Interview with Kelly Ritter, author of “From Liberation to Remediation”

Kelly Ritter is the author of From Liberation to Remediation: The Rhetoric of General Education (Utah State University Press, 2026). Ritter is the chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and professor of writing and communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of four books and editor or coeditor of four collections, including Beyond Fitting In: Rethinking First-Generation Writing and Literacy Education. Her work has appeared in CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review, Pedagogy, Profession, WPA: Writing Program Administration, Composition Studies, JAC, Slate, The Conversation, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

How would you describe your book to someone who hasn't heard of it yet? And can you tell me more about the title? It's really catchy.

This book explains the importance of General Education, or “Gen Ed,” in the context of helping students become informed citizens in a participatory democracy. The title comes from Gen Ed’s history, as it was first envisioned as a post-World War II effort to allow non-elite students to get a college degree with a fundamental background in variety of subjects that would help them be productive citizens, successful adults, and just generally intellectually curious people, especially as the US was competing in areas of science and technology to be a forward-thinking, innovative society. Since elite students already had access to ample training in university subjects, and so-called vocational students weren’t even tracked to take college courses or earn four-year degrees, Gen Ed was for the very large number of the students in the “middle,” including returning soldiers who were entering college on the GI Bill. However, especially over the last 25 years, Gen Ed has been recast as a burden—a waste of time and money, especially, in a time when college is very expensive due to lost state and federal support for higher education and rising costs of living. It’s further been cast as remedial, due to pre-college programs like Advanced Placement. As a result, Gen Ed is now largely something to be exempted from, to avoid, to test out of—and thus its original aims are lost. 

What made you want to write this book? 

I’ve been a professor and an administrator at various levels of the university for over 25 years, and I’m also a scholar of rhetoric and writing, especially histories of literacy and writing and institutional responses to social and cultural movements that change how we teach writing. I see great value in Gen Ed courses, as a place that students will be in the most diverse classrooms (not just racially but socioeconomically and intellectually, in terms of student majors/interests) and where students learn about subjects they never heard of in high school. So many students start their college careers thinking they will do X major, and then take a Gen Ed course in, say, history or political science—or English—and realize they want to major in one of those fields, or at least explore it further. When we track students right into what they think they know, or want, at age 18, we cut off those opportunities for learning. We also make the lines between high school and college (and in some cases, middle school!) completely meaningless by forcing “college-level” courses on 14, 15, and  16 year-olds. College courses are those taught in college classrooms on college campuses. Full stop. 

How do you explain the significance of general education, maybe generally and also to students who are asking? 

I think I answered this in my last response above, but I would say this to students: life is long. Learning is a gift. Gen Ed courses are certainly going to vary in terms of your experiences and interests. But the pre-college work your parents and American society tell you is the “same” as the work you will do in college, well, that’s just not true. College is a place of discovery. It’s expensive, and the world after looks pretty scary sometimes, especially for jobs. But I promise you that taking a full slate of Gen Ed courses in topics like English, Math, Chemistry, History, Psychology, Sociology, Art, Modern Languages, Physics, etc., will better prepare you for it than taking an AP course whose value is only measured by a two hour timed test. You’re worth more than that. 

I'm sure this is an annoying question that comes up all the time right now--how do you think AI is affecting or will affect general education?

Oh, AI is poised to affect all of higher education, not just Gen Ed. When we let machines think for us and do our writing and research for us, we all lose and it’s no longer something we can call “education.” Search engines are great. The internet is great. Allowing AI to perform complex tasks so we don’t have to learn them? Trusting ChatGPT to summarize articles and studies so we don’t have to read them? Asking AI to write our papers for us so we don’t have to struggle with words and ideas? If we move en masse as a society toward these options, we might as well all be living in those recliners in space in WALL-E. And we should prepare for a whole lot of AI’s decisions to be without important contextual issues, sloppy, or just plain wrong. So in short, I see AI as a great tool for helping us to complete tasks and helping us to think about new ways that machine learning can influence general education. But as a replacement for us—that’s a societal death knell. 

I think writing is a very important part of general education. How do you explain the value of writing in particular as part of education and maybe also as part of personal development or self-actualization or anything like that?

