Conferences With the Engineers: The Innovative Pedagogy and Career of Sada Harbarger,1884–1942

In June 1923, E.A. Hitchcock, the dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University, read a singular letter aloud to the 28 professors at that month's engineering faculty meeting to ensure everyone agreed on its sentiments. The letter, addressed to the chair of OSU's English Department, J.V. Denney, noted that a certain English instructor was invaluable in instructing engineering students due to a knowledge of “engineering technicalities.” Students were requesting more sections from this individual and there was a danger of losing this instructor to “other fields.” Denney was then asked to give this instructor “the title of assistant professor and a seat in the Engineering Faculty” (Turnbull, 1923). ¹

Denney didn’t have much choice. “Miss Harbarger,” the invaluable instructor, oversaw a successful parallel English track for engineering students taught by specialized instructors that ended in her popular elective senior course, 419. Of the five surviving engineering theses from her 23-year OSU career, four acknowledge her. ² Harbarger had also just published a textbook, English for Engineers, the first genre-based technical writing textbook (Connors, 1982; Kynell, 1999) and helped build OSU's Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education (SPEE) chapter into the largest in the country since Denney had hired her in 1919 (Weed, 1969). Harbarger embodied much that Denney, the author of several innovative composition textbooks with Fred Newton Scott and an able administrator, valued—his 1918 “Preparation of College Teachers of English” could serve as a description of her (Denney 1918), and as Davis (2012) has noted, Denney recognized a need for specialized, reality-based technical courses in English. Accordingly, three months later, in August 1923, Sada Harbarger attended her first meeting in the College of Engineering as faculty.

I offer a retrospective of Harbarger's unique career here to enrich our collective understanding of the crucial interwar period before World War II to the birth of technical writing as a field. However, I also want to showcase how she was a pedagogical innovator beyond her textbook, and how her personal identity forged her innovations and cross-disciplinary value. Harbarger's rural Ohio upbringing and familiarity with the aforementioned “engineering technicalities,” combined with her formal academic pursuit and appreciation of English literature and rhetoric, led her to focus on intense individual conferencing with students and interdisciplinary collaborations that were just as influential and discipline-forming as her textbook, and arguably more so. Her work eclipses the usual land grant agricultural college tug of war between the needs of working farmers and growing industries; rather, she helped merge those needs using rhetoric and literature reading as a humanistic basis for an engineering-centric writing pedagogy. While her English for Engineers textbook speaks of rhetoric as a necessary tool for the engineer, in parallel with her predecessors Scott, Denney, and Buck, ³ she also implores her students to read literature to generate metaphors and ideas for industry. Her oft-reprinted textbook was only the most visible part of a deeper pedagogy that stressed individual conferencing and emerging technologies, and while her efforts to bring English and the applied sciences together did not succeed beyond Ohio State, they predict the later writing-across-the-curriculum movement and the more formal beginnings of technical writing ⁴ as an academic field in the 1970s. As our field continues to evolve post-pandemic, looking back at Harbarger's pivotal career and what she was able to accomplish within the social, technological, and cultural structures of the interwar period can be illustrative. Harbarger's contributions from her publications have been previously assessed (Connors, 1982; Kynell, 1999; Kynell-Hunt, 2000), and likewise, the historical precursors to the rhetoric-centric technical communication that she espoused (Connors, 1982; Grego, 1987; Kynell, 1995; Russell, 2002) have been outlined, notably Samuel Earle and the English section of the SPEE. However, the more detailed archival portrait of her career and life offered here grants important missing context to this formative period, and her own distinctive value beyond her singular textbook. As the faculty's strident letter implies, Harbarger herself, the groundbreaking teacher, was what made Ohio's engineering writing program work.

In addition to her unique emphasis on conferencing, Harbarger's navigation of the gender politics of the interwar male academy through a skillful manipulation of dualities is particularly striking. She often went to SPEE conferences where she was both the only woman present with a speaking role and the only unmarried woman (SPEE 1920), ⁵ but she also often spoke formally for female-only organizations like the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) on religious and literary topics, and she read short stories at OSU's radio station in a popular “Story-Time for Shut-Ins” half hour program for many years. Indeed, Harbarger's academic career's success depended on doing what OSU's more “scholarly” literature “men” would not, and could not, do: teach specialized engineering writing classes and do so with empathy and understanding of the needs of that student population.

As I tell Harbarger's story, however, I am wary of the historiographical concerns of Mastrangelo (2010) about Fred Newton Scott and other “hero” figures of this transformative period. Mastrangelo advises avoiding a “hero-villain dichotomy” that salves disciplinary insecurities and preferring a “real man/woman” approach that tackles the complexities of real people (p. 264). Harbarger collaborated with many other contemporaries with similar insights into engineering and English, and while her story is thought-provoking, she was not a solitary trailblazer, but a co-leader of a larger trend that would culminate in a new academic field of writing (Connors, 1982; Kynell-Hunt, 2000) long after her 1942 death. But her publications are not enough to understand her historical role and value; her work and life are intertwined, like any professor's, and the merger of those two strands is both an explicit and implicit argument throughout.

