Inventing the University — Study Notes

Core premise: Education as a political instrument and the need to invent the university

• Education can grant access to discourse but its distribution follows social conflict; education acts as a political means of maintaining or modifying who gets to use knowledge and power. Quote from Foucault: The Discourse on Language.
• Every time a student writes for us, they must invent the university for the occasion — they must speak the language and adopt the aims, methods, and conclusions of our disciplinary discourses (History, Anthropology, Economics, English, etc.).
• A liberal arts education requires students to try on multiple voices and interpretive schemes — to write as a literary critic one day and an experimental psychologist the next.
• Students must appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse and do so as if they were insiders with their audience; they must mimic the academy’s language and conventions while balancing personal history and disciplinary requirements.
• The process creates tension: speaking and writing are required long before the skill is fully learned; this creates significant problems for beginners.

The act of inventing the university: students as rhetors-in-training

• Students have to speak our language, or dare to speak it, or bluff convincingly enough to carry it off.
• They assemble and mimic the academy’s language to become believable members of the discourse community; this is a mediated, ambivalent process between individuality and convention.

A concrete example: a freshman basic writer’s clay-model essay

• The essay describes making a clay model of the earth, including the core-mantle-crust and dimensions, showing how the student quickly enters the specialized language: "research and learn the different dimensions… (in magnitude, quantity, state of matter, etc.)" and "dimension" as a conceptual frame.
• The student reaches a general, textbook-like claim: "Creativity is the venture of the mind at work with the mechanics relay to the limbs from the cranium…" followed by a grand closing assertion: "Creativity is indeed a tool which has to exist, or our world will not succeed into the future and progress like it should."
• The student speaks with apparent authority and uses the discourse’s rhythm (parentheticals, qualifiers, and an air of scholarly seriousness).
• The analysis identifies an enabling but elaborate fiction: the student dramatizes experience in a setting required by the discourse to speak as a companion-researcher.
• The critical moment where the fiction breaks: the sentence, "Of course, your materials to work with were basic and limited…" shifts the voice into the teacher/parent stance, revealing a basic writer’s recurring difficulty in assuming the voice of an authority rooted in scholarship.
• This drop occurs again in the conclusion, where the high-level academic claim is replaced by a more “Elder” voice: a moralizing or life-lesson tone rather than an academic rationale.
• The basic writer’s tendency to switch from an academic stance to a more accessible, parental teaching voice marks a key liability in authorial stance within the discourse.

Key concepts introduced in Bartholomae’s analysis

• The “fiction” of the setting: students write as if they belong to the discourse community while lacking the authentic knowledge base that would make their conclusions academically legitimate.
• The idea of a “textual self”: a writer locates themselves within a discourse, but often the self is mediated by the language of others and the expected constraints of the field.
• Writer-based vs reader-based prose (Linda Flower):
  • Writer-based: prose that foregrounds the writer’s voice, personal experience, and private language.
  • Reader-based: prose revised to anticipate and conform to a reader’s needs and expectations, aiming to align motives with readers’ goals.
• The teaching implication: revision should enable writers to imagine and conform to a reader’s goals; but such revision requires pausing to reflect on the power dynamics of audience and the politics of the classroom.

Commonplaces, prearticulated explanations, and their authority

• A commonplace is a culturally or institutionally authorized concept or statement that carries its own elaboration and is readily available to organize explanation.
  • Example: in the Clay Model essay, commonplaces like "lack of pride" or other Church/ethical motifs could be invoked to explain failures.
• Commonplaces function as governing ideas that orient thinking and determine what counts as an acceptable conclusion or an acceptable set of examples.
• While commonplaces can be interchangeable, not all are permissible in given contexts (e.g., a student in a composition class is unlikely to be permitted to discuss theological concepts like original sin in the same way as a scholar).
• The problem for the basic writer: when a writer says, "I don't know," they are not admitting ignorance but acknowledging they lack access to the discourse’s privileged terms or its authoritative commonplaces.

