William Rainey Harper and the Ideology of Service at Junior Colleges

We in composition studies have much to learn from the history of the two-year college movement in the United States. Our rhetorical roots suggest we attend to the ethical and political dimensions of public discourse, and few phenomena in the discourse of higher education present ethical and political problems as conflicted as do two-year colleges. We know that two-year colleges provide cheap, convenient, and open-admissions options for college students of various backgrounds. If mindful of Mina Shaughnessy’s pioneering work on the logic of errors in New York City in the 1970s, we may even see the open-admissions institution as a