Composition Forum 44, Summer 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/44/

Engaging the Perpetual ‘But’: Shawna’s Story

Shawna Shapiro

I’m part of a search committee for a new colleague who will teach college writing courses, among other things. We’ve just completed our second campus interview and are planning to make an offer to that second candidate. We’re particularly excited that the candidate is themself a first-generation college student. Unexpectedly, I get a call from a campus number that I don’t recognize. It’s a colleague in a humanities department—someone I barely know—who met with the candidate during their campus visit. “I just had to reach out to you,” the colleague says, “I just couldn’t stay quiet any longer.” Alarmed, I ask them to explain. “Well, it’s this candidate we met last week. They, well ... they can’t write. How can we hire someone for your program if they can’t write?” They go on to say that the candidate’s cover letter is “riddled with errors” and verged on “incomprehensible.” They say they showed the letter to several other colleagues and they were all “very concerned.” I pull up the letter on my computer and ask them to explain. They go on to list the “egregious” errors they found. While I agree that two issues with subject/verb agreement should probably have been corrected, most of the examples they mention are stylistic preferences that I hadn’t even noticed. I try to explain to them that all of these “errors” may be related to the candidate’s class and language background. I remind them that I teach an English grammar course, and we don’t even cover these subtle stylistic issues in that course. My colleague insists that they would have difficulty entrusting the teaching of writing to someone who writes “so poorly.”

Later, in a long email to my dean outlining why we wish to make an offer to this candidate, I briefly mention the concern raised by the colleague, as part of the feedback we received on the candidate. The dean picks up on the issue and asks me to explain why I’m not concerned. Surprised but resigned, I write a long response, trying to explain to my dean why the presence of occasional errors or typos in a cover letter shouldn’t disqualify a candidate for a position. I find myself trying to capture decades of research into the nature of “error” and the construction of “standard” language in a few paragraphs. I again reiterate all that this candidate had to offer to our institution. The dean seems satisfied with my response, and gives us approval to make an offer. But I’m left feeling really conflicted. Should I have tried to educate my colleagues on the problems with their assumptions about “correctness” in writing? If this candidate chose to accept the position, would they be hindered by the elitist attitudes at my institution? Should I offer to provide feedback or even proofreading for this new colleague, in order to ensure that they aren’t “written off” based on superficial and elitist judgments of their writing? Even if I did that, it wouldn’t address the underlying issue.

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