the...

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