Well, there have been studies after studies showing that when we write about something—anything, regardless of topic—we learn more about it, and about our own thought processes along the way. Young children will write about any number of things they observe and also are eager to write about their feelings. It’s definitely a core form of expression, including for those people who may have disabilities or other barriers to speaking or communicating in person or verbally. Writing is a tool of discovery across subjects. What we haven’t taught well enough over the last 50 or so years is that writing is not “one” thing—it changes depending upon what you need it for. Academic writing gets a bad rap because students don’t see it as discovery, especially when almost all colleges require a first-year academic writing course as part of Gen Ed. I believe in that course, but as part of Gen Ed’s new remedial framing, those who are required to take it think that their college or university thinks they are too dumb or under-prepared to succeed in the rest of their classes. And in turn, colleges and universities often expect magical transformation of student writers after this course is done. Neither is true. Writing is a process. I’m still learning about myself as a writer and I graduated college 35 years ago. 

One thing about college writing classes... not everyone wants to take them. Why is that? Writing is one of the cheapest forms of self-expression and it has a long history for people of all kinds of backgrounds, but many students are reluctant to do it. What's your take on why that is?

So I said a bit about this above, but in addition to that, a lot of people think they are “bad writers.” Their metrics for this are all over the place, but since writing has long since been associated with intelligence, social class, and even good character, people are very hard on themselves about how well they write. Never mind that “good” writing in one context can be “bad” writing in another. So this causes students to dread college writing courses, and also drives more and more people (including faculty!) to use AI, ChatGPT, etc. to help write important documents and papers. Also, I’m not a math professor, but math is a concept of right and wrong—you solved the problem correctly or you didn’t. You know the formula or you don’t (I’m not talking about theoretical math here, just for the record, but things like college algebra or Calculus). Writing isn’t about right or wrong answers, and writing changes across contexts and audiences. That scares students. And we avoid (and disparage) what we fear. That’s just human nature. What’s dangerous is to accept fears as reality and find ways to dismantle writing in a curriculum, or say you value it as an employer or university and then never help students develop it across time. 

I know your book discusses misconceptions about general education and why those misconceptions are a big deal. Without giving it all away, could you highlight a little of that, maybe one big misconception? And why is that misconception common and being spread by certain groups?

Some of this probably I covered above, but the biggest misconception is that “college” coursework can take place anywhere. So a 14 year old can take AP Environmental Science and if they get a 3 or higher on the AP exam, get credit for a college course when they enroll at a college or university four years later. I’m sorry, but how does that make sense? There is an entire industry, led by Advanced Placement, that makes us believe a student can be in “college” no matter how old they are or where the lessons take place. I have a whole chapter on this in the book. It’s insidious, and driven by rhetorics of competition and efficiency. It’s a real crime committed against young students who have enough to do just getting through middle school and high school without being told, you are actually also in college now! Ridiculous. 

Many people right now seem to think that higher education is in crisis. I'm not sure if you feel that way or not, but, either way, what are some things you'd like to see in higher education in the next five years that you would see as positive developments or trends? Is there anything we are doing and should do more of? Anything we should start doing? Anything we should stop doing?

Well, as someone who has taught in state (public) schools her whole life, and attended those as an undergraduate and graduate student as well, we need to get back to stable and decent state and federal funding for universities. Many people think college is unaffordable because colleges and universities are greedy. Well, it’s really because they don’t get money from the state anymore to help hire teachers, repair buildings, literally keep the lights on and the air conditioning running. So that’s number one. Second, we need to talk about college as a place to grow as a person and not just as a future worker bee. Kids listen to what adults say. We have a whole generation growing up who will enter college (or not) in ten years and value it very little as a site of intellectual discovery and public good. Finally, we need to re-invest in subjects other than STEM in higher education. I’ve benefitted personally from science and medical innovation, and certainly the world is global, digital, fast-moving. But the more we narrow down the purpose of higher ed, the more we also narrow down the purpose of our society. We need to take a step back and remind ourselves of the important role that humanities and social sciences have played in higher education, and in the US as a whole, over the last century. I could go on about more issues, but those are top of mind for now. 

Ok, one last one. What's your personal story with writing and general education? 

I loved to write from an early age but never thought I would be a professor. I grew up working class and with very little opportunity as a first-gen student lucky enough to have a major state university in the town where I lived. I didn’t fully appreciate Gen Ed when I was a student, partially because I was working 25 hours a week, living at home, and without anyone in my life to talk to about college or learning or the world. But I did have my eyes opened by Gen Ed courses like Judeo-Christian Tradition taught by the late Professor Jay Holstein at the University of Iowa. He got me (and other students) thinking about the diversity of beliefs across the world in ways my own upbringing never even considered. I also was really interested in the concepts in my introduction to Psychology course. But it was a 500-person lecture and during class, the other kids were chatting so loudly that I could often not hear the professor, so I missed a lot. So the value and de-valuing of Gen Ed has been with us for a while, and it’s been stuck in me somewhere all this time, both as a student and as a professor.