This paper attempts to explain the relationship between publication and professionalism in the culture of the American research university. To act, order, and believe in relation to the dominant image in contemporary composition studies is to understand published, professional discourse as the sacred well of the culture. The published discourse of composition and the image of the publishing professional, its ideal of excellence, necessarily create hierarchies that enforce conformity to that ideal. The reorientation of some composition specialists from "hapless bottom feeders" to endowed chairs has come about through the acceptance of values, assumptions, and practices that have traditionally enforced the hierarchical oppositions sometimes deplored in rhetoric and composition. Through a process of professionalization the huge group of non-publishing composition teachers are now effectively marginalized or devalued even within the context of rhetoric and composition. No longer can the composition scholar look to the traditional literature/composition binary to explain the hierarchy of productivity in English departments. The ultimate tyranny of a culture's centralizing image is its ability to legislate conformity to it by making itself appear part of the natural order. The elevation of the publishing professional as the cultural ideal of those who teach writing is an "achieved" state of affairs, a construction, an argument. Contains 15 references. (TB)