Purdue English and the Jurisdictional Wars: Convenient Beliefs in a STEM Empire

The “convenient beliefs” idea comes from Stephen Turner’s good bad theories framework. Beliefs function as social glue, status signals, and institutional maintenance tools. They coordinate hiring, teaching, grants, and self-image while explaining little about reality. Purdue English is a clean, legible instance of a broader American pattern. What makes it useful as a case study is its clarity. In a land-grant STEM powerhouse, the underlying logic of English departments becomes harder to hide. The convenient beliefs stand closer to the surface because they are under constant pressure to justify themselves in terms administrators and engineers recognize.
Purdue English contains at least three semi-distinct regimes occupying the same institutional shell. Rhetoric and composition, along with professional and technical writing, form the service empire. Literature and theory form the prestige inheritance layer. Creative writing functions as the department’s public-facing romance, useful for attracting majors, donors, and undergraduate aspiration. These are not equal partners. They are a negotiated settlement.
ICaP stands for Introductory Composition at Purdue. It is the department’s first-year writing program, one of the largest and most studied composition programs in the United States.
Every student at Purdue, regardless of major, typically passes through it. That means thousands of engineering, science, agriculture, and technology students sitting in writing classes taught largely by graduate student instructors from the English department. It is the engine that justifies the department’s existence in a STEM university because it creates an unkillable dependency. You cannot eliminate English without eliminating mandatory first-year writing, and you cannot eliminate mandatory first-year writing without a fight that no administrator wants.
For the department’s internal power structure, controlling ICaP means controlling graduate student labor deployment, course design, pedagogical philosophy, and a substantial portion of the department’s budget justification. Whoever directs ICaP has more real institutional leverage than most tenured literature faculty, which is why Bradley Dilger’s position as director gives him power that does not map onto his rank in any simple way.
The Purdue OWL, the Online Writing Lab, is the public-facing complement to ICaP. Where ICaP serves Purdue students directly, the OWL serves the entire internet. It became the dominant online resource for writing instruction globally, which is an extraordinary piece of soft power for an English department to possess. Between them, ICaP and the OWL are the reason Purdue English survives budget scrutiny in ways that most humanities departments at comparable institutions do not.
Rhetoric and composition carry the department’s real leverage. ICaP and the Purdue OWL are not just programs. They are proof of indispensability. They teach thousands of students, produce visible outputs, and give the department a hard answer when deans ask what English does for a university built around engineering and applied science. Literature and theory retain symbolic authority. They connect the department to the older idea of English as a guardian of cultural inheritance and serious reading. But their claim is softer. They cannot point to the same scale of service or measurable institutional dependency. So they survive by attaching themselves to broader legitimating vocabularies like global context, critical thinking, and cultural understanding. These phrases are elastic enough to justify almost anything while committing the department to almost nothing.
The department needs a set of propositions that can reconcile two facts that do not naturally fit together. Its material survival depends heavily on service teaching and professional writing. Its internal self-respect depends on the idea that literary study is a distinctive and irreplaceable form of knowledge. So the department asserts that literary study uniquely produces empathy, adaptability, and communication skills indispensable in a twenty-first century economy. That claim flatters engineering administrators, reassures parents, and allows literature faculty to describe their work in terms legible to a STEM environment. It is rarely tested against alternatives. It functions less as an empirical claim than as a coalition bridge.
The ten convenient beliefs operate as follows.
The most fundamental is that literary study is a distinct and irreplaceable form of knowledge rather than a set of interpretive skills whose value depends entirely on what they are applied to and by whom. This belief supports the department’s existence as an autonomous unit with its own hiring authority, curriculum control, and graduate program. The alternative, that literary analysis is a transferable skill best integrated into other disciplines rather than housed in a freestanding department, is never seriously entertained because it would dissolve the institutional structure that provides everyone’s livelihood.
The second is that close reading produces genuine insight into texts rather than sophisticated rationalization of prior ideological commitments. The department presents itself as a truth-seeking enterprise in which careful attention to language produces discoveries. The costly alternative is confronting what the research record shows, that readers with different prior commitments produce systematically different close readings of the same texts, and that training in close reading does not reduce this variance but often increases it by giving readers more sophisticated tools for finding what they already expected to find.
