Kenneth Bruffee: Brief Biography

Kenneth A. Bruffee is Professor of English and Director of the Scholars Program and the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

A graduate of Wesleyan University with a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University, he has taught at the University of New Mexico, Northwestern University, the University of Virginia, Columbia University, Cooper Union, and the University of Pennsylvania. He directed a FIPSE-funded Institute in Peer Tutoring and Collaborative Learning in 1979-82. He has held a Broeklundian Professorship at Brooklyn College, 1991-94, and was a Wolfe Institute Faculty Fellow, 1991-92.

Professor Bruffee's publications include:

• Elegiac Romance: Cultural Change and Loss of the Hero in Modern Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1983).

• A Short Course in Writing, 4th edition (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1992).

• Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence and the Authority of Knowledge, 2nd edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1990).

• Articles Modern English Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, College English, Liberal Education, Forum for Honors, and Change.

He was a member of the editorial advisory board of Liberal Education, the journal of the Association of American Colleges.

Articles of his that have been anthologized include:

• "The Lesser Nightmare: Marlow's Lie in Heart of Darkness," Modern Language Quarterly, 25 [1964]).

• "Collaborative Learning: Some Practical Models" (College English, 34 (1972).

• "Collaborative Learning and 'The Conversation of Mankind,'" College English, 46 (1984).

• "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay" College English 48 (1986).

• "Science in a Postmodern World," Change (fall 1992).

Professor Bruffee was keynote speaker at the Brown University Conference on Peer Tutoring, 1984 and 1993; delivered the University of Memphis Marcus Orr Higher Education Lecture on "Changing Paradigms in College and University Teaching," 1996; was the first Chair of the Modern Language Association Teaching of Writing Division (1976); was the founding editor of WPA, the journal of the National Council of Writing Program Administrators, of which he was a co-founder; and has been a New York University Faculty Resource Network Scholar in Residence, 1998-2000.

He has led colloquia on collaborative learning, liberal education, and the authority of knowledge at Bard College, Brown University, Bucknell University, University of Chicago, Colby College, University of Colorado, Columbia University, University of Delaware, Hobart-William Smith College, Lewis and Clark College, Union College, University of Memphis, University of Minnesota, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, the U. S. Army War College (Carlisle), and at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Workshop on Interpreting the Humanities at Princeton University.

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