Refiguring English

Introduction

In 1997, the English department considered and ratified a comprehensive five year plan as outlined in a document known as “Refiguring English: What We Do, Where We're Headed, What We Need.”  This document was the product of two years work by a committee that had been selected to represent the diverse professional interests, background, and expertise of the department as a whole.  The report offered a detailed departmental self-evaluation and outlined a long-range plan for future development.  It began by proposing a “ new structure and philosophy” for the department that better reflected “recent developments in our discipline nationally and with the university's urban mission.”  From there, it designed a new configuration for the department that included concrete proposals for new hires, improvements in the Writing Program, cross-disciplinary work in the University, and a deepened involvement in the community of Portland.

Most notably, “Refiguring English” challenged our department to reimagine its work on an integrated level to replace what it viewed as the atomistic model it still shared with many peer institutions.  Citing a number of influential scholarly studies, it warned that the typical English department was fragmented into isolated and often competing areas of concern: Literature was divided from Writing, British Literature from American Literature, Creative Writing from Professional Writing.  As a means of escaping this counterproductive situation, particularly in an era of academic downsizing, “Refiguring English” envisioned a new, overlapping structure for the department that might foster new dialogues and collaborations with which we could develop a deeper community of interests.  To this end, the document built its plan on our shared interests in the study of rhetoric, poetics, and culture, subjects it considered of continuing and growing importance to the Portland community. 

This central goal of integrated learning and study has now been largely achieved.  Today, the PSU English department, through its study of literature, rhetoric, composition, critical theory, linguistics, creative writing, and other forms of writing, trains students in intertextual and cross-disciplinary methods of inquiry that are directed toward many cultures and historical periods.  We teach critical approaches to texts that enable student to interpret them, to historicize them, to ask what cultural and rhetorical work they do, to appreciate their artistry and poetics, and finally to write them with fluency and care.  These are the same concerns that also comprise the active core of our research and scholarship.

This document proposes the next step in “Refiguring English.”  Five years after its predecessor, it reports how we have actually implemented our earlier plan.  It also evaluates where our department now stands, and proposes a new blueprint for where we believe we should go in the next five years.

Our department has made tremendous progress in achieving the goals it defined in September 1997.  Indeed, by enacting the prescient initiatives of that original document, we have created a vibrant yet diverse department that has rebounded strongly from the budget cuts of the 1980s and early 1990s. 

We would describe some of our most important accomplishments as follows:

A Newly Designed Major

In 1997, the English major was substantially redesigned to reflect the new long-term plan of the department.  Student course requirements were broadened across the areas of literary history, cultural studies, writing, and critical theory, to better reflect the diversity of interests and approaches that the department has aimed to cultivate.  This new design was the first step in setting up an institutional framework for the achievements that follow.

Successful Searches

In 1998, we conducted a successful external search for a Department Head that could guide our department through the implementation of the new plan.  Since his arrival, Professor John Smyth provided us with leadership that has helped us to negotiate this difficult period of departmental turnover and disciplinary transformation.

In rebuilding a department from which over a dozen faculty members have recently retired, we have integrated our strengths in literary studies and the teaching of writing with a range of interdisciplinary approaches, a vital combination for advancing the university's mission to serve a wider urban community in Portland.  Our new tenure line faculty have renewed our expertise in areas long of special interest to English majors: renaissance literature, twentieth century literature, creative writing, and literary theory, for example.  At the same time, they have expanded our offerings in newer areas of departmental expertise.  Medovoi, Ruth, Giarelli, Clark, Hines, Miller, Kalas, Ceppi, Guetti, Greenstadt, McGregor, and Lo teach and research in such nationally developing areas of scholarship as film and media studies, cultural studies, composition theory, American studies, law and literature, ethnic studies, gender studies, critical theory, and non-fiction writing.  Their training in these fields come from some of the strongest research programs in the nation, including those at Berkeley, Duke, Pennsylvania, Stanford, Brown, Cornell, Chicago, and Minnesota.  Strengthening our growing Master's program, faculty offer upper-level courses and seminars that enable our graduate students to pursue recent developments in scholarship.  They also help the department to expand its intellectual links with other academic programs, including Women's Studies, Black Studies, Education, Theater, Foreign Languages and Literature, History, Anthropology, and Communications, and Urban Studies.

