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Оглавление1 Toward a Philosophy of Generation Administration
As they read, write, and practice administration, students and faculty try on wildly divergent self-images of the WPA.
—Louise Wetherbee Phelps
Using landscaping as a metaphor for disciplinary knowledge-making offers a mechanism for understanding two provocative challenges. One is to recognize that whatever we currently know about rhetorical history as a disciplinary landscape is situated on a larger terrain of developed and undeveloped possibilities. A second challenge is to understand on an operational level, rather than just a theoretical one, that knowledge is less truth for all the time, space, and conditions than it is interpretation.
—Jacqueline Jones Royster
It’s not about choosing the job or not choosing the job. That’s a false and binary understanding of the choices we face for employment and academic responsibility. It’s about not letting the job choose you, and not letting it alone define your identity.
—Conversational nugget from the authors
What is Administrative Identity?—Generating a Generational Frame
The identity of writing program administration has historically been varied, complex, and marked by periods of tension, out of which new temporal and theoretical moments continually grow. Where writing program administration was once largely perceived as a much-needed service role for corralling large numbers of composition sections and their teachers, it has since become a discipline and profession performed by tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track faculty, as well as graduate students taking on such roles as part of their educational training. To the five of us writing this book, GenAdmin refers to an historical positioning that isn’t bound by chronological placement or cultural positioning as much as by an intellectual posturing towards the work. For that reason, we have two main goals for this book, and readers will see us frequently negotiate some tension between them: (1) to articulate an administrative positioning that we have seen emerge in the theorization and practice of writing program work in the last two decades; and (2) to illustrate how that positioning reflects a philosophy of writing program administration that impels us to retheorize a discipline of writing program administration, even as we rethink disciplinary parameters.
This undertaking is rich with the complications that arose as we learned to write together through our differences, highlighting both the shared characteristics of and the disparity among our roles. Fundamentally, we have three experiences in common: (1) we have had explicit preparation in one or more aspects of writing program administration that our predecessors did not; (2) we have directly benefited from groundwork laid by the CWPA (e.g., in terms of guidance for evaluation of the intellectual work of the WPA); and (3) we have all at one time or another expressed a difference between our understandings of our beliefs and goals as untenured WPAs and common expectations for junior WPAs (jWPAs) even endorsed by the CWPA. These commonalities still leave room for flux: we do not all have the same expectation of our roles as WPAs; we were not all hired into departments where our work is acknowledged, valued, or understood; and we did not all come to our roles via the same understandings of what it means to choose a career in writing program administration. But throughout our ongoing conversations, we return again and again to the idea that what we experienced in our first years as WPAs was different than what we were told to expect. We found that our relationships with colleagues need not be agonistic, that effective program work could be done without the power afforded by tenure, and that being an untenured WPA need not require that we forsake a domestic or extra-academic existence. The narratives peppering the scholarship of writing program administration told us we should expect otherwise, as did some of our mentors. When our collective and individual experiences did not match those stories, we began to wonder if we were a part of a new generation of WPAs—one for whom the conventional WPA narratives do not necessarily apply, or for whom they could be more deliberately disrupted.
In the course of this book there are many terms, like jWPA, that we do not privilege as identifiers because of our desire to position and understand WPA work and workers in relationships that are complex alternatives to ones defined as junior/senior. Of course, we realize that some positionings will always be institutionally unrealizable or unproductive, revealing both the ends and the beginnings of concepts even as we name or categorize them. We suggest GenAdmin, instead, as a placeholder. As a generational placeholder, we value GenAdmin for what it makes visible: how we moved into the roles we now play as writing program administrators, and how this identity played out in other areas of our work. This visibility, in turn, complicates other notions, such as what it means to choose WPA work (something we will take up in greater depth in an interlude to Chapter 2), what is at stake in abandoning traditional arguments against this work on the basis of institutional naïveté (which we address in Chapter 3), whether and how well other forms of disciplinary knowledge or authority can serve pre-tenure WPAs (which we take up in Chapters 4 and 5), and what WPA responsibility might mean when responsibility is refigured as ethic not task (which we explore in Chapter 6).
