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Interlude

On Choice

Jonnika: I live with the desire to both fit in and be different. I left my home and parents to go back to graduate school, picked up and moved with Colin and our then-two-year-old son Ian over eight hundred miles away to a place that, compared to where I had spent the last twenty-six years of my life, was cold, gray, and huge. It was an extremely difficult choice to make, one I agonized over for the first few years of school, but one I knew would make a significant change in the trajectory of my professional life. But it was the reason I was leaving almost everything I knew and it was breaking my parents’ hearts, so I clung to a vision of myself as a WPA as a way to justify my choice to move.

I like to think about the big picture, and I love the viral potential of doing administrative work. It must be linked to my desire to do something big with my life, always seemingly unfulfilled, that makes me want to be a WPA, a real one, a respected one. I had been the interim writing center director at the university where I got my MA, and while I knew my colleagues had confidence in me, I also knew they wanted the position to be tenure-track, which meant I would not be able to keep it. I had to go back to school. I chose my graduate program because of its secondary area in WPA, and I immediately embraced what that program had to offer—a commitment to the intellectual nature of WPA work. I knew that was my path towards respect.

Colin: While Jonikka defined and chose a path for a PhD, I went along for the ride. I knew I wanted to teach writing, and I knew that, unlike a range of couples we would meet in our doctoral program, Jonikka and I would be together, working together, even if I eventually went outside of academia for a job. So moving to Indiana, for me, wasn’t a choice I ever had to make. But I did choose to have a programmatic voice, even though I struggled with the definition of rhetoric and my role in a rhetoric and composition program for many years. And that started from day one when I met with our incoming graduate student mentor group. Shirley K Rose asked us pretty directly, “Why are you here?” I couldn’t answer that question, and she bugged me about it until I could. In fact, she kept asking until I had incorporated it into my internalized reflections, my ways of thinking about teaching and learning, about being anywhere.

At the time, I didn’t know that asking such a question would lead me to learn about an area connected to administration. But that word wasn’t a bad word to me. I think I was in middle school when my dad was promoted to being in charge of a lab at a government contractor, and I remember his prep-work including reading Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, which I read in turn. Such a self-education taught me several things about what my dad called management: (1) administration doesn’t circumvent creativity and should in fact stimulate it; (2) assessment isn’t useful or relevant if you can’t give a five (on a one to five scale) to your people—it’s just a rationalization for financial choices that will be made at an administrative level higher than yours; and (3) interdisciplinary reading should increase exponentially with your pay-grade, while management-related trend texts were barely worth a library card and a quick read for main points. In short, a classic book on the way of the samurai can be quite a relevant read for anyone in a position of authority and responsibility if you’re not asking questions you already have the answers to.

Amy: Like Jonikka, I’m a big picture-thinker and I’m a planner. I like to think about what could be and what has to happen in order to make the could be what is. While I like thinking about and reading theory, I’m a practical person by nature, and WPA work gave me the chance to take the theories of rhetoric and composition and put them into practice in ways that supported student writers and their teachers. To me, it felt like work that mattered. I could see the outcome of my writing and thinking as a WPA that I couldn’t see if I tried to imagine myself as a theorist. I don’t support the theory-practice divide that seems to pervade much of the field because I think that writing program administration is a blending of both, but I was drawn to WPA work because of its practicality—it suited my interests and strengths and my desire to contribute to the programs in which I work. I’m also a collaborator; I work best when I can talk through ideas with others, and that seemed to be a particular offering of WPA studies. This could be because I was doing my work in a big program with lots of WPAs who worked closely together, so I saw the collaborative work environment I desired modeled by the faculty in my program. Taking what I knew of myself and what I wanted and how I worked best, I really didn’t see any other option than making WPA studies a central part of my graduate work.

Kate: For me, becoming a WPA never felt like a big, life altering choice but rather the unfolding of decisions and choices along the way that, while substantial, weren’t a direct path to writing program administration. I chose to leave my first doctoral program because I felt a huge disconnect between my teaching and prospective dissertation research and wanted to spend more time teaching before outlining a research trajectory that would likely map my career. A few years later I chose to leave my high school teaching job because I understood many of my beliefs about teaching and felt driven to return to graduate school to earn the PhD that might make my beliefs about teaching and learning matter more than to a few sections of composition or literature classes, that might have larger impact on students stuck learning five-paragraph essays and thinking they have to guess what the teacher wants. I also went back because I knew that as a woman I didn’t get listened to that much when it came to raising concerns about writing, agency, and gender in the high school I taught in. I wanted to have more influence on designing curriculum and helping students gain a sense of agency from learning about writing and rhetoric. As a doctoral candidate, I learned how WPAs use their disciplinary knowledge to design, develop, and teach curricula that engage students in thinking and learning in potentially powerful ways. My commitment to writing program administration became a commitment to rhetoric and often a commitment to reform.

