Book Review: Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work

Karen Mooney

Professor Barbara Gleason

English B8104: Basic Writing: Theory and Practice

December 16, 2014

Book Review: Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work

Maher, Jane. Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work. Urbana, IL: National Council of

            Teachers of English, 1997. Print.

More than four decades after her untimely death, Mina Shaughnessy’s presence still resonates in writing classrooms and in the debate over college equity. Jane Maher’s biography, Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work, demonstrates why that is so. Mina Shaughnessy directed the writing program at City College of New York in 1970 when it opened its doors to anyone with a high school diploma. She pioneered the discipline of basic writing to serve them. Through the narrative of Shaughnessy’s life, Maher dramatizes one of the noblest experiments of educational reform—college open admissions—and the role that writing played in it. Though unprepared students are now largely pushed out of universities and directed to community colleges, the issue of how they should be taught remains at the center of the conversation about education in a democracy. Shaughnessy’s experience and writings still prevail.

Jane Maher is well suited to the task of animating Shaughnessy’s life and mission. The child of an Italian firefighter from Brooklyn, she was the first in her family to go to college, enrolling as an open admissions student at the College of Staten Island, a division of the City University of New York. Attending part-time, it took her seven years to finish. Despite that fitful start, Maher went on to earn a Masters Degree in English Literature at Columbia and a Ph.D. in English Education at NYU. She has taught basic writing since the year Shaughnessy died. Maher writes in the Acknowledgments to her book, that Shaughnessy’s seminal work, Errors and Expectations, was her lifeline in those first days in the classroom. She was motivated to write this biography because of her admiration for that work and for Shaughnessy’s leadership in the field. She refers to Shaughnessy as “Mina” throughout.

Mina Shaughnessy, the person, was an enigma. As Maher writes, she “seemed to be the quintessential New Yorker: tall and beautiful, sophisticated, well spoken, well read, well dressed, interested in literature, art, music, and politics” (1).  She was all of those things. But she was also from the West, she was held back from advancing professionally, in part, because she was a woman, and her personal life was far from ideal. She was an outsider who fought desperately for acceptance among the university establishment, a battle that helped her to identify in some measure with her students. Yet Shaughnessy never waivered in her respect for the traditional academic disciplines of research, scholarship, and publication, and she sought always to defend what she did in her classroom in terms the academic mainstream would appreciate. It was her exhaustive research and analysis of student work that became Errors and Expectations. Ultimately she would reach the center of the scholarly world but via a non-traditional path.

That path began in 1924 in a South Dakota gold mining town where she was born Mina Pendo. Her mother was a teacher, her father a miner with an eighth grade education. In “Writing the Life of Mina Shaughnessy,” Maher suggests that may have helped Shaughnessy connect to her students: “it’s easy for me to imagine Mina thinking of her own father: with his eighth grade education, he couldn't read or write "properly" either, but that wasn't his fault any more than it was the students' fault. Mina never confused a lack of training with a lack of ability” (54).

Shaughnessy excelled academically, but she was a standout in speech and theater. For college, she went East, studying speech and theater at Northwestern University outside Chicago. Standing an impressive 5 feet 11 inches tall, she was a striking blonde. College trained her to move and speak with extraordinary control. No one who met her failed to recognize her physical presence, what scholar E.D. Hirsch, Jr. would later describe as “that electrifying effect” (21).  She loved the traditional adornments of femininity—nice clothes, makeup, perfume—which both attracted and repelled the mostly-male professional antagonists she encountered as she built a groundbreaking writing program at City College. Her manner, when challenged, reflected a traditional feminine posture. Shaughnessy never turned confrontational, always remaining measured and well spoken. While her pleasure in these feminine attributes was sincere, she also learned to use these charms to ease her way.

Upon graduating college, Mina went to New York but within months realized the uncertainty of an actor’s life was not for her. She earned a Masters Degree in English at Columbia University as a special student, enrolling part-time, supporting herself with a variety of jobs, but she could not afford to continue on to a Ph.D. Although she aimed to teach on the college level, the lack of that terminal degree—and her gender--held her back from finding a full-time job. Instead, she signed on as a research assistant in the writing of a biography of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Shaughnessy wrote half of it without earning a by-line. Though she gained experience as a writer and researcher, the work also exposed her to the lofty world of power and influence. Both prepared her for the academic and leadership tasks she would later take on, but if her authorship had been acknowledged, she might have obtained the college teaching position that she sought.

