Composition Forum 51, Spring 2023
http://compositionforum.com/issue/51/

Drawing on Our Jesuit Mission to Make the Case for Rhetoric: A Profile of the Rhetoric and Composition Minor at Holy Cross

N. Claire Jackson and Sarah Klotz

Abstract: Despite a rapid growth in student interest, the Rhetoric and Composition minor at the College of the Holy Cross faces staffing challenges due to its placement in an interdisciplinary center but reliance on faculty lines in English. In an attempt to address these challenges, we sought to develop a new gateway course to the minor that was deeply situated within our unique Jesuit small liberal arts context. This profile explains our development of such a course, focusing on the Jesuit rhetorical concept of eloquentia perfecta, or writing and speaking for the common good. Ultimately, we suggest that mission alignment is an important strategy for writing programs at small liberal arts colleges as we work to articulate our value to the institution and draw needed resources to the program.

Institutional Context

The teaching of rhetoric at the College of the Holy Cross grows out of a strong emphasis in Jesuit education on eloquentia perfecta, the principle of writing and speaking for the common good. We are a small liberal arts college in the Northeast with an enrollment of approximately 3,000 students and the only Jesuit school that is an undergraduate-only liberal arts college. While many other Jesuit colleges and universities embed the study of writing and rhetoric within first-year-writing programs, Holy Cross did not have a specific place for writing and rhetoric prior to 2018 when Patricia Bizzell and K.J. Rawson created the Rhetoric and Composition minor. Indeed, as Bizzell has written, “there has never been a required composition course for full credit at Holy Cross, nor is there any single course that every student in the college is required to take” (Bizzell “Historical Notes” 47). Prior to the formation of the minor, it is fair to say that rhetoric existed in the Holy Cross curriculum due to Professor (now Emerita) Bizzell’s diligent efforts during her 41 years here. By creating the minor, Bizzell and Rawson ensured that the study of writing and rhetoric would exist because of an institutional structure rather than a particular faculty member. Important rhetorical work also happens in our Center for Writing which was founded in 2015. The Center for Writing serves as both a WAC resource for faculty and a tutoring center for student writers.

When Bizzell retired in 2019 and Rawson moved to Northeastern University in 2020, the progress that they had made to institutionalize the program slowed down. One new, tenure-line faculty member (Sarah) remained to run a program initially designed for multiple faculty advisors. While student enrollment and interest in the minor continued to grow, the staffing of the minor quickly became a serious challenge. Due to decades-long tensions between literature and writing studies in the English department (where all rhetoric faculty hold their positions), the minor was designed in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies alongside other concentrations and programs such as Africana Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies; and Health Studies. The institutional home of Rhetoric and Composition, then, is split between faculty who primarily teach in English, an interdisciplinary center that oversees the minor, and the Center for Writing where writing and rhetoric scholars hold professional staff positions.

As the minor grew from 2 enrolled students in 2020 to 19 enrolled students in 2022 with an additional 19 students in the application process, staffing questions have become more urgent. Who is responsible for teaching the core courses in the minor? What institutional area is responsible for hiring to staff the minor? Is there a coherent path forward for the minor if directors maintain that Rhetoric and Composition is a distinct area of inquiry? These urgent issues have been eased somewhat through the hire of a full-time Visiting Assistant Professor (Claire) to help staff courses in the program, but the duties of administering the minor fall beyond the purview of this contingent position. How the minor will move forward as enrollments continue to grow remains an open question, but we propose that the most fruitful path in an emergent institutional program in Writing and Rhetoric is to turn to the mission of the college. Articulating the role of Rhetoric and Composition in the language of institutional mission gives our field coherence in the liberal arts context and helps direct institutional resources including staffing, hiring, and funding to the program. In what follows, we will detail how we are working through the many constraints on the minor by aligning its learning outcomes and curriculum with the Jesuit concept of eloquentia perfecta, or writing and speaking for the common good.

