Released into Language: Errors, Expectations, and the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy

Abstract

When Adrienne Rich reprinted her essay “Teaching Language in Open Admissions” in 1979,1 she added in a headnote that the “profound” experiment of open admissions was, perhaps, “naively optimistic,” citing a history of broken promises, disappointments, and betrayals. Basic writing teachers found themselves overworked, underpaid, and often excluded from the protection of tenure-track positions. Working-class and minority students were left to compete for resources which, she said, should have been open to all. And, in a final image, Rich added that “on the corner of Broadway near where I live, I see young people whose like I knew ten years ago as college students ‘ hanging out,’ brown-bagging, standing in short skirts and high-heeled boots in doorways waiting for a trick, or being dragged into the car of a plumed and sequined pimp.”

At. the bedrock level of my thinking about this is the sense that language is power, and that, as Simone Weil says, those who suffer from injustice most are the least able to articulate their suffering; and that the silent majority, if released into language, would not be content with a perpetuation of the conditions which have betrayed them. But this notion hangs on a special conception of what it means to be released into language: not simply learning the jargon of an elite, fitting unexceptionably into the status quo, but learning that language can be used as a means of changing reality.

— Adrienne Rich, “Teaching Language in Open Admissions(1972)” In On Lies, Secrets and Silence