Background and Preparation

Sada Annis Harbarger was born on August 13, 1884, in Columbus, Ohio, the eldest child of James Winfield Harbarger and Adaline Burt Harbarger (Harbarger, 1938b). Her name evokes her father's sister, a devout Methodist schoolteacher who died of fever in 1881 at 21 with her brother at her side (The Jackson Standard, 1881). Her father, an iron molder like his Union veteran father (The Clarion Democrat, 1940), was in the International Molders Union as late as 1913, supporting Columbus strikes in 1907 and 1909 (Harbarger, 1907, 1909, 1913). ⁶ Ada (1886), their second child, resembled Sada strongly, with a third daughter, Merle (1888) next, and a son, James Jr. (1894). James Sr. eventually moved into oil, real estate, and local Republican politics (The Daily Times, 1912) and by 1900, he owned a prominent house on High Street in Clintonville, then a rural area of farms and summer houses for OSU's early professors. An overexposed circa-1899 photograph, perhaps taken with a new Eastman Kodak camera, shows the Harbarger house with the innovative High Street trolley line visible, and what may be James, one of the sisters, and James Jr. astride a pony. Neighbors venturing into Columbus after dark often left a lantern on the Harbarger's fence to find their way home (Ohio Historical Society, 1912-).

Harbarger was prepared at Clintonville High School; an 1897 photo (Ohio Historical Society, 1912-) shows about 14 students, including the three sisters, ⁷ who all attended the co-ed Ohio State. Harbarger began in 1902, majoring in English, joining the Omicron chapter of Gamma Phi Beta, the Philomathean Literary Society, and the yearbook staff. Philomathean meetings included poetry readings (Ohio State Lantern, 1902) and debates, once taking the opposing position over “Is Life Worth Living?” (Ohio State Lantern, 1903), and an English Club meeting at Denney's home includes Harbarger talking on “The Reasons Why Women Specialize In English,” having written to women at other colleges.

Harbarger's early activities comprise what Hoss (2018) calls an “everyday epideictic” (p. 425) of sorority culture; the importance of community formation for college women in this period cannot be overstated. ⁸ While OSU was coed from its 1873 inception and 200 women were enrolled by 1900, they remained second class (Alcott, 1979). Harbarger likely lived at home from 1902 to 1906 given a housing shortage for female students; the only female-only social space on the small campus was the “Gab Room.” ⁹ Her professional hopes after college were likely high school teaching, ¹⁰ but there were other female professional role models: Olive Jones, OSU's first full-time librarian, and Edith Cockins, OSU's longtime registrar (Alcott, 1979). If she had the ambition to be a university English professor at this early stage, however, the doors were seemingly only open to men.

After graduation in 1906, Harbarger taught German at Worthington High School, ¹¹ north of Clintonville (Scott, 1918). ¹² She then enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1907 and graduated with an English M.A. in May 1909, 1 year after the Ford Model T began production. Her thesis chair was Chester Noyes Greenough, chair of English, later a Harvard dean. ¹³ Her thesis, “The Relation of ‘Enthusiasm’ To English Literary History: A Preliminary Study” consists of a lengthy bibliography of references to “enthusiasm” in English literature, with a brief analysis suggesting that religion, presumably Christianity, is the driving force behind the rise of English literature. ¹⁴

Harbarger missed much of her last Illinois semester as her brother James was ill (The Daily Illini, 1908, 1909a, 1909b). He died of cancer in August 1909 at the age of 15 years, 3 months after she earned her master's degree. She returned to Illinois to work as a part-time English “assistant” instructor at Urbana-Champaign (Ohio State Lantern, 1909) for a salary of $900 per year at the age of 25 years (The Daily Illini, 1908). ¹⁵ Initial courses were “Rhetoric and Themes” and assisting “English Literature before the Nineteenth Century.”

The Urbana Origins of a Personal Approach

Harbarger would hold her assistant position for 8 years after her brother's death, until early 1917; her salary only rose from $900 to $1,000 in that time (University of Illinois-Champaign, 1909–1910, 1919–1920). Her long Urbana stay was both a professional rut and a crucible. Rooming off campus, she was active in Gamma Phi Beta, Alethenai, and the OSU alumni association. ¹⁶ She attended sewing parties, Methodist social events, University functions, and traveled with female friends. Personality is visible; the 1914 Illio yearbook lists a quip by “Sadie Harbarger” that parodies “The Wants of Man”: “Man wants but little here below – a woman, less; she wants but a man,” (Ropeiquet, 1914, p. 277) and the 1918 Illio offers her as an example of “fine, intellectual, high-minded women.” (Winters, 1917, p. 509).

Given no trace of engineering or rhetoric in her master's thesis, the genesis of Harbarger's later career emerges in two Urbana activities that suggest discomfiture with her trajectory. The first is speaking before all-female audiences, primed by OSU debating experience and the suffrage movement in Illinois. In 1909, “Miss Sada Harbarger of the English department” spoke before the “young women at the Y.W.C.A. house” on “Christian Girls… Standard of Scholarship and How to Obtain It.” (Champaign Daily Gazette, 1909, p. 3). While the subject reflects similar “women in college” talks given at Ohio State, they grew more ambitious and overly religious over time. Following YWCA speeches included “The Woman as Sky Pilot,” holding “every University woman by virtue of her opportunity should be a sky pilot,” (The Daily Illini, 1914, p. 4), ¹⁷ “Modern Women and Ancient Virtues,” (The Daily Illini, 1915a, p. 3) as well as one on “Friendship,” (The Daily Illini, 1915b, 5). Harbarger is consistently adamant about Christian women taking on larger professional roles. Save for her master's thesis, however, her Methodist faith is invisible in her later professional publications related to the teaching of writing and engineering; her careful cultivated division of appropriate roles and audiences is characteristic.

