AROUND THE QUADS
Bizup Developing New
Writing Program
By Patrick Whittle

Joe Bizup, director of the Undergraduate Writing Program

Around the Quads

• Rushdie's Midnight's Children coming to the Apollo • General Science Course Being Created for Core • Bizup Developing New Writing Program • Bollinger Adds Two Key Administrators • Campus Bulletins • Alumni News • Transitions • In Lumine Tuo • In Memoriam • Elbaum, Carroll Receive CCYA Achievement Awards • Athletics' Bill Steinman Retires (Sort of)

Following five years of evaluation and planning, the College’s writing program is undergoing a rivitalization under the leadership of Joe Bizup, the new director of the Undergraduate Writing Program.

Bizup introduced a new writing course this semester that is expected to replace Logic and Rhetoric, a 15-year staple of the Core Curriculum. The Undergraduate Writing Program replaced the Composition Program this year as part of the same evolutionary process.

The new course differs from Logic and Rhetoric in key ways, but is very much in the same tradition, Bizup says. While students of Logic and Rhetoric provide the text for the class with their writing, the pilot course will emphasize the relationship between reading and writing. The new course includes readings of works by Edward Said, John Berger and Marianne Hirsh.

Bizup says alumni who remember Logic and Rhetoric from their first-year experience will be pleased with the new course and the direction the writing program is taking.

“Logic and Rhetoric has long been considered the ‘core of the Core.’ It has been a mainstay of the College curriculum for the better part of two decades,” says Bizup. “As a newcomer to the University, I am deeply conscious of the mantle I am inheriting. I want to develop an innovative and intellectually exciting first-year writing course that remains true to the traditions that make Columbia College so unique.”

Bizup succeeded Sandra Pierson Prior, who held the reins of the writing program from 1987–2002. Logic and Rhetoric became the writing component of the Core Curriculum in 1986.

Bizup, who had been an assistant professor of English at Yale since 1996, was chosen by a five-member search committee this spring. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and English from Virginia and a master’s in English from Maryland. He earned his Ph.D in English from Indiana, with doctoral minors in Victorian studies and cognitive science.

Dean of Academic Affairs Kathryn Yatrakis said that scores of accomplished academicians sent resumes for the post, and about a half-dozen interviews were conducted before Bizup was chosen. She said that she looks forward to Bizup introducing “the teaching of writing in exciting and innovative ways” at the College.

“We were impressed by Joe’s thoughtfulness and the new ideas that he had about how to incorporate writing into the undergraduate curriculum,” says Yatrakis. “Joe is able to continue the innovation that was first developed in Logic and Rhetoric.”

Professor Michael Scammell, a member of the search committee, said Bizup’s ambition and solid body of work made him the “preferred candidate from the moment we finished the preliminary interviews. He had thought deeply about the problems of teaching undergraduate writing and was thoroughly conversant with the vast literature on the theory and practice of the subject.”

This fall, 15 of the approximately 90 sections in the Undergraduate Writing Program are testing out Bizup’s course, and he is personally teaching one of the sections. The rest of the sections are studying Logic and Rhetoric. The new course will be refined based on this year’s experience, and is scheduled to fully replace Logic and Rhetoric next fall.

Under the course’s present plan, students will write four substantial essays and one collaborative research project. During the last five weeks of the semester, students will bring research materials to class for group analysis before writing their own research papers. Bizup says he hopes this collaborative effort will provide an “intellectual community” in which the research papers will take shape.

Beyond the new first-year course, Bizup says he would like to implement a writing tutorial program for all students. The program, which could take form as a Writing Center, would be for both accomplished and improving writers.

Bizup also is thinking about developing more writing-intensive courses for upperclassmen, and says he may work with other departments to integrate writing-based electives into their course offerings. At Yale, Bizup worked with a biology professor to offer a writing-intensive science course, which he termed “tremendously successful.”

Writing plays a major role in the undergraduate experience at the College, and its students will profit from the practice, says Bizup. “We want to create active students,” he says. “We want to foster active learning. The goal is to make students aware of the choices with which they are confronted, and how to make those choices.”