New Accomplishments in Research and Scholarship

Since 1997 we have built steadily on past strengths in the department's national research profile.  Our faculty members have recently placed or published manuscripts at major scholarly presses such as Duke, Palgrave St. Martins, and Oxford.  An anthology co-edited by Tracy Dillon was recently nominated for an Oregon Book Award.  We have placed and published articles in some of the most prestigious refereed journals in the discipline, including Genders, Novel, Diaspora, American Literary History, Georgia Review, Journal of Education and Cultural Studies, Minnesota Review, and Shakespeare Studies.  We have also been awarded nationally competitive fellowships from such prestigious organizations as the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Folger Institute, and the Huntington Library.  One member of our faculty is a founding board member for the new Cultural Studies Association (U.S).

Despite limited support for travel, faculty members make a diligent effort to attend national and international meetings in their fields of scholarship.  Over the last academic year, for example, our faculty collectively attended some thirty national and international conferences at which they presented their research. In addition to being a national presence themselves, our faculty have trained numerous graduate students who have entered prestigious doctoral programs, including ones at Berkeley, Texas, UC Irvine, published their work in important journals, and secured teaching jobs at schools across the country. Others have gone on to the top creative writing programs in the nation, such as the Iowa Writers Workshop.  For all these reasons, the English department has made Portland State an increasingly familiar name to the national scholarly community.

Widening Community Outreach

In establishing our new Center for Excellence in Writing, we have vaulted Portland State into a leadership position for writers in the city of Portland. The Center, which exists to serve local writers, offers Portland's first and only graduate program in writing leading to a master's degree. At the same time, it conducts craft workshops and seminars for people who want to participate in a supportive writing community without joining an academic program. It provides a clearinghouse of information on local activities of interest to writers. But most importantly, it has become a tremendous resource for all those who want to make writing a career.

This success was made possible in part by three of our aforementioned new hires, who devote a significant part of their teaching to the Center and who chair MA/MS graduate committees: Clark, Giarelli, and McGregor.  These hires, with their rich combination of academic and journalistic experience, bring new areas of expertise to the center, including Legal Writing, News Writing, Folklore, Mass Media, Non-Fiction Writing, and Journalistic Writing.

Book Publishing is the newest concentration in the MS/MA in Writing. The coursework is intended to produce publishing generalists who understand the entire publishing process and who are prepared for either employment in the industry or further specialization. At the heart of the program is Ooligan Press, a teaching press that is also a small trade publishing company with national distribution. The publishing curriculum and the working press are integrated into a coherent whole that provides students with theoretical and practical exposure, publishing real books for real audiences.  This program is coordinated by Dennis Stovall, an experienced teacher of publishing and a well-known member of the Pacific Northwest literary community who we are pleased to have hired.

We have initiated a highly successful program in our Community of Writers, which offers a workshop in which middle school teachers from across the Portland area can explore and improve their writing skills.  We are also becoming directly involved in the management of the regionally renowned Haystack Program in Creative Writing in Cannon Beach

With help from the Center for Academic Excellence, the English department has grown active in the project of Community Based learning. In the past two years the English department has been awarded two Departmental Engagement Grants which have enabled us to bring renowned speakers on Community-Based Learning, present at local and national conferences, design a Web Page and departmental brochure, and recruit several more faculty to offer community-based learning classes.  Mary Seitz's Senior Capstone, “Enhancing Youth Literacy,” and her community partner, King Elementary School were the recipients of one of two Portland State University Civic Engagement Awards, and  several members of the  Departmental Engagement Team have published articles in refereed journals on their work in this innovative pedagogical method.

A New Breadth of Teaching

The English department now offers over 200 writing courses each year in a wide variety of genres and levels: academic writing, professional writing, creative writing, nonfiction writing, discipline-specific writing, life writing, and writing with/for technology.  These range from first-year writing to graduate seminars of all sorts. We are also heavily involved in outreach to high schools, other colleges, and the Portland community, partnering with high school English teachers and providing courses for underprivileged students, honors students, and others.  Our writing across the curriculum work now reaches University Studies and other disciplines, not only through a variety of courses, but through faculty development, TA and undergraduate peer tutor development, and assessment of writing.  The Writing Center holds over 5,000 tutorial sessions each year, with increasing responsibilities for assisting the large number of students who are non-native speakers. The program also trains Graduate Assistants in English to teach a variety of writing courses, where they acquire skills that they can later transfer to the community's high schools, colleges, and universities.  Indeed, we estimate that our department now trains some 75% of the writing teachers in the Portland area's community colleges.