We recognize that, as material conditions on many campuses cause WPA roles to be more creatively defined, expanded, or shared, the benefits afforded those roles do not always follow suit. The possibilities of the job and for the role are still constructed differently according to a constellation of factors. In “Ethics and the jWPA,” although Alice Horning offers what we see as uninterrogated assumptions1 about power and responsibility in speaking for junior WPAs, we realize she makes an argument that cannot be wholly ignored—it is unsustainable to have untenured faculty do program work in some institutions because of the ways in which the jWPA is practically, theoretically, or technically situated within that environment. For example, the untenured faculty member doing WPA work at a college or university that lacks a way of recognizing the work as commensurate with reward is at risk of not getting her needs met in the form of resources, course releases, or research support. A solo WPA who is the only rhetoric and composition faculty member or a WPA facing high publication expectations that don’t accommodate her administrative service will also be vulnerable, as WPAs in those roles may find it difficult to be fully functioning members of the faculty. But because both the limits and the sources of support are determined by complex rather than single factors, we also realize that choosing pre-tenure WPA positions well (insomuch as this is possible) is important, as is being savvy rhetoricians on the job. Nevertheless, being intellectually shaped by a disciplinary landscape in which writing program administration is a legitimate scholarly enterprise can create an unavoidably different climate, one that disrupts the categories dominating debates in the field for the past two decades.
Applying a generational frame to the changing nature of WPA work, and the professionals who inhabit those positions, is not new to WPA studies. In their multivocal article, “The Progress of Generations,” Anthony Baker, Karen Bishop, Suellyn Duffey, Jeanne Gunner, Rich Miller, and Shelley Reid identify themselves as members of two generations of WPA professionals—those who paved new territory in their departments and institutions as the first officially trained WPA to hold the position and those who take up the work after a first-generation WPA has moved on to a different role. They write of ghosts who haunt the second-generation WPAs as these newer professionals attempt to develop and lead already established programs, but they do so “carrying the professional DNA of earlier generations,” forcing them to comply with or fight against their genetic predispositions (Baker et al. 55).
Our ghosts, or at least the ones we try to lay to rest in this volume, are less institutional and more disciplinary, in part because we see our identity as WPAs separate from our institutional contexts, even though our practices are always informed by our institutional and theoretical locations. We are a generation of WPAs whose identities are emerging from a philosophy of life and work that is more portable than earlier discussions of WPA work focused on institutional context would suggest. Instead, our generational frame offers us a new way of thinking about our identities as WPAs, identities that are, indeed, marked with the DNA of earlier generations but that are shaped and moved forward by different political, personal, and disciplinary forces. What we offer here is not a dismissal or a critique of the work of previous generations of WPAs; on the contrary, we are well aware that we would not be able to do this work without the efforts the WPAs who came before us and successfully argued for the professionalization of WPA roles and for the intellectual nature of WPA work. We use generational differences as a starting point for highlighting the ways in which the material reality and the intellectual nature of WPA work has changed.
We acknowledge differences in our WPA roles and those of prior generations, made possible by the increasing disciplinarity of the field and demonstrated in part by a rise in rhetoric and composition doctoral programs with writing program administration emphases; the slowly growing presence of WPA curriculum or seminars; professionalizing efforts by the CWPA; the increasing number of collections focusing on writing program administration; and the shifting material conditions of our universities which lead to part-time or full-time positions as graduate student WPAs, or that necessitate shared administration and lead to multiple WPA roles on one campus. These shifts are well documented and have been theorized by a generation or more of active and retiring WPAs who have worked hard to improve the conditions in which we now work, and who have themselves adopted writing program administration as more than an occupational identity. We see ourselves as taking earlier work in new directions, particularly on such intertwined issues as disciplinarity and identity; power, authority and positioning; and the place of rhetoric and ethics in writing program administration.
In this new intellectual climate, what does and can it mean to be teachers and scholars, especially pre-tenure, with an administrative identity? How does this positioning translate as a way of being a scholar, teacher, researcher, and citizen? We do not necessarily posit writing program administration as a subdiscipline of rhetoric, composition, or English studies, but rather acknowledge its multiplicinarity,2 especially inasmuch as it concerns all of us with the articulation of particular theoretical orientations for the instruction each of our programs provides (Gunner, “Ideology” 7), thus setting itself apart from any number of fields to which it “belongs.” By the same token, we do not only posit GenAdmin as a specific population within the WPA community, but also a philosophical perspective that we see emerging from the ongoing theorization of this field.
We hope this book helps account for the thinking of a generation of rhetoric and composition practitioners who were in some ways trained to think ideologically or philosophically like WPAs, whether or not they were seeking a traditional WPA role. We contribute to the emergent historical picture of who WPAs are but also who they can be, and in some part to assuage our own dissonances with taking on various aspects of the job. Our mentors taught us to think certain ways with the full knowledge that they were sending us out into a different field, a different job, a different historical and epistemological context, even if they didn’t know exactly what those would be. Here, we explore consequences of educations embraced, jobs taken, lessons learned.
