This is the second part in a two-part series about Penn’s Critical Writing Seminar. Read the first part here. 

As students question the usefulness of Penn’s Critical Writing Seminar, faculty members in the Critical Writing Program are also expressing concern about the course’s structure and alleged restrictions on academic freedom.

Over the past month, The Daily Pennsylvanian surveyed nearly 300 Penn undergraduates who have either taken or are currently enrolled in a writing seminar. Only 5% of respondents rated the class as “extremely useful,” and many students interviewed criticized the course for being overly rigid and disconnected from the writing they do in other contexts.

Faculty raised similar concerns in interviews and internal reports obtained by the DP. While they expressed support for teaching key writing concepts, many felt that a lack of academic freedom limited their ability to approach these ideas using their own expertise and pedagogical judgment.

One CWP lecturer, who was granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation, explained that there is “a great deal of consensus” among writing seminar instructors on the value of writing studies concepts taught during the course including genre, rhetorical awareness, and the concept of writing as an iterative process. The lecturer explained, however, that many CWP professors also desire the “flexibility and autonomy” to teach those concepts in ways that draw on their specializations and research interests.

“CWP instructors have a wealth of teaching experience that inform our ideas for curricula development,” the lecturer said. “Yet, we're routinely excluded from substantive decisions about curriculum and punished or threatened with punishment if we deviate from what we're told to do and how to do it. I think the majority of CWP instructors have pedagogical and ethical reservations about aspects of the curriculum, especially the white paper.” 

A second lecturer, who was also granted anonymity due to fear of retribution, feels similarly and expressed a wish for the program to function in ways that are “more creative and open to experimentation.” 

“The course that we all have to experience is so overly predetermined and restricted that it creates a chasm between high-quality student interactions and the questionable quality of the course,” the lecturer said, explaining that students often tell CWP faculty they’re “among the best professors” they have in their first year. 

After founding director Valerie Ross retired in 2023, Matthew Osborn stepped in as Interim CWP Director. CWP Faculty Director Kathy Brown described the program as “in a moment of transition” due to the lack of a permanent director, which limits the administration’s ability to drastically change its curriculum or structure.

While acknowledging that a transition period is not the time for “drastic change,” the first CWP lecturer believes the program should still be researching and piloting potential improvements. 

They noted that faculty are given “no opportunities or encouragement” from the administration to have “faculty-centered” discussions about revising the curriculum in ways more substantial than “simply making small adjustments to the system in place.”

The second lecturer similarly explained that faculty are often “merely talked at” during meetings, with no indication that their input is welcome or will be considered.

Brown emphasized the importance of “maintaining fairness” for students in different sections of the course, explaining that there will always be a “tension” between the need for standardization while maximizing the expertise and teaching strengths of individual faculty.

Osborn said that while some faculty have shown interest in being “co-creators” on curricular matters, others are more focused on “the personal aspects of their careers, making it challenging to strike a balance” when it comes to faculty involvement in decision-making. 

Under Ross’s leadership, the program evolved from relying on graduate student instructors to being staffed by full-time lecturers with Ph.Ds in a multitude of disciplines. Unlike most non-tenure track faculty at Penn, CWP lecturers are eligible for promotions and can advance from one-year renewable contracts to longer three- and five-year terms.

While emphasizing that CWP lecturers are not granted the protection provided by tenure, Brown said that the longer-term contracts provide “a certain kind of job security not available to many other lecturers in the University.”

However, multiple lecturers expressed that the security provided by their contracts does not eliminate their concerns about speaking out against the CWP’s curriculum and structure.

A third CWP lecturer, who was also granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation, explained that many instructors in the program feel that “speaking publicly about the CWP in a critical way endangers its existence.” 

They emphasized that, despite disagreements about the program’s direction, the faculty are all “dedicated educators who want the best for their students.”

“If we weren’t afraid for our jobs, we would be much less internally divided on the future of the program and would be able to create, through open debate, a curriculum that best serves our students,” the lecturer explained. “It’s worth speaking out because critical writing programs are essential for students, and I want to see the program improved for their sake.”

The lecturer’s concerns align with findings in a May 2024 Faculty Senate report, which stated that the CWP generates an “unusual number of complaints” from program faculty and experiences a “high level of attrition.” The report recommended an external evaluation to identify potential issues, including “patterns of harassment or discrimination.”

A report by an internal committee commissioned by the College to assess the program after Ross retired also highlighted a lack of consideration of lecturer perspectives.

Chaired by former College Dean Paul Sniegowski and composed of standing faculty from all four undergraduate schools, the committee addressed faculty governance in the report. The report recommended that lecturers “play a more meaningful role in academic and pedagogical decisions” and emphasized a need for “more active consideration of lecturers’ views of the course content and teaching approaches.” 

The report also described the Writing Seminar syllabus as “bloated” and criticized the white paper and op-ed as having “insufficient relation to the types of writing students need to do in later coursework.” The committee reported that the Writing Seminar syllabus had become “very crowded with scripted elements, ” which act as a “time map that indicates, minute by minute, what professors should be doing.”

AAUP-Penn Secretary and English professor David Kazanjian said that the lack of autonomy offered to professors over their own syllabi is a violation of the academic freedom principles listed in the Penn Faculty Handbook. 