Rhetoric and Composition, The Jesuit Tradition, and Small Liberal Arts College Culture

There is a growing body of work on Jesuit rhetoric that draws upon a centuries-long rhetorical history to articulate a niche for the teaching of writing, speaking, and digital communication in the 28 U.S. Jesuit colleges and universities today. The Jesuits are a Roman Catholic order made up of brothers and priests that was founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. As Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton argue, the Jesuits are distinct in that they “joined sacred rhetoric with civic rhetoric and action for the public good, which suited their distinctive characteristic of being “contemplatives in action” (3). The first Jesuits drew upon Cicero and Quintilian to develop their notion of eloquentia perfecta, the joining of ‘erudition’ (knowledge, wisdom) with ‘virtue’ and ‘eloquence’” (Gannett and Brereton 10). As early as their first school in Messina, Italy in 1548, the Jesuits developed educational principles that persist in higher education today. Their approach was articulated in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599, including the liberal arts goal of “developing the students’ psychological wellbeing and ethical sophistication as well as their intellectual competence” (Bizzell Historical Notes 42). In a contemporary context, Steven Mailloux, Morgan T. Reitmeyer and Susan A. Sci, and John W. O'Malley have discussed how the tradition of eloquentia perfecta guides not only the teaching of writing and speaking, but the entire curricular philosophy of Jesuit colleges and universities. Focusing on such core concepts as cura personalis (care for the whole person), active learning, comfort with ambiguity and different opinions, and crafting one’s language to accommodate the needs of different audiences, the Jesuit tradition offers many core principles that align with the democratic and social-justice aims of writing programs at public institutions across the country.

The Holy Cross mission statement articulates these Jesuit values clearly. Students are “challenged to be open to new ideas, to be patient with ambiguity and uncertainty, to combine a passion for truth with respect for the views of others.” The statement articulates eloquentia perfecta as the mission “to educate students who, as leaders in business, professional, and civic life, would live by the highest intellectual and ethical standards.” While the history of rhetoric appears implicitly in this language, it is our goal to explicitly align the Rhetoric and Composition minor with this broader mission by naming our new gateway course Eloquentia Perfecta: Writing and Speaking for the Common Good and focusing the course on these broader traditions in Jesuit education.

In our design of this new gateway course for the minor, we knew we needed to be attentive to the unique Jesuit liberal arts context of our institution. While Thomas Amorose noted in 2000 that there has been a lack of attention to the material conditions of small colleges in WPA research, there has since been a more concerted effort to consider how WPAs can develop programs that respond to the specific needs of small colleges (e.g., Carroll et al.; Folsom; Gladstein et al.; Gladstein & Regaignon; Hanstedt & Amorose; Hebb; Spohrer; Taylor). What the majority of this scholarship has in common is the recognition that because WPA scholarship tends to focus on large research universities that have vastly different material conditions than small schools, our field does not have an accurate picture of the complexities of WPA work at different types of institutions. WPA scholarship’s disproportionate focus on the large research universities where most of us receive our graduate training has several practical drawbacks, as it fails to prepare PhD students for the “particular type of intellectual labor” (Gladstein et al. 13) required of a small school WPA, makes it difficult to consider how to evaluate the work of WPAs on campuses nationwide, and causes WPAs at even large institutions to miss out on opportunities to consider WPA work differently (Amorose 91). While tied to the specifics of our Jesuit liberal arts mission, then, we hope this profile of our minor and our work designing a new interdisciplinary gateway course can provide current and aspiring WPAs with strategies for conceiving of ways to strengthen a fractured and understaffed program without much institutional support.