While adding an impressive list of popular new courses in cinema, the department has built a new collaborative teaching arrangement with the nationally renowned Northwest Film Center down the street from us on the Park blocks.  We are centrally involved in the college's new minor in Film Studies, which should create educational opportunities for an underserved community of interest in film culture here in Portland.  Although Portland is well known for its numerous independent theaters, film clubs and centers, this minor in film studies represents the first public degree option in Film Studies available in the Portland metropolitan area since the cutbacks of the 1980s.

Student Credit Hours and Degree Completion Program

Given our state's current fiscal crisis, the English department recognizes what a pressing budgetary issue the generation of student credit hours has become.  The last three years have been a period of unique transition, with new hires arriving, many senior faculty members retiring, and a complete turnover in our staff and administration.  Amidst all of these changes, we have sought ways to increase our student credit hours.  We have analyzed our enrollments to determine which courses are successfully drawing students, and added sections to these courses.  We have streamlined our curricular planning process, thereby greatly reducing numbers of scheduling changes.

Our involvement in the Degree Completion Program is a central part of our SCH growth strategy.     We have steadily expanded our night classes, thereby allowing many more working students or students with families to enroll in both our undergraduate and graduate programs.  Finally, we have increased the number of core courses available for our majors.  These strategies are beginning to prove their effectiveness.  In 2002-2003 we exceeded our SCH goal by some 18%, where we had missed our goal in 2001-2002 by 4%. We expect steadily improved growth figures to hold firm in the years ahead.

An Ongoing Commitment to University Studies

The English department has renewed its commitment to the university's mission of General Education by working closely with the University Studies program.  With at least eighteen faculty members offering inquiry courses and “U-designated” departmental courses, the English department now contributes more to University Studies than any other department at Portland State. All thirteen of our new tenure-line faculty were explicitly hired with a contribution to University Studies as part of their job description, and the same will be true of future hires.  Our growth plans are thus based upon a close, ongoing collaboration between English and University Studies that ensures PSU's freshmen and sophomores the opportunity to study with our tenure line faculty.

Sharpening our Vision of the Department

These successes, shared by the different sectors of our department, owe much to our implementation of the integrated structure that the “Refiguring Document” first envisioned.  Based on the department's discussions of the lessons of the last five years, we have begun to restate what we see as the collective mission of English.

As we see it, the common focus of our discipline is on the texts of the English language itself as media of expression, imagination, and historical determination.  Every day, our university conducts it various activities – education, artistic endeavor, administration, research, and outreach – through the medium of the English language. Our discipline reflects upon this process and studies its history.  This we trace in the study of literature, culture, and writing, beginning with the inception of English as a language right through the present day, and with an eye also to its possible futures.

The preceding “Refiguring” document fostered dialogue within the department by emphasizing rhetoric, poetics, and cultural studies as the critical approaches to English shared by the various sectors of our department. English may be approached as a means of persuasion, as an aesthetic medium, and as a cultural process. 

Given the ever-widening range of activities in which our department members are involved, we feel that it would now be useful to emphasize our shared objects of study along with our approaches to them.  The members of the English department teach and study a wide range of topics, and from a variety of perspectives.  At the same time, in keeping with developments in our field, it is clear that all of us share a basic interest in how the texts of English are shaped under the broad and mutually implicating categories of language, culture, and historicity.

English derives the model of textuality from longstanding developments in literary studies, which have expanded our interpretive understanding of literature from the primacy of authorial intention to further meanings generated by the text's internal structures, its reception by various readers, and by its shifting contextual significance.  This is therefore an exciting time to be studying and teaching literature.  Textuality, moreover, has proved to be an extraordinarily supple and creative approach for understanding diverse social phenomena, allowing our discipline to turn it attention to a wide range of objects, events, and practices that can be usefully understood as texts of English.  Texts, however, cannot be understood or interpreted in isolation.  Rather, they only become intelligible and effective as the crystallization of specific languages, cultures, and histories.  While in many ways the language, culture, and historicity of any text are inextricable from one another, they each have a specificity of their own that we consider indispensable to the knowledge that we call English Studies.

