MSS: Writing at the University of Pittsburgh
Through the 1960s, the department continued to publish the annual collection of student writing, MSS: Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. There was no 1969 volume in the archive, which could mean that the volume is missing from the stacks, or it could mean that the 1969 controversy surrounding student publications (and the control over student publications) brought MSS to a halt that year. (MSS had both faculty and student editors.) The collection continued to be published into the 1970s. The last volume in the archive is 1977.
In the early 1960s, Edwin Peterson and Montgomery Culver shared the role of Editor. They were assisted by George Crouch, Abe Laufe, Frederick Mayer and a regularly changing group of undergraduates. In 1965, Culver took over as a single editor. In 1967, he was assisted by Virginia Elliott, Margery Gulbransen, and Abe Laufe. The student editor was Don De Cesare. The 1967 issue began with a “Dedication” recognizing the retirements of Peterson and Mayer. The dedication reads:
The twenty-first annual issue of Mss is dedicated with the greatest respect and affection to retiring Professors Edwin L. Peterson and Frederick P. Mayer.
Inseparable from the very thought of the study of writing in Pittsburgh are the name of Edwin L. Peterson and the images that the name evokes: the brown suit, the throat-clearing at the punch-line of an anecdote, the Early American Room with its long table and secret loft, the smile and the inexhaustible cheerful and genuine concern of Professor Peterson with thousands of students in forty years….He has worked with the writing major program at Pitt since it began, and hundreds of his students have gone on to win prizes, publish articles, write for newspapers, publish short stories, write successful books. His own books—No Life so Happy and Penn’s Woods West—show his feeling for simple, evocative language and his love for the world. Late in his career he took over an entirely new project—lecturing on composition to huge audiences of freshmen with the aid of an overhead projector—and his accomplishments have been nationally publicized and imitated.
Professor Frederick P. Mayer, in his forty-five years at the University, has served as English Department chairman more than once—most recently as acting chairman in 1965-66—but has always preferred to give his time to literature and to his students. An accomplished essayist in his own right, he has tirelessly commented upon hundreds of graduate theses and dissertations and thousands of undergraduate papers; as all his students know, no one else marks a paper as thoroughly as Professor Mayer does, or offers as many helpful suggestions for its improvement. And no one else within their knowledge is likely to be as genuinely and unassumingly erudite.
Both of these men will retire in 1967; many things at the university, however—ranging from definite features of curricula and course content to less easily definable influences such as the standards, attitudes, and habits of mind of their colleagues—will perpetuate their presence.
In the 1960s, the MSS table of contents tended to feature fiction and poetry rather than nonfiction. In 1964, however, there is a collection of “freshman paragraphs.” Ed Roberson, who would go on to win many major national awards for his poetry, is published in MSS in 1961. (He received his BA from our department in 1970.) Here are some samples:
“Somewhere There’s Music,” Andrew Welsh (1961)
“Four Songs at the Coming of Winter” and “Dirge” (poems), Ed Roberson (1961)
“Freshman Paragraphs” (1964)
“Fear Gets a Base on Balls,” Andy Solomon (1966)
“Unintentional Stress,” Don De Cesare (1967)
From the 1960s to the 1970s: Faculty Recruitment and Retention
In 1959, the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust gave $12 million to the University to establish ten distinguished professorships and 50 pre-doctoral fellowships. English was one of the 10 departments chosen to receive these funds and, it was assumed, to develop a significant research profile and a distinguished graduate program. In return, there would be new faculty lines (along with new expectations for tenure and promotion).
As you would expect, with the Mellon money the graduate program grew dramatically. In the 1940s the department granted 21 PhDs; in the 1960s, 20 years later, it granted 89, more than 4 times that number.
To support the graduate program, there was aggressive hiring at all levels and the faculty size increased across the ranks. Eleven assistant professors were hired in the 1950s. Fifteen were hired in the 1960s. (Three had been hired in the 1940s.) If I tally the full faculty list by decade, there were 27 tenure track faculty in the 1940s and 50 in the 1970s.
