Read the following passage, adapted from compositionist David Bartholomaes ground-breaking article, titled Inventing the university, published on the Journal of Basic Writing in 1986. Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like History or Anthropology or Economics or English. He has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes-to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and an experimental psychologist the next, to work within fields where the rules governing the presentation of examples or the development of an argument are both distinct and, even to a professional, mysterious. The students have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily and comfortably one with their audience, as though they were members of the academy, or historians or anthropologists or economists; they have to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language, finding some compromise between idiosyncracy, a personal history, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline. They must learn to speak our language. Write 3 to 4 paragraphs to show your understanding and interpretation of the above passage. Some questions to consider: Based on your understanding of the passage and your own experiences, what does “inventing the university” mean? Based on your understanding of the passage, how would you interpret the phrase discourse of community? Any examples you could think of? How would you interpret that “The students have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse”? Again, any examples? Do you agree with Bartholomaes idea? Why or why not? These questions are meant to guide your thinking; you do not have to answer all of them or write your paragraphs according to the order of the questions. This is a writing exercise where I could get a sense of who you are as an (emerging) academic writer and what your (academic) writing looks like. It is not an exam or quiz, and what you write or how you write for this exercise will not affect your grade in this class. Put the 3 to 4 paragraphs in a Word or PDF document