Jonnika: During that first year of my PhD program, I took two WPA courses, and it was pretty clear to me early on that many of my peers were in those courses because they knew that one day they might have to be a WPA. Only a few of us were there because WPA work was our passion. That summer, I presented at my very first CWPA conference, and I began my paper, an argument for WPA professionalization, with a line that has been at the heart of my work ever since: “I choose to be a WPA.” In that statement was the idea that drives this book for me. The fact that I choose to be a WPA, that I am a WPA even when I don’t hold an official WPA position, defines a large part of who I am.

I took four WPA classes, I wrote a WPA dissertation, and when I went on the job market, I sought out WPA jobs. Advice to steer clear of those jobs until after tenure were deeply offensive to me since, emotionally, that advice registered as an affront to my worth as an academic, to my education and experience as a WPA, to my professional identity.

Kate: I never took any WPA classes, and I wrote my dissertation on the rhetorical canon of memory. Honestly, it didn’t occur to me to write a WPA dissertation. I simply hadn’t read enough WPA literature to realize I might want to make that choice. My doctoral institution was small, and we didn’t have courses about WPA work. Instead, I came to WPA through service and my interest always in the big picture: I was the assistant director of the program, co-taught the TA practicum, and found I really liked teaching and mentoring teachers, and I wanted to make that central to my daily work. When I went on the job market the first time, I chose to apply for both WPA jobs and non-WPA jobs, and my first job cemented my WPA career. I’m not sure I could have chosen other than a WPA job and gotten it in a geographical region my partner and I wanted to live—the so-called more desirable route to tenure—but since I wanted a WPA job, I was happy to get one. And I really enjoyed working with TAs, collaborating with colleagues, and contributing to developing an undergraduate composition program. I wasn’t advised to steer clear of WPA jobs, though I was advised to carefully consider the do-ability of any job. When I left my first WPA job, in part because it felt untenable—too big, too many worries that I couldn’t get tenure because of its scope (I had worries of my own and didn’t feel comfortable with other people’s worries on top of my own)—and because we wanted to live in the west, I chose to step into an actually bigger WPA job—a directorship—at a smaller school. While we can never know what we choose when we choose a job, on that search I felt like I was choosing—a certain kind of WPA in a certain kind of school, in a particular place. I already had a job, and felt like I could choose a new one or stay at the old one. The first time on the market I felt like I had to take the best job offer rather than the best lifestyle choice for me.

Tarez: I was drawn to WPA coursework and projects because I enjoyed the kind of intellectual engagement they provided, had been a WPA prior to my PhD program, served as a gWPA in graduate school, and in many ways think like a WPA. I identify with the role and its potential for institutional and social reform because it seems like a natural outgrowth of (or parallel space to) my identity as a rhetoric and composition scholar and practitioner, not because I felt inclined to identify with a subject position or a group called WPA. Writing program administration problems and questions are the discipline’s problems and questions, just as much as other theoretical or historical or methodological commitments become the shared property of us all. (Here, I don’t mean to forward the argument that one is a sub-field of or supra-field to another, simply that I do not view my work in histories and theories of rhetoric and composition as cut off from the same intellectual onus that drives the work I do with course administration, TA mentoring, and curriculum development. And vice versa.)

This may be why I have been drawn to Generation Administration as a historical and geospatial identifier more so than to WPA as a label or a subject position. I did not leave my doctoral program hoping for a WPA job, but simply hoped and expected that I would continue to mentor teachers and develop curriculum in a dynamic program, at the hub of core issues and trends that shaped or disrupted the broader university context.

