Haswell, Richard H. “NCTE/CCCC’s Recent War on Scholarship.” Written Communication 22.2 (April 2005): 198-223.

NCTE and CCCC – the two professional organizations most closely concerned with composition instruction and scholarship – foster and promote qualitative knowledge at the expense of RAD-based research of their academic area (i.e. research that it replicable, aggregable, and data supported), while systematically produced knowledge in data-infused studies flourishes in non-peer reviewed and surrounding disciplines or apprentices to the field.  

In order to illustrate the NCTE/CCCC’s “war on scholarship,” Haswell uses the words and work of Stephen Witte.  To Witte, scholarship was ecumenical, particularly in the combination of “discovery and validation,” and he attempted more than twenty years ago to encourage “marriage” of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies in his field (Witte 207 qtd. in Haswell 199).  Instead, the binary relationship between the two has only proliferated.  Through RAD based research of his own, Haswell offers a study that quantifies the rapid increase of research into three hallmarks of composition: the research paper, the gain in student writing from the beginning to the end of a writing course and peer evaluation.  Correspondingly, NCTE and CCCC see a sharp decrease in the publication of research into these areas that grows over time (the historical records of scholarship are observed from the 1940s to the 1990s).  Haswell also separates RAD study from “empirical” research.  As he points out, “[n]umbers may assist but do not define RAD scholarship,” since the gap created between the qualitative and the quantitative has been one of the tools utilized to engender false dichotomies (201).  Likewise “it avoids the term theory, not because RAD inquiry distrusts theory (just the opposite, theory is implicated in any act of RAD inquiry) but because the definition does not want to risk the most pernicious dichotomy of all: research versus theory” (Haswell 201).  He also chronicles the failure of NCTE/CCCC to generate an annual bibliography of its scholarship that would help enable an effective review of and extension to research which is “testable, replicable, [and] accruable” (217).  Ultimately Haswell compares NCTE/CCCC’s selective support of one kind of scholarship and hostility toward another to “a body…undermin[ing] its own immune system,” given that data revealing of its practices is essential to its growth and improvement (219). 

Quantitative

Possessing quantity, magnitude, or spatial extent

Qualitative

Relating to, connected or concerned with, quality or qualities

(Interestingly enough, OED points out that qualitative is “now usually in implied or expressed opposition to quantitative” – so obviously Haswell is right to contrast the two and [re]express the thought that they were not always contraries).

Aggregable

Capable of being collected into one mass (as opposed to something short-lived and lacking in consistency/cohesion – Haswell uses the word “ephemeral” to compare: “One piece of scholarship proved ephemeral; the other proved aggregable” [205]).

ecumenical

Belonging to the whole world; universal, general, world-wide (In contrast to “warlike” according to Haswell: “[Witte’s] belief in scholarship was at root ecumenical, just the opposite of warlike” [198]).