The second notable activity is that while Harbarger taught service English courses at Urbana-Champaign, she also taught a “rhetoric for engineers” course and one of the summer “short courses” in agriculture and housekeeping (The Daily Illini, 1910), with her “short course” students often coming to the literary events (The Daily Illini, 1914; Champaign Daily Gazette, 1914). These brief courses, coupled with her strong positions on women and professionalization, power her first academic publications. The three short pieces appearing in 1916 signal a major shift: “Theme Subjects for Engineering Students” in The English Journal (Harbarger, 1916a), “A Defense of Rhetoric,” in The Technograph (Harbarger, 1916b), and “The Sag of the Second Year” in the SPEE's Bulletin (Harbarger, 1916c), as well as an address to the local American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) student branch (The Daily Illini, 1916) all together constitute a clear message that engineering students need special attention in rhetoric by specialists like her. Her ASME speech, “Rhetoric and the Engineer,” is quoted partially as: “The engineer's attitude (toward rhetoric) discloses whether his profession shall be ranked with other great professions… (it) reveals whether he is a man with ideals and standards; a man who is competent, not only to plan and to execute great engineering projects, but also to take his rightful place in the community of which he becomes a member.” (The Daily Illini, 1916). While this speech showcases her early and common maintenance of male pronouns for engineers, it also serves as a statement of her own ambitions that parallel her YWCA speeches; Harbarger, too, intended to take her rightful place among the competitors, having found a niche for her skillset.

The origins of her eventual OSU pedagogy are visible in “The Sag of the Second Year,” where she discusses why engineering sophomores tend to slump. While their writing was usually competent in terms of content, “… a spirit of unrest, of dissatisfaction…” was present in “the writing of even the best students, regardless of the subject chosen—a general, vague handling of the subject, a confused sentence, a lack of attention to mechanical accuracy” (Harbarger, 1916c, p. 376). Her future emphasis on conferencing and empathy appears as she attempts to find the sources of this “unrest”: “When I questioned anyone of them upon his faith in himself, upon his philosophy of life, I came across the same baffled groping, the same lack of grip and oneness of purpose. The student was frequently painfully conscious of this slipping, this sag; but unaided he was unable to begin to explain much less to become master of himself.” Harbarger identifies the sag's causes as a difficulty of making the early “fundamentals of engineering” taught relatable to the student's specific branch of engineering, and the quality of the instructors (p. 377). Accordingly, she followed up with engineering freshmen with “The First-Year Fatalities” in the SPEE Bulletin (Harbarger, 1917). With hindsight, Harbarger's opportunity and value are clear; English specialists attuned to engineering students’ discipline-specific problems were needed.

The origins of what the 1923 engineering faculty letter calls her “knowledge of engineering technicalities,” however, rest farther back than her assistant years at Illinois. In July 1896, when Harbarger was 12 years old and William McKinley's election would represent the height of Ohio's Republican Party, her father bought 160 acres west of Hamden, Ohio for $1,000, one-quarter of a square mile section (Jackson County, 1896), mostly untouched woodland. Hamden was a promising rural town of about 850, with large farms, a furnace, a brick plant, and a Methodist–Episcopalian Church, as well as a rail station popular with traveling salesmen (Turner Publishing, 1996). The Harbargers retreated there in the summers, but by 1913, perhaps prompted by her brother's death and her parents’ age, they left Columbus for the farm permanently (The Daily Illini, 1912; Harbarger, 1913) ¹⁸ and Harbarger stayed there while not teaching in Illinois, forwarding her mail from July to September. Her father's 1920 census occupation, “farmer,” may have fallen on the “gentleman” side (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022a), but their lifestyle was not urban. Rural electrification remained well off and the available 1918–1922 car registration records do not list a Harbarger owning a vehicle when most Hamden farmers did. Harbarger would have regularly taken a train from Illinois and back, transitioning from rural to urban life and back every year. Harbarger's “short course” and knowledge of “engineering technicalities” is linked to this dual lifestyle, her father's practical acumen as an iron molder and farmer, and the expertise of her soon-to-be brother-in-law, Floyd Delashmutt, a farm agent. In any case, by 1916, her publications and activities signal unease with her Urbana position, and the coming war enabled her and other young women to change their social and professional positions.

American intervention in Europe was imminent in early 1917. Immense social pressures followed. Draft cards were signed and matches were made. Merle, her younger sister, married and left for South Carolina. Adda, the middle sister, married Delashmutt, the aforementioned farm agent. ¹⁹ Many of Harbarger's female peers at Illinois followed suit or renewed their teaching appointments. Harbarger did not marry or renew, however; she headed to New York City.