The “privilege” and power dynamic of audience awareness

• To address an audience as insiders requires imagining oneself within a privileged discourse; this involves recognizing who has power within the discourse and whether the writer can approach that privilege.
• Writers who successfully manipulate audiences must imagine themselves as equal to or more powerful than their readers (the teacher, the discipline, the field).
• Writing for the professor means effectively writing within the professor’s knowledge and interpretive schemes; students must learn the professor’s ways of thinking and arguing.
• The problem of audience awareness is thus a problem of power and finesse, not merely a matter of basic reader-writer alignment.
• Classroom exercises that ask students to write for outsiders (e.g., Martians, Pittsburgh residents, high school seniors) introduce an ethical and rhetorical simplification that falls short of the university’s insider discourse.
• Real academic writing requires addressing a reader who already knows Pittsburgh or To His Coy Mistress better than the writer does, which complicates the use of commonplaces and requires more sophisticated bridging to discipline-specific discourse.

The broader theory: reading, writing, and the discourse community

• Bartholomae’s argument connects to Patricia Bizzell’s cognition/convention thesis: the basic writer’s lack lies in unfamiliarity with the discipline’s conventions and thus with how experience is constituted and interpreted within the academic discourse community.
• Proposed responses: identify the community’s conventions and make them explicit; study basic writers’ essays to diagnose where the discord lies; design curricula to move students into university discourse through scholarly projects, not merely skill-based tasks.
• The remainder of the paper analyzes 500 essays from a placement exam to identify how writers locate themselves within or against the university’s discourse.

Detailed analyses of representative essays and what they reveal

• The Jazz essay (creative statement as commonplaces):
  • The writer defines creativity in terms of personal expression and universality (music, sculpture, building, art, acting).
  • The commonplace is used to anchor the writer’s authority, even if the commonplace is not entirely accurate (improvisation follows rules; inspiration is a real factor).
  • The essay ends with a universal claim about creativity as a key aspect of life because it enables individuality.
  • The writer’s authority is established through the commonplace, not through rigorous argument or evidence; the essay relies on a shared, recognizable assertion.
• The Football essay: wearing white shoes to stand out; the writer claims originality and personal expression from a short anecdote; the conclusion asserts creativity from one’s imagination and self-expression.
  • The piece demonstrates a classic “Great Man” narrative: a single act of deviation becomes a declaration of creativity and individual agency.
  • The rhetoric positions the writer as a hero who altered the team’s appearance and, by implication, altered history; the narrator’s self-identification as an innovator is secured by a rhetorical sequence that centers the self as originator.
• The Songwriting essay (composing songs):
  • The writer chronicles early musical activity, then reflects on how the initial sense of originality was limited or mischaracterized.
  • The writer recognizes that inspiration came from a radio hit and that the sense of creativity evolves into a nuanced process of self-definition; creativity becomes a series of small creations rather than a single dramatic act.
  • The piece shows how self-awareness and the discourse’s codes (quotations, parody) function to navigate between personal experience and disciplinary expectations.
• The Clay Model essay (difficult syntax, advanced vocabulary):
  • The sentence structure signals an attempt to use unfamiliar vocabulary and long, embedded sentences to imitate academic discourse.
  • The analysis suggests that the problem is not simply grammar; it’s that the writer lacks the full utterance that the key words presuppose within the discourse’s context.
  • The act of sentence construction becomes akin to transcription where the voice fades; there is an attempt to participate in the discourse without fully inhabiting it.
• The “Composing Songs” essay (advanced prose and metaphor):
  • The writer uses density, quotation marks, and parody to move within and against the discourse’s codes.
  • The essay demonstrates how a student can work through competing codes to claim authority and to critique the discourses they critique.

