A comprehensive composition course for the college level should include the strengthening of cognitive skills, language skills, social organization, and language patterns. The subjects which students are asked to read and write about should be multi-cultural in nature so that students learn more about other cultures while they analyze their own cultural experiences. Many constraints limit the professor's ability to have such a well rounded curriculum. In a composition course at the University of California at Irvine the constraints are the following: (1) the large number of students in the class; (2) the commitment to finish the course in a ten-week quarter; (3) the placement of the course in the English Department, where the faculty has narrow views about what constitutes a good composition course; (4) staff members who are mostly Anglo and have little knowledge of multi-ethnic literature; (5) the bias of publishers against including some ethnic groups but not others, like Asian Americans and American Indians; (6) the cost of books; and (7) student resistance to all or part of the multi-cultural approach. The solutions to these problems may be that instructors of these courses must develop and evaluate their work outside of the mainstream of existing departments, and students must be encouraged to validate their own cultural experiences as well as those of other groups. (VM)