A College at Risk?

RICHARD MARIUS, director of the Expository Writing Program, offered some keen analysis of student writing in a recently released 20-plus-page report. It's worth remarking, though, that making assessments is only one of the responsibilities of the person most responsible for writing instruction here. If student writing is as poor as Marius evidently believes, the program he heads deserves more scrutiny than his report suggests.

Marius' analysis is interesting even though he often lapses into banal generalities of the kind he criticizes in students' writing. He says at one point (and we apologize to Marius for using a lengthy quotation, a technique to which the report objects): "Our students have an almost eerie ability to identify rock groups on hearing a few bars of the music. They know much about sports. They can make exquisite discriminations about the relative merits of various commercials on TV." We appreciate his tact; after all, Marius might simply have called us stupid.

But the tone of the report aside, one is left to ask, "Richard, if so many of us write so poorly, don't you deserve some blame?" His answer is that Expos does a fine job, churning out prize-winning essayists year after year. The trouble, it turns out, begins upon completion of Expos, after which inattention to writing becomes the norm.

His recommendations on the whole are reasonable, even useful ones. Professors shouldn't require papers at the end of terms, as doing so makes the exercises seem incidental to the learning process. Teachers should talk about writing, thereby affirming its importance. And further, professors should consider the rewriting of papers correctly as a critical aspect of the learning process.

Nonetheless, it seems odd--and more than a little self-serving--for the director of Expository Writing to criticize undergraduate writing in the same report that absolves him of any responsibility in the matter. One would hope that Marius would turn a critical eye on his own program, in which the quality of instruction varies enormously among classes. Many of Marius' criticisms have to do with difficulties of style of a kind which the semester-long course he oversees should be able to address. So we conclude that your points are valid, Mr. Marius. We only hope you do something about them.