The Battles of Texas: Adjuncts, Composition, and Culture Wars at UT Austin

The 1980s were a consequential decade for universities. The marketization of higher education, the adjunctification of labor, and culture wars over curriculum transformed the landscape in a short period of time. The Battles of Texas traces the lived consequences of this upheaval by focusing on one influential institution: the writing program at the University of Texas at Austin.

Drawing from university records, newspaper archives, and present-day interviews, Nate Kreuter and Mark Garrett Longaker provide an on-the-ground perspective of the radical creation of UT Austin’s writing program and the subsequent events that made national headlines: the mass firing of lecturers in 1985, the national debate over ＂multicultural＂ content in the first-year curriculum, and the divorce of the writing program from the English Department in 1992. Despite these pressures, however, the authors also reveal how writing program administrators at UT Austin exerted their own agency to resist economic and political forces in service of their students and adjunct lecturers. By highlighting the parallels between the 1980s and current labor and political pressures in higher education, The Battles of Texas offers a strategic perspective for academics and administrators today.

Combining a narrative institutional history with a public digital archive, searchable and arranged in exhibits and in chronological annals, The Battles of Texas provides academics with the resources they need to survive in times of rapid transition.

Nate Kreuter is Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Georgia. He is coeditor of Rhetoric and Guns.

Mark Garrett Longaker is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, English, Communication Studies, and European Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, also published by Penn State University Press.