DISCIPLINE AND PROFESSION: Can the Field of Rhetoric and Writing Be Both?

Imagine that virtually all 4,000-plus postsecondary institutions in the United States required all entering students to take an introductory statistics course. This course—let’s call it Stats 101—exists because of long-standing tradition and the near-universal belief that students will use statistics frequently in college and later in their careers. But in fewer than 100 of the 4,000 institutions can an undergraduate actually major in statistics; in fact, only a handful of these institutions even have a statistics department. As a result, the Stats 101 course is nearly always housed in the math department—but no one considers this strange