In October 1917, “Miss Harbarger” had departed to “…New York to accept a position with the Altman store as social adviser - to the shop girls” (The Daily Illini, 1917, p. 3). Her later reported activities in New York are more diverse; she worked for a transit company, taught and did postgraduate work at Columbia (Neely, 1900-), and did secretarial work for the YWCA, organizing recreational activities for young women working in the city and helping the YWCA's facilities house the city's growing homeless population. The earlier “adviser” position reflects the YWCA's contemporary drive for a euphemistic “positive health,” or sex education emphasizing avoiding venereal diseases, from its 1913 Commission on Social Morality. ²⁰ Harbarger likely identified more with the YWCA's original, conservative middle-class Christian mission than its growing “social gospel” and worker's rights faction (Browder, 2007), given I can find no activity with the YWCA after 1919. ²¹ Her efficient typed summaries of her secretarial work suggest considerable organizational and financial skill (Harbarger, 1918, 1919a). ²²

In 1919, after the war ended and the third wave of the Spanish flu pandemic eased, Harbarger returned to Hamden, and was hired by Denney as an English instructor at Ohio State in August at a salary of $1,800, a considerable improvement from Urbana. Enrollment was up, the 19th Amendment had passed that June, and American women were now employed at workplaces in numbers unthinkable 20 years before. Harbarger was not hired to be a peer among scholars, though, but to handle the persistent, difficult problem of the rapidly growing numbers of engineering students who wrote poorly, a problem the relevant journals had argued about since 1903 (Connors, 1982). However, she had developed in Illinois a formula for teaching engineering writing with careful personal conferencing, and her wartime work and the changing professional climate had opened a door at OSU.

The X Factor of the Individual Conference

Harbarger's textbooks, articles, editorial work, radio show, speaking engagements, and organizational work with the SPEE, sororities, and women's groups demonstrate strong written and oral rhetorical skills. But the engineering faculty's 1923 call for her promotion hints at something far rarer and not evident in her English contemporaries drafted to teach engineering writing. Harbarger understood the mission of the engineering college, their work, and the work of their students, both professionally and personally, and like them, she took it seriously enough to spend a great deal of time conferencing with senior engineering students, which accelerated major and successful changes in engineering's curriculums. McKee (1939, p. 188) notes the “serious” nature of engineering writing and engineering administrators versus “frivolous” treatments when reviewing Fountain's later seminal survey of technical writing courses; the faculty's letter plants her firmly in the “serious” category. She was not shy about her expertise: Harbarger's first publication after joining OSU, “The Qualifications of the Teacher of English for Engineering Students” for the SPEE (Harbarger, 1920a), is a canny self-description. The qualities she lists in a later version, namely knowledge of engineering, technical publications, a “wide acquaintance with practicing engineers,” and intimate knowledge gleaned “…through the personal conference with each student… a necessary part of the teaching,” are what she brought to the table (Harbarger 1920b). The conference emphasis would become her hallmark, and the department's as well.

A 1921 letter by Dean Hitchcock to the engineering faculty lists five major curriculum changes. Number one was “Advanced English,” offered as a junior or senior elective; Harbarger started teaching this class, 419, in the Fall of 1920 (Weed, 1969). The faculty agreed that more English was needed, and engineering graduates suggested more than two semesters (Hitchcock, 1921). 419 was well attended by all four departments, powered by growing enrollment; the hours in Electrical Engineering alone doubled between 1919 and 1922, and the university did no advertising in 1925 as enrollment was so high (Rightmire, 1925). OSU's 1920s English department taught 10 to 13 hours a week, with the senior professors teaching more hours but with fewer students (Denney, 1926). Harbarger usually taught nine: three sections of 419, plus supervising the specialized engineering sequence of 410–411–412 (Ohio State University, 1936, 1940, 1941; Ohio State University English Department, 1919–1942). ²³ In 1927, Denney reported to OSU's President on Harbarger's direction of that sequence, in place for 6 years. 410–411 paralleled the standard 401 freshman writing course, but 412 was a more advanced track, with 419 Harbarger's. Denney champions the experienced instructors (Harbarger's 19 years was the longest) and the heavy workload of her conference system. The seven instructors teaching 410–411–412–419 scheduled 95 hours of individual conferences each week, with most contributing 15, and all seven met together weekly (Denney, 1927b). ²⁴

This emphasis on individual conferences and collaboration between teachers was unusual and oft imitated, and the documents all point to Harbarger as their impetus. When the junior dean of engineering reported in 1929 to the Board of Trustees about the engineering college, he mentions the junior deans had started to interview their students to gauge their progress and needs, but they were “about seven or eight years” behind Harbarger's practice, and Harbarger and another instructor eventually did the interviews to their own standards. Harbarger is mentioned writing a report that detailed her interview technique, which involved identifying the student's strengths and any need for special assistance (Turnbull, 1929, pp. 193–194).

Fountain's 1938 thesis on engineering/English courses incorporates interviews with Harbarger and concurs on this conferencing emphasis (Fountain, 1938). Fountain places Ohio State among seven colleges taking a “cultural” approach to such courses; he notes “a major emphasis of the senior class is upon self-analysis, recapitulation of the values received in the four years of undergraduate study, and appreciation for the literary classics,” along with a larger amount of “strictly” graded written work that started with shorter papers and built to longer ones not connected to the previous assignments (pp. 108–109). Harbarger's 419 had one credit of lecture, one credit for outside reading, and three major conferences, “one on individual strong and weak points; one on record of qualifications, transmittal, and interview; and one on individual activities of the quarter” (pp. 120–121). The major writing assignment involved “a resume or recapitulation of the writing of the whole four years, as well as some training in the reading of classics” (91), and he also mentions “talks on outside readings, in form of compilations or reviews of material read” (93). While Fountain's descriptions are generalized, combining his notes with departmental records and Harbarger's textbook suggests an atypical structure with conferencing as central. If 15 conferencing hours per week were average, the acknowledgments on the surviving theses suggest even more.

