I was a few years out of college, employed as a “learning skills specialist” in math and science at Boston University, when a friend in the rhetoric program invited me to a talk about teaching writing. We’d become friends when we both ended up at the CCCCs [Conference on College Composition and Communications] the year before—he was drawn to the conference by his interest in rhetoric as a means for social change, and I, by the fact that it was being held in New Orleans. I’d planned to dip in and out of the conference, and enjoy the city, the music, and the food, but I got hooked on the radical eclecticism enshrined in the conference program. I went to panels on Wittgenstein, on pop culture, on teaching, on liberatory pedagogy, and on science writing. And I returned newly aware of this heterogeneous profession devoted to literacy.
So, I accepted my friend’s invitation and joined the audience of rhetoric teachers assembled to hear Dave speak about the philosophy behind the textbook he and Tony Petrosky had been working on with the people at Bedford [Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers]. This is my first memory of Dave: in a blue oxford, open at the collar, and khakis, asking us to read a student paper. And then Dave did what Dave does like no one else I’ve ever known: He read this thing I’d skimmed quickly and without pleasure as if he were reading a poem. His approach was serious and respectful, and there wasn’t a hint of sentimentality in his effort to foreground the potential in the young writer’s struggle to speak in a language not yet his own.
Dave built his reading of the paper in collaboration with and in the teeth of his increasingly engaged audience. He faced open skepticism that first-year college students should be struggling with Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rodriguez, that writing and reading had to be taught together, that literate adults are made not born, and he didn’t give an inch. In the process, he showed me something I hadn’t learned in college: that there isn’t one right way to read, there are multiple ways of reading, some more fruitful, more productive, more empowering than others. So, I met Dave first as a teacher teaching other teachers, and I was awestruck. (He’s never heard this story. I know it will embarrass him, but just because something is embarrassing doesn’t mean it’s untrue.)
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When I got to Pitt a few years later, I met fellow graduate students who’d had similar reactions to listening to Dave read student work. This was in the late 80s, and the department was teeming with an intellectual energy that encouraged all manner of interdisciplinarity, propelled in part by a curriculum that productively blurred the boundaries between teacher and scholar, teacher and theorist, teacher and activist. I was as much in the thrall of the advanced graduate students as I was energized by the extraordinary constellation of faculty members in the Composition program, where Dave was completing his tenth (and final) year as head of first-year writing. In this context, I remember Dave as one part of a system of relations that brought together a group of methodologically-diverse scholars and teachers with a shared commitment to transforming the teaching of writing to undergraduates.
Things were often fraught in and out of class and between the various quadrants of the graduate program during that heady time, but this all seemed by design. Dave had argued in his 1988 Chair’s Address at CCCC for the importance of keeping the teaching of writing in departments of English not because this was a frictionless solution for the profession, but precisely because staying in English, which houses such differing understandings of what it means to read and to write with power, insured that teachers of writing would be forever stimulated to reconsider their deepest assumptions about literacy. This was not a popular position to stake out at the time, and I know Dave takes no pleasure in having served as the profession’s Cassandra, foreseeing the intellectually stultifying effects of the field’s professionalization via isolation.
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I returned to Pittsburgh for graduation in the early nineties. The ceremony mattered to me in ways I found hard to articulate. I wanted to see my friends; I wanted to spend a few more stolen moments in a city I’d grown to love; and I wanted to have Dave hood me at graduation. Mister Rogers was the commencement speaker, and he did what I have since learned he did whenever he could: He asked for a moment of silence so that the honorees at whatever ceremonial occasion he was presiding over could thank all those who had made their success possible. I had a lot of teachers and friends in my thoughts that day, but Dave got top billing in my silent catalogue.
For all his talk of teaching involving “a fair amount of push and shove,” I felt he let me loose on my dissertation and then taught me how to rein myself in. I discovered, while drafting this remembrance, that he’s written about the origins of my dissertation on the dynamics of educational reform, which began with a chapter on Matthew Arnold’s life as an inspector of schools. Funny to learn, 30 years later, the pre-history of the book on Arnold Dave put into my hands which, it turns out, was put into his hands by one of his teachers back at Ohio Wesleyan. Funny, but also emblematic: Dave let me write the dissertation I wanted to write, providing a pivotal book here, an argument changing marginal comment there. There was never a moment where I felt I was being asked to write any dissertation other than my own.