Even still, a project like this comes with the following risks:
contextualizing our work only in terms of what we wish to change about our individual circumstances;
coming across as simply being “dis”—dissatisfied, disempowered, disenfranchised—while trying to explicitly avoid a they say/we say binary;
perpetuating metaphors and narratives of loss, victimization, and grief;
sounding so neutral that our message loses impact;
sounding so specific that we over-criticize the institutions where we live or have lived;
subjecting our real message to erasure in our attempts to be well-intentioned with every audience we wish to reach; and
romanticizing pragmatic hopefulness.
In fact, none of these is our goal. Readers of this book will find that we offer GenAdmin not as a homogeneous identifier, an essentialization of any set of characteristics, or a polemical suggestion, but as a theorization—a concept for the WPA community at large, a core philosophy that can actually be mobilized in spite of (or because of) the complexities of our different roles, and a movement towards a new kind of agency for those who do WPA work. We hope this book will be useful for its larger philosophical breadth. We hope it will be read and valued by people who didn’t originally self-identify as WPAs according to stock definitions of power and profession, but who recognize in administration a vital intellectual identity—one that is never only parlayed into serving the immediate needs of particular tasks, courses, or programs.
Ultimately, we theorize administration as an open identity that is (we hope) more productive than some of the narratives that have shaped our field. The narratives of grief, fear, victimization, extraordinary empowerment, and heroism that have helped us to understand the evolving WPA experience are not unproductive in themselves, but neither are they always told with the intention of enacting discursive power, shared understanding, or change. Like others before us, we reject the dichotomous thinking that posits WPAs as either administrators or intellectuals. But a rejection does not fully justify how and why this dichotomy is unnecessary. In the same way that Christy Desmet elides the “accommodation-resistance” (40) binary among new teachers in a writing program, we hope to elide a rhetoric-administration binary among all program participants that causes them to position the classroom, the WPA, the students, the teachers, and the curriculum in static positions that shape not only their work, but also their identities. Where this binary operates, it usually implies that, by virtue of our filling a role, we must stand in for a subset of ideologies that others assume the role carries with it. We also see this binary at work whenever professional rhetoric and composition identities are formulated at the exclusion of other personas, rather than understood as preparation for “adopting myriad and shifting professional personas” that our roles may need us to take up (Anderson and Romano 3).
Situating GenAdmin Historically
Reading through the past fifteen years of literature in WPA scholarship, we see assertions of writing program administration as a legitimate discipline in the twentieth century and the recognition in the twenty-first century of writing program administration as a protean and diverse discipline.3 We also see a good deal of attention paid to the WPA and an emphasis on sharing experiential narratives. Such writings often consider how issues of power, authority and responsibility intersect and diverge, often related to the existence of untenured WPAs and a lack of disciplinary recognition and respect from administrators and colleagues within and beyond our “home” departments. The identities of WPAs have evolved to include an understanding of the multiple roles and personas a WPA might adopt—and adapt differently in different situations—to succeed on the job. As a discipline and an endeavor, writing program administration is marked regularly as a space of tension—between crisis and change, discord and direction, promise and peril—because of the political, ethical, and programmatic challenges of both being an endeavor attached to a simultaneously poorly respected discipline and one that involves stakeholders with varying degrees of commitment to this discipline and its theories, practices, and interests. With the WPA often at the center of these tensions, the notion of the WPA as a change agent, established by Susan McLeod in 1995, has coalesced into a professional totem, though what that entails is varied and complex. These evolutions position writing program administration as a particularly rich site for institutional change and the WPA as a catalyst of change. For the five of us, one circumstance of our inherited WPA identity, and one impetus for ongoing change, has been the underlying conviction that our work is creative, intellectual, and has activist potential within and beyond our programs. In committee meetings we find ourselves regularly trying to creatively reform beliefs and practices about writing and writing instruction that have currency on our campuses and in our departments. We rhetorically frame data so that different stakeholders will support our program developments because of their extra-programmatic concerns and values. We invent and experiment with new feedback strategies that bridge our understanding of best practices with local student needs, values, and anxieties. When we create public events around the work our students and teachers do, we try to shift the culture of degree requirement into a culture of intellectual accomplishment. Even upholding program policies and negotiating student-instructor disagreements demands creative and intellectual efforts that may in fact lead stakeholders to new understandings. And these programmatic acts keep aggregating to create new, hopeful representations for employers, parents, public organizations, and more about what exactly it is that we do in writing programs. It is the conviction behind these examples that caused us to seek out jobs with different iterations of programmatic responsibility right away, and we see this coalescence of conviction and artistic action as an interesting historical moment to explore.
In Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing Programs, editors Joseph Janangelo and Kristine Hansen collect arguments that claim, from multiple angles, that the administrative work of WPAs is an expression of disciplinarity. GenAdmin follows this argument in new directions, largely because we represent a generation of administrators who became administrators in this climate of professionalization, who chose writing program administration as a career pre-tenure, or who became interested in writing program administration as an intellectual pursuit. In other words, our WPA disciplinary identification is strong, though our discipline still contends with those who see administration as purely managerial and entrepreneurial. Texts such as Stuart C. Brown and Theresa Enos’s The Writing Program Administrator’s Resource and Irene Ward and William J. Carpenter’s The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators mark the disciplinary terrain Janangelo and Hansen’s collection explores, establishing guideposts that offer handy resources for practicing WPAs, particularly new WPAs seeking knowledge from authorities in the field to help them solve problems and gain background knowledge in the diverse disciplinary terrain. Additionally, Brown and Enos’s collection extends the conversation of WPA disciplinarity by emphasizing the importance of WPAs adopting a reflective stance towards writing program administration, something the five of us have thoroughly embraced as an important methodology for making sense of our WPA experiences (as teachers, scholars, activists, and researchers). Each of these texts argues, in different ways, that writing program administration is its own discipline, one marked by thoughtful planning, problem solving, communication, and reflection.
Shirley K Rose and Irwin Weiser’s The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist extends the recognition of writing program administration as scholarly to “develop our professional understanding of the role of theory in writing program administration” (1). “Raised” as we were studying rhetorical and literary theory, this discussion of how WPAs develop and use theory and theorizing is an inherent part of our educational history and positioning, for it confirms our understanding that writing program administration is not just something that we do; rather, it is something we think about, write about, and live. Discord and Direction: The Postmodern Writing Program Administrator, edited by Carolyn Handa and Sharon James McGee, focuses on postmodern theory and how it impacts writing program administration, particularly given the claim that composition studies “sides itself more with modernism” while postmodernism “aptly characterizes the world in which WPAs must function every day” (2). Their collection considers how postmodern actions, like challenging hierarchies or resisting master narratives (Handa and McGee 2), play out in the context of writing program administration to determine how WPAs and their programs can move from discord to direction. McGee and Handa’s position is a thread that informs our entire collection, for in arguing that WPA work, and GenAdmin in particular, is a becoming, we negotiate the theoretical tensions between what we want for our programs and the environment in which our programs exist.
Current WPA research adds to this rich body of work that has established writing program administration as a theory-based discipline in its own right by exploring the ways that WPAs enact their identities, problematize their work and role as administrators, and chart new paths toward pragmatic, ethical program leadership. In The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers, Linda Adler-Kassner identifies the need for WPAs to link ideas with strategies to reframe the predominantly negative stories about writing and writing instruction that circulate publicly, drawing largely on principles and practices related to grassroots organizing. Moreover, Adler-Kassner cites tikkun olam, a Jewish practice of “healing and restoring the world,” and prophetic pragmatism as motives and means that guide her activism as a WPA (169). Like Adler-Kassner, studying identities and ethics motivates and grounds our own work, although we focus more closely on academic WPA communities because we also see a need for activism and reform within these contexts. We value Adler-Kassner’s call to shift frames, a move we also make, though our focus is more often on changing the stories WPAs tell about themselves.
A reading of the essays in Theresa Enos and Shane Borrowman’s The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration causes us to reconsider the belief that writing program administration is a discipline built on solid ground. This collection offers survey data about WPAs and their living/working conditions and situates WPAs as caught between tensions related to a disrespect of our disciplinarity and jobs that entail large responsibilities but little authority, largely because of the number of untenured WPAs. An important argument Skeffington, Borrowman, and Enos make is that writing program administrators need to extend their understanding of the legitimacy of writing program administration beyond their sphere or work: “we have convinced ourselves that writing program administration is legitimate, important, and theoretical work. We now need to convince faculty members in our departments, colleges, and across campus” (“Living” 19). The tensions that WPAs negotiate, they argue, are often the source of much peril, but also create the possibility for much promise. Debra Frank Dew and Alice Horning’s recent collection, Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics, more fully explores the ethics and politics of jWPA positions, a discussion close to our hearts and minds as we all hold or have held WPA positions as graduate students and as pre-tenure faculty. This collection begins to re-landscape writing program administration in significant ways, and our work responds to their concerns, for we go further to disrupt accepted WPA narratives and frameworks that claim that jWPAs should not ever take on WPA jobs, a stance that the five of us find to be practically untenable and philosophically limiting given the many complications related to job choice.
