Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

Hairston’s thoughts on how “critical literary theories” were
brought down from English departments to writing classrooms, but
I would look at what she sees as the result of composition
instructors conforming, as it were, to that “need to belong and
be approved by the power structure” (184). Of this, she writes:
I see a new model emerging for freshman writing
programs, a model that disturbs me greatly. It’s a
model that puts dogma before diversity, politics
before craft, ideology before critical thinking, and
the social goals of the teacher before the education
needs of the student. It’s a regressive model that
undermines the progress we’ve made in teaching
writing. (180)
And Hairston explains her opposition to writing courses becoming
transformed into “political forums” or “social crusades”:
I vigorously object to the contention that
[teachers] have a right – even a duty – to use their
classrooms as platforms for their own political
views. Such claims violate all academic traditions
about the university being a forum for the free
exchange of ideas, a place where students can examine
different points of view in an atmosphere of honest
and open discussion, and, in the process, learn to
think critically. […]
[…] Can’t any professor claim the right to
indoctrinate students simply because he or she is
right? The argument is no different from that of any
true believers who are convinced that they own the
truth and thus have the right to force it on others.
(187)
And her extreme aversion to such a situation is that, if such a
thing occurs, “a correct way to think” reigns through
“intellectual intimidation” and, because of this sort of
atmosphere, there could exist a very real pressure upon students
“to take refuge in generalities and responses that please the
teacher. Such a fake discourse is a kind of silence, the
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