While on a research mission to the New York Public Library, Mina met Don Shaughnessy, a history Ph.D. student at Columbia. They shared a passion for books, art, and New York life, and they married after a whirlwind two-month courtship. It was 1953, and Mina embarked on the traditional path of marriage. She wrote to a friend about her contentment at tending to her “domestic duties.” That included putting off her own educational goals. The decision to abandon the pursuit of a Ph.D., Maher writes, “would haunt her for the rest of her life” (51). Instead, she spent five years as an editor at McGraw-Hill, turning raw manuscripts into published works. The experience gave her an extraordinary ability to help writers improve their work, an important foundation to her later pursuits. But at McGraw-Hill she would be shocked to learn that even experts and professional writers could not write well, despite their fine educations. She would keep that in mind when the criticism of her basic writing students grew fierce.

However, a traditional marriage would not be hers. The relationship between Mina and Don cooled, though they never divorced. A cancer scare left her unable to have children. Don Shaughnessy eventually found work with the State Department, taking overseas assignments that took him away for months, sometimes years, at a time. During his absences, Mina had relationships with other men, but she poured most of her energy into her work.

In 1961, Shaughnessy left McGraw-Hill to teach composition and literature part-time to remedial students at Hunter College, the kind of students she would make it the hallmark of her life to champion. She had finally made her way into a university, though it was through this back door. Even when she later took a full-time teaching position at Hofstra University on Long Island, she continued to work with those remedial students at Hunter. Shaughnessy was gaining a reputation as a teacher who never patronized students, who sincerely cared about their success, and who had extraordinary gifts at helping them learn to write.

Six years later, Mina got the call that would change her life. City College offered her a position teaching writing to students in a program for minority students, later called SEEK, that was growing even before Open Admissions. Three months before she was to start, the head of the program suffered a heart attack and she suddenly became its director. Her signature work was about to begin. The teaching of writing was not considered a true academic discipline at the time; the Conference on College Composition and Communication had been formed less than 20 years earlier. Virtually no scholarly probing had been done on how to teach students who were inadequately prepared. Yet at City College, the number of unprepared students was soaring. When Shaughnessy arrived at City College in 1967, one-third of the English Department’s courses were in writing, two-thirds in literature. Two years later, it was already the reverse. And the Open Admissions policy did not take effect until 1970.

Despite the mandate and the surging numbers of students under her charge, Shaughnessy found herself on hostile terrain. The English Department at City College was among the most conservative. Many faculty members opposed opening the doors to students who needed help writing and Shaughnessy became a lightning rod for their hostility. She was given little support and even fewer resources. Not only did the senior faculty resent her for her work with unprepared students, they still held it against her that she didn’t have a Ph.D. That cost her several promotions. Despite the resistance, Shaughnessy collected a committed staff around her, the close-knot group sharing pedagogical insights, developing classroom materials, and creating a writing center. As one devoted student later called, “she was fighting on two fronts: trying to figure out how to teach us while trying to figure out how to get the college to let her and the rest of the SEEK staff do that teaching” (112).

Even when the campus was shut down by the protests that roiled the country in the spring of 1969, Shaughnessy held class. Another of her students tells Maher: “As long as we could get on campus, she refused to cancel her classes. Mina had decided that she would practice her "politics" in the classroom, not on a soapbox. She told us that she was providing the SEEK students with the tools to think, to write, and to read; that was the greatest contribution she could make” (114). When other offices were vandalized, Shaughnessy’s were spared.

Shaughnessy never doubted her students’ inherent intelligence; she came to realize they were just stunningly unprepared. A close examination of their work showed consistent patterns of errors that were not arbitrary. She collected thousands of their essays and analyze them, categorizing errors according to their sources, recognizing the differences between spoken and written language, different language traditions and first languages, confusions over particular aspects of grammar and punctuation, and spelling mistakes. She and her staff developed ways to address each of them. City College was becoming the country’s biggest laboratory for basic writing instruction, and Shaughnessy wanted to share what she and her instructors were learning. She applied for a grant to write a resource book for teachers and received funding from the Carnegie Foundation to do it.

Shaughnessy’s acclaim was growing. Between 1973 and 1977, she delivered eight addresses at major conferences, always arguing for a student-centered approach to teaching and for an educational system open to all. The most stirring of her speeches was delivered at the MLA Conference in December 1975, the address interrupted repeatedly by applause and concluding with a standing ovation. In “Diving In” she argued for the notion that it was the teacher who needed remediation, calling upon teachers to dive beneath the surface of their assumptions and meet students where they are. Two years later, at another MLA conference, she would once again make that appeal, saying “To prepare only some people to flourish in a democracy and then to argue that they are the only people with the native ability to do so is to consent to the existence, within the boundaries of what we call public education, of the most exclusive country club of all” (205). Shaughnessy’s call to a higher purpose touched a chord with teachers across the country.

