There was a little flurry of conversation in my social networks about Mark Bauerlein’s recent offering on the Brainstorm blog (at the Chronicle), and i just realized that it was almost all in the rhet/comp corners of those networks – so in case library friends haven’t seen it – it’s worth looking at:
All Summary, No Critical Thinking
Pull Quote:
From now on, my syllabus will require no research papers, no analytical tasks, no thesis, no argument, no conclusion. No critical thinking and no higher-order thinking skills. Instead, the semester will run up 14 two-page summaries (plus the homework exercises).
Students will read the great books and assignments will ask them to summarize designated parts.
A soft description of the conversations I saw would be “skeptical.” There were those who thought this was an April Fool’s joke, until they noticed the byline. I think it reads like an effort to solve a problem that’s not really about summary, but about reading. I italicize “think” there, because I don’t really get the summary idea – it seems to me that people who only engage enough with argumentative writing to cherry-pick quotes from source texts will be just as able to create “summaries” that don’t reflect any more than a superficial understanding of those source texts.
Michael Faris pointed out Alex Reid’s excellent response, which does a much better job of problematizing the summary than I could:
The Role of Summary in Composition (digital digs)
I believe we misidentify the challenges of first-year composition when we focus on student lack and specifically on the lack of “skills.” Our challenge is to take students who do not believe they are writers (despite all the writing they do outside school), who do not value writing, who do not believe they have the capacity to succeed as writers, and who simply wish to get done with this course and give them a path to developing a lasting writing practice that will extend beyond the end of the semester.
Isn’t that a great, um, summary of why writing teaching matters?
Can we substitute “researchers” for “writers” here? I kind of like the resulting statement, but it makes me uncomfortable as well, because – can we do, are we doing that with our current models?
info-fetishist 
I think you can substitute “researchers” for “writers” in Reid’s passage. And are current models doing that? Not with most of what I see (go to the library databases for the “research paper”). Research (and reading) is often decontextualized from writing processes.
I think you’re right that the concern about summarizing is more a concern about reading, and based on the idea that “if you can’t read, you can’t write.” But maybe in Bauerlein’s post, there’s also a lack of a sense of reading “for what purposes” and writing “for what purposes and to whom and in what contexts.”