https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/pity-writing-studies-the-field-that
Obscure research is one thing; a failure to support teaching is another. A truly toxic dynamic for our university system is that the conferences and journals and organizations are run by the tenured, but the tenured don’t teach low-level classes. In some writing programs at research universities tenured faculty don’t teach undergraduate writing at all. (I in fact know of several professors who had to go to great lengths within their institutions to be allowed to continue teaching basic or freshman writing.) Instead, freshman writing is dominantly taught by adjuncts and, at schools with graduate programs, grad students. Again, the actual brick-and-mortar work of teaching students how to write sentences, paragraphs, and papers is essential to the finances of programs that run writing classes but disdained by many of the faculty who are funded by such classes. But the work continues, and freshman writing is sometimes cited as the single most commonly-taught class in the American university system. The people who teach such classes are typically overworked and undertrained, and they could use better insights into the process. More than once at conferences I met adjunct instructors and professors at teaching colleges who ruefully pointed out that the large conference programs contained not a single presentation that would be of use to people looking to teach actual writing. But the tenured at research universities don’t teach those classes, and the contingent labor that does lacks the voice to induce change.