History of WAC at MIT
The inclusion of instruction and practice in writing in all parts of its academic curriculum is almost as old as MIT itself. Beginning in 1889, Writing faculty reviewed and critiqued undergraduate technical papers in several engineering disciplines as well as from classes in architecture and economics.1 In 1896, Robert Grosvenor Valentine, took over the leadership of this innovative program and expanded it by having students, including students in engineering classes, comment on each others papers.2 After leaving MIT, Valentine served in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, becoming Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1908 but was forced to resign in 1912 by President Taft after Valentine tried to protect the religious autonomy of Native Americans.3 He then invented the field of “Industrial Psychology” to develop rational methods for mediating labor – management disputes.4
Between the two World Wars, writing instruction became focused in the Humanities. After World War II, the School of Humanities and Social Science was created as a separate unit of the Institute. In the early 1950’s, Prof. Robert R. Rathbone began collaborating with engineering faculty, including Jay W. Forrester, Director of the newly created Digital Computer Laboratory, and faculty in Mechanical Engineering to offer both lectures on technical communication and feedback on student technical reports. These informal arrangement soon evolved into the Undergraduate Technical Writing Cooperative, which for the next forty years, first under Rathbone’s leadership, then led by Prof. James G. Paradis, currently Head of the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, by Prof. Rosalind H. Williams, who then became Dean for Undergraduate Education, by Dr. Edward C. Barrett, and then by Dr. Les Perelman.
Dr. Perelman had previously been Director of the Writing Requirement, which was established in 1982 to ensure that MIT students were proficient in writing both expository prose and the specialized discourse of their academic discipline. Unfortunately, the Writing Requirement was concerned with assessing minimum proficiency rather than helping students become effective writers and speakers. Consequently, beginning in the early 1990’s, a new initiative began to build on the existing Undergraduate Technical Writing Cooperative to create a new curriculum that would ensure that MIT students become competent and effective writers and speakers. These efforts, supported by substantial grants from the National Science Foundation and the J.M.R. Barker Foundation, resulted in a vote by the MIT Faculty in 2000 to replace the Writing Requirement with a new Communication Requirement that would ensure that all MIT undergraduates receive instruction and practice in both writing and speaking in each of their four undergraduate years.
This new curriculum necessitated the expansion of the Technical Writing Cooperative into the Writing Across the Curriculum group in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. In 1989, Writing Cooperative Lecturers totaled only 1.5 Full Time Equivalents (FTE’s). In 2008, WAC Lecturers and Tutors now total over 25 FTE’s.
(1) David R. Russell. Writing in the Academic Disciplines. 2nd Ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 108.
(2) Robert Grosvenor Valentine. “On Criticism of Themes by Students.” Technology Review 4 (1903): 459-78.
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