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2 Listening to and Rewriting History

When our present vocabularies prove inadequate for describing the world, a new vocabulary is necessary . . . [and] is the result of conscious questioning of the existing order. . . . [This] new vocabulary allows for different modes of expression than current language allows.

—Valerie Renegar and Stacey K. Sowards

As our experiences in the composition classroom have taught us, the problem of audience is a common one for those entering into an academic discourse community with well-established norms, patterns, and rules. The discourse patterns employed when writing about writing program administrator identity are fairly well illustrated by the titles of volumes that explore these issues, like Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers and Troubadours; The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration; or Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators. When we review these narratives and think of our own, the five of us imagine that if we could only find a metaphor to illustrate our experiences, we would have a way of talking about the work that reflects our lived experiences. If we could place ourselves on a continuum between two descriptive poles, either promising or perilous, we would have a foundation for our WPA identities. If we could define ourselves by rank alone, we would know how to place ourselves within the conversation. But because we think of our work—and ourselves as we do the work—more fluidly, there doesn’t seem to be much space for our stories in the narrative patterns established by the field; our stories do not fit the existing narrative patterns. And we expect we’re not alone in this thinking.

The work of this chapter, then, is to position GenAdmin within a context of history and inheritance, to attempt to carve a new narrative space for WPAs whose lives and work cannot be expressed easily in old metaphors, along binary continuums, or by the identification of rank. We seek a new vocabulary with which to discuss WPA work, its historical roots, and its potential to accommodate a wider range of views and experiences. We find agency in our historical positioning, which necessarily includes understanding how certain ideas have been taken up from past histories, reclaiming other ideas that have been neglected or left behind, and acknowledging the narratives we have inherited. We expose and come to terms with our own frustration at being viewed as naive or unprepared in understanding the kairotic moments that inspired past histories and stories. Most importantly, we offer a new way of imagining a history both collective and diverse in order to shed the notion that WPAs are victims and to create a new space for thinking about administration as capable of creating new conditions.

WPA Narratives as Situated Histories

Telling stories is a way of “doing history” (Lerner 199), and this narrative historicization becomes a useful site for the co-construction of WPA identities (Campbell, “Agency”; Howard, “Reflexivity”). Because they help establish norms and values that shape individuals’ behavior and thinking within a community, narratives develop a shared history that functions as a touchstone for later generations as they negotiate their present and imagine their future. This imagining, in turn, gives individuals the opportunity to claim ownership over their own lives and experiences and empowers the community to exercise control over its own self-perception. In the ways that narratives “give messages and instructions; they offer blueprints and ideals; they issue warnings and prohibitions” (Stone 5), they offer powerful representations that legitimize certain ways of being in the world that shape who we were, who we are, and who we are becoming.

Storytelling has become an integral component of WPA professional life and identity, as conventional a part of scholarship as citing sources or participating on the WPA-L listserv. At the 2008 WPA Conference, Amy listened to the ways that presenters used storytelling to frame their public discourse about WPA work. Out of the eighteen speakers she attended (including four panels of three presenters each, and three plenary speakers), seventeen told stories in one form or another as a way to frame their scholarship. The prevalence of these stories may be explained by the fact that narratives provide WPAs an opportunity to move between theory and experience and to anchor the hermeneutic inside/outside moves Donald E. Hall describes in The Academic Community: A Manual for Change. As Thomas P. Miller notes, “Stories help us make the imaginative leap back and forth between our lived experiences and abstract speculations” (Anson et al. 80).

Stories may also help us move from isolated self-definition to a sense of shared community. As graduate students, Amy, Jonikka, and Tarez wrote professionalization narratives in their WPA seminars that were modeled on published narratives in the field. They each adopted a genre or metaphor that shaped their story—Amy wrote a fable and Tarez wrote a creation myth, while others wrote a fairy tale, a victim narrative, or a children’s story. Given the opportunity to tell stories in their own way, seminar participants were able to articulate and share their experiences while also entering into a community—as both actor and listener—from which some members had previously felt excluded. Seminar participants drew on these narratives not as experts in each genre but as rhetoricians interested in how their composition provided insights into the communal values they tried to represent, whether certain genres best represented the epistemic potential of writing histories, and how the process of constructing narrative histories asked them to reconcile their “mixed heritages” and “complex pasts.” These narratives were a discovery of how to proceed, and their writing revealed much about how WPAs can see and approach the labor of reconstructing their own intellectual migration. Their writing also revealed that professionalization narratives have great potential as an ethnomethodological practice that—in their construction and analysis—can align writing program administration with knowledge-making, especially by helping new WPAs or WPAs-in-training to understand and reflect on the work of writing programs as emergent, their role in them as productive, and their representations as situated and complex.1 In a way, narratives position writers and readers as co-creators of productive knowledge, revealing how we use story in an ongoing maintenance of social order.

