Writing assignmentsfor students must seem relevant to their work in college as well as to the outside world. Kenneth Eble on Writing in College: Ahead of His Time William J. Mccleary Making assignments is among the most difficult of a teacher’s routine duties. We know the worth of what we ask the students to do, but for students. almost any assignment may seem to be busywork if they don’t see what purpose it serves. -Eble, 1988b. “In general, the term paper is a bad assignment,” wrote Kenneth Eble in the first edition of The Croft of Teaching, published in 1977. And he hadn’t changed his mind for the second edition, published in 1988. Of course, the advice was no longer heretical in 1988 because so many advocates of writing across the curriculum (WAC) were saying the same thing. But Eble’s saying it in the seventies, before the current revival of WAC began, shows how his views on the important subject of writing in college were just as sane and forward-looking as his other views on college teaching. Although Eble discussed writing in other articles and books, a chapter of The Craft of Teaching entitled “Assignments” summarizes his views on writing and is virtually the same in the two editions; it is the main source for this chapter. Citations here are all from the second edition. Since Eble died shortly before the second edition of The Crqt of Teach- ing was published, the book will remain the final word on the subject of writing in college by an English professor who carved out a “second spe- A shorter version of this chapter appeared in the Composition Chronicle: Newsletter for Writing Tcachm, December 1988. NEW D(IIEm FOa Tf”C AND l.uRNwG. no. 4+, Winm IPW @Josey-etu Inr. Wshm 101102 EXCELLENT TEACHING IN A CHANGING ACADEMY cialty" by writing about higher education. As an English professor at the University of Utah, he not only specialized in William Dean Howells and F. Scott Fitzgerald but also taught composition and drew several of his favorite anecdotes from his composition classes. And as a University ho- fessor he wrote extensively on teaching, administration, and faculty devel- opment. Along with Wilbert McKeachie of the University of Michigan, he was among the few experienced professors to offer advice on teaching to other professors-a group of people who usually act as if they don't need advice on how to teach. (It is one of the ironies of American education that elementary and secondary teachers are required to learn how to teach but those who teach them are not.) Why Term Papers Are Not Useful By opposing term papers, file agreed with what the WAC movement would later say about there being better ways of accomplishing the same purposes. He agreed with the aims of the term paper but registered five complaints against it as it is actually used by teachers (Eble, 1988b, p. 133): 0 Teachers rarely think through their reasons for assigning papers. Too much weight in the course is given to the term paper. It is too easy for students to get term papers done for them by someone Students often face too many papers within a brief term to do any of 0 Faculty members don't provide the feedback that serious written work else. them justice. deserves. While Eble acknowledged that some of these problems could be par- tially overcome if faculty members were simply willing to work harder (for example, by supervising the writing of the papers), he preferred using other types of assignments. The main alternative he suggested is for the teacher to pose specific questions, "indicate where answers might be found, and move students to the legwork that accompanies real investigation. As a practical matter, shorter, focused assignments in which the teacher's expertise plays a sig- nificant part offer more chances for learning than term papers do" (1988b. p. 135). Relevance of Writing and Teaching With this type of assignment, Eble (1983) was connecting writing to what he had to say about teaching in general in The Aims of College Teaching, In that book he questioned the value of simply having knowledge, and heKENMnr EBLE ON Wm IN COLLEGE 103 attacked the notion that the professor's job is to hand out "packages of knowledge" with no regard to the use of knowledge. As he put it, "we live our lives within some crucial and common frameworks-earning a living, establishing a community, maintaining our health, preserving our lives, amving at a satisljmg self-identity; all of what we know or wish to know relates crucially to these" (p. 99). And if education does not relate to these, he said, it's not worth much. Therefore, he concluded, professors must reduce the number of packages of knowledge presented in order to include time for letting students use the knowledge. This view again fits right into the mold of writing across the curricu- lum. One strong reason that teachers of all levels resist including writing is that they feel compelled to cover their topic. But knowing is worthless without the use of knowledge, Eble said, and writing is one of the primary ways that knowledge can be put to use in the classroom. Students can be given real or hypothetical problems to solve and can not only explain their solutions in writing but can also argue for these solutions. Finally, in his essay, "Educating Rims." Eble (1985) advocated yet another aspect of writing across the curriculum-educating the professors themselves about writing by having them do more writing. He said, "This would enable more teachers to be, in some degree, teachers of writing and to encourage in their students the thinking and feeling that are inseparable aspects of literary expression" (p. 47). He was not speaking of academic writing here but of writing that is "exploratory and engaging, of both the self and the world-writing that searches through the vastness of any human experience and mes hard to find words to express some part of it" (p. 47). Where did Eble come by this appreciation for writing in all disci- plines? Perhaps it came from a study that he and McKeachie (1985) con- ducted in the early eighties of a faculty development program in the upper Midwest. They discovered that while professors themselves set the highest value on getting out of their institutions to attend conferences or conduct research, supervisors of the faculty development programs at individual