Rosary College's Writing Program:
Four Years of Writing Across the Curriculum

Rosary College is a private, Dominican affiliated, liberal arts college situated on a 30 acre wooded campus ten miles west of Chicago's loop in River Forest, Illinois. The campus is housed in four main Gothic Revival buildings, three of them of architecture significance in the community. The college offers its nearly 1800 students course in 40 undergraduate majors and three graduate areas. The student body is composed of men and women from 20 states and 16 countries, with nearly 20% of the student population being international or ethnic minorities. Fully 15% of the diverse student body are non-traditional students, many of who are served by the evening degree program. The school's diversity is a central institutional commitment as revealed by the college's mission statement: "The college values diversity in its members and strives to recruit and serve a heterogeneous community. A spirit of friendliness and caring unites the diversified community whose aspirations are summed up in the College emblem, Caritas/Veritas."

That diverse student population has effected the form and content of the writing program at the college. Although the mission statement says nothing about a commitment to writing, that commitment seems to be strong. For this brief evaluation, I've talked with three Rosary writing faculty, and gathered material from those interviews and from email conversations, compiled writing materials and scoured the course bulletin. This combination of sources provides insight into several specific areas of Rosary's writing program: the curriculum in English, Writing across the Curriculum, the role of the writing program administrator, the writing faculty, and the role of the writing center.

Rosary's writing program within the English department consists 13 courses in three separate areas: the first year writing program, writing courses for English majors, upper level writing courses for non-majors, and two separate majors in writing, one in creative writing and one interdisciplinary major in business writing. In this paper I'll examine the first three of these categories, beginning with the first year writing program. Because of the college's diverse population, the school has a number of first year writing options which consist of a series of four classes that students place into by means of a summer writing sample graded holistically and their ACT scores and class rank. Most students will take a series of two courses, 101 and 102. These are both rhetorically based classes that focus on the writing process and audience analysis. Some students, and most students for whom English is a second language, will place into English 100 before they complete the 101-102 series. This course is a linguistic based course which examines the parts of written documents, the word, the phrase, the sentence, the paragraph. Some students, usually those who have high class ranks, English ACT scores above 30 and are admitted to the Honors program will take only one English writing course, 212, Critical Reading and Writing. This course is modal, uses an essay reader, and is reading intensive, with students reading 300-400 pages over the course of the semester and writing eight formal papers. English majors are required to take this course, but most must do so after completing the regular sequence of 101-102. A final class that is designed primarily for first year students is English 103, or Writing Tutorial. This course is billed in the bulletin as "Individualized writing instruction through the writing center. Open to all students, regardless of placement. Offered on a pass/fail basis." Although the course is often thought of as remedial—it is taken in conjunction with writing intensive courses in which students are experiencing problems—Writing Program Administrator Dave Himmel made it clear that the instruction was not meant to be remedial but only to offer formal help or structure with writing intensive courses, English writing classes or senior theses.

The second two categories of courses contain both the business and tech writing courses and the creative writing course. Both are taught to major and non-majors, though upper level creative writing classes require a 200-level prerequisite. Several 200-level writing classes fulfill a general fine arts requirement, while English 201, Writing and On-Line Research fulfills a research requirement for many majors.

Rosary's commitment to writing is probably best demonstrated though their courses designated "Writing Intensive" and their requirement for a senior thesis. Although the college has no formal WAC program, all majors offer upper level courses with a writing intensive option. This means that the class is offered for 3 or 4 credit hours and the student may choose to take the class for 4 credits and augment the regular class activities with a writing project. Students are required to take two of these courses in their major or minor to fulfill graduation requirements. In addition, all students are required to write a senior thesis and present and defend it before a 5 - 7 member committee. The requirements for the paper vary from department to department, but most require a 25 -70 page documented research paper involving independent research. The writing faculty respond positively to this program that integrates and reinforces the importance of writing throughout the students' four year college career, and support the goals of the program the writing lab and with courses such as the 201 research class and the 103 writing lab support course.

The writing faculty at Rosary consists of three Emeritus faculty with backgrounds in literature, no adjunct or temporary faculty, and nine full-time tenure line faculty of whom all but two are senior faculty. One of those two is the only composition specialist on the faculty, Robert Himmel, who acts a WPA, though there is not formally such a title, and who also directs the writing center. All English faculty with the exception of emeritus faculty teach first year writing, though all are specialists in literature, creative writing or film. Although Himmel admits to feeling frustrated at the lack of interest in composition theory among the faculty, he admits that the faculty are interested in writing in general and supportive of his desire to begin standardizing the first year writing program. Though the faculty responded well to Himmel's curricular changes that moved the 101-102 series to a more rhetorically based class, he conceded that most of the instructors do not seem to teach audience analysis (as the bulletin suggests) or recognize why it might be important. In addition, he feel he "lost the battle" for 212, the Critical Reading and Writing course. He does not foresee that course being restructured to eliminate "outmoded modes." Overall though, Himmel's comments suggested a good working relationship with the literature/creative writing faculty. Two literature professors seemed to be equally supportive of Himmel's work to restructure the first year writing program, though one, Sr. Maria Sommers, particularly bemoaned what she saw as a loss of focus on mechanics and grammar when Himmel fought the school's correctness standard (1 error per 1 typed page) in his first year, 1992.

Rosary has no official WPA, though clearly Himmel fills that role in all ways but his title. He has single-handedly attempted to bring about huge changes in the mere 4 years he has been at Rosary. He has built the writing center, redesigned the curriculum to make it more rhetorically-based, and he fought to eliminate the school's out-dated correctness standard. Through this, he seems to have gained many allies and has goals for Rosary's writing future. He particularly wants to see changes in the 212 class and advocates a class that is more closely aligned with the goals of the first-year writing program, which would be a Composition Honors course.

Rosary's students are a diverse group, though academically they are only slightly above average. The school is listed in college source books as only "Competitive." In spite of this, though, the college places a premium on communication and seems to have attempted to integrate writing practice throughout a student's program of study, without regard to a student's major.

North Dakota State University has a similarly prepared student body—though less diverse, they also have an average ACT only slightly above average (and the university was also described as only "competitive" in college source books). In addition, although Rosary has a student body of only 2,000 students, their English Department has the same number of faculty as NDSU—10. While NDSU has 15 teaching assistants and 20 full and part time lecturers, and Rosary has only 5 part time lecturers, a Writing Across the Curriculum could work at NDSU. For example, it would solve two of the administration's major concerns: 1) the issue of staffing 110/120 for an ever-growing student population (if student learned more writing in their own areas, perhaps we could make do with fewer comp classes) and 2) the issue of really getting students writing in the styles of their own fields of study. A problem it would not address, however, is whether teachers outside English can teach writing. Although administrators at NDSU have expressed doubt, success stories like the one at Rosary College could convince them of the possibilities of writing across the curriculum.
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