Composition is suspect?

would think research into composition would be one of the most well-funded areas of study, especially with the high school diploma less capable of providing its recipient a living-wage,and society making the four-year college experience seem like a key component of social mobility. Recent trends show an increase in overall enrollment in non-vocational higher education and with that there has been an increase of students into the college classroom who lack an understanding of grammar and mechanics, and whose rhetorical understanding is underdeveloped, hampered (among other things) by well-meaning, but misguided instruction of five paragraph writing . One would think that given such a state of things, a legitimate, concerted effort supported by the academic community would be given to the process of composing and the method of teaching that process to students; yet North in his defense of writing centers, notes that "composition," and I'm not sure if he means the process or the study of here, is suspect in the eyes of the academic community (76). I'm not sure how to interpret this comment. The article was published in 1984, and so maybe the 20 something years of scholarship since the increased focus on composition was yet to be accepted as authoritative; yet even if I say the scholarship is suspect (and at the time of this writing it was still in its infancy), to say composition, which has been practiced for hundreds of years, is suspect does not make sense. Or maybe it does and I'm missing something. Any thoughts?