On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Russ Hunt wrote much wonderful stuff, but then he said: > That [collaboration between faculty] will probably happen, but if you start off > advertising that collaboration is planned or expected my experience > is that 80% of university faculty shy away like a horse from a > sudden movement at their knees . . . It's easy enough simply to link > the courses and ask the writing person to take that into account. > Collaboration will follow. Easy enough for who? I don't think collaboration will follow, especially not if you link first and tell the writing person later. ("Oh, by the way, we've linked your course with a particle physics course. Can you bone up on the literature and make it relevant in your class?") Or you could end up with a situation like we have here, where the Honors Humanities classes are linked with writing courses . . . and the humanities profs tend to think of the writing class as the place where they (the humanities profs) can assign all the reading they didn't manage to get to in *their* part of the link . . . almost irrespective of what the writing person wants to do. This is not to say that writing courses can't be profitably linked with other courses. It's just to say that the linkage needs to be a little more intentional and a whole lot more equitable than asking the writing person to take someone else's curriculum into account. Collaboration *doesn't* occur on a forced march -- at least no kind of collaboration I'd want any part of . . . Marcy =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Marcy Bauman Writing Program, University of Michigan-Dearborn 4901 Evergreen Rd, Dearborn, MI 48128 fax: 313-593-5552 http://www.umd.umich.edu/~marcyb [log in to unmask] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=