Language

Language is traditionally most central of these three terms to our discipline precisely because our discipline defines itself in terms of a specific language.  Yet English is also one of the most widely spoken languages in human history, and has therefore come in many forms and dialects.  English Studies therefore unavoidably draws attention to the linguistic side of texts, asking how a language like English – in its many versions – has mediated the representation of human life.  It teaches us the power of language to represent, silence, inflect, and revise experience.  Even for those of us in the department who sometimes study non- (or only partially) linguistic texts such as film, language remains a powerful conceptual metaphor.  English Studies classes hone our students' most foundational skills: reading, writing, and critical thinking.  Language defines our very ability to argue, to imagine, to remember the past, as well as to create new realities.  This is why traditional fields of study such as philology, rhetoric, and poetics remain important contributors to English as a discipline.  Particularly in a city like ours, with its rich activist tradition of community involvement, it would be difficult to overstate the role of language in forging thoughtfully critical citizens.  It also goes without saying that the most successful members of the workforce are those who can eloquently articulate their thoughts and thereby win the respect of others.

Culture

In the last thirty years, culture has become increasingly important as a rubric in English Studies.  Culture may seem to name a wider arena than language, for it speaks to collective ways of living that include not only language, but also material culture, our various new visual media, and social practices of all sorts.  Texts are always cultural, even when they are not linguistic.  Yet culture may also seem smaller than language insofar as many cultures can dwell within the parameters of a single language.  In universities nationwide, English has led the way in researching and teaching students the complexities of living multilculturally, of sharing languages and histories even within the context of cultural difference. Cultural Studies, perhaps the single most influential interdisciplinary project of the last two decades, has found a natural home in English departments precisely because of the discipline's interest in thinking about the relationship between the social and the textual. 

Historicity

English Studies has always relied heavily on conceptions of history and periodization, expecting English professionals to be familiar with the sweep of writing through time.  It teaches students how to evaluate the past both for its radical difference from the present – its disquieting beliefs, feelings, and ideas – but also its sometimes uncanny familiarity.  English therefore teaches students how to reckon with the contemporary world by placing it in a larger temporal context.  Texts from the past challenge our students both to stop taking the languages and cultures of the present for granted as the natural way of things, and to encourage them to grapple with the long histories and traditions in which they are sometimes the unwitting participants. These lessons seem even more timely than ever today, as a globalizing economy brings all of us into contact with an ever-wider range of historical traditions and issues.  The growing importance of postcolonial studies in English, for instance, speaks to the United States's emergence as a crossroads of world histories that suddenly makes the history of textual production in Asia, Africa, and Latin America newly relevant to us, while also calling upon us to revisit the histories that led into an English language multiculturalism within the United States.

Critical Theory

It is not difficult to see that the mutual relationships of language, culture, and historicity are immensely complex.  While in practice we elaborate these relationships whenever we read literature, write creatively, or analyze rhetoric, we also consider English to centrally involve generalized reflection on these relationships.  Since the 1970s at least, debates within English Studies over our the status of our terminology and methods has led into an active engagement with various intellectual traditions collectively known as critical theory – Structuralism, Hermeneutics, British Cultural Studies, Pragmatist Philosophy, among others – that are today considered an indispensable part of one's education in English.  Precisely because there is no theoretically innocent eye with which to examine the intersections of language, culture, and history, we consider the vigorous self-examinations that critical theory has facilitated to be central to our discipline's intellectual growth and vitality.

Because the questions that it asks are often pitched at a high level of generality, critical theory leads us into necessary conversations with other disciplines.  One cannot generalize about language without drawing from the insights of Linguistics, Communications, Education, and the comparative insights of the Foreign Languages and Literatures.  Theoretical claims about culture lead us to the fields of Anthropology, Sociology, Theater, and Film Studies, but also Medicine and Science Studies.  Our concern with history takes us, not only into an obvious dialogue with the discipline of History, but also with Political Science, Urban Studies, and Art History.  Finally, many schools of critical theory encourage us into especially close dialogue with Philosophy, the Honors program, and with such self-consciously interdisciplinary fields of knowledge as Women's Studies, Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, International Studies, Film Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies.  These intellectual affinities have enormous practical consequences, for they offer the department concrete opportunities to collaborate with other sectors of the university.  At the same time, they allow us to ask shared questions and raise common issues that offer a unifying structure for the department as a whole.

Changing and Growing in the Coming Years

Over the next five years, the department aims to build upon this exciting vision of curricular and scholarly development.  We expect, not only to sustain present programs, but also to expand lower-division offerings as the student population grows, to continue our strong support of University Studies, to reach out further to the interdisciplinary programs and activities at PSU, to add to the department's diversity as the demography of the university and community changes, to engage with the internationalization of urban culture in Portland, to strengthen our Center for Excellence in Writing, to continue to provide a competitive graduate program that prepares our students for doctorate programs and for teaching careers at all levels, and to seize the opportunity to bring more film education to our city.  We are also envisioning in this document a plan commensurate with the invigoration of the humanities at PSU that would accompany the proposed Humanities Center, and recent discussions about an interdisciplinary PhD program.  To accomplish these objectives, we will need to continue replacing our anticipated retirements with interdisciplinary hires that reach out to all of these growing educational needs.

