Charged with coordinating writing instruction on campus, computer science professor Tom Cormen started his three-year term as acting director of College's new writing program July 1.
The writing program will oversee all first-year courses -- English 2-3, English 5 and the first-year seminars. The Committee on Instruction's subcommittee on writing recommended these changes last fall in order to bring all first-year writing courses under one administrative structure, and selected Cormen from a pool of tenured faculty members.
According to Karen Gocsik, the new program's associate director, their aim is to improve communication and unity among the faculty administering first-year English courses. The program will also incorporate the student center for research, writing and information technology into the composition center.
Consequently, students will now be able find help for a variety of disciplines in one consolidated instructional center. "This is a big move for students because it is an innovative merging of the three fields," Gocsik said.
Cormen's appointment, which former Dean of the Faculty Michael Gazzaniga announced last month, means that, as director, Cormen will oversee the day-to-day activities of the program while it begins to get underway.
The writing program may also result in broader curricular changes, Cormen said. If the necessary funds are secured, plans are in place to eliminate the English 5 exemption in order to ensure that all first-year students are provided with a greater amount of writing training.
Cormen would also like to see more variety within English 5 courses. While he emphasized the importance of learning the basic of expository writing and developing an argument, Cormen said courses could be offered that focus on topics beyond literature.
Discussions on incorporating more writing courses into every major will begin within the next year, as Cormen plans to meet with all of the College's academic departments and programs to discuss this possibility.
Drawing from his background in computer science, Cormen said writing is essential for all disciplines.
"If you track the career of a computer scientist as he progresses in his or her career, the ability to make ideas known to other people is more important than the ability to write programs," Cormen said.
Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Humanities Lenore Grenoble echoed Cormen's objectives.
"Sort of the point of the writing program is that writing is a skill that you need no matter what your major is, no matter what you go on to do in life. It's something that you have to do well ... people write wherever they are," Grenoble said, indicating that students and faculty from all disciplines would be involved in the new writing program.
Cormen started a graduate course last fall, which teaches computer programming students how to write prose for the discipline, an act he said probably put him on the radar of the writing subcommittee.
"People have asked me how I feel about doing this," Cormen said. "It wasn't something I sought out, but I thought about how much I work with my students on writing, and I got really excited about it."
According to Cormen, most people in other departments have been very supportive of his appointment. And, while he said there might be some concern among the humanities departments because he is a computer science professor, he hopes they share the same goals.
"I'm not trying to ram science down the throat of humanities," Cormen said. "What I want is for our students to be good writers and to like writing."
English department chair Peter Travis said he fully supported Cormen's appointment.
"I thought it was an excellent selection," Travis said. "I think in actuality and symbolically it's very positive to find someone outside of the humanities."
Travis said he hopes a donor will give the financial support needed to extend the writing program following the three-year interim period, at which time a nationwide search would be conducted to find a specialist in writing and composition.
According to Travis, the appointment of a computer science professor as interim director does not indicate that the English department has let up on its involvement in the program but, in fact, has become much more involved than in the past.
The COI subcommittee developed out of the English department several years ago in response to a lack of administrative emphasis on writing. Prior to the new program, Dartmouth was the only Ivy League institution without a separate writing program.