Amy: The WPA courses that I took as a graduate student taught me how to think like a WPA. I began graduate school with an interest in language and grammar (having spent two years working as a copy-editor for an investment company before beginning my PhD), and while my dissertation was about grammar instruction, it had a particular WPA bent, examining the ways in which decisions made by WPAs in TA training and curricular development push grammar out of the first-year writing curriculum. I could have focused my study on classrooms alone, but because I was trained to think like a WPA, I knew that what happened in the classroom was directly influenced by how a program was constructed, so for me, writing about grammar pedagogy necessarily meant that I had to talk to WPAs, too.

Colin: I was actually able, in retrospect, to overlap all of my final classes and my dissertation with programmatic questions that emerged for me as our writing program underwent a massive change from a two-semester sequence to a single five-hour course that had a serious rhetorical-technological dimension. I worked with professors, new teachers, and students at the undergraduate and graduate level to try to understand the dynamics we were putting in place, from conferencing to computer classroom pedagogies to my obsession with challenging expert-novice narratives of education in writing classrooms. Without taking any WPA classes (though I did occasionally peek at Jonikka’s course packs) and with a position as a graduate mentor, WPA concerns emerged in all aspects of my doctoral experience. But this was in large part due to my desire and choice to work with particular people and not a connection to an area of study.

Jonnika: My relationship with the concept of choosing WPA has not always been an easy one. When I took my first tenure-track job, I still felt like a WPA, I wanted to be a WPA, but I wasn’t the WPA, and that hurt my feelings. One of my new colleagues had taken on the WPA position in a pinch the year we came in, and while he certainly proved himself to be a capable steward of the program, his true interests lay elsewhere, and, emotionally, that was hard for me. I didn’t take over the position for a couple of years, and in the interim, I had a bit of an identity crisis. If I wasn’t the WPA, who was I? A WPA scholarly agenda, a strong WPA mentor, and WPA friends helped me see that my WPA identity was more complex than I had realized. I will always be a WPA no matter the circumstances.

Kate: At my current job, I am the WPA. I try to both resist and deploy the notion that the connotes for me—the only one. Technically, I’m not, as there is a Basic Writing Coordinator, a Composition Coordinator, a Writing Center Director, and an Associate Writing Center Director, all of whom are committed to their jobs. But I am the only one with a doctorate, the only one with a doctorate in rhetoric and composition. My love of collaboration also urges me resist the the even as I have invoked my role as it pertains to my responsibilities for writing and writing students and my disciplinary affiliation that shapes my beliefs and arguments on campus. I also resist the phrase because for many people it’s seen in quite a reductive way, as little more than a manager of multiple composition sections and their teachers, mainly TAs and adjuncts. As the WPA, I’m also a WPA for life even though I imagine not being the only WPA because I think the WPA is too conflated with the program, and I want to see it diversify and entail more of a shared programmatic commitment. As the WPA, I’m in the position of needing to try to define and imagine what else that could mean.

Colin: I usually don’t think about a class, a teacher, or a curriculum apart from a program. Makes for complicated negotiations, but I adopted the mantra don’t teach what you love early on. That just leads to disappointment. I’d rather teach what I don’t know (yet) under an umbrella or vision for the smaller pieces—like a first-year writing class—as a smaller part of a greater sequence. As someone obsessed with invention in senses beyond rhetoric and composition, I still can’t function without a map. Some would say that explains why Jonikka and I are together. Anyone who goes off the reservation needs a map. But her involvement with WPA never seemed programmed. Our discussions always gave me a sense that, for my own personal style of teaching and philosophy of learning, I had to know about, think about, and live with the larger structures of power, persuasion, invention, and functionality that surrounded me in any job. My obsession with invention morphed into a desire to change what I perceived as detrimental dependence on expert-apprentice models for learning in rhetoric and composition. But you have to be in the administrative mix to change that particular dichotomy, or at least you have a better chance to promote significant change. So when I had an opportunity to coordinate developmental courses at my current university, I felt compelled to choose it, to become officially a teacher-scholar-administrator. But you really have to just keep adding hyphens, especially in terms of what I have come to see as GenAdmin. I have a willingness to engage, and a need to not rely on another class of people to take care of what I do or don’t do in the set of classes I’m responsible for, in my classrooms, or in my writing.