Furthermore, we were informed by recent Composition scholarship that attends to the ways in which mission is articulated across the institution and how that can inform the work of writing programs (e.g., Jackson; Janangelo; Shoen, Vander Lei & Pugh). More importantly for our immediate purposes, what these arguments have in common is that they demonstrate that WPAs are often more successful in their programmatic initiatives when those initiatives are aligned with the values expressed in the institution’s mission statement. Education scholars Morphew and Hartley contend that a “clear mission helps organization members distinguish between activities that conform to institutional imperatives and those that do not” (457), and that this ability of a mission statement to guide decision making is especially pronounced at small institutions, such as small liberal arts colleges. Within Rhetoric and Composition, Vander Lei and Pugh have made a similar argument, suggesting that when WPAs align their programmatic goals with those of their institution’s mission, “they position the writing program to become a valued part of the university (and thus a justifiable recipient of the university’s goods—budget, faculty, facilities)” (149). Therefore, our work to design this course drew from our college’s mission to demonstrate how this particular course, and the Rhetoric and Composition minor more broadly, are crucial components of the college’s Jesuit liberal arts mission.

While Rhetoric and Composition is often not recognized as a field of study at small liberal arts colleges, which view the focused study on writing and rhetoric as more “practical” or “vocational” than their focus on a broad, general education allows (Gladstein & Regaignon; Kinneavy; Trachsel), several scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have argued that the development of the field is actually deeply intertwined with the history of liberal arts education (e.g., Bizzell, William Perry; Donahue & Falbo; Kinneavy), especially because of the ways in which learning about how writing and rhetoric “can be seen as a process of learning to think about one’s own thinking” (Bizzell, William Perry, 453). For Bizzell, such a liberal arts approach to literacy instruction involves working with students to “evaluate competing ideas according to the criteria of logical structure, adequate evidence, and so on” and “fosters relativism by casing [students’] beliefs into comparative relations with those of others”, and she notes the ways writing is especially useful in examining and critiquing competing ideas (William Perry, 453). Moreover, as mentioned above, Jesuit colleges themselves have a unique rhetorical history, which Bizzell notes entails a “blend of verbal facility and ethical action” (Historical Notes, 39).

Despite this rhetorical history, many Jesuit colleges and universities have seen a relegation of rhetorical education to first-year writing classes, as occurs at other types of institutions nationwide. Therefore, some scholars at Jesuit colleges and universities have argued for “reviving a rhetoric-based education, aimed at eloquentia perfecta . . . that emphasizes reason, digital sophistication, classroom discussion, collaboration, active learning, and the ability to put words (both written and oral) to thought” (Ranieri 270). We can see evidence of this materializing at Jesuit schools like Fordham College, which now offers a year-long first-year seminar titled Eloquentia Perfecta. Therefore, by designing our introductory course as a course in eloquentia perfecta, we have not just situated our course, and by extension our minor, as an important outgrowth of our institutional history and commitment to our current mission as a Jesuit liberal arts college, but we are also reflecting a current trend at Jesuit schools by developing a curriculum that explicitly attends to the tradition of eloquentia perfecta.

Overview of the Rhetoric and Composition Minor

The Rhetoric and Composition minor supports students as they develop effective communication in writing, speaking, and visual media. In addition to core courses in academic writing and the theory and practice of rhetoric and/or composition offered in the Department of English, students select courses from across the College to enrich knowledge in one of two emphases — rhetoric or composition. The minor consists of six total courses and a portfolio. Requirements are divided into three categories: Academic Writing, Rhetoric and Composition, and Electives. Within English and at the 300-level, students have many options for the Rhetoric and Composition requirement including a course in rhetorical theory and public speaking, a composition theory course run by the Writer’s Workshop director, and yearly offerings in topics courses that align with the expertise of rhetoric faculty. Students complete the minor by choosing three electives in any discipline that focus on rhetoric and/or composition broadly conceived. Some possible minor electives include New Media offered in the Visual Studio Arts department, Black Feminist Philosophy offered in the Philosophy department, and Public Policy offered in the Political Science department. During their final semester, students submit a digital portfolio to the minor advisor that showcases their writing and speaking throughout the minor curriculum. The minor aims to balance subject-area expertise in Rhetoric and Composition with a liberal arts model of disciplinary interanimation and student choice.