Furthermore, by 1920s standards, Harbarger was technologically savvy. Her students practiced using a dictation machine (Weed, 1969) and English For Engineers from its first 1923 edition covers the parallel business technologies of the telegraph and telephone as letter alternatives in much the same tone that we today might discuss using Twitter or Zoom. Harbarger holds neither technology can replace the letter and the report, but they can supplement. She favors the reliable telegraph over the newer telephone, and the older technology features in the opening triad in her genre-centric strategy for selling the course to engineering majors, stated in English for Engineer's introduction: Harbarger interests them first through “the letter of application, by an appeal to an immediate use of English; next, to emphasize, through the telegram, the value of certain rhetorical qualities – conciseness and clearness; then to stress, through the order letter, the desirability of good display and layout (Harbarger, 1923, p. viii; Harbarger, 1928; Harbarger, 1934). Connecting to her students is a constant thread throughout, a rhetorical maneuver skirted by contemporary and later genre-based textbooks, notably the more popular The Engineer's Manual of English.

While Harbarger's textbook has been noted as groundbreaking by its emphasis on genre and its multiple early editions (Connors, 1982; Souther, 1989; Kynell, 1999; Kynell-Hunt, 2000; Fountain, 1944; Harbarger et al., 1943), ²⁵ the archival material suggests to me, rather, that individual conferencing is how Harbarger found success on a practical level, and this personal approach was imitated not only by the new junior deans, chosen for qualities evoking “a combination of Jesus Christ and Santa Claus” (Weed, 1969, p. 23). Her chair, Denney, had five sections of “Zero English” by 1923 to address upperclassmen with “bad” English through tutoring (Denney, 1923) and without mentioning Harbarger, he champions the department's emphasis on “personal conferences” developed in “past years” in a letter to OSU's president in 1927 (Denney, 1927a). ²⁶ While placing one-on-one conferencing with writing students at the center of coursework is sometimes sold as a rhetoric and composition innovation in the 1970s, emerging perhaps at the 1966 Darmouth Seminar (Russell, 2002, pp. 273), Harbarger was conferencing with engineering students systematically, at minimum, in the 1910s at Urbana—and she was even more ambitious about interdisciplinary efforts. Her close collaborative teaching and conferencing are evident in 1934's “Better English,” with William Hildreth, where a partnership between an unnamed Agriculture junior dean, Harbarger (an “experienced teacher in English”) and Hildreth (the “English consultant” who taught the course), was instrumental to an English Agriculture project (Harbarger & Hildreth, 1934; Harbarger, 1933). But it wasn’t her first effort; a 1928 article notes Harbarger and a Professor Beck in English did similar earlier work in Chemistry (Evans & Day, 1928), and Denney notes that Harbarger's engineering sequence also served OSU's Pharmacy students (Denney, 1927b).

These cross-departmental efforts reflect a desire to transfer her writing pedagogy into more than engineering. Her second textbook with McGraw-Hill, 1938's English for Students In Applied Sciences, aimed at freshmen, is co-authored with Hildreth, W.R. Dumble, and Bert Emsley, and like the first, it stresses the study of literature and rhetoric (Harbarger et al., 1938a). ²⁷ Connors notes this book “bombed” (1982, p. 344), perhaps based on its single edition and tepid reviews (Lowe, 1940; J.R.S., 1939) but the full reasons are worth teasing out. Fountain's 1938 survey notes that 23 of 93 engineering/science “English” courses surveyed did not use a primary textbook, with The Engineer's Manual of English (Sypherd and Brown, 1933; Sypherd et al., 1943) used in 18 ²⁸ ; only 3, Ohio State, Alabama, and Nebraska, used Harbarger's primarily (pp. 100–101, 104) ²⁹ With another war approaching, the Depression keeping pay and enrollments flat, and not many instructors of Harbarger's unique caliber in abundance, there was little market for an introductory textbook that attempted the writing across the curriculum movement three decades in advance. Still, while acceptance of the need for better engineering writing was widespread by the early 1920s (Connors, 1982), Harbarger was thinking farther ahead.

Harbarger's bond with her engineering students was both practical and personal. The two hobbies on her 1938 faculty profile are “motoring” and “gardening,” (Harbarger 1938b) neither unsurprising given that most of her close family, colleagues, and students were skilled craftsmen, engineers, and farmers; the land grant OSU was strong in all these areas. When Harbarger began at OSU, she initially boarded with Henry Erdman, a professor of agricultural economics, and his wife (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022a). Afterward and until 1938, she boarded with the professor of Steam Engineering Francis Marquis, his wife, and their two sons, both engineering undergraduates. ³⁰ Harbarger still returned to rural Hamden in the summers, perhaps by “motoring,” as her income would have allowed car ownership. ³¹ She could have gardened in either home; the Marquis house still stands and has an ample backyard, and the Hamden farm had unlimited space, with Delashmutt, her brother-in-law, planting experimental crops there during (and after) his later OSU stint as professor of Agricultural Education. ³² Even if she did not have immediate intimate knowledge of an engineering student's specific work, she was never far, even at home, from someone who could familiarize her with the particulars (the “wide acquaintance” mentioned in her 1920 “Qualifications” article), and her textbook reading lists show that she read the technical journals and publications of the relevant engineering subfields. Few English literature professors of the period could say the same, much less regularly attending the twice-monthly engineering faculty meetings.