Virginia Anderson and Susan Romano’s collection, Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric and Composition, turns a critical lens on the position of WPA by examining how the decisions WPAs make and the philosophies they enact as WPAs, combined with the changing issues of disciplinarity and professionalization happening in the field, challenge rhetoric and composition graduates’ identity development, practices, and beliefs about graduate student preparation. As a whole, the book critiques “luck-of-the-draw, true-grit” professional narratives in favor of rhetorical understanding (2). In their introduction, Anderson and Romano characterize the essays in this collection as “ask[ing] implicitly and explicitly for preparation in rhetorica utens, in the arts of deploying disciplinary knowledge and the skills of establishing relationships and ethos, from programs that have listened to and acted on news from the field” (3). We likewise use critique to construct new thinking about our profession. In this book, we build not only on “news from the field” to develop our arguments, but also on our collective (though disparate) experiences as WPAs in order to establish GenAdmin as an identity that includes, among other things, rhetorica utens and the notion that taking on shifting identities rather than seeking a fixed positioning is not only strategic (Anderson and Romano 3) but also a part of how we understand and experience identity.
In Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White’s two edited collections on twenty-first century WPA identities—Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change and Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future—the various chapters complicate a new WPA role and WPA work in the market-driven university by revitalizing their convergences with and their divergences from composition studies on issues like disciplinary origins, epistemology, and methodology. Framed around questions explored at an October 1993 conference by the same name, the first volume focuses on crisis and change by anticipating the kinds of practical and theoretical re-definitions that WPAs will need to make, not only to understand and teach the discipline but also to identify stakeholders in the discipline and what that identification means, to rethink assessment, to ask questions about politics, to understand and enact activism, and to consider how research will affect teaching. The second volume, shaped very much by the shadow of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, offers multiple readings of composition’s past in order to compose arguments for the future. In these collections, the editors and their contributors were as focused on an historical moment as we are now.
We build on the promises of texts like these because doing so yields a more complex understanding of WPA identity and disciplinarity. Most recently, Donna Strickland and Jeanne Gunner’s The Writing Program Interrupted: Making Space for Critical Discourse examines where WPAs have been, where they are, and where they are going in their abilities to critique the cultures, discourses, and subjectivities that ensue, reminding us again of the critical urgency to locate the WPA among vital and current theoretical dilemmas. Where previous work helped WPAs to see and rely on “admin” as a position, GenAdmin views administration as an orientation towards creating new conditions and, hence, for choosing the work. Rather than replace “admin” in our work, we hope to define it more robustly.
These texts, and any number of articles from the pages of our journals, especially WPA: Writing Program Administration, have been instrumental in the development of writing program administration as theory, as practice, as scholarly pursuit. Although these are not the only texts that have influenced the disciplinary emergence of writing program administration or our own beliefs as WPAs, we cannot underscore enough their importance in establishing writing program administration as a scholarly discipline in creating a body of texts, establishing research methods (narration, theorizing, reflecting, studying local practices and programs to offer useful generalizations), and in imparting means of constructing and revising programs rhetorically and thoughtfully.
Changing Perceptions About Administration
Our intent is not to talk back or aggressively reject criticisms that are directed towards our perceptions of WPA work, mainly because these are no longer the only speech acts that have shaped our thinking, but also because we are well aware of the diversity of our mentoring and training—that where we are is a direct result of the committed and longstanding work of many people in writing program administration specifically and in rhetoric and composition more broadly. As GenAdmin, we position ourselves within the dimensions of a broader evolving WPA identity that has been shaping the field since Donald Bushman’s recasting of the WPA as humanist intellectual in “The WPA as Pragmatist: Recasting ‘Service’ as ‘Human Science,’” including the WPA as activist, scholar, and change agent. Although in Chapter 4 we discuss the inefficacy of laying claim to metaphors, we realize that the evolving WPA role has been critical to our identity study. Furthermore, we invite extra-academic connections, again because of how related roles have challenged stable definitions of WPA work.