The PhD program, as it always had been, was a program of fairly conventional literary study—period, author, and genre. With the emphasis turning to the PhD program, the study of literature became, and for the first time in our history, the center of growth, energy and visibility in the English department.
And with the large numbers of graduate teaching assistants who were added to the lower division teaching pool, the study of literature became the frame of reference for general education (including the teaching of composition) in ways (and to a degree) that were markedly different from the past. The investment in a graduate program in English Literature had substantial consequences for the curriculum, and undergraduate writing in particular.
But the first tremors of a seismic shift came when the new assistant professors began to be reviewed for promotion and tenure. The Mellon initiative dramatically changed the expectations for the research profile of the tenured and tenure track faculty, across fields. If the university were to become a leading research institution, the assistant professors needed to prove their worth though publication.
The story of tenure and promotion in the first half of the 1970s is gruesome. In the 1960s, promotion to associate professor was routine—and it came quickly, in most cases between 2-5 years after being hired. In the period from 1970 through 1977, of the 29 assistant professors up for promotion and tenure, 24 were denied, or the decision was postponed, or individuals resigned their positions and left the University. Of those denied tenure (16), all (or most all) had departmental support. The restructuring of the English department was being managed at level of the Dean and the Provost.
I came in the department in Fall 1975, and I arrived to a stunned and bitter silence on the 5th floor of the Cathedral. It took me some time to figure out the lay of the land. In my first year, a group of assistant professors, all of whom had been denied tenure or whose tenure was in question, came to my office to ask me to sign a petition insisting that Bill Coles, my new boss, be fired.
The wounds felt and inflicted divided a department that had thought of itself as an idealized, democratic commons: with shared governance and a carefully designed set of bylaws (bylaws which are still in use); with picnics, a softball team, and house parties. This is the subtext to Chris Rawson’s account of the 1960s:
Amid all the excitement and the alarums of battle, there were doubtless losses. In my first year, we could have all 25 tenure-stream department members to a party, and did. A couple of years later, the department was too big – but there were too many battle scars to make such a party attractive, anyway. Some of us younger faculty lost relations with senior people we admired. Differences in principle too quickly became personal.
Afterword
I began this project in 2005 when, as English department chair, I was told that Thomas H. McIntosh had endowed a chair in the name of Charles Crow, and that the position would be coming our way in the near future. I also knew that I would be a candidate for that position.
I had heard of Charles Crow, his name was on our reading room, but I knew almost nothing about him—and I felt I should. I arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in the Fall of 1975, after Crow had retired. He died in 1976; we never had the opportunity to meet. And so I went to the University Archives to see what I could find.
At this point, the archive consisted of paper, lots of paper--files in boxes and books on shelves--, and I felt the pull to dig in and to see what I could learn, not only about Crow and his very productive and influential career, but about its larger context, including his teachers and colleagues. In the following year, 2006, Anna Redcay, my research assistant, began to assemble materials and to outline a full history of the English department—or, more precisely, of English language and literature, its study and practice at the University of Pittsburgh from its opening days in 1787, since there was no English department at the university until 1886. There have been several research assistants since then, and the University Library system has been busy digitizing many of the materials that were (and continued to be) central to our research: chancellor’s reports, alumni magazines, course catalogs, yearbooks, photographs, collections of student writing. The online archive is a remarkable resource. You can find it at “Documenting Pitt.”
This history ends with the 1960s. I’ve been asked why I stop there. The answer is simple. I arrived in the department in 1975. I know both too much and too little to continue on as an historian, and I’m not ready (or inclined) to be a memoirist. I have deeply enjoyed the opportunity to see my department and my profession (and my teaching and research) as part of the story made up by the cast of characters we’ve listed on these digital pages.
This history is dedicated to all those who have promoted the literary and rhetorical arts on our campus.
September 1, 2014