But even as Shaughnessy and her staff blazed a new trail in writing instruction that teachers around the country were clamoring to learn and the number of her own students was growing, the tide was already turning. The conservative backlash after the progressive 60’s, along with New York City’s near bankruptcy, led to drastic cuts in City College budgets, including in the basic writing program.

When her book was finally published in January 1977, programs of basic writing and open admissions were already in retreat. Yet the book was met with enormous acclaim, receiving glowing reviews from both mainstream and scholarly publications. The Atlantic Monthly recognized it as a “book about the spirit as well as the mechanics of teaching.” But for a woman who had craved acceptance as a scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s review was particularly satisfying, praising her for bringing to the field of basic writing the same “first rate scholarship” and “all the critical and creative intelligence that literary scholars have traditionally been trained to lavish on T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.” The invitations for her to speak and publish continued to grow.

Less than two months after the publication of Errors and Expectations, Shaughnessy was diagnosed with kidney cancer. She fought the disease with the same patience and resolve with which she had moved mountains in her career, enduring numerous rounds of surgery and chemotherapy, but she ultimately lost that battle in November 1978. She was 54 years old.

Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work is a worthy tribute to her achievements. It is a literary biography, the narrative told with generous support from the written record Shaughnessy and others have left behind. For much of her life, letter writing was still central to communication and long distance phone calls were expensive and rare. Shaughnessy’s brother, friends, and colleagues shared their correspondence with Maher. Those closest to Shaughnessy also gave Maher insight into her life during lengthy interviews. In the book, Maher also generously excerpts passages from Shaughnessy’s published works. Several keys works, including the famous “Diving In” address, are included as Appendices in the book. Although the passages included in the main narrative are often lengthy, they are so well written and, in the case of interviews, so well spoken that they do not seem tedious. Shaughnessy lived in a literary world, among writers and speakers who valued language highly and who cherished the well-drawn sentence. Maher matches them in her own prose, the whole a pleasure to read.

Still, Maher faced a difficult challenge in portraying Mina Shaughnessy’s life. She was, in the end, a charismatic person, and while charisma dazzles it may also blind. She died young and at the peak of her influence, which may have burnished her image in the recollection. And Shaughnessy had tremendous control. Les Berger, the City College dean who hired her, recalled “Mina may have ben depressed, disgusted, overwhelmed, who knows what emotions he felt during those tumultuous years but she never showed them in the "arena." She "performed" for one of the toughest academic audiences in the country at that time, and the performance was always flawless” (103).

Maher does not probe the messier parts of Shaughnessy’s life. She describes Shaughnessy’s father, Albert Pendo, as “brusque, rude, and obnoxious;” one summer her mother took Mina and her brother away for a respite from his temper. Mina was anxious about introducing him to her husband. More significantly Don Shaughnessy is a shadowy figure in the book, never becoming a fully defined figure. Maher treats the Shaughnessy’s marriage with extreme delicately, never exploring why the relationship cooled. Faithfulness did not seem to be part of the Shaughnessy’s bargain in the end; the marriage may have served certain purposes of social convention and appearance for both of them. Maher mentions that Mina had relationships with a number of men, and one long-lasting relationship in particular, but she goes no further and does not judge her. In an unpublished interview, Maher explains her choice to go lightly on these more complicated parts of Shaughnessy’s life for two reasons: she expected her book to be published by a literary press, and to be read by a literary rather than a general audience, but several of the men in Shaughnessy’s life also threatened legal action if they were identified.

The biography is more thorough as a record of Shaughnessy’s work, but it is not a critical view of that work. Maher never challenges Shaughnessy’s argument that colleges, and City College in particular, should educate all who arrived, even though the resources to do so were never provided. We hear little from those who oppose Shaughnessy’s views; they appear largely as a malevolent force that acts off-stage. Maher does not address reexaminations of Shaughnessy’s work, especially those sparked by Min-Zhan Lu’s 1992 article “Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?”

Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work is a remarkable biography. It is sensitively wrought, satisfying, and extremely well written. Shaughnessy’s life traces an arc from a world in which colleges and universities seemed to be an ivory tower refuge for the few, to a conflicted world in which they were challenged mightily by the non-traditional students who demanded, and for a time, were invited to join. The world outside those hallowed halls has grown more complex and more clamorous since Mina Shaughnessy’s day, and higher education along with it. Her respect for the innate intelligence of the students who arrive at the gates and her guidance in how to prepare them for the demands they will meet when they pass through them is more important than ever before.

Works Cited

Lu, Min-Zhan. “Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?” College

English. 54 (1992): 887–913. Print.

Maher, Jane. Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of

            Teachers of English, 1997. Print.

Maher, Jane. "Writing the Life of Mina P. Shaughnessy." Journal of Basic Writing 16.1 (1997)

            51-63. Print.

Maher, Jane. Personal Interview, 7 November 2014. Video.