To clarify, this book is not a statement of identity or an essentialist manifesto, a simple acknowledgment that the tenor and shape of the job is changing, therefore so must we, or a confession of entitlement, difference, or being caught unawares. This book is an exploration of WPA identity in the twenty-first century; an identification of GenAdmin as a subject position for WPAs in the twenty-first century; a narrative of choice, hybridity, and/or emergence; an opportunity to locate WPA work within larger systems of activity and to reinvent the parameters of those activity systems; and an occasion to disrupt some of the binaries that have caused tensions between how past, present, and future WPAs perceive one another to work and to think, perhaps even to help them arrive at a more nuanced understanding of one another’s positionings in the field. In taking up the questions posed by our Prelude, we arrive at the following understanding of GenAdmin: it is an always emergent identity, a position from which we can destabilize and disrupt prevalent binaries in writing program administration scholarship to, consequently, represent and enact administration as rhetorical theory and philosophical practice.
Challenging History and “Doing Philosophy”
At this point it is useful to mention that in challenging perceptions about administration and in clarifying the purposes for our book, we both build on and build away from Jacqueline Jones Royster’s idea of “disciplinary landscaping” for rhetoric and composition. On the one hand, we recognize that knowledge in rhetoric and composition studies (in writing program administration, specifically) is an interpretive enterprise and social construction (“Disciplinary” 149) that can be collectively “historiciz[ed] based on new perceptions” and “reenvision[ed] . . . in more dynamic ways” (“Disciplinary” 163). Royster makes this point in the context of challenging rhetorical history to disrupt the understanding that African women’s rhetorical participation began in the nineteenth-century United States when we can reasonably situate it three to five centuries earlier by being more inclusive with our collections across genre, space, and time—more inclusive of the terms of their “participation” (“Disciplinary” 151). It is useful to remember that historical situatedness is a matter of geospatial location and rhetorical context, and not merely of temporality. On the other hand, we suggest alternatives to or disruptions of the perpetual mapping and landscaping metaphors that probably inspired Sidney I. Dobrin to charge the discipline of writing program administration with having “foregone the freedom of space in favor of a guarded conservatism to protect its place” (57). That is, of being so preoccupied with legitimation and place that it has “renounced not only critical perspectives of its work . . . but has succumbed to a false security bound up in a mythology of administrative power that fails not only to question the very safety of that place but to deny the potential critical, theoretical, and political work that can be done beyond the borders of WPA-place” (Dobrin 57-58). Whereas maps and landscape images can serve to fortify borders and boundaries (to totalize or imperialize), we disrupt and make more fluid these boundaries as spaces and places to move towards as we chart out new epistemologies for our work.4
Even in our theorization of GenAdmin as a disciplinary identity, we aim to reasonably disrupt the various histories that GenAdmin inherits as well as to consider how such an identifier challenges (or stretches or expands) “disciplinary” history. Like Royster, the larger point we make is that when you shift rhetorical subjects and challenge perceptions, you can reform disciplinary histories beyond geographic and historical scope (“Disciplinary” 152) towards a more nuanced recovery of both self and history. But unlike Royster, we do not strive for self-and-historical recovery as much as we provoke what have traditionally been seen as stringent theoretical (and historical) divisions that limit perceptions of our work. In other words, rather than unsettling past narratives of WPA work so as to more accurately say what GenAdmin is, we strive to enact what GenAdmin does, and to redefine the terms of this en/action in the process.
This move in turn puts a compelling question to our book: What are our explicit interventions in WPA’s theory and history if we do not wish to re-landscape, correct, or totalize in return? What does it mean for us and for GenAdmin to “theoretically disrupt”? In her article “Sp(l)itting Images,” Karen Kopelson poses a similar question, asking readers that if theory need not be applicable, if it need not be justified as a mode of inquiry, and if in fact there is no real need to overcome the theory/practice split (or what she calls the “use/do” divide) (764), then what are requisite roles for praxis in rhetoric and composition? While practice need not be consciously informed by theory, praxis, or “action driven by and resulting from theory” (Kopelson 764), it necessitates a more urgent recognition of a theory/praxis split, since practice is an “explicitly theorized, politicized intervention” (Kopelson 764). To make this new errand explicit, Kopelson argues for a redefinition of “terms such as action, intervention, service, and use” (765), a movement that aligns with how we see GenAdmin praxis being taken up.
