Welcome to the Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages at Texas Woman's University, one of the founding departments when the university began in 1903. The history of the department is long and rich. With a Ph.D. program in Rhetoric, our department is a center for the study of literature, language, and writing. We offer a series of courses on writing, literature, and foreign languages. Our activities in classes, in the Write Site, and in our organizations, such as ERGO, reflect our commitment to preparing and empowering students for participation in our society's discourses. In addition, we offer the following programs of study:

RECONSIDERING HIGHER EDUCATION — It was surprising enough to learn that Neugebauer, whose brilliant, demanding lectures on ancient science had impressed even Richard Feynman, no admirer of the humanities, had ever been a less than brilliant student. But I was even more shocked when he went on to explain that he thought his experience typical of the only general principle about education that he had been able to distill from his career of many decades in German and American universities. I asked him to reveal it. He smiled and said: “No system of education known to man is capable of ruining everyone.” In recent years, I have often found myself thinking back to that conversation. For if the nature of education and the uses of four years of college could stir passions thirty years ago, when Neugebauer told me his story, they are now the objects of a debate, extensive and often intemperate, that rages in magazines, on the blogosphere, and in the political institutions that control public colleges and universities. Americans assert and challenge the value of both with a passion that shows how important they consider the subject and a lack of precise information that shows how little is actually known about it. More...