A significant bottleneck has been the Academic Writing requirement which has only two offerings, Introduction to Academic Writing and Intermediate Academic Writing. The new course, CIS 299: Eloquentia Perfecta supplements these offerings and will allow up to 19 students per section. We are beginning with one section per year in addition to the existing 3-4 sections of Introduction to Academic Writing and 1 section of Intermediate Academic Writing. By adding this new course, we effectively double the number of minors who can fulfill this requirement each year. Over time, CIS 299: Eloquentia Perfecta will become the gateway course that all students take prior to declaring the minor with the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Rhetoricians Morgan Reitmeyer and Susan Sci argue that undergraduate students “learn composition and speech as grounded in distinct academic areas, taught in completely different courses. Highlighting the differences between these skills does a disservice to students given the increased reliance on digital media including videos, websites, blogs, and social media which seamlessly combine writing and speaking.” As a response to this challenge, the concept of eloquentia perfecta asks students to integrate their communicative practices across written, spoken, and digital modes. As a grounding framework, eloquentia perfecta further asks students to explore the ethics of their rhetorical work on campus and beyond the gates of Holy Cross. By centering the Jesuit values of reflection and social justice, this course brings students together from multiple disciplines to communicate their research and ideas in service of making positive change in our world. They will gain a foundational understanding of the materials and methods of Rhetoric and Composition in the context of Jesuit higher education.

Course Design

CIS 299: Eloquentia Perfecta guides students through an iterative process where a single area of inquiry morphs into different genres as students shift the audience and purpose of their compositions. After completing an initial research project on a social-justice topic of their choosing, students will remix that academic essay into a short digital video then a speech. Along the way, students work weekly on a reflection journal to articulate the specific choices they are making in their remixing processes. In the final four weeks of the semester, students return to their initial research project and write a final academic essay with a new level of rhetorical awareness enhanced by their remixing projects. At each stage, students think about the process and ethics of research writing as they reach out to audiences within and beyond the classroom.

Assignment 1: Research Essay

Working within the context of a small liberal arts college enables the focused attention to undergraduate research that lies at the heart of the EP course. The central research project makes up 30% of the course grade and includes the initial short draft of 4-6 pages and the final draft of 10-12 pages. Students will spend the semester delving into a research area of their choosing that they select within the first two weeks. They may choose topics relating to our local communities, such as the Holy Cross community or the Worcester community. They may also choose topics that they are passionate about in our larger global community such as climate change or the movement to end gun violence. The research component of the course has three main learning outcomes. First, students will read and reflect upon ethics in research writing and then put these methods into practice as they compose their projects. Students read about such topics as choosing research subjects, honoring the dignity of both the rhetor and the communities with which they engage, understanding one’s own positionality, ethically engaging with the ideas of others (e.g. avoiding plagiarism), and carefully engaging with different viewpoints. Second, students are working on their academic research writing skills. They are pursuing useful knowledge for themselves and their community through inquiry practices such as finding and working with appropriate sources and engaging with others, particularly subject-area experts, as they make their claims about problems facing our society. Finally, students learn how to engage with deep revisions of the content, argument, structure, and point of view through which they compose research writing. These revisions are enhanced and enabled by the remixing projects that take up the middle weeks of the semester.

Once students have completed their initial research essay and two remixes, it is time to return to the traditional research essay with a new perspective and new experience thinking about audience, purpose, and genre. Students will revise their initial short draft by adding new information, elaborating and clarifying their argument, and even rethinking their topic following substantial feedback from their peers. The goal is for students to come at a particular topic or social issue from a number of perspectives before returning to the task of completing a lengthy academic research paper. In our environment, where some are skeptical of the intellectual rigor of composition courses, this return to a traditional genre will allow faculty to justify EP to the curriculum committee with a research assignment that is legible within the liberal arts context.

