The Battles of Texas

Drawing from university records, newspaper archives, and present-day interviews, Nate Kreuter and Mark Garrett Longaker provide an on-the-ground perspective of the radical creation of UT Austin’s writing program and the subsequent events that made national headlines: the mass firing of lecturers in 1985, the national debate over “multicultural” content in the first-year curriculum, and the divorce of the writing program from the English Department in 1992. Despite these pressures, however, the authors also reveal how writing program administrators at UT Austin exerted their own agency to resist economic and political forces in service of their students and adjunct lecturers. By highlighting the parallels between the 1980s and current labor and political pressures in higher education, The Battles of Texas offers a strategic perspective for academics and administrators today.

Combining a narrative institutional history with a public digital archive, searchable and arranged in exhibits and in chronological annals, The Battles of Texas provides academics with the resources they need to survive in times of rapid transition.

“The Battles of Texas offers a compelling, incisive, and well-written historical account of debates about the place of writing instruction in the University of Texas at Austin curriculum. Kreuter and Longaker’s detailed analysis of events that shaped a nationally prominent writing program offers a unique perspective on the history of writing studies and thoughtful insights about history’s ongoing presence in contemporary developments in the field.”—Lois P. Agnew, coeditor of After Plato: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing

“Kreuter and Longaker’s book is a keen microhistory that showcases a heretofore under-examined case study in the disciplinary histories of Rhetoric and Composition Studies: the UT writing program. The authors’ meticulous examination is situated in the context of twentieth-century higher education politics, including ongoing debates about who should teach writing and what writing pedagogy itself should entail. Their reader-centered approach to navigating multiple intersecting stories and their associated players makes the book a must-read.”—Kelly A. Ritter, author of Reframing the Subject: Postwar Instructional Film and Class-Conscious Literacies

Nate Kreuter is Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Georgia. He is the coeditor of Rhetoric and Guns.

Mark Garrett Longaker is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, English, Communication Studies, and European Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, also published by Penn State University Press.

Business & Economics

Communication Studies

           Rhetorical Studies

           Political

Education

History

           U.S.

Political Science

           American Politics

           Twentieth-century

Rhetoric