College English - Volume 67, Issue 3, 2005

The author suggests that Saul Alinsky’s concept of community organization, a theory of action devised for neighborhoods rather than for higher education, might offer a new model of service-learning, and describes the Community Educators’ Collaborative at Temple University as one example of how such a model might work.

The author raises several issues regarding cultural shifts over the last half-century that he believes were evaded in the Fall 2002 Partisan Review symposium that gives his article its title—including attitudes toward mass culture, the significance and aims of cultural studies, the roles and institutional affiliations of the conservative counterintelligentsia, and the question of intellectual honesty and civility—in the hope of fostering a more productive dialogue between right and left than has recently been the case.

The author offers a local, institutional microhistory of the work of William Leonidas Mayo, a figure who both exemplifies and complicates some of our more recent concepts of student-centered pedagogy, both to enrich our understanding of our disciplinary history and to illuminate trends in English studies of continuing interest to contemporary teachers and scholars.

Reviewed are Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction, edited by Pamela Takayoshi and Brian A. Huot, and Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age, edited by Ilana Snyder.