Assignment 2: Digital Remix of Research

Like Yancey et al.’s Teaching for Transfer curriculum, which asks students to repurpose a written research paper into three new genres, our course asks students to “remix” their research essay twice, with the first remix being a 1-2 minute video targeted toward a specific audience, worth 20% of their final grade. As Yancey et al. note, such repurposing to new genres helps to solidify students’ understanding of how context influences their rhetorical choices (142), and we see our digital remixing operating similarly. Because students are asked to select a specific audience, different from the audience which might read their research paper, and compose in a very different genre, students have to deeply consider how audience, medium, and genre influence the rhetorical choices they make as they compose. In other words, they have to repeatedly ask themselves how the digital genre, the non-academic audience, and the difficult constraint of only 1-2 minutes (and thus an inability to use all of the information in their research essays) changes what want to say (and what they are able to say), as well as how they say it in a way that can engage with their audience. Paired with the reflective writing discussed below, this first remix assists students in developing knowledge they can transfer across contexts while they practice 21st century literacy skills.

Assignment 3: Speech Remix of Research

The second remix opportunity comes after students have composed a short, largely informational research essay draft with a preliminary central claim and remixed that essay into a video. Students will now transform their evidence and claim into an 8-10 minute persuasive speech for their peers worth 20% of their final grade. Students consider what their peers already know about their topic to create a compelling speech that gets right to the point. Students also consider how to persuade their peers that their path forward to address a problem is the right one, and they will do so within the rhetorical framework of accommodation, thinking about audience needs and preferences, and meeting the audience where they are. As John O’Malley has argued in The First Jesuits, rhetorical accommodation is foundational to Jesuit thought: “the Jesuits constantly advised in all their ministries to adapt what they said and did to times, circumstances, and persons” (41). Student rhetors may even want to change their approach as they learn more about their interlocutors. Finally, students will embody their ideas in a very real way. By thinking about elements of delivery including body language, pace of speech, tone, and voice volume, students will reckon with the ways that all researchers are also embodied, moving through the world with our identities and bodies fully engaged in the process of communicating and deliberating with others. Another important component of the speech remix is to take a long-form rhetorical mode—the essay—and create a concise spoken version. This will help students return to their research writing with an eye for what is most necessary in their argument and evidence. As students develop their speech remix, they will write reflective prompts in their journals about the choices they are making. Following the speech, students will also get peer feedback on how they might develop or shift their ideas going back to the research writing mode.

The Speech Remix has three other important purposes. First, this assignment moves us beyond the divide between speech and writing that Reitmeyer and Sci so astutely point out in our contemporary college curricula. Second, the speech affords the opportunity for critical reflection about how to deliver information orally and how this is different from delivering information in writing. Finally, this assignment serves the larger minor by introducing spoken rhetorical skills before the 300 level, helping students to develop these capacities through a deliberate course of study. As a gateway to the minor, it is important that CIS 299: Eloquentia Perfecta introduce students to the many competencies and theories that the minor covers. These assignments are not only building skills, but also helping students understand Rhetoric and Composition as a distinct field with its own epistemology, ethics, and areas of inquiry.

Assignment 4: Ongoing Reflection Journal and Final Reflective Essay

Central to the design of our course is a series of ongoing opportunities for students to reflect on their work. As Kara Taczak explains, providing a space for students to think through both what they are doing in their writing and why they are making those particular rhetorical choices, “helps writers begin assessing themselves as writers, recognizing and building on their prior knowledge about writing” (78). Following Taczak, we understand reflection to be a necessary skill to develop in order for students to both have agency over their writing and to transfer writing skills from one context to another, as they can reflect on why certain choices may or may not be appropriate for a new rhetorical situation. Moreover, Krista Ratcliffe’s reflection on the overlaps between the principles of Jesuit education and the beliefs that shape the field of rhetoric and composition reveals the central role reflection plays in drawing these connections. For example, she argues that “teach[ing] students to identify cultural scripts in discourses and ask[ing] them to reflect on which scripts to perform and which ones to revise” (399) reflects the Jesuit principle of “Development of character via modeling” and that, when paired with this Jesuit principle, a focus on reflective practice not only prepares students to identify why they might make certain choices in their writing and/or speech, “but also how and why they may (or may not) embrace leadership positions then model for others actions that lead to social justice” (399). Therefore, the ongoing reflection we ask students to engage in throughout the course not only provides them with opportunities to articulate and solidify their learning, but opportunities to reflect the ways in which they can be accountable to the communities to which they belong and/or which are the subjects of their research, as our Jesuit mission explicitly articulates as a central part of a Holy Cross education. Thus, the final assignment for Eloquentia Perfecta is a reflective essay in which students analyze the rhetorical choices they made as they shifted their research into different modes, the ethical aspects of their research, and the information ecologies and discourse communities they engaged with throughout the process.

