• Introduction: Managed Labor and the Intractability of the First-Year Composition Requirement, by Anthony D. Baker

• Strand 1:  Dissecting the Beast
• Strand 2:  Institutional Effects
• Strand 3:  Alternatives?
• Strand 4:  The Requirement and Drudgery

Welcome to the electronic roundtable discussion of the proposal to abolish the requirement for first-year composition. This discussion board will be operative for the week beginning Monday 1/29 and ending Sunday 2/4. Our online conversation will be published as "Abolish or Perish? Managed Labor in Composition: A Roundtable with Sharon Crowley" in the special spring 2001 issue ("Literacy Work in the Managed University") of the online journal Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.

I'd like to reserve this opening space for brief introductions. Since many of us have not previously met, I'm requesting that each participant write a short bio.

Here's mine: I'm Tony Baker, and I'm humbly serving as moderator/editor of the discussion. I'm a PhD candidate in the University of Louisville's rhetoric and composition program; my dissertation is an exploration of the theories and practices of student reflection in comp classrooms.

Walter Jacobsohn--presently on a hiatus from teaching in order to write. I have worked in a variety of institutions as a teacher of composition, intro. to lit., speech and creative writing both as "adjunct" and instructor. These institutions include LIU-Brooklyn (where I was active in promoting adjunct concerns as an officer and a member of the Executive Committee of the LIU branch of NYSUT), Queens College, Middlesex County College, and most recently Seton Hall as a full-time non-tenure track instructor of Writing.

A long-time two-campus instructor, Michael Murphy is now a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and the Interim Director of Composition at Oswego State University, SUNY. He is currently soliciting submissions for Reimagining the Instructorate: Models for Full-Time Instructorships, Lecturerships, and Preceptorships in Composition and Rhetoric.

Hello everyone. I'm Sharon Crowley and I teach at Arizona State University. Most of my current teaching and my published work is in the history of rhetoric and composition. For about ten years now I've been advocating that the universal requirement in first-year composition be dropped. I'm very much looking forward to this discussion.

Hi, everyone, I am Katherine Wills. I taught as an adjunct lecturer for eight years before entering the University of Louisville doctoral program in Rhetoric and Composition. I advocate student/teacher labor activism and collectivism as a response to managed labor practices and academic capitalism as discussed by Rhoades and Slaughter. My dissertation will focus on the effects of corporatorization on students and teaching in the composition classroom. This conversation with all of you is central to my life and work.

Hi. Karen Thompson here finally. As a long time part-timer (22 years at Rutgers), a local and national advocate for part-timers in the AAUP, the CCCC, the MLA or wherever I can get a work in, I'm overworked. I'd like to have this conversation more leisurely, but I feel rushed (as usual) trying to wedge this in between a huge pile of papers, my representation work, and national travel (and, oh yeah, my life.) Since I already have a reputation for bluntness, I'd like to apologize in advance or at least warn folks--this feature gets exaggerated online. I tend to be more of an organizer than an academic, so that's another reason I'll probably be concise and direct.

And finally...Hi everyone, I'm Eric Marshall, PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Grad Center, and adjunct lecturer in English (mostly comp) in CUNY since 1991. I'm Vice President for the Part-time Instructional Staff of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), CUNY's labor union, and have spent much of the past seven or eight years organizing part-timers into the PSC, and advocating for a more vocal, visible, knowledgeable, active part-time faculty. In CUNY, I've been involved with a number of literacy initiatives, most recently "Looking Both Ways"--which brought together CUNY writing faculty and New York City high school teachers of English and Social Studies to discuss the teaching of writing. I very much look forward to this forum.