Snehal Shingavi's controversial course, "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," is no longer listed on Berkeley's roster of fall English composition courses. This is mysterious indeed. Has it been cancelled? Cancelled courses are marked as such on the roster, so that seems unlikely. Has the course description merely been pulled until it can be revised and brought into accordance with Cal's Faculty Code of Conduct? That seems unlikely, too. You don't have to erase the entire entry for a course to revise the description; all you do is pull the description from the entry until it's ready to be re-posted. Besides, from the sound of things, extensive revision was not in the offing. All Shingavi had to do was to excise the problematic statements that "This class takes as its starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination" and "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." There seems to be no logical explanation for the course's disappearance from the English web. It has simply vanished without a trace. And yet, web sites don't erase themselves. To controversy has now been added mystery. Call it the Case of the Missing Course Description.

Hunting for signs of Shingavi, I trawled through the rest of the freshman English course offerings for fall 2002. I didn't find any clues to his course's whereabouts, but I did find much of interest. For instance, I learned that Shingavi is not alone in his use of the freshman writing seminar as a political platform. Nor is he alone in his failure to mention writing--the ostensible subject of a composition course--in his description.

Most of the course offerings announce that they will be concerned in some way with the politics of race, class, and gender. Statements such as the following are typical: "We will examine how gender and race inflect the dynamics of power and identity in our readings." Such statements may seem innocuous enough, but if you look closely, you will see that they are actually deterministic--and dubious--claims about what constitutes identity, and how power works: your gender and your race are the stuff of your identity, and they are the materials of power. Not everyone would agree with such a claim. But it is taken as a given here, and in many similar statements in the fall course roster.

Some descriptions go considerably further than the one above. This one, for example, is every bit as partisan as the unabashedly pro-Palestinian stance in Shingavi's missing course description: "The approach to the course and texts will be ethno-feminist and homo-positive. We will challenge our assumptions of what constitutes 'male' and 'female' as well as 'writer' or 'artist,' letting us imagine gender while resisting the systems of racism and heteronormativity." The instructor stops short of saying that students who are not feminists, or who do not feel that homosexuality is "positive," are not welcome. But that's because he's a bit smarter than Shingavi when it comes to dissuading students of unlike mind. And for that, his course description stands.

Overall, politics seems to interest Cal's fall writing instructors more than writing does. Roughly twice as many courses promise to address politics--which they define, predictably and uniformly, in terms of race, class, gender, nation, ethnicity, ideology--than promise to address the craft and technique of writing. Many instructors seem to have forgotten entirely that they are teaching writing courses, and make no mention of writing at all in their descriptions of what students who take their class will do.

Maybe that's just as well, though, since I found a lot of bad writing in the course descriptions themselves.

There were plenty of grammatical errors like this:

"Students who enroll in this course with the intention of engaging with the material and with his/her classmates will find the work rewarding." ("His/her" refers to "Students," and should thus be "their.")

And this:

"We will also be examining other kinds of artistic production that is considered modernist..." ("Is" should be "are:" making a verb agree with the object of a preposition is a classic grammatical slip that composition teachers, of all people, should be able to avoid.)

And this:

"We will see how the scene of a male writer taking artistic license to create females of his imagination into literary characters becomes a very style-which 'actual' women take up." (Hopeless.)

I also found typos like this:

"we will examine texts that explore the meaning of the home in forming and reflecting indiviudal and national character"

Spelling errors like this:

"Is their a particular form of political membership involved in being a spectator?" ("Their" should be "there.")

And egregious instances of linguistic incapacity like this:

"In this class we will examine US prison narratives--particularly those of African Americans--and the way captive narration interrogates liberal tenants such as "progress," "freedom," "democracy," et cetera." (A tenant rents an apartment; a tenet is a belief.)

There was also much jargon and murky prose like this:

"Our readings will put pressure on the binary opposition between 'original' and 'imitation...'"

And this:

"We'll then consider [the hero's] place in the imperial project and in the construction of normative masculinity. We'll examine that positive stereotype, as well as its countertype, in order to understand something about both the reasons for its production and the effects of its deployment."

And this:

"Documenting the development of our own ideas, we will try to responsibly address those aspects of circumstance which our writing crops or foregrounds, and thus to become more aware and dialectically rigorous thinkers."

These examples of obfuscatory prose do not bode well for either attracting students (who are not likely to register for courses whose descriptions they cannot follow) or for teaching those who do enroll how to write clear, persuasive prose.

So, in fairness to Shingavi, he is not alone. Ideologically motivated courses abound in his department, as do courses that shirk their pedagogical responsibilities. Even Shingavi's great sin--his willingness to say that some will not be welcome in his class--reappears in other descriptions, albeit in a pedagogically acceptable way. Where Shingavi wrote that "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections," one especially rigorous instructor attempts to dissuade slackers: "Those who are looking for an easy way to fulfill a requirement are encouraged to look elsewhere." The language is strikingly similar, and one can see how readily the rhetoric of righteous pedagogy (stay away from my course if you don't want to work) can morph into the rhetoric of righteous ideology (stay away from my course if you don't believe). In a writing program where most courses are making political inquiry the vehicle for teaching writing, and where many get so caught up in that political inquiry that they lose sight of the fact that it is not supposed to be their principal objective, there is bound to be the occasional Shingavi who takes things too far. Or, more precisely, there is bound to be the occasional Shingavi who gets caught taking things too far. And in such an environment, the real problem is not the person who gets caught, but the people who don't.