The hiring plan that follows is guided by the firm belief that the students of Portland State benefit enormously when their instructors are also active researchers who continually bring fresh scholarly insights into their classrooms.  Conversely, the classroom plays a vital role in scholarship by offering a space for the daily discovery and testing of ideas.  As the preceding Refiguring document pointed out, this relationship suffered during the era of budget cuts, when the number of tenure-line faculty in the English department was nearly halved even as the student population grew.  By following the hiring plan outlined in the original Refiguring document, we have improved this situation considerably over the last five years, but we have much further to go.

A Guideline for Excellence

The goal of teaching and scholarly excellence makes it vitally important that our students – at all levels – be taught primarily by tenure line faculty who possess a long-term stake in the future of both our department and the profession of English as a whole. Particularly, if we are to continue to offer competitive graduate programs, a high proportion of our faculty must have the time and resources to pursue nationally visible research in their fields.  The proposed Ph.D. in the Humanities adds only further urgency to this need.  For all these reasons, tenure-line positions are where our hiring dollars and energy should be placed.

For these same reasons, however, the long-term quality of teaching in our department will depend on providing job security, academic freedom, and just compensation for the adjunct instructors who are already making vital contributions to so much of what we do. The task of ensuring excellence in teaching is a difficult one without the security, reward, and professional respect that our hard-working faculty deserves.  A secure long-term contract and greater academic support for fixed-terms would be vital starting points for initiating this process.  The students of Portland State will be the real winners when we simultaneously commit ourselves to tenure line hiring in the future, and to more stable, improved labor conditions for our existing adjunct instructors.  The success of the long-term plan envisioned in this document will depend on our steadfast adherence to this guideline for excellence.

Focus of Hires and Possible Literary and Writing Areas

In keeping with these general principles, we propose as our hiring plan fourteen tenure-line positions with which we can meet our future staffing needs while seizing new opportunities for growth.  Four of these (fiction writing, technical writing, poetry writing, and non-fiction writing) represent new lines in the writing strand that the university has already made a commitment to the state of Oregon to create. The remaining ten represent positions associated with anticipated retirements and emerging needs.

Each future hire addresses a critical approach to English studies that defines cutting-edge scholarship in the field and whose insights need to be incorporated or expanded in the curriculum.   In keeping with our last “Refiguring English” plan, many of these hires will also provide expertise in literary areas or writing areas that also need to be covered in our curriculum.  A hire in “Literature and Culture of the Americas,” for example, might teach contemporary literature.  A hire in postcolonial theory might possess expertise in eighteenth or nineteenth century British literature.  A hire in “queer theory” might specialize in medieval, renaissance, or modernist literature.  And a film studies hire might teach screenwriting or film journalism.  In the appendix each hire is cross-referenced with a list of appropriate literary and writing areas, along with possible university and community links.

Internationalization and Postcolonial Studies: Two Positions

The internationalization initiative at PSU plays a special part in our department's long-term plans.  One of the most intellectual and socially pressing challenge we face is the need to broaden our mission into the larger global role of English that has accompanied the globalization of the world economy over the last twenty years.  Globalization raises basic questions of sustainability and effective interconnectedness, yet these questions are not merely economic or ecological, but cultural as well.  It has long been recognized that literature in the English language is written, not only in Britain and the United States, but also in Ireland, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa, Jamaica, Canada, and Australia, among many other countries.  This broadly global history of the English language offers, as many departments around the country have realized, an opportunity to move well beyond the Anglo-American origins of English Studies, developing in its place a more cosmopolitan perspective that keeps pace with a world growing ever more culturally and socio-economically interconnected.  Yet at present, our only two tenure-line faculty members who teach postcolonial literature are expected to retire in the near future.  We expect that further departmental expansion in the field of postcolonial culture will provide Portland State with a curriculum of great interest to foreign students, and that it will provide the university with an expertise in world culture that befits an urban institution on the Pacific Rim.  We see a special role for English in preparing students for lives in a larger, often contentious world whose cultures and histories they will need to understand.  Two proposed hires would further these goals.

