ABSTRACT
In recent years, comfortably tenured, the author routinely serve as an external evaluator of English Departments and writing programs, as well as an external reviewer of scholarship in numerous cases of tenure and promotion—not to mention grant proposals, fellowship applications, and submissions to journals and presses. The elastic nature of such standards may be even more conspicuous in rhetoric and composition. External reviews are necessary, not because external reviewers are any more objective than individual departments or institutions—they’re not—but because they’re removed from them, and therefore at least in theory, free of local concerns, including alignments in departmental feuds and current priorities. That English departments are changing to incorporate experts in composition studies into their mainstream faculty is unmistakable, as Bettina Huber’s recent reports to the ADE and MLA indicate. Conventional literary faculty members should derive their view of composition studies research from the major work—intellectual, theoretical, pedagogical—in the field.
