Symposium: Critical Retrospections on the 1987 CCCC Position Statement “Scholarship in Composition: Guidelines for Faculty, Deans, and Department Chairs”

This issue’s symposium consists of what I call “critical retrospections” on a CCCC position statement from 1987, “Scholarship in Composition: Guidelines for Faculty, Deans, and Department Chairs.” The authors of the statement intended it to be useful to faculty and administrators called upon to justify or explain the work of composition studies as an academic and scholarly field. The statement calls attention to our field’s methodological “diversity” as well as to how our work “reach[es] outside the traditional methods of literary studies.” I invited several scholars and teachers from across the field to reflect on this statement, asking them if it still represents the range of interests and commitments within our discipline.