Our first hire should be a critical theorist in Global and Postcolonial Studies who can address the historical, cultural, and linguistic consequences of colonialism and globalization.  This hire will address such broad questions as what it means that English has become either a native or a second language for so much of the world, including its literary and cultural production.  Particularly exciting, therefore, would be the intellectual links this hire would create between our general offerings in critical theory and the departmental mission to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) to our international students.  We anticipate stronger connections through this hire between our department and International Studies, Foreign Languages, History, and Sociology, and the many events on campus concerned with the social issues of internationalization.

A second postcolonial hire in World Literature would broaden our literary offerings, while also offering students the opportunity to study and learn from an active scholar of English language literatures from outside the United States and Britain.  This hire would bring the world's anglophone literatures into a useful dialogue with the canon of English and American literature, which has long served as a foundation of the English curriculum.  A hire with this expertise should bring to Portland State opportunities for cosmopolitan learning in many different ways.  In course offerings, or by facilitating public readings and academic lectures by international authors, this hire would bring to our campus the work of novelists and poets who speak directly to the new demographic realities of the student body and our city.

Film Studies: Two Positions

In our new association with the Northwest Film Center, the English department is building a powerful new link between the College of Arts and Sciences and the community of Portland, one that might even in the long run bring a new source of donors to the university interested in support for media training in the Pacific Northwest.  The Portland community displays an enormous interest in cinema that has remained academically untapped.  Portland is home to the Northwest Film Center and its famous Portland International Film Festival, The Oregon Society of Film and Video, (which runs the Hollywood Theater), a top-notch independent theater in Cinema 21, a vibrant Key Cinema club, and an avant-garde film collective known as Four Walls Cinema.  Portland State itself runs a very successful film club at Fifth Avenue Cinema.  Yet the city of Portland lacks a developed film studies program that could speak to the needs of this large population.  The English department is committed to ensuring that Portland State fills this vacuum and takes up the important educational role it could play in our city's burgeoning film culture. The department is devising plans for a strong curriculum in film criticism, film history, and screenwriting.  This would complement the film production course offerings in which the Northwest Film Center excels.  With several careful hires and effective collaboration with faculty in other departments, the English department can build, through this collaborative effort with the Northwest film center, a comprehensive film program for our city.  These objectives will require at least two full-time hires in the area of film studies.

The first of these hires would be in the area of American cinema, with a possible interest in visual mass media, and popular culture studies.  This hire would contribute to a core curriculum both in Hollywood film history and in film writing.  A secondary role might also be possible in training students in the art and profession of film journalism.  This hire would serve as the department's liaison to the Northwest Film Center, while also establishing interdisciplinary ties to Communication and Theater Arts.

The second hire would be in the area of world cinema, marking yet another opportunity to internationalize the departmental mission.  From its inception, film studies has approached the history of its medium from an international perspective.  Because film historians are therefore trained in world visual culture, a strong opportunity exists for us to hire someone whose interests will reach out to underserved and perhaps even untapped student populations in Portland.  The annual Portland International Film Festival, which sells out every year, indicates a ready population of interest in Portland that might be drawn to enroll in courses on the vibrant new cinemas of Iran, China, or Africa.  While building this new constituency for the department, this hire would also be responsible for courses in film theory, as well as for building a relationship between our film studies program and the International Studies program.

Literature and Culture of the Americas: Two Positions

One of the key accomplishments we hope to pursue in the next five years is a more systematic engagement with the multicultural history that has shaped the United States.  In the twenty-first century, an English department will certainly play a key part in the teaching of diversity.  Its mission will involve educating our citizens of their complex past, including with it the study of African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American contributions to U.S. culture.  These fields also require us to acknowledge the important overlaps and exchanges between the literatures and cultures of the United States and those of neighboring nations in the Americas, This task holds a special importance here in Portland, situated as it is near the Canadian border, with its important regional history of native peoples and with its burgeoning Latino and Asian population.  At present, we lack enough enough tenure-line faculty to provide the training in cultural diversity that students in this part of the world need.