While narratives function in very particular ways for members of a given community, they can function just as powerfully for those outside of the community. Chris Anson’s claim that “experiential narratives set up a Bahktinian multivocality that rarely leads to a sense of resolution” is apt here (Anson et al. 79). In the same way that we posit GenAdmin as a broader reaching philosophical practice, we do not just think about what we gain personally by telling our stories, but rather we consider how these stories could work in the world: What do our colleagues in other disciplines make of our stories? How do these narratives shape the understanding of the field for pre-service WPAs or graduate students? Are we perpetuating an administrative philosophy, a way of being and working, that limits new opportunities for thinking about administrative work? How do these stories include and exclude, liberate and oppress? The weight of these questions, and the implications of their answers for the future of the field, calls us to interrogate the narratives that have shaped our WPA community by critically examining how they are told, why they are told, and how and why they might be told differently. To that end, we offer a discussion of the different ways in which WPAs tell their stories with an eye toward understanding what these stories say about this community, our notions of our community’s history, and the possibilities for its future.

A Spectrum of WPA Stories (or Beyond “The Promise and the Peril”)

The available WPA narratives seem to fall within a spectrum that places the victor’s story of success on one side (White, “Use It”) and the victim’s tale of suffering on the other (Bishop and Crossley, “How to Tell”; Bloom, “I Want”). These two poles offer very few avenues by which GenAdmin can enter into WPA discourse and claim authenticity: if we are successful WPAs, it is because we know how to read people and institutions and use the power we have. If we fail, it is because the system has in some way failed us. The extremes these two story types represent—the superabundance of power on the one hand and the lack of agency on the other—do not serve our visions of ourselves, and we’re not sure they serve WPAs as agents in the twenty-first century, in part because they are so extreme.2 Like other historians and theorists of rhetoric, we understand that what gives agency can also threaten it; that is, whatever is resource is also restraint (Campbell), and what some see as opportunity can be seen by others as impediment. Thus, examining the narratives we have inherited may help us to realize what aspects of WPA work and identity GenAdmin are compelled to adopt.

The Hero’s Story

On one end of the spectrum, we have inherited the hero’s story, demonstrating that when faced with seemingly impossible institutional constraints, colleagues, or budgets, the hero WPA perseveres. Edward M. White’s 1991 article, “Use It or Lose It: Power and the WPA,” offers a clear example of the hero’s tale and the tropes such stories employ. White begins his narrative with a credible scenario: his writing-across-the-curriculum budget is cut in favor of other, more powerful departments, and while the Dean offers consolation in a “soothing” voice, he refuses to support the program or to support White as the WPA. By mobilizing his contacts, White is able to convince the new dean of undergraduate studies to take the WAC program under its umbrella (an umbrella with a more fluid budget), and, in so doing, he “discovered a kind of power that does not appear in flow charts, power that most WPAs have, and [he] was able to use it to save the program” (“Use It” 5). In this tale, White wields heroic power in defense of his program, and the experience taught him that in the face of adversaries who will not support writing instruction, writing programs, or WPAs, “only one answer will work: sheer power” (“Use It” 8). “It is futile to argue with them,” he continues, “for you cannot pierce the hidden source of their beliefs. The most difficult part of being a WPA is combating those who have only scorn for our enterprise, for that means assessing and using the forces at our disposal” (“Use It” 8).

What is notable about White’s argument is the extent to which he acknowledges WPAs’ apparent lack of power. In his opening paragraph, he offers this exhortation: “Recognize the fact that all administration deals in power; power games demand aggressive players; assert that you have power (even if you don’t) and you can often wield it” (“Use It” 3). Two important premises of White’s argument are that power is owned and is inherently tied to outwardly aggressive acts, and that in order to be successful, the WPA must wield whatever power he has (or doesn’t have) with a ferocity that matches the power department chairs, deans, provosts, chancellors, and presidents have through title and position alone. White’s rally cry offers a seemingly more heroic solution than the victim narrative for WPAs under siege—if we use or create power when we feel we have none, we might be the victor of our story, successful in our efforts to save our program, our faculty, our students, and ourselves.

The Victim Narrative

On the other side of the spectrum, we have inherited the victim narrative detailing the situations of those WPAs who suffered at the hands of institutional whims, vindictive colleagues, tight budgets, or unrepentantly selfish teaching assistants. Lynn Z. Bloom’s satirical “I Want a Writing Director,” written in the style of Judy Syfer’s iconic piece, “I Want a Wife,” offers a victim narrative that exemplifies the genre. Writing in the voice of the exacting male department chair, Bloom describes the unreasonable expectations he has of his (always) female WPA: manage writing program faculty, establish curricular guidelines, handle student complaints, and care for colleagues. According to Bloom’s chair, the ideal WPA is a female who “will keep the writing program out of my hair” (176). On top of the administrative responsibilities the chair asks her to assume, Bloom also explores the demanding expectations placed upon the WPA who not only has to manage the program, but also has to “meet [the] department’s rigorous criteria for tenure,” all the while remaining invisible, someone “who will not demand attention when [the chair is] preoccupied with [his] scholarly work, and who will remain faithful to [his] needs so that [he does] not have to clutter up [his] intellectual life with administrative details” (177).