The handbook states that Penn’s policy is to “maintain and encourage freedom of inquiry, discourse, teaching, research, and publication” for “any member of the academic staff,” which includes non-tenure track faculty. 

“It would be fine if the faculty themselves decided there should be a standard curriculum and played a role in setting that curriculum up,” Kazanjian added. “The issue is that it is currently imposed on them without input.”

The third lecturer also criticized the Writing Seminar structure as indicative of Penn’s “wider pre-professional focus.”

“The genres we teach have real world application, but we throw students into them without any foundation,” the lecturer said. “The way the curriculum is structured squeezes all the nuance and critical thinking out of writing to take one standard approach.”

Several CWP faculty members pointed to first-year writing curricula at peer institutions as models for an approach that is less standardized and less pre-professional. 

At Princeton, the first year writing courses are organized around four major writing assignments which are “designed to teach analytical argument,” including a mentored research project. The course is multidisciplinary, teaching students how to “frame compelling questions” and “position an argument within a genuine academic debate.”

Cornell offers multiple first-year writing courses spanning the humanities, social sciences, and sciences that aim to introduce students to multiple genres and teach “clarity, coherence, intellectual force, and stylistic control.” Cornell students complete between five and eight formal essays in their writing courses, receiving feedback from their professor throughout the process.

“You’ll hear from the administration that [the CWP] is a good program because it’s grounded in research,” the third lecturer said. “But even if that research is good, it is currently horrendously applied, and applied without the enthusiastic consent or substantive participation of most of our faculty.”

The third lecturer explained that students will develop white paper topics ideas that they’re excited by but often have to devote “significant time and energy to spin it to fit the narrow framework of the Writing Seminar.”

They added that students have told them that the course’s structure “sucks the creativity and life out of them” while not allowing them to fully explore writing in the ways they had hoped.

The lecturer also raised concerns about the implementation of co-grading, which requires a second CWP faculty member to assess a student's Writing Seminar portfolios. They estimated that faculty teaching three Writing Seminar sections are expected to grade 48 portfolios from their own students, in addition to nearly 40 outside portfolios. 

While the lecturer supports co-grading as a “baseline” for fair assessment and opportunity for faculty to “share best practices,” they described the current portfolio structure as “bloated,” averaging between 60 and 100 pages. They noted that lecturers usually have just under a week to grade portfolios, which means they are expected to read and grade roughly 750-1,200 pages per day.

“Most CWP faculty work nearly non-stop that week, including weekends, and it’s just impossible to read the portfolios in-depth,” they said. “Most people are only able to skim and leave very minimal comments as a result.”

The first lecturer noted that while portfolios are a common assessment tool in many writing programs, requiring students to submit multiple portfolios in a single class is unusual.

“I think the portfolio process, as it’s currently instituted, functions to generate data for the upper administration about measurable student outcomes at the expense of actually helping students write,” the first lecturer said. 

Brown described the usage of outside graders as a way to ensure fairness and neutrality, but also acknowledged it as a “huge lift” for instructors. Osborn added that efforts to “streamline” grading for faculty have included phasing out co-grading for the midterm portfolio and initiating dialogues to arrive at “shared and sustainable” expectations for comments. 

The third lecturer, however, believes that dialing back the “intense focus” on assessment and standardization would allow more room for student conversations and small group writing workshops, an approach they believe to be more effective.

“I would prefer to work with students on four or five essays throughout the semester, possibly culminating in one piece they want to showcase,” the lecturer added. “The portfolio as it currently stands is a huge burden for both students and faculty.”

Concerns about academic freedom also surfaced in a November 2023 report collectively authored by nearly half of CWP faculty.  

The report, which emerged from conversations with former Dean Paul Sniegowski, shared perspectives on the “current state and possible futures of the program.” The faculty developed it and circulated it with the intention of securing representation on the Dean’s CWP director search committee, according to the first lecturer, who was a contributor to it.  

The report’s authors noted in their preface that not all CWP faculty had the chance to contribute, explaining that “fears of retaliation under existing leadership prevented a public circulation.” 

The signatories only shared their names with Sniegowski.

“We tried to include as many CWP faculty as possible in writing it, but there was a palpable fear that if the CWP leadership found out what we were doing, we would be reprimanded or lose our jobs,” the lecturer explained, noting that 15 faculty members ultimately signed it and an additional 3 contributed but did not feel comfortable attaching their names. 

The report’s authors called for an approach that combines training in writing theory with the freedom to draw on their disciplinary expertise in the classroom. They argued that standardization across sections can be achieved without mandating identical readings, assignments, or portfolio assessments — and should instead be collectively shaped by instructors themselves.

“Program coherence can be attained if efforts are made for students to become familiar with key threshold concepts,” the report reads. “However, how to best teach students these tools within the context of a specific discipline should be determined by instructors in that discipline.”

Brown emphasized that she and Osborn have taken a “forward-looking” approach to move the program in a “constructive direction.” 

She noted that the CWP administration made efforts to “increase transparency” in the hiring process for a new director, highlighting that two of the nine voting members on the hiring committee were CWP faculty. The CWP administration also established formal channels to ensure all faculty remained informed about the candidates visiting campus.

“It’s not perfect, but there has been progress,” Brown added. “And the new director coming in is certainly a moment where there can be additional changes.”

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