We have taken a first step in this direction by hiring Marie Lo, whose work in Asian American literature and culture, particularly as it crosses the U.S./Canada border, has a special value here in the Pacific Northwest.  Yet the projected retirement of senior faculty in Native American and African American literatures means we risk losing ground.  We propose two further hires in the Literature and Culture of the Americas that would allow us to develop our curriculum in African American, Latino, and Native American studies.  Rather than specifying the field of these two hires, we would search out the best, strongest comparatists we could find, with an eye to hiring candidates that could make connections between critical theories of race and ethnicity and the literary or cultural traditions associated with these fields of specialization.  Both of these hires would build necessary bridges between our department Black Studies, Chicano Studies, Women's Studies, Latin American and/or Caribbean studies, International Studies, and other departments (such as Sociology, Philosophy, or Foreign Languages) depending on their fields of expertise.  The timing for this hire would be especially auspicious given the new Native American center on campus.  In general, these hires would transform our offerings in literary and cultural studies by making the multiculturalism of the nation, our city, and even our student body central to our textual inquiries.

Rhetoric and Composition: Two Positions

Since University Studies absorbed the majority of our writing courses, our task now is to transform the program from one with a traditionally defined focus on providing compulsory undergraduate writing courses to one of increasing specialization at the undergraduate and graduate levels.  We are revising our undergraduate offerings into an official Minor, planning special writing courses for departments and units, and expanding our already considerable outreach efforts to secondary schools, other colleges and universities, and the business community.  In order to develop a Minor, undergraduate offerings need to be rebuilt and refocused.  Graduate offerings are now so depleted that they need to be totally rebuilt, updated, and expanded so that we can offer an M.A. in this area, possibly in partnership with Washington State University, Vancouver.  The Minor and M.A. will give valuable credentials to students, since composition teaching is such an economically viable professional option and rhetorical skills are needed in a variety of non-teaching professions.  The Minor and M.A. would be the only ones of their kind in the entire state of Oregon.

Amidst all these growing pains, we are critically understaffed with only one full-time tenure-line faculty member in Rhetoric and Composition – and her time is devoted entirely to administration and to teaching the required G.A. seminar.  The only other tenure-line faculty serves in the Dean's office, and, even if he returns, we will still be understaffed for all the work to be done.  We also face the impending retirement of several faculty members whose work is related to Rhetoric and Composition efforts (potentially including two former directors of composition).  Over the last fifteen years, outside consultants to PSU (Council of Writing Program Administrators, 1985; Association of Departments of English, 1995) have repeatedly pointed to the need for more rhetoric and composition faculty, particularly in light of the greater number of writing faculty at comparable institutions.

To this end, we need two new hires in Rhetoric and Composition.  The first of these should have a background in writing across the curriculum, writing assessment, and, ideally, technology experience.  This person would develop graduate and undergraduate courses and develop a graduate-level writing course for the new Humanities PhD; serve as liaison to University Studies; and possibly help integrate technology into our writing courses.  It is possible that this could be a joint appointment with University Studies.

The second hire should be a rhetorical theorist with a broad background in history of the book, the critical tradition of literacy studies, and perhaps an interest in the technologies of language.  This person would develop our graduate program, offer one or more theory/research/history courses at the undergraduate level; help create and coordinate our undergraduate Minor and graduate Master's; and possibly help integrate technology into our writing courses. 

These hires would provide a vital bridge between our department's literary and writing sectors, both of which share a basic interest in textual effects, the power of writing, and the cultural nature of literacy, thus helping to ensure the long-term coherence of our departmental mission. Not only would they serve the writing needs of PSU's students, but also they would enable us to fulfill the University's mission by partnering with University Studies, Education, and other units, and by providing a graduate-level writing course for graduate students across the curriculum, particularly those in the new Humanities Ph.D.  Finally, we could better fulfill the University's mission of serving the community by expanding our outreach efforts to faculty and the business community and by educating students who go on to teach in high schools and colleges in Portland and throughout the state.

Queer Theory: One Position

A key area of expertise mentioned in the previous “Refiguring English” document that has not yet resulted in a tenure-line hire is Queer Theory.  This rapidly developing approach to the study of literature takes up topics and themes that are classically associated with literature - romance, love, desire, and personal expressivity for instance.  But queer theory specifically interrogates these topics within broad currents in the history of sexuality and gender relations as understood by the last twenty years of feminist and gay scholarship.  Queer theory in particular explores the central role of sexuality in the formation of modern identities, including those of nation, race, and class.  Queer theory approaches sexuality as a constructed and ever shifting category that nonetheless has consistently played a crucial part in establishing what counts as “normal” selfhood.  A hire in Queer Theory would bring these important issues in literary studies into our curriculum, allowing students to think critically about the continuities and differences between the market-driven sexual culture of the present and constructions of sexuality in the past.  These issues are of particular interest to students – particularly but not only women and sexual minorities – who are often at an age where they can benefit greatly from the opportunity to reflect critically and intellectually about the historical meaning of sexuality.  A hire in queer theory would also allow us to replace necessary courses in traditional literary topics or periods senior faculty retire, while simultaneously allowing us to strengthen our relationship with Women's Studies, contribute to the new sexuality studies cluster in University Studies, and provide a faculty liaison to university groups concerned with issues of sexual diversity and tolerance.

