ken macrorie, r.i.p.
Sad news breaking on the WPA List today: Ken Macrorie, teacher and scholar of the founding years of rhetoric and composition, passed away on 11 July. The obituary:
Ken Macrorie was born in the Mississippi River town of Moline, Ill., in 1918. He graduated from Oberllin College in Ohio and served in the Army during WWII. He then earned a master’s degree in English at the University of North Carolina where he became a civil rights activist and began his lifelong dedication to breaking down racial bigotry and bars to equality wherever he was. He taught at Michigan State University and was active in forming the teachers union. When he began work on his doctorate at Columbia University, he studied perception, concentrating on how it affected journalists and accompanying New York Times reporters on assignments. He wrote his
doctoral thesis on objectivity/subjectivity in reporting. After receiving his degree, he returned to Michigan State, eventually moving to San Francisco State and then to Western Michigan University where he made the breakthroughs that led to his national leadership role in re-educating teachers trapped in unproductive teaching methods to learn how to express themselves in print and pass that knowledge on to their students.As an educator and writer, Ken touched and changed the lives of his students by opening them up to their own latent abilities to write their stories, tell their truths, find their interests, research their curiosities, and finally organize what they needed and wanted to say into memorable prose. His books include, “Uptaught,” “Writing to be
Read,” “Telling Writing,” “Four In Depth,” “A Vulnerable Teacher,” “Twenty Teachers,” and “The I-Search Paper.” All of his books are filled with student writing alongside his, demonstrating his belief in them. Additionally, for many years, he edited the professional journal, “College Composition And Communication.”Perhaps Ken’s happiest teaching experiences were at Breadloaf Graduate School of English, a summer Masters program for Vermont’s Middlebury College. He taught there for many years after retiring from Michigan and moving to Santa Fe in 1978. He was never more certain he was on a good path than during his tenure at Breadloaf. Most of the students were already teachers who came together with concentrated energies, eager to learn and willing to put what they learned to use in their own classrooms.
When old age necessitated Ken’s staying home in Santa Fe and made him consider doubles tennis rather than his usual tough singles, he decided to indulge his wife and move to warm Las Cruces. He died there on July 11, 2009, at the Village at Northrise. He leaves his wife, Joyce; grown children, Mike (Marie), Lisa Dillman
(Dennis Hamel), Karin Imel (Scott), Kirk Dillman (Lori); and the grandchildren, Olivia, Deirdre, Jessica, Erika, Cole, and Rachel. At Ken’s request, cremation will take place and no services will be held at this time.
And a very kind tribute from Andrea Lunsford, who originally posted news of Macrorie’s death. Please note the call for donation to the Macrorie Fund.
Ken was a beloved member of the faculty at Michigan State (and other places) and for about 15 years taught at Bread Loaf every summer, where he along with Dixie Goswami really created the Writing Program here–and where Ken and his students every summer put out Yeast, a publication of student writing. His work has been, of course, hugely influential in our field–his I-Search book alone has touched tens of thousands of students–and he was always a fierce advocate for students
and teachers of writing. Bread Loaf seeks to honor Ken in some very special way–probably at the Santa Fe campus. So if anyone would like to donate to the Ken Macrorie Memorial Fund, please send donations to the Bread Loaf School of English, care of Sandy LeGault, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753, and make sure to say that the donation is for the Macrorie Fund.
I won’t attest further to Macrorie’s influence on rhetoric-composition (in part because, influential as he is, I think our field has regressed tremendously into the habits of “Engfish” that Macrorie decried), but I can attest to his influence on my own studies in rhetoric and composition. If I had to distill Macrorie’s work to a single dictum, it would be this: take your students seriously. This remains both a challenge and a provocation to a field which — despite its espoused commitment to student agency and individual voice — has yet to accommodate Macrorie’s belief that students best learn writing when allowed to say the things they want in the ways they want to say them. It is perhaps easy to dismiss such provocation as naive expressivism. Yet Macrorie (at least the Macrorie evident in his books) worked to give his students a literate power that is not so easily identified in our current FYC scene that merely accommodates student voice to the strictures of academia. For those few of my fellow rhet-comp scholars who read these jottings of mine, I urge all of us to use the sad occasion of Macrorie’s passing to look forward to the coming academic year with one goal in mind above all others: to take our students seriously.
(My response to Macrorie’s Uptaught is available here).
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So sorry to hear this news. Macrorie has been a huge influence on my teaching. I had the pleasure of meeting him just before he retired from Western Michigan. We spent an afternoon together, chatting. I can recall nuggets of his wisdom from the conversation that day, and the tomato soup he served for lunch, and his generous gift of books from his own massive library.
A fine man. A great teacher.
I had Ken as a teacher at WMU in 1970 just before I graduated. He was the only person who ever really taught me how to write. I went on to a career in journalism and never forgot two primary lessons that served me well for years: “stop one paragraph before you think you should” and his whole mantra of “truth” in writing. I’m sorry to hear of his passing but I’m glad that he lived such a full life. I only knew him for one semester but wish I had gotten to know him better.
I just learned of Ken’s death through a Bread Loaf newsletter. Not only does his method create better student writers who are able to find their own voices and truth through writing, but it also enables teachers to create relationships with their students on a human level, one beyond the usual student-teacher relationship. (Ken would enjoy that rambling thought.) This, in turn, creates persons who are aware of their own humanity. Those of us who benefitted from his wisdom and who followed his strategies (he would prefer “truths” here)have lives that are forever touched and changed. Too bad those in charge of Engfish today did not know Ken.