1946 was a year of ambivalent retrenchment. Churchill gives his "Iron Curtain" speech and John D. Rockefeller donates eight and a half million dollars to the United Nations for a permanent headquarters in New York City. Victor Emmanuel III abdicates as King of Italy and Juan Peron becomes President of Argentina. Truman creates the Atomic Energy Commission and, with the death of Alekhine, Botvinnik becomes the world's best as well as most boring chess champion. And Syracuse University hosts the first ever conference devoted exclusively to first-year college composition!

Following the usual format of academic conferences in the 1940s and 1950s, plenary talks alternated with workshops followed by reports on the workshops by workshop chairs. All told, plenty of topics got covered. Participants discussed the need to evaluate fundamentals; the validity of the College Entrance Examination Board's essay tests; the objectives and goals of the first-year course; the quality of high-school preparation and the need for more articulation with the schools; the most honorable goal of holding class size at 20 students; the ways and means of teacher evaluation; the nifty rubric that will facilitate response to student essays; the learning efficacy of individual placement, learning centers, group tutorials, office conferences, and rising-junior examinations. Sounds like just yesterday.

Except for a general discussion, led by John C. Hodges (of Harbrace Handbook fame), on what to do with all these demobilized war veterans.

This Report, published by Syracuse University Press, was edited by Sanford B. Meech and Maurice E. Troyer. Individual contributions are indexed in CompPile.

RH, June 2003