Good news for English composition - Derek Bok's "Our Underachieving Colleges"

I've started to read Bok's book, Our Underachieving Colleges, and skipped the introductory chapters and went right to the marinated tofu (as vegetarians say). Chapter 4, entitled "Learning to Communicate," offers Bok's thoughts on the importance of English writing and composition in the curriculum. I do not need to be convinced of the importance of writing well, nor of the difficulties in teaching composition. I was a little startled by Bok's insistence (three separate times) that correcting grammar mistakes is "discredited." Should the period go in or out of the apostrophe? Is it better to not correct grammar mistakes? Could writing be improved without any attention to grammar? Is grammar something one learns on one's own? Similarly glib was Bok's solution to the problem: have a "facultywide forum"and find out what your goals are in teaching writing (p. 97). (Just 7 pages later, he notes that in the related field of oral communication one could never get a consensus on an ideal curriculum (p. 104). So much for the forum idea.) Then initate a process to weed out bad teaching of English composition (outmoded practices must be extirpated). Then add a lot more resources. Well, this isn't very useful advice: "Pay attention and work better!" One begins to wonder what the budget for implementing the rest of the book is going to look like...