We can only hope that Bloom’s essay blends her experiences with stories other WPAs have shared with her, that it’s not just one person’s narrative of a good job gone horribly wrong. For many WPAs, at least one element of her narrative is familiar, and this sense of the collective, shared suffering Bloom describes allows us to tap into the comfort Bishop and Crossley describe when WPAs discover “that others share their experiences” (74). We can think, “If nothing else, at least we don’t have it as bad as the WPA Bloom describes,” but that positioning leaves unchallenged the assumptions about WPA work that the narrative perpetuates. While Bloom’s narrative creates empathy in her readers, she concludes her essay with a vexing question: assuming WPAs were everything her fictional Chair hoped for, she wonders, “My God, who wouldn’t want a Writing Director?” (178). Yet for some readers considering WPA work, this closing raises a different question: My God, who would ever choose to be a WPA?

Bloom’s text may work in different ways for different audiences—for seasoned WPAs, it may elicit a knowing nod and a resigned sigh; for pre-service WPAs, graduate students, or non-WPA colleagues, it may raise warning flags about the nature of the work or the priorities of those who willingly take on the job. For GenAdmin, specifically, it reasserts the feminization of composition and the alignment of writing program administration with mere service, in turn reinforcing a research/service binary that we and others wish to disrupt.

Wendy Bishop and Gay Lynn Crossley’s meta-narrative about their attempts to construct a story of WPA work highlights another feature of the victim narrative we wish to interrogate: bringing stories to voice in a discipline that is sometimes critical of the narrative form itself. Their text is a hybrid of journal entries, reflective response, and critical discussion that explores the ways in which Bishop, a principled WPA—one who is committed to developing a “‘strong’ writing program . . . staffed by teachers educated to work toward the objectives of a coherent, theoretically-informed, student-centered curriculum”—was silenced by her colleagues (Bishop and Crossley 71). When Bishop’s attempt to preserve her “strong” writing program caused her to make administrative decisions that went against the graduate director’s desires, her expertise was belittled and her influence ignored because her priorities were not in line with the department’s or the university’s. Not surprisingly, Bishop resigned early from her position, frustrated, exhausted, and alienated by the experience.

In an effort to comment on the institutional and political constraints that made their work almost impossible, Bishop and Crossley also include comments from early, anonymous reviewers of their essay who claimed that the authors (1) were naive to the critical distance, the separation of personal and professional lives, required of WPAs or (2) were simply telling “another victimization narrative that you hear so often in accounts of composition, WPAs, and even women WPAs” (74). Bishop and Crossley bristle at the critique, claiming they made efforts to avoid both of those criticisms, and yet their early readers still assumed they were either unprepared for the work or too self-affected to look critically at their own experiences.

The WPAs of Bishop, Crossley, and Bloom are destined for failure because of the expectations and constraints put upon them, a theme which highlights another function of the victim narrative in the construction of WPA identity from which GenAdmin hopes to dissociate. If we construct ourselves as victims, as hapless females or males unable to act on our own behalf, we are able to tell the stories of our failure without accepting professional responsibility or personal blame for those failures. This isn’t to say that the overt reason WPAs tell victim narratives is to shirk responsibility or place blame, but it does illustrate the ways in which narratives about oppressive forces (whether they are institutional or individual) hold particular sway in academe. It may be the case for many WPAs that their training as progressive, open-minded academics leads them to side with, rather than blame, the victim, and while victim narratives certainly emerge as a way of naming the intellectual, personal, and professional violence done to us as WPAs, they also emerge as evidence of institutional power run amok, narratives told not just by WPAs or even English faculty, but faculty in disciplines across the university. The victim narrative justifies why WPAs are unable to succeed, and those justifications often go unchallenged within university culture writ large.

The narratives by White, Bloom, and Bishop and Crossley have shaped many WPAs’ notions of what it means to be a WPA and do the work required of the position, and yet they present only one side of the story, one aspect of the job that does not take into account the many successes we have found at the institutional and disciplinary levels. Furthermore, they impose an unnecessary constraint on the generative potential of what narratives can do. Shirley K Rose and Irwin Weiser’s edited collections, The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher and The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist, present different WPA stories, making a compelling argument about how much intellectual, rhetorical work writing program administration requires. Collections like these offer a welcome counterargument for those whose tenure committees would dismiss administration as service equivalent to other committee work, and their texts make the case that writing program administration is a valid site for scholarship, functioning as a theoretical response to the difficulties some WPAs discuss in their narratives of having people understand, respect, and acknowledge the work that they produce. Moreover, Rose and Weiser offer ways to reframe WPA identity as something not defined by a university or department, but rather by self-reflective inquiry.

