William Perry argued that adult development can be marked by a progressively refined set of questions focused on how Authorities like teachers can support multiple right answers and still maintain that there are wrong answers. When prospective English teachers view right and wrong answers as relativistic, they seem to view themselves as purposefully neutral, as prospective discussion hosts charged exclusively with facilitating turn-taking and the creation of an emotionally safe context that encourages all to participate. They expect to coach students' thinking, to inform it, and shape it, even though they are fully aware that there is no one right answer out there. A study explored data taken from a broad, longitudinal study of English majors as they developed subject matter knowledge. The larger study focused heavily on prospective English teachers' personal histories as readers. Prospective teachers (n=12) were interviewed early in their sophomore year and again in their senior year. Data were taken from study participants' responses to a sub-set of the corpus of interview tasks and questions; this sub-set includes a teaching task involving Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," a literary criticism evaluation task, and a "Romeo and Juliet" teaching task. Students' varied responses to these tasks illustrate how intellectual development is different for each person. Each prospective teacher experienced his/her role projection as the norm. They were unaware of their position on a continuum of development and satisfied with their way of understanding the role of an authority in a literature classroom. (Appended is an explanation of four literary theories. (Contains 12 references.) (NKA)