When Professor of Education Richard J. Light interviewed hundreds of students in an exhaustive survey on teaching at Harvard, he found that undergraduates wanted to learn one skill more than any other: writing.

At Harvard, however, what students want sometimes has little to do with what the University values. Prestige, money and tenure go to those who publish, not necessarily those who teach.

The discipline of writing has only one endowed professorship, the Boylston professor of rhetoric, who is not a rhetorician but a poet.

And the body charged with teaching every undergraduate the art of composition, which has no tenured members, does not even hold the status of committee that the Linguistics Department is fighting desperately to avoid.

It is the Expository Writing Program, and those who work in it say that in the symbolic hierarchy of Harvard, they are at the very bottom, ghettoized and isolated from those who should be their peers.

The University responds that symbolism is not reality, and the mission of teaching students to write is central to the work of the faculty.

"It is the single most fundamental academic skill," says Dean for Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell, the person charged with overseeing every aspect of an undergraduate's educational experience.

But Expos teachers, students and even some Faculty members ask if the attention devoted to that mission is adequate, and if the symbolically low status of the discipline and teaching of writing reflects the reality at a place where research is often valued over practice.

Writing Not Included

Over the past year, Buell and the Educational Policy Committee crafted a report calling for a reexamination of the undergraduate concentrations' curricula, and writing was not part of it.

Here, perhaps, is where the reality of educational policy at Harvard seems to mirror the Expos program's symbolic place at the bottom of the Faculty totem pole.

"I'm not sure the University's commitment [to teaching writing] is that strong," says Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures Patrick K. Ford '66, a member of the Faculty committee on Expos. "People who teach composition are considered to be second-class citizens, isolated from the rest of the intellectual activity on campus."

Students retain writing skills and "approaches to knowledge" like those taught in the Core far longer than much of their academic training, says James D. Wilkinson '65, director of the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.

"We have some appalling statistics about how rapidly factual knowledge is lost after students graduate if they don't stay in the same [academic] field," he says. "What they tend to remember is how to use evidence and things like how to write...[there are] all sorts of reasons why writing should be more consciously pursued as a goal."

And Expos is the only place where University Hall officially places the responsibility for impart- ing an understanding of how to write.

No single course, no matter how effective,could do the job, says Wilkinson. There must be apartnership, a curricular link between Expos andall of the courses that follow.