No abstract

Composition programs in American colleges and universities do not enjoy the rights and privileges of other fields and disciplines. The problems have to do with the status of an academic field beset by commonsense criticism of both its curriculum and pedagogy. Subject to frequent institutional reviews, writing programs are often expected to defend their academic practices from the advice of reviewers whose commonsense understanding of writing eschews process and practice in favor of product. Drawing on several reviews of the program in which they teach, the authors argue that the propensity to allow professors from a range of departments to decide what constitutes good writing and the best ways to teach it violates the intentions on which academic freedom at their university resides. They provide examples of reviews of their program that fail to take into account the pedagogical goals of the writing program. Such reviews rely on external criteria such as commonsense understandings of grammar and style instead of considering the program's stated pedagogical goals and learning outcomes. The essay concludes that institutional reviews of writing programs should acknowledge the review guidelines set by professional organizations in writing program administration and, further, that they be conducted by peers familiar with research and scholarship in the field of composition.

In appraising the oceanographic work carried out by a number of Russian institutions during recent years, clear distinction must be made between those expeditions which were sent out for purely oceanographic work and those whose oceanographic program was coordinated with and often subordinated to the aims of an economic or trade expedition. While this latter category of research was necessarily limited in scope and sporadic in achievement, the purely oceanographic expeditions have pursued a well‐planned survey over definite sections of the polar shelf, especially within the more accessible western part of the Russian polar seas.