Overview

While some students need more writing instruction than others, The Politics of Remediation reveals how that need also pertains to the institutions themselves. Mary Soliday argues that universities may need remedial English to alleviate their own crises in admissions standards, enrollment, mission, and curriculum, and English departments may use remedial programs to mediate their crises in enrollment, electives, and relationships to the liberal arts and professional schools.Following a brief history of remedial English and the political uses of remediation at CCNY before, during, and after the open admissions policy, Soliday questions the ways in which students' need for remedial writing instruction has become widely associated with the need to acculturate minorities to the university. In disentangling identity politics from remediation, she challenges a powerful assumption of post-structuralist work: that a politics of language use is equivalent to the politics of access to institutions.

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9780822941866

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Reviews

Demonstrates definitively that use of the term 'remediation' in American higher education is far more firmly tied to institutional and economic circumstances than to students' actual educational needs or desires. - Sharon Crowley, Arizona State University Deals with the complex political and educational background of the rise of open admissions, as well as its failed promise.... Soliday is particularly helpful in discussing how the attacks on remedial instruction have often misrepresented the enterprise. - John Brereton, University of Massachusetts at Boston

Demonstrates definitively that use of the term 'remediation' in American higher education is far more firmly tied to institutional and economic circumstances than to students' actual educational needs or desires. - Sharon Crowley, Arizona State University Deals with the complex political and educational background of the rise of open admissions, as well as its failed promise.... Soliday is particularly helpful in discussing how the attacks on remedial instruction have often misrepresented the enterprise. - John Brereton, University of Massachusetts at Boston

Author Information

Mary Soliday, associate professor of English at the City College of New York, is Coordinator of the CCNY Writing Fellows Program, and an advocate for open admissions students at the City University of New York.

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