Tarez: I think that what sets GenAdmin apart is its intellectual orientation to the work, i.e., having been brought up under the onus that one can do the work willingly, prepared, and excitedly, that doing the work is likely intrinsic to all the other dimensions of our selves, and that doing the work carries multiple forms beyond the lone writing program director. There is something exciting in the realization that what brings us together for the writing of this book—and what may have brought some of us together to do WPA coursework in graduate school—is our need to theorize and to articulate our theories as fundamental, not only to the daily operations of the courses or the programs we direct, but also to the epistemic fissures and openings that drive the field forward. There is also something hopeful about knowing that there do exist collaborative models for program direction, and that one need not always be the WPA to carry influence on campus. Before and throughout graduate school, it had always been my experience that the writing program was one of the most dynamic, fluid, and contentious systems of activity on campus. When its players were committed to that contention and oriented towards that dynamism, the work felt rewarding indeed.

Amy: The year that I applied for my current job, the university had two rhetoric and composition lines open—one for a rhetoric and composition specialist and one for a rhetoric and composition specialist who would be the WPA. At the time, I was in a non-tenure track WAC job at the institution where my husband had been offered a tenure-track job. WAC wasn’t my forte, and at the time I believed I wanted a tenure-track job that didn’t have administrative responsibilities, so I applied for the non-WPA rhetoric and composition job. Because of budget shortfalls, they were only able to hire one position, and although I didn’t officially apply for it, they offered me the WPA job because of my experiences as the Assistant WPA in graduate school. I chose to take the job because I wanted to work toward tenure, and I knew that I could do the WPA work they required, but I was nervous about being the WPA before tenure. Now that I’ve been in the job for two years, I can’t imagine not being the WPA (even though, like Kate, I don’t like the article). I came in to the job while the university was in the midst of a major general education overhaul, one that necessitated a revised first-year writing course. I have been able to enact the curricular development, collaboration, and big-picture thinking that originally drew me to WPA studies in my job, and I feel fortunate that while I certainly have WPA tasks that seem, at times, managerial, I’m supported by my department in doing the intellectual work of writing program administration that I desire.

Jonnika: I feel like I have been the most adamant in pursuing the idea that what sets GenAdmin apart is our choice to be WPAs, but saying that doesn’t mean that we do so blindly or that we will always choose to be the WPA at our given institutions. We know enough to make wise choices based on the information available to us. And we know the perils of WPA work—of any kind of meaningful work—but we choose to do our best to realize the potential of our individual contexts. I know that I don’t want to be the WPA every day, but whether I am the official WPA or not, I will continue to think and act as WPAs do because that’s how I see my professional world.

Kate: I find I often see choices by the choices I’ve chosen against. I chose not to be X or do X, which means I chose Y. That doesn’t make Y a default choice, but a way of getting to Y by refusing to be or do X. I know what I didn’t want, in other words. I didn’t want a doctorate in literature. I didn’t want a job focusing on technical and professional writing. I wanted a degree in rhetoric. I wanted to be a WPA. Of course, what we choose and how it works out doesn’t necessarily match up. We choose careers and jobs with information we have at the time, and sometimes we realize our choices come with constraints we would not have chosen or possibilities we wouldn’t have sought out. Choice for me is both agentive and strategic and somewhat imaginative and serendipitous. I make choices and not-choices to make my way in the world, but I’m cognizant of how choices might lead to limits but also open to how choices might liberate and inspire me. Part of my commitment to writing program administration derives from knowing I could do otherwise, but I choose to be a WPA.

Tarez: I guess the bottom line for me in how we’re defining GenAdmin isn’t “people who choose the work in spite of the consequences,” but “people who do not see subjectivity as something that has to be overcome.” So the notion of choice, for me is not a simple one or a moral one either, but requires much disruption beyond whether untenured junior faculty should take on WPA roles. Choices can be both freeing and constraining.

Amy: There are days, often those when I look at the calendar and mark the second consecutive week that I’ve been unable to turn my attention to my research, that I question my decision to be a WPA. I find it hard to balance my research and administrative responsibilities; though I receive incredible support for my research from my colleagues, I find myself more drawn to the work that allows me to engage with other people, which for me, is administrative. And there are days when I wish I weren’t the WPA because then I wouldn’t have to care about the curriculum or the position of adjuncts in the program or how to handle another grade appeal. I sometimes look longingly at my colleagues who spend hours writing in their offices, undisturbed by e-mail or meetings or decisions that need to be made. But I am the WPA because I care, and I find that I work better when I care about what I’m working for. My first job didn’t engage me—people didn’t fight about writing or pedagogy or curriculum because it wasn’t a priority for them. I was left to work on my own, but I’ve realized, since I’ve changed jobs, that I need the emotional engagement in order to do my job well. I need people to want to discuss, and sometimes argue, about what is best for the writing program. I want to get worked up about the program, I want to be an advocate, I want to fight for what I believe is right. What I know now, though, is that emotional engagement takes its toll—psychically, intellectually, emotionally—but it also makes me present and engaged and allows me to do the intellectual work that is central to writing program administration. Caring about my job and the people I work with and the students we work for makes me a better WPA.

