As soon as they feel comfortable in the middle-group courses, most students find the educational experience euphoric. They generally revere their section leaders ("He's a God," sighed one Cliffie), and accept his criticism as the kind advice of a helpful expert. Most look with solicitous condescension on those stranded in the renamed version of Gen Ed A.
The program's administrators also worry about what's happening to average students. Putting down the over-confident has never been a problem. "It's easy," says Rosenblatt, "to get across the message, 'you may be the best thing your high school English teacher has ever seen, but you're not the best thing we've ever seen.'" With the middle level courses, keeping the best minds sufficiently stimulated has also disappeared as a difficulty. The others are more of a problem.
"The solid B student may pass out of our hands, still writing the kind of mechanical prose that is all you need to get B's around here. He often has the ideas to do A work and we wish we were able to teach him how to write it," Rosenblatt says.
Kiely expressed the same concern in a recent article in the Radcliffe Quarterly. "Style is not an incidental appendage of the mind. Nor is the correct and graceful use of language a simple matter of well regulated memory." Students whose "good preparation" in secondary school has made them complacent about their writing are the targets of Kiely's worry.
Rosenblatt talks vaguely of extending the "spirit" of the middle-group courses into the rest of the expository writing program. This year he has asked the heads of regular sections to encourage students to choose their own approaches to assigned material.
The vision is an appealing one, but it has sharp practical limits. No one contemplates throwing away Inquiry and Expression and turning all freshmen loose in specialized writing seminars like the middle-group course. "We just can't do that," says Rosenblatt, "with people who haven't demonstrated the ability to put sentences together." And for those, it will probably always be questionable whether spirit or renaming can make Gen Ed A more than a necessary evil of the freshman year