However, as many scholars have noted, reflection can be difficult to teach, and end-of-class reflective writing often takes the form of a student telling their instructor what they think that instructor wants to hear about how much they learned (e.g. Pruchnic et al.). In order for students to have ample opportunities before their final reflective essay, we also ask students to engage in a weekly reflective journal where they think through the recent writing and research they have engaged in for their research project and its various remixes. Thus, throughout the course students are engaging in both what Kathleen Blake Yancey calls reflection-in-action (reflecting on various stages of the writing process as texts are in development) and reflection-in-presentation (reflecting on completed texts, such as at the end of the semester). By employing ongoing reflective assignments, which not only provide several opportunities for students to practice these skills, but also for the instructor to check in with the student and provide feedback on both the current state of their research project as well as their reflective process, we hope to significantly scaffold the necessary reflective writing skills we want students to develop by the end of the semester.

Furthermore, as Lindenmen et al. have argued, reflection-in-action assignments, such as our weekly reflection journal, can play an important role in the revision process as well, as they “provid[e] students with a record of their thought processes and self-directed critiques at different points along the way” (585). Therefore, we see these weekly reflections not only as a way to scaffold reflective writing skills before the final reflective essay, but as a helpful tool for students to conceptualize and plan the remixes of their research project in response to feedback (from the instructor, their peers, or their communities) they received as they think about what different rhetorical choices they might make as they revise their research essay into a digital project or a speech. These multiple opportunities for reflection emphasize for students that research is a process of continually thinking through ideas and making connections.

Institutional Challenges

The central constraints on the minor in Rhetoric and Composition can be boiled down to its liminal position in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and the lack of staffing support from the English department. As in many contexts, there is a fraught relationship between the fields of Literary Studies and Rhetoric and Composition. An additional challenge is that the majority of English faculty here are unfamiliar with the field of Rhet/Comp due to their backgrounds in private colleges and universities where the field is underrepresented. While Deans and the Provost have expressed vocal support for both the Rhet/Comp minor and what the field can offer our intellectual community more generally, any hire has to come from the will of the English department. That will has just not been there since 2019. There is also no budget for the Rhetoric and Composition minor. It comes with no course release or stipend for the advisor, and the position of “director” that would come with compensation is only available to majors. At this time, there is no chance of creating a major with a single tenure-line faculty member at the helm. Ultimately, the constraints feed into one another. As students join the minor and the program grows, the labor of advising the minor and the need for more course sections also grow without a clear path to a solution. For all of these reasons, we are drawing on the Jesuit mission of the College in hopes of creating a path to long-term sustainability. The first step in this process is to ground the minor in the Gateway course based in eloquentia perfecta.