The third is that the current canon, including its recent expansions, reflects genuine literary quality rather than the accumulated hiring and publishing decisions of a specific professional class at a specific historical moment. The department presents canonical inclusion as the outcome of critical evaluation. The costly alternative is acknowledging that canonicity is largely a product of which texts were assigned in influential graduate programs, which scholars had the institutional positions to write about them, and which presses had the distribution networks to make those arguments widely available. Klingenstein showed this for the earlier period of Jewish entry into English departments. It remains equally true now.
The fourth is that theory is a tool for understanding literature rather than a substitute for it. Theory arrived in American English departments in the 1970s and never left. It provided a universal solvent that could be applied to any text regardless of the reader’s formation in the specific tradition the text came from. The department presents this as methodological sophistication. The costly alternative is acknowledging that theory often functions as a way of generating publishable arguments about texts without requiring the kind of deep formation in the tradition that genuine criticism demands. You do not need to know Latin to write a Foucauldian analysis of a medieval text. Whether you should write one without knowing Latin is the question the department prefers not to ask. At Purdue, theory has been domesticated into pragmatic and STEM-adjacent forms, science and literature, games and narrative, environmental ethics, which avoids the ivory tower label that would hurt in Indiana while preserving the credential of sophistication.
The fifth is that diversity of representation in the curriculum is equivalent to or substitutable for depth of formation in any particular tradition. Adding more voices to the syllabus is presented as intellectual enrichment. The costly alternative is acknowledging that breadth and depth are in genuine tension, that a curriculum covering more traditions necessarily covers each one less thoroughly, and that the loss of depth in any particular tradition is a real cost that falls disproportionately on students who came hoping to be formed by that tradition rather than exposed to a survey of many. At Purdue, the English in a Global Context major and course lists featuring Black women writers, Asian American literature, literature and imperialism, and disability studies satisfy DEI expectations in a red-state public university while maintaining the LTC track. This allows the department to signal progressive values without the activist intensity of coastal institutions, a calibration perfect for a Midwestern public institution navigating state politics.
The sixth is that graduate training in English is a reasonable investment for the students who undertake it. The department presents its doctoral program as preparation for an academic career. The costly alternative is confronting the tenure-track job market honestly. The department trains far more PhD students than the market can absorb, and the question of whether continuing to admit students under these conditions serves the students or primarily serves the department’s need for cheap teaching labor is never asked with adequate seriousness. Graduate students supply the labor that runs the composition machine. The system depends on their presence even as it cannot absorb most of them into the career it nominally trains them for. Job-market-ready becomes the key phrase that holds this together. It reassures students, satisfies administrators, and disciplines internal dissent. It converts a structural problem into a rhetorical solution. The department counts composition directorships at two-year colleges and professional writing positions as placement successes, papering over the distinction between what LTC doctoral students imagined when they entered the program and what the market provides. The placement data masks the reality of contingent labor. The belief that doctoral training is a sound investment protects faculty from the guilt of an arrangement that requires their labor while offering them diminishing prospects.
The seventh is that the political commitments dominating the department are the conclusions of rigorous critical thinking rather than the prior commitments of a self-selected professional class. The department presents its overwhelming ideological uniformity as the natural outcome of careful analysis. The costly alternative is the one Peter Novick identified in the historical profession and that applies equally here. The profession selects for people who have already internalized its assumptions, which means the next generation looks remarkably like the current one not because the evidence compels the same conclusions but because the hiring process filters for prior agreement.
The eighth is that the skills English departments teach are valuable to students in ways that justify the cost of acquiring them. The department presents literary study as training in critical thinking, communication, and humanistic understanding that serves students across careers. The costly alternative is asking why employers do not share this assessment, why English majors face persistently worse employment outcomes than graduates of more technically oriented programs, and whether the skills the department teaches are the ones it claims to teach or something quite different and less transferable. The rhetoric of readiness has a shelf life. When the department claims it teaches skills for the new economy, it invites comparison with technical programs. If English majors do not outperform peers in communication tasks, the justification fails. The department avoids this test by relying on the belief that humanistic study has a value that metrics do not catch. This contradicts the data-driven language it uses to talk to the provost.