Although we may be less concerned than Kopelson’s subjects that our discipline will be seen as a user-doer-producer for others, rather than as a producer of our own knowledge field, we do benefit from Kopelson’s characterization in five dimensions of what she calls a “living rhetoric and composition” (775). We extend these five dimensions towards GenAdmin to consider the tenets that make GenAdmin a living philosophy and that differentiate it from other theoretical subject positions. First, a living philosophy aligns action, intervention, service, and use with politicized intervention rather than with group identification. Second, it links identity to becoming rather than to stability, where participants may be defined less by the spaces they occupy than by how they move between and among them. Third, it is productive—it makes itself, feeds on itself, could itself be seen as a field rather than as in servitude to some other field. Fourth, it relies on both the study of and deployment of language uses, in turn acknowledging the significant role of discourse in its enactments. Finally, it offers a spaciousness around which “an array of disciplinary inquiries and pursuits might best coalesce” (Kopelson 772), including those concerned with ethics and change.
At the heart of a living philosophy we see an illumination and enactment of principles that can themselves carry meaning as useful abstractions, and a flexibility to imagine and respect other people’s truths even as we pursue alternatives. Thus, we do not posit that none of the difficulties raised by our critics is unprecedented or real. However, we do argue that these difficulties create vital gaps in WPA theorizing that push us to reject helpless notions of power for more helpful notions of disciplinarity and agency. They also push us to embrace the non-universality of our experiences without arriving at an unproductive, unpragmatic, relativistic set of principles from which to practice.
Even still, this philosophy has its limitations. It need not stand in for perfect understanding, perfect rhetorical persuasion, or universally accepted principles of program management—hallmarks of the analytic philosophical tradition rather than a more feminist epistemology that privileges context and subjectivity. It may be a universal enough assumption to acknowledge (by now) that our lives would be easier in some ways if we were not WPAs. However, an overarching value of GenAdmin for us isn’t finding ways to make things easier day to day, but rather making ways to build the discipline by negotiating daily realities in the enactment of rhetoric and writing, whether or not those realities directly pertain to the construction and maintenance of a college writing program. In an attempt at re-orientation and enactment, we have arranged this book around six chapters that both describe and argue for an administrative philosophy embodied in a new generation of writing program administrators by addressing interrelated questions about WPA identities and actions. Both the conflation of rhetoric and composition with writing program administration, and the positioning of them as subsets of English studies are, we think, serious problems; as much as possible, the reader will find that our philosophy elides either conflation or subjugation in favor of other positionings, as we use narrative, reflection, and theorizing to study WPA identities and provide examples of how this theorizing impacts the work that we do.
In so doing, the five of us assign new meaning to the narratives we inherit to articulate our understanding of WPA work within the context of new identities and experiential realities in order to build new knowledge about WPA identities and work. This book follows discussions of how we, as writing program administrators, and as teachers, scholars, spouses, parents, gamers, painters, foodies, hikers, yogis, crafters, birdwatchers, and more explore such questions as, Who do we think we are?, How do we conduct our work?, and What difference can that make? Because those discussions involved tracking our movement between past, present, and future locations and our positioning in those locations, each chapter in this book represents one of these locations or positionings, even as it articulates how a GenAdmin philosophy repositions us.
In organizing the book, we found no perfect ordering to the chapters, as each chapter is a bit of a microcosm of what was, is, and can/should be. Even so, the order of our chapters is best described as a movement from past to future in terms of how GenAdmin relates to the domain of writing program administration. In Chapter 2, we illustrate the ways in which GenAdmin both inherit and challenge the conventional history of WPAs and their work by problematizing the perception of WPAs who take the job before tenure through a historical re-interpretation of WPA beliefs. We respond to and reframe the negative victim narratives that have shaped the field of WPA studies so consistently. We discuss how history and disciplinary memory influence writing program identities and work, for all program participants and stakeholders, and we begin to address the question of why this philosophical practice is sustainable day to day.
In Chapter 3, we consider how GenAdmin is prepared for its work, focusing specifically on what WPA education looks like now and what it might look like in the future. We discuss the fear of professionalization grounded in a limiting suspicion of managerial specialization, the processes by which we studied or trained to become WPAs, and a possible future for disciplinary professionalization. We also consider what it means to be marked by multiplicinarity and the possibilities that WPA education affords our various roles.
In Chapter 4, we discuss various iterations and implications of seeing ourselves as people in the process of becoming WPAs, and how withholding fixed identification affects theorizing, collaboration, training, and the value of expertise. This chapter performs a detotalizing of certain binaries, especially labels like s/j/gWPA, which we eschew for their association with tasks and preset identifiers. In disrupting staid and hierarchical notions of expertise, we better realize that the contexts in which those hierarchical relationships first emerged have changed and are changing. The same structures aren’t in place to support this kind of master/learner relationship; thus the relationships are being reconfigured.
