Before outright rejecting our questions as hyperbole, as rhetorical strawmen, let's consider the facts. Yes, we know that peer review has become de rigueur for writing programs. We know that students are occasionally required to coauthor essays. We acknowledge some important deep changes have transformed our practices (i.e., various electronic peer review tools or online research or peer-group reviews of student papers). And we recognize it has become commonplace for scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition to coauthor scholarly works (although our colleagues in literature remain primarily tied to the humanistic tradition of privileging solitary works). Additionally, we understand that the Computers and Composition community, especially readers of Kairos, are leading the way when it comes to using wikis, blogs, and other content management tools to engage the collective wisdom of knowledge-makers in our community.

Despite these important changes, we also believe there remain major social, interpersonal, and technological obstacles to acknowledging or valuing collaborative work in academic settings. Back in 1994 Lunsford and Ede conceded that "collaborative learning theory has from its inception failed to challenge traditional concepts of radical individualism and ownership of ideas" (Lunsford & Ede, 1994, p. 431). Old habits die hard. Changing individual behavior is problematic, but changing systems is even more problematic. While the academic reward system has clearly been under scrutiny for decades, the single-authored book or essay remains the coin of the realm. Hence, graduate students, adjuncts, and faculty are still motivated by individual accomplishment rather than collaborative efforts. The same values, the same focus on competition, guide the work of our students. As Smit, Heller, and other critics of collaborative

learning have pointed out, students are motivated by competition for the holy grail of academe, the grade. Hence, it is not uncommon in our composition classrooms for students just to subdivide the work of group projects. And we are also aware of critics who argue that there is no empirical evidence that there is a "collaborative model of inquiry," that we lack empirical measurements that indicate that collaboration matters (Heller). And, almost ironically, we are aware of critics who depicted ways in which collaboration can be counterproductive, that the value of collaboration has been overstated, that we need to teach students to think independently, to fight the "shadow" of "dominant culture and its privileged kinds of subjectivity" (Heller 306).