Creative Writing: Three Positions

Anchored by Powells Bookstore and a host of other independent sellers, Portland is nationally known for its rich book culture.  For a city of its size, it has an extremely high proportion of local creative writers whose vibrant presence contributes to the ambience that has attracted so many culturally appreciative people to the Portland area.  As in the case of film studies, Portland State is in a unique position to expand its importance as an institutional anchor for the writing community in Portland.  Indeed, the department already has a long tradition of such work and a significant national profile that is largely indebted to the work of our resident writers, Primus St. John and Henry Carlisle.  Our creative writing faculty is nearing retirement, however, at exactly the moment when the department should be making itself ever more central to the city's reputation for cultural creativity.

Of the four areas of concentration in the MA/MS in Writing, fiction consistently attracts the most applicants.  Given the rigors of advising a creative fiction thesis – normally a book-length manuscript requiring the advisor to conduct time-intensive editorial work – our capacity to accommodate new students is limited by the number of tenure-line faculty in the fiction strand.  With only two tenure-line faculty advising fiction graduate students, we were forced to turn away nearly 25 otherwise qualified applicants in 2001.

The College of Arts and Sciences has already made a commitment to the state of Oregon for the creation of four writing positions, including an immediate one for a creative writing line (the one that was loaned out in 2001-2002 to the Biology department).  We plan on using this line to hire a creative fiction writer specialist who would take on these departmental responsibilities.  Particularly given the anticipated retirements, a line for a poet will also be a critical investment.  If we are to continue building our relationship with the city's writing community.  Finally, a position in creative non-fiction will be no less critical for rounding out the writing offerings in our department and making it possible for students to study the range of creative writing at Portland State.  With one new hire in each of these areas, we can maintain our long-term cultivation of PSU's relationship to the Portland writing community, and make our school an increasingly vital hub of local literary activity.

Professional/Technical Writing: One Position

The professional/technical strand is by far the largest among the MA/MS concentrations. The faculty member whose primary teaching load is in this strand also is the program director and receives released time for administrative duties. Bolstering this strand with an additional tenure-line hire - as opposed to relying on adjuncts as we do now - would ensure continuity in the program and allow us to better prepare graduates for success.  Companies including Intel, Tektronix, Integrated Measurement Systems, Pixelworks, and others currently look to PSU's technical writing graduate program as a source for new hires.  Adding a tenure-line appointment in this area would help maintain these valuable relationships and build additional ones.

Education Outreach: One Position

One of the most important roles that the English department plays in Oregon is as a trainer of secondary school English teachers.  Students as PSU who intend to become English teachers often train as English majors before enrolling in the school of Education for their advanced degree.  The English department routinely offers courses in English education and advises students on this career path.  As the number of students seeking to become schoolteachers steadily grows, it has become increasingly clear that the department needs to create a long-term, dedicated position devoted to these tasks.  The duties of this position would involve student advising, acting as liaison to the Education program, and coordinating outreach to the Portland secondary schools, community colleges, and community at large.  S/he could also develop teaching courses as needed.

Where All This Takes Us

Hires in these areas will enable Portland State's English department to enter into dialogue not only with other programs and departments within the university, but also with new communities of interest in Portland, as well as with other universities that are moving in similar directions.  Our updated departmental model connects soundly with University Studies, and its innovations are appropriate for a university in the city.  It promises a broad cohesion of interests in the study of texts, musters an innovative curriculum that will teach essential critical skills to our unique student body, and offers a forward looking paradigm for English departments in the context of an urban university.  Even as it challenges us to play a larger role in the Portland metropolitan area, this plan charts new directions for our department that we hope will be noticed by the larger academic community as it seeks models for the future of English Studies.  We are confident that, using the publicity of this agenda, we can hire innovative and passionate teachers who will energize us with the new areas of scholarship and expertise they bring to our city and institution.  It is our hope that this long-term departmental plan will, to paraphrase our institution's motto,  “let knowledge serve the city” in innovative ways.

APPENDIX A