Resisting Vocationalism in the Pre-Professional Writing Course / Susan Griffin.

This paper discusses vocationalism versus a utilitarian view of the university in the context of funding and inclusion of pre-professional writing courses in a liberal arts education. It begins by describing a situation in which pre-professional writing courses for medicine, law, and business might be eliminated, based on their vocational specialization and their cost. It then reviews the goals of a liberal arts education: teaching students to think and reason; to compare, discriminate, and analyze; to refine taste; and to sharpen mental vision. The paper continues by applying these goals through each of the three writing courses. It concludes that the entire university curriculum can be seen as vocational, in that the university is a profitable degree-selling business, and that the professional writing course is in fact both useful and enlightening and thus a true liberal art. (EF)

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