Though she is only recorded speaking on SPEE and English matters, the engineering faculty doubtlessly wanted her in those meetings to keep track of their activities that affected her teaching. The minutes show constant debating on curriculum changes to keep up with rapid technological advancements in the four engineering departments, and then voting on individual course substitutions that were the unfortunate but logical consequences of the frequent curriculum changes. Harbarger was always on the two SPEE-related committees, occasionally as “chairman,” and the Broadcast Station Program committee, reflecting her interest in WEAO (Ohio State University Engineering College, 1914–1942).

WEAO, OSU's radio station, launched in 1922, was used extensively for distance education, offering entire courses and hourly educational programming and news. Harbarger hosted a program called “Story Hour” first in 1925, later “Story-Time For Shut-Ins,” where she read “short stories and novels in serial form” until 1931. The April 1928 program notes its “large audience” and mentions a vacation searching for “stories in the libraries of Boston and other eastern cities” (Ohio State Broadcasting, 1928). Later formats had her detailing the biographies of famous engineers. While the 1930 program notes her continued popularity (Ohio State Broadcasting, 1930), Depression budget cuts, the station's shifting format, and her mother's death in 1934 ³³ may have been factors in why she stopped by 1931.

A Female Professor at OSU

Harbarger's innovations emerged in environments designed for men, and white ones at that. Ohio State had progressive coed credentials, but she was the first woman in the engineering faculty, and her 1923 promotion represented both progress and lack of progress. The many annual photographs of the Ohio State Engineering newsletter staff she advised contain all white men save her. ³⁴ Even after Harbarger's time, in the early 1950s, OSU was a very conservative environment, as much “social as political” (Wheeler, ca. 1965). Young black men were heavily discouraged from taking engineering courses by OSU's president in the 1910s (Thompson, 1911), though he recommended them as teachers elsewhere (Pritchard, 1982). The few black students overall, including future Olympic medalist Jesse Owens, couldn’t buy a sandwich off campus in the 1930s (Ohio State University Libraries, 2022). When sociology professor Herbert Miller was dismissed in 1931 over his alleged support of Indian independence, the AAUP's scathing report noted the real reason he was fired was the Board's opinion of “his close association with Negroes” (Pritchard, 1982, p. 116).

I mention Miller's dismissal as like all OSU faculty of the time, Miller's employment was a 1-year contract (p. 165), but while over 170 faculty signed a supporting petition, Harbarger did not (Various, 1931). Her absence concurs with my suspicions elsewhere, gleaned from the male pronouns in her academic writings, her apparent withdrawal from the YWCA after 1919, and her careful navigation of gender roles in all instances: whatever her specific beliefs and politics, she kept a low profile. ³⁵ Such a stance coincides with the “decline of feminism” that Freedman (1979) describes after 1920, with professional women seeking to first assimilate into male-centric fields (pp. 512–29).

Even “assimilated,” however, Harbarger was typically mentioned only in the context of her gender by other faculty and Ohio newspapers. A post-1934 article chooses a headline of “Woman Instructor Formulates English Courses For Engineers,”(1934-) noting how she has “given up all thought of teaching anything else in her enthusiasm for the new field.” ³⁶ In 1938, The Marion Star mistook “Sada A. Harbarger” as one of “four men” who wrote her second textbook (The Marion Star, 1938, p. 2). Well after her OSU hiring, however, Harbarger continued to speak publicly on women and education with a religious undercurrent. The April 1920 Lantern quotes her on OSU's vocational education for women, noting “the need for competent college women is great, and every woman should take immediate steps to find out how she can get into the work for which she is peculiarly qualified” (Ohio State Lantern, 1920). Likewise, in March 1922, Harbarger spoke to the Marion County Federation of Women's club which paralleled her “The Cultural Contribution” article in the Ohio State Engineer (Harbarger, 1922; The Marion Star, 1922). Her address exemplifies all the dualities of her position in a careful rhetorical balance: a female professor at a male-centric university, giving an oral speech based on a published text, to a largely female audience on a male-dominated professional topic, with the topic being how to link the cultural benefits of literacy to the industrial benefits of engineering. One of the models for Harbarger's overall stance on gradual female professionalization may have been Isabel Bevier, a pioneer of the “home economics” field, who taught at Urbana when Harbarger was there and thanks Harbarger in her 1924 Home Economics in Education for manuscript preparation (Bevier, 1924, p. 9).