The theoretical anchors: Flower, Shaughnessy, and Aristotle’s commonplaces

• Linda Flower’s Revisions: to teach writers to revise for readers, enabling initial writing to be oriented toward a reader’s goals and responses; revision is not just technical but strategic about audience expectations.
• Mina Shaughnessy: advanced writers exhibit a different pattern of linguistic pre-packaging versus the basic writer’s lack; the advanced writer may hear the melody of formal English but still struggle with precision; the “public, communal nature” of language requires writers to navigate language as a social instrument, not just a private voice.
• Aristotle’s commonplaces: ancient theory of argument using common topics (general topics) and special topics (loci) for particular disciplines; understanding where to find arguments depends on the mind of the speaker aligned with general assumptions; for the writer, the commonplace must be anchored to the discourse community to avoid misplacement.

The stages of development and critique of common teaching beliefs

• Bartholomae argues that basic writers are not simply defined by sentence-level errors; rather, their problems reflect the discursive asymmetry between their native or home discourse and the university’s discourse.
• The claim that many curricula overemphasize sentence-level errors ignores the deeper problem: students may write correct sentences yet fail to participate in or locate themselves within an academic discourse.
• The comparison between the White Shoes essay and the Clay Model essay demonstrates that the most fluent writers in familiar territory may maintain a tidy but shallow discourse, while less fluent writers may produce more fragmented prose but show a willingness to engage with higher-level discourse.
• The taxonomy of error versus growth: error is a marker of developmental stages, not a fixed trait; students progress toward the disciplinary discourse through a sequence of illustrated assignments that enable successive approximations rather than a single, all-at-once victory.
• The implication for pedagogy: universities should design courses that actively involve basic writers in scholarly projects, moving them from mimicry to genuine participation in the discipline’s discourse; writing across the curriculum is essential but must be implemented in ways that immerse students in authentic academic work.

Pedagogical prescriptions and the proposed curriculum design

• A sequence of illustrated assignments that allow successive approximations toward disciplinary discourse; students cannot acquire sociology, psychology, or history by a single standard test but by engaged participation in scholarly work.
• The danger of treating writing as a mere tool for thinking; writing is itself a mode of learning and participation in an academic enterprise.
• The need to move basic writers from outsider status to insider status by teaching them the community’s conventions, not by lowering the bar or offering simplified rhetorical exercises.
• The professional aim: to have students become colleagues in the university’s enterprise, not merely to produce test answers or descriptive reports.
• The role of teachers and curriculum designers: demystify the conventions, reveal how arguments are constructed in the discipline, and scaffold students toward authentic academic writing.

Practical outcomes and implications for education

• The university as a place where common sense is reinterpreted and reorganized through disciplinary codes; students must learn to operate within those codes while recognizing their own voice and perspective.
• Writing is not only about correctness but about the capacity to locate oneself in a discourse and to negotiate power relations within a field.
• The aim is to cultivate writers who can both define a position of privilege and critique the very codes that grant that privilege, thereby developing a critical consciousness about discourse communities.
• The broader ethical and philosophical implication: access to knowledge is inseparable from power structures; education should empower students to participate in those structures rather than to be relegated to outsiders.

Summary of core terms and concepts (quick reference)

• Invent the university: students must learn to speak the academy’s discourse, adopting its voices and epistemologies.
• Discourse community: a group with shared ways of knowing, presenting, and arguing; entry requires learning the community’s conventions.
• Commonplace: a culturally authorized idea that provides ready-made explanations and arguments; powerful but context-bound.
• Privilege and insider status: the perceived authority to speak within a discipline; students must imagine themselves as insiders to write effectively, which involves power dynamics.
• Writer-based vs reader-based prose: a spectrum from a self-focused, private-voice writing to writing shaped by readers’ needs and disciplinary expectations.
• Classical commonplaces (Aristotle): general topics and loci used as starting points for arguments; location within the discourse affects applicability.
• Successive approximations: a curricular approach in which students move gradually toward full disciplinary discourse through scaffolded tasks.

Final takeaway

• Bartholomae’s central claim is that basic writing problems are not simply about grammar or surface syntax; they reflect deeper issues of access to and participation in the university’s discourses. Effective teaching must acknowledge the political and social dimensions of writing, reveal the conventions of disciplinary discourse, and provide authentic opportunities for students to inhabit and critique those discourses as they develop their own intellectual voices.