The ninth is that the department’s hostility to certain texts and authors reflects principled critical judgment rather than coalition enforcement. When a department decides that certain writers are too problematic to teach, or that certain critical approaches are too retrograde to assign, it presents these decisions as the outcome of careful evaluation. The costly alternative is acknowledging that these decisions track the political commitments of the dominant coalition with suspicious precision, and that the writers and approaches excluded tend to be the ones that would most directly challenge the department’s current convenient beliefs.
The tenth and deepest is that the department is the appropriate custodian of the literary tradition it studies. This belief makes all the others possible. It rests on the claim that professional training in literary analysis produces a special relationship to texts that justifies institutional authority over their interpretation and transmission. The costly alternative, which Klingenstein’s work implies without fully stating, is that custodianship requires formation as well as analysis, that a tradition has a character that can only be transmitted by people who inhabit it rather than study it from outside, and that a department whose members relate to the Christian literary inheritance primarily as an object of ideological critique rather than as a living tradition to be inhabited and transmitted has a weaker claim to custodianship than it presents to the world. The department wraps service functions in the robes of culture to maintain its dignity. The result is a department that speaks two languages and belongs fully to neither.
Power in this system follows a clear hierarchy. At the top sit the provost and deans, who set budgets, enrollment targets, and accountability metrics, and the engineering deans whose demand for writing instruction determines how much of the service empire survives. The operational center is occupied by whoever directs ICaP and the OWL. Bradley Dilger as ICaP director controls the single most important institutional lever, first-year composition, overseeing massive teaching loads and graduate labor deployment. The OWL leadership controls the department’s most visible external product, a rare humanities asset that administrators can point to with measurable pride. Below them sit the Rhet/Comp faculty who built and maintain the service infrastructure, figures like the late Janice Lauer, who founded Purdue’s Rhet/Comp PhD program in 1980 and essentially created the department’s national brand, and Irwin Weiser, who trained generations of graduate instructors and anchored the department’s teaching culture. Literature and theory faculty, represented by figures like John Duvall, Thomas Rickert, and Dino Franco Felluga, control internal intellectual legitimacy and the LTC doctoral track but operate with limited leverage over resource allocation. Creative writing provides undergraduate appeal and donor sentiment without significantly influencing core power flows.
The key structural insight is that the doctrine layer still believes it runs the department. The operational layer makes the department indispensable. The constraint layer decides how much of both gets to exist. The entire system is stabilized by the convenient beliefs because doctrine gets to say it is about literature, culture, and critical insight, operations gets to say it teaches everyone and produces usable output, and administration gets to say the unit justifies its budget. No one has to fully confront that the department’s survival depends far more on composition and professional writing than on literary study.
Generative artificial intelligence now disrupts this arrangement from below. If the service empire justified itself by teaching writing skills that the job market requires, a tool that automates those tasks makes the human instructor’s position harder to defend. The department’s response is instructive. It has begun arguing that English teaches a human element that technology lacks, emphasizing ethics, human connection, and the qualities of judgment that cannot be automated. This shift forces the service layer to adopt the language of the prestige layer. The composition directors now sound like the literature faculty. They talk about humanistic depth and critical consciousness to justify budgets that were previously secured by enrollment numbers and measurable outcomes. The rhetoric of readiness gives way to the rhetoric of irreplaceable humanity.
This shift will not be seamless. The service layer borrowed the prestige layer’s language because it needed a new justification. But the prestige layer’s language has always worked by resisting measurement. The moment you claim to teach what machines cannot replicate, you invite the question of how you know, which is the same question the department has always managed to avoid by pointing to ICaP enrollment figures and OWL traffic. The automation challenge forces the convenient beliefs into the open in ways the previous arrangement allowed them to avoid.
Purdue English survives because it occupies a middle ground. It is useful enough to justify its budget and established enough to make removal costly. The convenient beliefs are the translation layer that allows a divided institution to present itself as unified, a precarious labor system to present itself as professional formation, and a set of historically contingent practices to present themselves as the natural shape of literary knowledge. In a STEM empire, English does not win by proving it is indispensable in the old sense. It wins by making itself difficult to remove without creating visible damage. The convenient beliefs are how it explains that position to itself and to everyone else.
The people who define what English means are not the same people who make sure English survives, and the beliefs that hold the department together are precisely the ones that prevent those two facts from colliding.