Harbarger made considerable inroads in the predominately male SPEE. In 1918, she began attending its conferences, and in 1919, she stepped into a vacant speaking slot and spoke on “Some Unconsidered Factors” (Harbarger 1919b), and in 1920, on “Qualifications of the Teacher of English for Engineers” (Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, 1920). The few SPEE members concerned with English education formed a small cabal of co-authors and critics, including C.W. Park at the University of Cincinnati (Harbarger, 1926). By 1936, she was a vice president (The Post-Crescent, 1936) and had organized two SPEE conferences at OSU, including a summer session (Pi Lambda Theta, 1932). Connors claims she “tyrannized” SPEE's English committee (1982, p. 339) ³⁷ ; a cordial letter exchange between Harbarger and OSU President Rightmire in 1932 reflects her leadership in this area (Harbarger, 1932a, 1932b; Rightmire, 1932). ³⁸

Long exploited at Illinois, Harbarger did better at OSU, but she hit a ceiling. Her salary increased to $2,500 when made Assistant Professor in 1923, and from $2,750 to $3,000 with the Associate rank in 1927, par among her male colleagues. At the Depression's height in 1931–1932, the senior faculty took cuts; Harbarger went from $3,072 to $2,806 (Ohio State University English Department, 1932) and then to $2,616 by 1933–1934 (Ohio State University English Department, 1934). Her salary returned to $3,072 only in 1939–1940 (Ohio State University English Department, 1939) and by then she was the lowest paid associate despite her seniority. Her brother-in-law Floyd, much later to academia, reported a $3,400 salary in the 1940 census; hers is $2,000 as a “Public School English” teacher, possibly a deliberate misstatement (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022b). ³⁹ She may have supplemented this income by teaching summer sessions at Columbia and the New York University of Commerce and Finance (Central Ohio Alumnae, 1942).

In April 1938, English chair James Fullington wrote to his dean about the OSU English Department's status, concerned about low salaries, as “a mature man with a family cannot live decently on less than $3,500. And on less than $4,500 he cannot do thoroughly efficient work, without sacrifices of his family…” (Fullington, 1938). Without such a “decent” income, a faculty “man,” Fullington stated, might have to “deprive his wife of respectable clothes and his children of a social life fitting their station.” Fullington's laments reinforce a consistent thread in Harbarger's story; while she was highly valued due to her engineering expertise and little threat to the status or pay of the literature-dominated, all-male English faculty, she could not widen that niche further. While she did rise in rank and avoided some of the typical disciplinary “segregation” (Kynell-Hunt, 2000, p. 85) of instructors teaching engineering-writing courses at other universities in this period, a ceiling remained, both figurative and financial.

A “Quiet But Useful Life”

April 1938's Ohio State Engineer reports Harbarger's resignation from its advisory board (Ohio State Engineer, 1938). Harbarger completed a new faculty profile that year with an address back in Clintonville, a house where she lived with her sister Adda, her brother-in-law, and her two nieces (Harbarger, 1938b). Adda had been the principal of Hamden's school, but Floyd becoming a professor at OSU seems to have necessitated a move to Columbus, or vice versa. Illness may have been the primary factor; she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1940 (State of Ohio, 1942). In March, Fullington asked for teaching relief for Harbarger's 419 class, given enrollment had reached 149, over 115 in the previous year, with the course requiring “much paper reading and student conference” (Fullington, 1940). Relief was granted, but this was an enormous and stressful workload even for a professor who did not already meet with every student often and could assume good health.

Harbarger gifted her share of the Hamden farm to her sister in October 1941 (Jackson County, 1941). Knowledge of her illness was not widespread when she attended the ASEE's Michigan conference (Fountain, 1941), and Harbarger was teaching and attending faculty meetings in November, but not December (OSU Engineering College, 1919–1942). Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, shifting the United States into a war long avoided. She asked for a year's leave on March 1, 1942; Fullington recommended Harbarger remain on the budget for 1942–1943. notes that Harbarger's doctor thought she would not survive the year, and that her request allowed her to die still employed by the university she loved (Fullington, 1942).

Harbarger died on April 23, 1942. All the major newspapers in Ohio ran an obituary noting her teaching reputation, and the Board of Trustees passed a laudatory resolution, calling her College of Engineering efforts “second to none in the country” (Bevis, 1942). Of the notable obituaries, ⁴⁰ the most revealing is in the Ohio State Lantern, written by William Graves, an OSU English professor since Harbarger was an undergraduate; ⁴¹ he is noted as another presenter at her early 1905 talk at Denney's house, mentioned earlier. Graves's laudatory, if heavily gendered, description of her “quiet but useful life,” approximates the personality traits and strategies that allowed Harbarger cut through some of the barriers keeping women out of the professoriate and successful connect with engineering students, and yet kept her defined as outside literature. Graves describes a well-liked, friendly, and dignified teacher and colleague who was “almost maternal” with students, but “retained all her womanly traits,” and “had a rare common sense in dealing with her students and her associates.” While she “never posed as a scholar,” she was “mistress in her own field, and refused to allow that field to become a narrow one.” Her favored literature was “not in the least exotic” and was “perhaps pleasantly old-fashioned.” Graves's portrait shows Harbarger used the same personas that many female professors later used to navigate the gender politics of the academy: the nurturing but strict and authoritative mentor of male students that segues into the plain-speaking, rural “homespun” solver of faculty and university problems by cleverness rather than erudition, who is also the specialized “mistress” of engineering education: formidable in her area, but harmless to the male literature faculty with her quaint tastes (Graves, 1942).