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In a funny coincidence, I ended up getting my first (and so far, only) job, in the English department at Rutgers University—the very place where Dave had earned his PhD. There wasn’t a graduate-level composition program when Dave was a student at Rutgers (and there isn’t one now). Dave wrote his dissertation on Thomas Hardy, but, rather than take a Victorian lit job at Boston University, he elected to go to Pitt to help run the program for teaching writing to entering students. It was a fateful decision: He became involved in the teaching of basic writing, in the study of error, and in thinking about the writing classroom as home to a set of sequenced assignments designed to help create thoughtful readers and writers. He wrote award-winning essays (including “Inventing the University,” which remains among the most-cited in the profession more than 30 years after its publication). He coedited Ways of Reading, now in its eleventh edition and arguably the most-influential textbook in the field. He trained legions of graduate students and directed scores of dissertations. After his stint directing the Composition program, he went on to chair the department for 14 years (!). He and Jean Ferguson Carr, the English department's current director of Composition, launched an imprint at the University of Pittsburgh Press—the Pittsburgh Series of Composition, Literacy and Culture—that paved the way for dozens of composition scholars to publish books that would earn them tenure and promotion. He racked up multiple awards from the CCCC and the Modern Language Association in recognition for his writing, his exemplary teaching, and his service to the profession. He solicited the gift that created the first endowed chair in the teaching of writing at Pitt. And, well, see his CV for a career as distinguished as one could possibly imagine.
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During the two terms I served as chair at Rutgers, I would seek out Dave’s advice when things got too challenging for me to manage. I never was able to emulate his calm at the center of the storm that is ever brewing in large English departments. He seemed always to be able to keep things in perspective and always knew how to stay in conversation with colleagues who had lost the ability to stay in conversation with each other. He dispensed his wisdom and his advice generously, and, when our paths crossed at chairs’ conferences, he ordered grappa to salve the wounds of the day.
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Dave’s written extensively about his own education, starting at Ohio Wesleyan, moving through Rutgers, and on into his four decades at Pitt. He has singled out Richard Poirier as his “first and, in many ways … only writing teacher.” He has traced his own intellectual genealogy through his teachers’ experiences learning to write at Amherst and at Harvard and, in a parallel universe, via Bill Coles, who hired him at Pitt in 1975. He has told the story of his emergence as a teacher and as a reader committed to the genre of student writing in ways that honor the lives of those who write in the margins of student papers. But how to account for the lasting power of his own writing? I read his work now, and I feel anew the thrill of being in the presence of a generous mind at work on the page, a master of the essayistic form, a writer who gracefully turns a problem this way and that, revealing facets and edges and opportunities to think further about fugitive efforts to make meaning; his work shows me there is yet more I can do to become a better teacher of writing.
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When I wrote Dave to tell him I’d been asked to write a piece for The Fifth Floor on the occasion of his retirement, he responded from an office whose contents he is in the process of methodically gifting to others: some books to a prison library, others to Books for Africa. In the run-up to his retirement, Dave has been teaching around the world—with the PittMAP program and semesters abroad. He’s begun to try his hand at travel writing along with his students. He and his wife Joyce now have grandkids to visit. He’s had an amazing career, and now he’s on to the next stage of his remarkable life. I will be forever grateful that our paths crossed and that I have the honor of being able to say I was one of his students.
—Richard E. Miller
Richard E. Miller received his PhD from Pitt in the spring of 1993 and started as an assistant professor at Rutgers University that fall. Cornell University Press published his revised dissertation, As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education, in 1998. He was instrumental in securing a $2-million gift to create The Jules and Jane Plangere Writing Center at Rutgers, which he then directed for over a decade. His latest book, On the End of Privacy: Learning to Read, Write, and Think in a Screen-Centric World, is scheduled to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the spring of 2019.