Elaine Maimon

In this interview, Elaine Maimon, a leading WAC scholar who has been involved in the field since the mid-1970s, by Mike Palmquist, Publisher and Founding Editor of the WAC Clearinghouse. The interview was conducted November 24, 2025.

About Elaine Maimon

Photo of Elaine MaimonElaine Maimon is a true WAC pioneer. She was one of the first scholars to see the potential for what was, in the early to mid-1970s, a promising but as yet unproven approach to enhance student learning and writing abilities. Her early efforts to establish a WAC program at Beaver College—now Arcadia University—led to two foundational NEH grants that helped shape WAC on a national level. They also led to a career as a higher education administrator at Brown University, Queens College, Arizona State University West, University of Alaska Anchorage, and Governors State University, the latter three as chief executive officer. She has published widely in scholarly journals and edited collections. Her books include Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation (Stylus 2018); A Writer’s Resource, 7th edition, with Kathleen Yancey (McGraw Hill, 2024); and the pioneering WAC textbook, Writing In The Arts and Sciences, which is available in the WAC Clearinghouse Landmark Publications in Writing Studies book series. She was a member of the first group of scholars designated as a Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum and was a founding board member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

Credits

Video Production: Mike Palmquist and Zakery R. Muñoz

Closed Caption Editing: Camaryn Wheeler

Additional credits are provided at the end of the video.

Errata

Elaine noted the following after reviewing the video recording.

  • The seminar with Harriet Sheridan took place in Jan 1977, although I kept saying 1976.
  • Harriet Sheridan's Carleton colleague who came the second week was the editor of the Carleton Miscellany. I called it something else.
  • The visionary publisher of Writing in the Arts and Sciences was Paul O’Connell. (I said “McConnell.”)
  • Google tells me the Toby Fulwiler seminar at Rutgers was organized by Robert Parker “to explore British writing research and writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) theories.” In the interview I say summer of 1975, and I misremembered Toby being the leader. I wonder if Toby or Robert Parker did something preliminary in the summer of 1976 (it wouldn’t have been 1975, in any case).
  • At one point I refer to the “Why Johnny Can’t Write” article as a Time Magazine article when, of course, it was published in Newsweek.