Jonnika: When I started writing about what choice has meant for me, I couldn’t get a line from the first of the Lord of the Rings movies out of my mind. Arwen is telling Aragorn that she is not leaving Middle Earth with the other elves, that she is forsaking her immortality to be with him, and she says, “I choose a mortal life.” Though our choices have been much less life altering and romantic, they have changed our paths in perhaps subtler, yet still significant ways, and they have led us to commit to think together about what it means to be a WPA and do WPA work. Our choices have led us here, to this moment, to this book, to these types of lives.

Tarez: I think our GenAdmin orientation bears a certain kind of responsibility—more specifically, the responsibility to look at whether and how our discipline has actually made writing program administration viable and feasible and fair in the institutional contexts in which we work. Like Kate, my own experiences before, during, and after graduate school tell me that we have not yet penetrated these institutional contexts sufficiently enough, ideologically enough, to make WPA work equitable everywhere. While visibility is important, making WPA work more visible isn’t necessarily a panacea if there is no way to valuate the work. This is really nothing new, and in a way I merely echo how Andrea Lunsford has been challenging and encouraging rhetoric and composition (as a field) to look carefully at its positioning, to ask itself critically whether its gains represent the best kinds of progress— i.e., field status and recognition, collective vision, intellectual growth, and material support for writing programs—each time she is invited to speak at a national conference.

Colin: While preparing our first full manuscript for the book, I took on another administrative position. Because of shifts above me in positions, I was asked to take over the vice provost’s responsibilities for university-wide program review, in part because of my work as chair of the program review committee at my university for two years. I was untenured and, of course, nervous about meeting with the new president to discuss this opportunity. But I never thought about not doing it, or how much time, energy, and expertise it would take. At some point in the meeting, he said that he expected the job to take 25%—and only 25%—of my time, and he would be fair in determining how that would affect my other responsibilities. I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around the idea that this translated into two course releases (since course releases were being snatched back at a record pace), or that this would take away from my teaching or my writing and research projects. I write and teach and learn in almost every aspect of my work at a university. The distinctions between the types of work we do are, in the end, obstacles to invention, to making choices possible.

Tarez: I don’t think it hurts us to consider whether we are enacting and promoting choice in the best possible way for the current health and future growth of writing program administration and of GenAdmin. For example, if our efforts to ensure compensation and an authoritative voice for the untenured WPA inadvertently create the expectation that a lower tier of WPA-laborers should not have access to these things (because they carry lesser roles), then we have not persuaded our departments or institutions of the long-term viability, reputability, and complexity of the work, or done our part to prove that it takes on many forms, and in all forms is difficult. If our need to relinquish ourselves from harmful “protective” measures keeping untenured faculty from playing the WPA role inadvertently cuts off other WPA-laborers from this protection when they do need it, then we have not increased our market value on campus. Instead, we may still be offering ourselves as too cheap a solution to the symptomatic problem that most university structures still lack an ideological space for valuating any kind of administrative work as substantive, intellectual, commensurate. We may be inadvertently making promises to ourselves and to other junior faculty that the work we do, if quantifiable and justifiable, will be enough to not only get us tenure but also to cause our colleagues to embrace us as intellectual partners, when in fact the more zealously we do the work, the less they tend to embrace us.

I don’t think I am arguing that we should not do the work or should not choose to do it (mainly because I do the work and choose to do it well), but that we realize the opportunity for GenAdmin not only to complicate choice as a generational identifier, but also to heighten and deepen our understanding of all the players in our activity system whose lives and theoretical orientations are affected by our choices. We need to know what they need “choosing” to be. If we can pull it off, this interlude (and the larger book project it serves) may well represent a way of doing institutional critique—a way of pushing for greater ideological disruption. If GenAdmin does not do this, then who will? If GenAdmin cannot help position WPAs in alternative relationships than simply junior/senior, inside/outside, privileged/underprivileged, spoken for/spoken through, then what can?