Method

By telling Harbarger's story first, I have skipped over the method. I initially vacuumed up every source I could find with her name—newspaper articles, city directories, birth and death certificates, census records, property records, work records, book acknowledgments, journal articles, letters, conference proceedings, yearbooks, and photographs, among many other miscellaneous materials. I then used the resulting leads for more focused archival searches. For example, one of the most difficult questions was the location of the Harbarger farm, given the vague nature of rural addresses in the period. However, an obscure mention of gas wells being dug in the 1910s told me the approximate township section, and a newspaper mention of Floyd Delashmutt farming in the area allowed me to triangulate with aerial survey maps, town directories, and rural postal routes until I only had a half dozen likely plots that simplified finding the modern address at the county deed office.

Treatments of historical figures in composition studies and technical communication usually maintain a distinct theoretical distance, but a “life” genre in narrative form felt more appropriate to me here given the existing records and a lack of oral histories. I would also hold that there is no separating who she was and what she was doing and the historical context, any more than I can separate myself from the research. I also decided early on that I could not finish this article until I had seen the Hamden farm; I knew why she went there every summer, but there is a difference between knowing and experiencing. The rise of COVID-19 in 2020 kept me from the legwork, but in 2021, when the pandemic had ebbed temporarily and archives in Ohio reopened, I was able to go. I suspected it would be an idyllic place in its own quiet pocket universe, and it was nothing less. Delashmutt's log cabin is still there, though the current owners have built a larger house around the old wood, leaving a hint of the aged cedar core exposed. The wheat grows wild; there are kept bees, a deep pond, curious does, cool clear air, and massive pines planted decades ago by her nieces, who became Buckeyes and later professors and professionals elsewhere. Not much different, in other words, from countless rural retreats across the United States; like Harbarger did, I spend much of my summers in a similar place while maintaining an urban career.

Closing Thoughts

Sada Harbarger did not resolve the dualities of gender, occupation, mode, and field in her lifetime, but she, and others after her, set the stage for more women entering the professoriate, more emphasis on writing education in engineering programs, more professors needed to teach the required genres, and the centrality of rhetoric to what would eventually be a fully-fledged academic field of technical communication.

What has been lost, perhaps, behind the recognition of her innovative genre-based textbook, is the context of the empathic human teacher behind that book: a female professor in the interwar period, devoting individual attention to engineering students that had unique problems that her technical expertise and background could directly address. I find it telling that the 1923 letter politely demanding that Denney promote her does not mention her new English for Engineers textbook at all. Rather, the engineering faculty wanted Denney to know that Harbarger was someone quite different from the rest of the English literature faculty. She knew “engineering technicalities,” and their students wanted more sections with an English professor that knew their subject, felt their specialized anxieties, and listened to them. In other words, Hitchcock and the engineering faculty recognized that Harbarger herself, not her textbook, was the cross-disciplinary value and innovation; a professor with one foot in rhetoric and literature and another in engineering technology and agriculture who knew more than a rough approximation of English department pedagogy to engineering (Grego, 1987) was needed. Her repeated emphasis in her Urbana-era writings on the character of the teacher of engineering writing and the importance of specialized knowledge shows she understood clearly how her unique skills advantaged her students as well as her own career.

By their existing theses, Harbarger's students were experimenting with bulky and unreliable technologies that are now commonplace and refined: batteries, electromagnets, trucks, tractors, radios, and telephones. Her adaptability matched their ambitions; as “old-fashioned” as Graves described her in 1942, she was also “motoring” via an internal combustion-powered vehicle that was outright futuristic when she was born in 1884. Paradoxically, her position as the English specialist in engineering demanded that she be a generalist in all the engineering college's offerings, as she would see all the variant engineering fields in the theses she reviewed. Harbarger skillfully navigated the dualities of the urban university and the rural farm, the male professoriate and the women's club, the 19th and the 20th centuries, wartime, and peacetime. The nation and the world were changing rapidly and fusing English to engineering education made the transition to industrialization more manageable. Her second textbook's commercial failure only reflects her forward thinking; not enough interdisciplinary-minded professors and the necessary positions existed to enact her goals.

Harbarger's career is thus early prima facie evidence of the enduring value of a generalist, personalized, across-the-curriculum approach to writing instruction; the combination of her literature training, rural background, and practical engineering knowledge made her transition and insights into engineering education possible, and the engineering faculty's unprecedented yet logical insistence on her retention after witnessing the results of her personal conferencing approach completed the electrical circuit. The applied sciences, as it became increasingly apparent after World War II, would need technical communication and vice versa, but they also needed specialized human beings that could bridge those two worlds. Harbarger and her SPEE peers formed an early rhetorical bridge between two academic areas that gender, technology, culture, and a relatively progressive university had yet to accomplish.

The major factors in the enduring strength and success of that bridge were Harbarger's consistent emphasis on conferencing with students and working with other “applied sciences” teachers beyond English, and these activities were only possible due to her knowledge of “engineering technicalities.” Our disciplinary histories can often overlook the personal qualities, applied knowledge, and social skills that power the teaching of writing. No textbook, no matter how groundbreaking or innovative, can replace the effectiveness of a uniquely qualified individual. The evolution of technical communication into an academic discipline has not been a straightforward process; it contains steps forward and steps back, and these are often simultaneous. Harbarger represents, perhaps, in her ability to leverage her unique background into innovations in conferencing and interdisciplinary writing as well as her textbook, an early fork in a long road that was not taken until much later. ⁴²