Sponsoring Educational Opportunity: Race, Racism, and Writing Instruction at the University of Illinois

Sponsoring Educational Opportunity: Race, Racism, and Writing Instruction at the University of Illinois

African-American Experience on Campus

Within the field of composition history, much is presently known about the ways in
which elite groups have employed literacy instruction to preserve economic and/or political
power and privilege. However, as a number of recent scholars suggest, much less is
presently known about the means by which elites have employed literacy instruction to
preserve and promote the power and privilege of white racism, particularly at the institutional
level. Accordingly, this dissertation explores the ways in which one predominantly-white
university, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sought to conceive, implement,
and maintain "Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) Rhetoric," a writing instruction
program for "high risk" minority students. It analyzes a variety of archival EOP Rhetoric
documents-program descriptions, meeting minutes, administrative correspondence,
syllabi-to understand how literacy was "sponsored" by the university (in Deborah Brandt's
sense of the term) to support white power and privilege over time, as well as to understand
how such sponsorship was resisted by reform-minded administrators at certain points during
the history of the program. The dissertation contends that understanding such interplay
between racist sponsorship arrangements and anti-racist administrative resistance can help us
to recognize how white racism has profoundly shaped past composition program formation.
It contends, too, that such work can help us to reconceptualize future composition reform
efforts, shifting thinking away from overly-simplistic "color-blind" assessments of reform
toward assessments that both can account for and work against the multiple and complex
effects of racism.

Stephen Joseph Lamos

2004

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