This course is a workaround because faculty get some choice where they teach, so even though English has not shown willingness to add more sections of Rhet/Comp classes, faculty can move one of their courses to the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and work through a separate shared governance process outside of the English department curriculum committee. This allows another Rhet/Comp course to become available to students and also gets other voices across campus involved in the creation and evaluation of a Rhet/Comp course. As other faculty across campus do not share the skepticism toward Rhet/Comp that appears in English at this time, it was relatively easy to get the course approved and ideally will remain so as the course goes to the college-wide curriculum committee after it has been taught for the first time. To address the budgetary constraints, we are working on a larger, campus-wide conversation about tying course releases and stipends to the enrollment of minors as opposed to the arbitrary distinction between a major and a minor that currently exists. Indeed, some majors have very few students and minors are increasingly popular and enrolling dozens of students. To sum up, we are engaging allies across departments who share concerns about the staffing of interdisciplinary minors to bring more voices to the table that see the value of Rhetoric and Composition courses.

Looking Forward

Looking back at our first years at Holy Cross, there were many things we could not predict. We could not predict that our senior colleague would move to a different position or that Covid-19 would move all of our meetings and courses online, making it difficult to build connections and goodwill through outreach work across campus. What we have realized, even given the unknowable unknowns of the past few years, is that our understandings of WPA work were shaped in a public, R1 context that simply does not apply at a private, Jesuit, liberal arts college. While Claire’s dissertation research focused on WPA work at small liberal arts colleges, even much of that proved to be difficult to apply to our context. This is most apparent in early miscalculations. We were convinced that enrollment matters, as both our training and Claire’s previous research taught us. Thus, we assumed if the Rhetoric and Composition minor enrolled more and more students, resources and courses would necessarily follow. The “institutional resources follow enrollment” logic is just not the case here. Moreover, while it is not uncommon for SLACs to have questions about Rhetoric and Composition as a field, Claire expected the strong commitment to writing instruction her research showed was common at such institutions, which has been lacking in our department. Therefore, our question becomes, how do we align the program with the particular logics and values of this institution? Certainly, one way to align Rhet/Comp with the Jesuit mission is to draw upon the long history of Jesuit education where students develop both eloquence and ethics before moving on to their professions and vocations. By creating a gateway course to the minor that explicitly names this tradition, Holy Cross joins other Jesuit colleges/universities such as Fordham and Xavier with writing and speaking instruction tied directly to the history and theory of Jesuit pedagogy.

Another lesson has been how common area (distribution) requirements dictate course sections and hiring. Because the academic writing courses at Holy Cross do not fulfill any common area requirements, they are not an administrative priority. Until now, there has been no writing requirement and students have fulfilled a literature requirement instead. Following a lengthy shared governance process, we have new common area requirements beginning in the next few years, one of which is a writing requirement in addition to the existing literature requirement. We hope to capitalize on this change by coding all academic writing courses as fulfilling this new writing requirement, and we hope that aligning CIS 299: Eloquentia Perfecta with the institutional mission will enhance this argument with the college-wide Curriculum Committee. Moreover, since these courses will now fulfill a requirement, administrators will be more compelled by arguments about enrollment. While the Eloquentia Perfecta course has now been approved, we will not be offering it until Spring 2023. Therefore, it is too early for us to know how effective this strategy has been in demonstrating the benefits of the Rhetoric and Composition minor to the College. However, it is our hope that by deeply tying the course to our Jesuit mission, and the Jesuit tradition of eloquentia perfecta, administrators will be more willing to materially support the minor with more resources and staffing.

Finally, we have learned that interdisciplinary programs, centers, and intellectual energies on a liberal arts campus can be powerful allies in writing program building and administration. In our case, the separate governance structure for curriculum in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies means we can get feedback and approval from colleagues across campus for new writing courses and new visions for writing and rhetoric instruction. While we were developing Eloquentia Perfecta as a new course in CIS, our colleague in the Center for Writing also developed a practicum for writing tutors offered under the CIS umbrella. Because we have a place outside of English to offer new courses that our minors need, we are building a feedback loop making it more and more challenging for administrators of the college to ignore the staffing needs of the minor. However, because CIS does not have any faculty lines, we are still beholden to English for staffing needs. We continue to pursue all avenues to staffing and building the Rhetoric and Composition minor within an explicit framing of Jesuit Rhetorical Education at a SLAC.

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