In Chapter 5, we consider another turn in WPA theorizing by presenting GenAdmin discourse as inherently rhetorical and pragmatic (which we in turn understand as temporal, contextual, and shifting). This chapter explicates what we have come to understand as the arts of discursive participation, focusing on redefinitions of pragmatic activism, civic discourse, and communicative ideology as essential components of how we further our work. GenAdmin discourse occurs at the intersection of three areas: feminist rereadings of classical American pragmatism, rhetorical theory, and discourse studies. At this intersection, we find new models for enacting a discursive power—rather than settling between the dichotomous models of centered/managerial power and decentered/shared power—in order to participate in ideological conversations where our institutions might see or feel them the most quickly and urgently.
We end the book with a chapter that helps us consider GenAdmin philosophies for retheorizing other aspects of the university and profession. In Chapter 6, we offer a concomitant ethics for GenAdmin that relies on hope as a collective and critical endeavor. Part of theorizing a GenAdmin identity for WPAs means replacing stories of reluctance, disappointment, default, or defeat with those of eudaimonia, or flourishing. A GenAdmin identity helps the five of us to construct and enact an ethics that recognizes our potential as change agents and reflects our desires to have a productive impact on our worlds. This ethics is characterized by agency and by a reconsideration of responsibility as more than a set of tasks attached to a job description but rather as part of a scholarly, administrative ethic. While we respond to the daily challenges or practical demands of the job (and try to come up with ways to solve them), it is not this practicality that drives us as much as it is a desire to do the job humanely, creatively, reflectively, and critically.
Conversations and Interludes
Because this is in every way a collaboratively written book, we do not present a singular perspective about the philosophy or practice of WPA. In fact, the five of us are a small model of dissensus in action. We agreed to write together, to work through ideological differences and to challenge each other’s definitions, in order to try to arrive at something after understanding. One dimension of our interactions that a coherent theoretical text cannot replicate is the dimension of anecdotal dialogues or the power of narrative. As five friends, colleagues, and collaborators working on a book project, we have talked at length through email, extended conference meetings, and document creation and revision activities using interfaces like Google Docs. The consequence of these dialogic sessions is the interstitial philosophy and explication that is the book—one voice derived from many. But we do not want to lose the flavor of our differences and dialogues and how individual anecdotes lead to ingenious connectivity and invention, especially since these dialogues are a major force in keeping our ideas in oscillation rather than stagnation.
One way we juxtapose the necessary univocality of our book with dialogue is to include shorter extended illuminations or interludes between the major chapters where we have noted fault lines in our theorizing. These interludes are culled from a range of texts to (1) serve as interesting and thought-provoking bridges between chapters and their main ideas and (2) illuminate the way that GenAdmin enjoy thinking and rethinking about the daily issues we face. In the development of this book, we noted particular hotspots or contact zones regarding the complexities of choice, expertise, and empathy; the definitions and ways of strategizing in WPA work; and the practice of productive advocacy in the administration of higher education. In contrast to the rest of the book, each interlude is singly voiced and individually written (or compiled in the case of the first interlude “On Choice”) to represent how one of us has navigated a contact zone by theorizing individual experiences. We have left the authors of the singly voiced interludes unidentified to keep the emphasis on the individual experience while demonstrating the near arbitrariness of the narrative “I.”
While working on this book, we also began circulating Flip Ultra HD video cameras to WPAs and those with WPA interests around the country in order to collect responses to the questions driving our book in a kind of unscripted and aggregating conversation. We have created a supplemental website (www.sites.google.com/site/assemblageproject) where we have been and will continue to collect and index these clips. We call it The Assemblage Project to connote any number of texts, objects, or pieces gathered into a single set and context. This site will allow us to illuminate the book’s text with particular videos or sets of videos that extend conversation on an idea or topic. As a public site, other contributors will also be able to create original assemblages for any number of projects. Our purpose, other than experimenting with new ways of collecting and connecting knowledge, is to put our questions and ideas into play with a larger set of voices by creating an archive of interaction, providing either a quick entrance to the conversation or a more extensive source for research by our colleagues. Such a dialogical practice is commensurate with our understanding that GenAdmin, both as a working identity and a philosophical practice, never rests. As we live out the theorizing of GenAdmin, it remains explicitly under construction, allowing for the connections, inventions, and unforeseens we thrive on.
