The isolation betrays a problem far larger thansimply a lack of curricular continuity, Exposteachers say: A lack of respect not only for thediscipline of writing but for those who teach it.

For example, in the English Department--atraditional base at some other schools for theteaching of writing--graduate students shy awayfrom the teaching of writing, according todepartment Chair Leo Damrosch.

"I think it [teaching writing] gets lessrespect if it seems like a grunt job that nobodywants," he says. "That seems to me really aghetto."

And this missing link with the Faculty makes itdifficult for Expos teachers to properly preparetheir students for the academic rigors of thefollowing three years.

"We didn't talk to the faculty in differentdisciplines about writing problems they saw...wehave an obligation to the students to teach themhow to write for their next three years atHarvard," says Sarah King, a former Expos teacher."Either that, or we should just admit this is atotally separate discipline."

The neglect among Faculty which Expos teacherssee spills over into long-term plans for theUniversity, evidenced in the plans for theupcoming $1 billion FAS capital campaign.

Faculty committees are preparing to interviewevery single professor in humanities disciplines,but they will speak to only a "representativesampling" of Expos teachers, according to GraduateSchool Dean Cristoph J. Wolff, who chairs theFaculty committee on the planned HumanitiesCenter.

Expos teachers argue that the program needs therespect of the Faculty--and an acknowledgement ofExpos not as a service arm of the FAS but as adiscipline of colleagues like any department.

"It's a mystery to me why actual writing isunder-credited at Harvard," says a former Exposfaculty member. "If you went to an aeronauticsinstitute, and half of the institute wasdescribing planes and the other half flyingplanes, you'd think the hotshots would be in theflying part."

Beneath the concerns with tenured postsand faculty attention, the essential question formany is not how Expos faculty members feel aboutHarvard but how Harvard teaches its students towrite.

"I think that writing skills are not as good asthey should be and maybe not as good as they usedto be," says Michael B. McElroy, chair of theEarth and Planetary Sciences Department.

Within the undergraduate concentrations, manyprofessors say department courses fail to build onwhat is taught in Expos. The result is somethingakin to an academic free-for-all.

"Someday you write a paper with someone whoknows how to write and they beat on you until youknow how to do it," says Howard M. Georgi III '68,chair of the Physics Department.

"It's a course-by-course basis," says Thomas N.Bisson, chair of the History Department. Writingis addressed in the tutorial system, butessentially "it is not done more systematicallythan that."

Wilkinson says this approach to teaching isinadequate. And the present system of keepingExpository Writing separate from the rest of thecurriculum does not work, he says.