I joined Pitt’s English department in 1975. Bill Coles, the director of Composition, had been hired the year before, and he recruited me to serve as his associate director. Our charge was to create a comprehensive undergraduate composition program, one that would put Pitt on the map. I took over as director in 1980, and together we hired the core faculty who developed what became the “Pitt” program: Jean Carr, Paul Kameen, Mariolina Salvatori and Nick Coles.
A composition program is a massive operation. We were teaching over 2,000 students a year, with a continually revolving staff that consisted of new teaching assistants, teaching fellows, and a substantial group of part-time faculty. To manage all this, we learned to rely on a remarkable group of non-tenure track colleagues who stepped forward to provide leadership, innovation, continuity, professionalism, and administrative savvy, including Jean Grace, Geeta Kothari, Jennifer Lee, Brenda Whitney, Beth Newborg, and Beth Matway, who is retiring this year. 
Beth Matway received her PhD in English from the University of Pittsburgh in December 1998. I knew her as one of the outstanding teachers among her generation of TA/TFs. She took a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Seton Hill University, where she taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, and first-year seminars (seminars in “Thinking and Writing,” a program she revised for the Seton Hill freshman curriculum). While at Seton Hill, Beth also played a major role in their teacher training and certification program.
In 2003, when I was department chair, we were looking to create a full-time, permanent director for the cross-curricular Writing in the Disciplines Program, a program developed by the English department and sponsored by the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Beth was the ideal candidate. We were pleased to hire her as a Visiting Lecturer (2003–2007), a Lecturer (2007–2010), and a Senior Lecturer (2010–2020). She took on a particularly fraught and demanding job, one that required not only regular diplomatic negotiation with tenured and tenure-track faculty from across the departments in Arts and Sciences, but also the ability to serve that privileged group as both critic and mentor.
From 2004–2016, Beth served as the chair of the College Writing Board, a faculty committee responsible for overseeing all of the writing-intensive courses offered across the Arts and Sciences curriculum. I served in this position in the opening years of the program. It was one of the hardest and scariest jobs I ever had. You walk a very fine line reviewing courses proposed by distinguished senior faculty in departments not your own, departments that range from History to Spanish to Chemistry and Biology.
As chair of the College Writing Board, each year it was Beth’s job to organize and orient a new group of faculty drawn from the three divisions (humanities, natural sciences, social sciences), preparing them to think beyond their own classrooms as they thought about undergraduate writing. Beth was brilliant at this, bringing dramatically new direction and vision to the development of writing-intensive courses (the required W-courses)—and she did it by developing close and productive contacts with faculty across our campus.
Beth had the confidence and character required to pay generous attention to other people’s courses, to think from within the requirements of their teaching and their subject area, and to make the kinds of suggestions that could stick—suggestions that could be heard and that made sense. As department chair, I received regular phone calls or emails from grateful colleagues, most frequently from Marcus Rediker in History, testifying to the important contributions Beth had made in faculty meetings and through her work with individual faculty members newly assigned to teaching the required W-courses for their majors.
On top of this, Beth taught (or team-taught) an annual series of very successful faculty seminars on writing (or on writing and speaking) in the disciplines; she organized and led the committee that determined the Ossip Awards (our competitive, cross-departmental undergraduate essay contests); she managed the assessment of the W-courses for Arts and Sciences (an extremely difficult and potentially perilous project that she handled with characteristic wisdom and finesse); she developed the Writing in the Disciplines website; and she played a major role in developing the new initiative to train undergraduate writing fellows in the natural sciences. I had the great pleasure of working together with her to plan and execute the 2009 Pittsburgh Study of Undergraduate Writing, an assessment exercise ordered by the Provost, who said that he knew we were doing interesting things but that he needed context and detail. This study was partly a matter of surveys and data collection, but it also involved extensive one-on-one interviews with faculty and focus group interviews with students. The report we wrote circulated widely both on campus and in the professional community. An essay we prepared on the Pittsburgh Study was selected for the Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals 2011 (Parlor Press).
Beth has had a brilliant career as a teacher of literature and composition, but her legacy also includes the key administrative work she did to support undergraduate writing across the curriculum on our campus. In September 2004, U.S. News & World Report listed ours as one of the top 16 “Writing in the Disciplines” programs in the nation, ranked with Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Duke, Chicago, and Princeton, among others. Although many people contributed over time, Beth deserves her substantial share of the credit for this recognition and for the continued attention given to Writing in the Disciplines at Pitt.
—David Bartholomae
David Bartholomae is emeritus professor of English and Charles Crow Chair. Upon his retirement,T5F featured him here.
Photograph of Beth Matway: Bethany Krupick, staff photographer, The Pitt News