THE FIRST-YEAR RESEARCH ESSAY: ALIVE AND KICKING, FOR NOW

The first-year research essay and the elephant in George Orwell’s essay "Shooting an Elephant" share some common characteristics. The essay also is a durable target, one that has survived terrible wounds for decades, but it is just as defenseless and as desperate to survive as the elephant was.

I now teach as a visiting assistant professor at Illinois College, where the research essay is a mandatory component of the first-year writing course. Every English faculty member teaches a writing course, and every student must meet the writing requirement to graduate. So the bullets aimed at the research essay have not yet hit it here. (If I prayed, I would pray for continued poor aim.)

Before moving here, I taught for nine years as a lecturer at Penn State’s University Park campus, where I also served for two years as the Associate Director of Composition. There, the research essay suffered from numerous wounds and was severely bloodied. The curriculum focused on public discourse and argumentation, integrating concepts from both classical and modern rhetoric, and it explicitly avoided the capstone research paper. I enjoyed teaching the curriculum immensely, and you can see it as a curriculum that elevated forums like the New York Times, rather than College English or The Faulkner Journal, as the source of writing models.

All of you know, however, that colleges and universities have an official reality and an actual reality. We had close to two hundred people teaching composition each semester at Penn State, and we rarely - never? - marched in perfect formation. No composition director ever truly awoke in the morning with the certainty that every teacher was following the curricular guidelines. The directors were trying to drive a machine whose moving parts desperately wanted to fly off in all directions, and ironically the higher-quality parts (tenured senior faculty) were the ones most likely to fly furthest from the guidelines. And the newly produced parts (graduate students and lecturers) were often eager to "reshape" the curriculum. So in the pursuit of widely divergent goals, some teachers were quietly assigning variants of the research essay. Even in a large composition program filled with accurate shooters, the research essay was still gasping and struggling to stand.

I am glad that the research essay lives in both places. As a genre, the essay often influences public discourse during times of uncertainty and conflict, and most of us will agree that we - and, more important, our students - live in such times now. Yet at a time when our forums beg for participants who can amass knowledge, draw defensible conclusions, and present the supporting evidence for their conclusions in a coherent form, many of us are backpedaling from our responsibility to give students the tools to enter them.

So, yes, I do teach the first-year research essay, although I rarely give it that label. My version is an eight-to-ten-page essay with a minimum of ten supporting sources, and I give my students several arrangement schemes that meld classical Ciceronian arrangement and modern critical thinking. Stephen Jay Gould’s essay "Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs" and Richard Falk’s essay "Defining a Just War" are two examples of this type of essay.

It is one of the most popular assignments in my classes (and a nemesis for only a few students, who usually can successfully complete it with additional help). Most students are quickly engaged by the fascinating complexity of their chosen topics, and they expend an astonishing amount of time and energy on the essays. I often overhear them adopting the research-junkie patter that is so familiar to graduate school survivors: a jumbled stew of complaints about a lack of time, surprise that they caught an expert in a mistake or sophistic move, and openly voiced disagreement with someone else’s conclusions all poured over a steadily growing core of pride in their accomplishment.

How much longer the research essay will survive in the college classroom, though, is an open question. The brutal, and rapidly accelerating, exploitation of full- and part-time adjunct faculty and graduate assistants, particularly at the large state universities, is hammering the research essay’s body like a machine gun burst. New lecturers at Penn State, for example, were teaching four sections of twenty-four students per semester, and they were required to assign six writing assignments and meet a forty-eight-hour turnaround deadline for final grades. Ending their courses with a ten-page research essay would require those lecturers to read and grade 960 pages in forty-eight hours. And the budgetary woes in most states will only increase the pressure on teachers who already believe that, as National Commission on Writing put it, they "do not have the time to deal with [the research essay]." Graduate students and lecturers, with a few oblivious exceptions, clearly see the narrow windows and long odds between them and tenure-line jobs. Faced with this choice, even teachers who believe they do have the time to teach the essay often choose the hope of professional advancement: They cut corners on their teaching and join the quest for the grail.

But let us admit the truth. The future killer of the research essay will not be the presidents, provosts, and deans who honestly and incorrectly believe that the words college and corporation are synonymous. It will not be the "meddling" alumni who complain about how poorly our students write. It will not be the business barons who run the handful of corporations that control most of the media outlets. And it certainly will not be our students - a constituency whose effective powerlessness is demonstrated by the tidal wave of tuition increases sweeping across the country and is unfortunately surpassed only by the defenselessness of the urban and rural poor.

If the research essay finally exhales its last breath, we will be the people who killed it, and many of us will participate in the slaughter, even while believing, as Orwell did, that what we were doing was wrong.

Responses to TEACHING THE TRADITIONAL RESEARCH PAPER - OR NOT

Reading these essays, I was struck by the amount of intellectual energy and experimentation all of the contributors invest in the teaching of writing. It is, after all, an activity that far too many faculty members see as a torment of the Inferno. I pity those faculty members, for they know not what they are missing. But I mourn for us, because we are unlikely ever to perfect our craft, even if we gather in a field and share with one another our stacks of manila folders filled with annotated readings, lecture notes, and exercises. Let us try, though.

This forum offers a welcome reprieve from our field’s ubiquitous bunker mentality. We will never achieve a unanimous consensus regarding the worth of the research essay, but we still can learn from one another. When Emily Bernhard Jackson writes of her efforts to demystify research and convince her students to see doing it as "integral to life," she is sharing an idea that I will consciously absorb into my classes this semester. And Thomas Ipri’s account of a fruitful collaboration with another librarian resonates with my experience here at Illinois College. In conjunction with our first-year writing course, our students take a half-semester research methods course taught by the college’s librarians. Our small size affords us this luxury. ("Wow!" was my clever articulation when I heard about the course.) But few courses are better positioned to engage the rest of our institutional structures to our ends than a writing course. Many nonteaching professionals elsewhere within our institutions are eager to serve students; why not ask them to help ours?

I reflected on the source of my own commitment to the research essay, and at least part of my motivation stems from a conference with a student in an honors composition course. This student had written a proposal essay aimed at reducing smoking among his peers. The essay claimed that seventy-five percent of students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four smoked. "What is your source for this percentage?" I asked. "It seems high." He told me that three out of four of his friends were smokers and he simply crunched the numbers. Well. And he was in the pool of students that can often substitute AP credits for a first-year college writing course. I fortunately stumbled onto Jeffrey Walker’s article "The Rhetoric of Evidence" at approximately the same time, and since then I have been emphasizing research.

Now, I constantly seek new ways to get my students to want to amass more and more knowledge about their topics. Even when I teach creative nonfiction, I include assignments like the profile or the general-interest article because they require legwork. And while I agree with the contributors who asserted the importance of exposing students to a variety of perspectives on every issue, we also owe our students the chance to take a stand and to feel the resulting sense of commitment and completeness.