Mutual Support: CAC Programs and Institutional Improvement in Undergraduate Education

Writing-and communication-across-the-curriculum programs often develop as independent initiatives focused on improving students' writing and/or speaking by incorporating these activities into coursework and helping teachers to use them more effectively in their instruction. 1 However, there is now much anecdotal evidence of the conditions that work against the cultivation of cross-curricular programs: faculty complacency; the weakening of a program's original spirit; reduction or elimination of funding; and the continued avoidance of involvement by some programs, administrators, or faculty (see White). We believe that such failures occur, in part, when programs become either isolated grassroots efforts, struggling to scatter the seeds of change across a vast and sometimes arid curricular landscape, or isolated control units, empowered and supported by higher administration but unable to break the bonds of their authority in order to work collaboratively with the groups they are trying to change (see Holdstein). In this essay, we will first describe ways in which CAC programs can become an integral part of a broader, in