The jWPA and the Advice Narrative

While many WPA narratives help to support the belief that significant work has been done to establish writing rogram administration as a serious, intellectual, legitimate field of study (and by extension, that those who labor as WPAs should be perceived as inquiring intellectuals rather than entry-level managers), the hero/victim spectrum invites different conclusions about the nature of writing program administration and the qualifications of those who do the work. One such conclusion, which some of us heard often as graduate students, was that an untenured faculty member should under no circumstances take on a WPA role, even if he or she had the requisite graduate preparation suggested by the Portland Resolution. Alice Horning’s essay, “Ethics and the jWPA,” exemplifies this kind of advice narrative that seeks to use other WPAs’ experiences as the basis for generalized summaries of what WPA work is, who should do it, and how WPA tasks should be approached. For those pre-tenure faculty who still write, collaborate, and think like WPAs, yet who were strongly discouraged from being WPAs, these advice narratives may harm more than they help. They often write GenAdmin out of a job by reinforcing the stereotype that we are unprepared—intellectually, personally, and professionally—to take on a WPA role successfully, when they could focus collectively on how to rethink models of protection and power so that GenAdmin can more quickly (i.e., sooner in their careers) do what they were trained to do in graduate school, which is to think, talk, and write about writing programs.

We find ourselves in a fundamental disagreement with arguments that claim we should play it safe, and we find this rationale for not accepting jWPA positions to be paternalistic: “Just as no parent would give children a steady supply of treats just because kids want them, no administration should give junior faculty members writing program administrator positions just because new graduates want them, not withstanding their training, energy, and experience” (Horning 48). The subject position that these arguments create doesn’t leave us much room to respond because our critique of these arguments can be dismissed as naïve, unaware, or unwilling to accept the gravity of life as a jWPA.3

In many ways, the tension we have just described that exists between generations of WPAs is mirrored by the often unspoken conflicts that exist between second- and third-wave feminists. In their book, ManifestA: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards describe the ways in which critiques by third-wave feminists have been silenced—either by those in the second wave, or more problematically, by the third wave writers themselves—because the younger feminists are perceived to be “unmindful of [their] foremothers” (224). Baumgardner and Richards explain that in many feminist organizations, if a third-wave feminist critiques or problematizes the organizing practices, strategies, or conceptions of feminism promoted by second-wave feminists, then she runs the risk of being seen as someone who doesn’t understand the lessons of the feminist movement and disregards the advancements the second-wave fought so hard to achieve.

Rather than participating in the conversation about how to be a feminist in the twenty-first century, Baumgardner and Richards note that many third-wave feminists feel they are not welcome in the conversation unless they toe the line. As Diane Elam noted, “Daughters are not allowed to invent new ways of thinking and doing feminism for themselves; feminists’ politics should take the same shape that it has always assumed” (Baumgardner and Richards 224). In their own experience and their observation of others, Renegar and Sowards argue that many third-wave feminists feel disconnected from the feminist community because, while they acknowledge and enjoy the victories previous generations of feminists achieved, “our experience as feminists . . . leave us feeling angry, hopeless, and confused as to where we are supposed to go, how we are supposed to get there, and what battles we are supposed to wage as part of a feminist movement” (330). Members of GenAdmin may feel the same sense of frustration—as if caught between second-wave and third-wave goals and means. Now that some of the major WPA battles have been declared—arguing for WPA studies as part of the discipline of rhetoric and composition, fighting for clear job descriptions for WPAs, making the case that WPA studies is an intellectual pursuit—it can sometimes seem difficult to know what our next “declaration” can be on an organizational level. That is not to say there is no longer a need to keep fighting these battles, particularly with recession cutbacks. Yet, as we have discussed, these efforts begin to build a monolithic view of what WPA is (as an organization, a job, and an identity) that doesn’t leave space for differing, resisting views.

We see this kind of stance in our discipline in moments when generational conflicts impede our efforts to build on the past and reimagine the future of WPA work. In his preface to Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators, Edward M. White notes, “When a jWPA takes the job, the center of gravity shifts somewhat. The traditional tasks remain, but the younger faculty has less stake in tradition, in keeping things running as they have been, in exerting authority over the program. . . . The jWPA may be more interested in challenging than maintaining the way things are done” (Preface viii). White acknowledges a shift in the way WPA work is conducted by junior faculty, but his reluctance to embrace this shift whole-heartedly illustrates a tension that jWPAs feel as well: we are torn between the received wisdom of experts—much of which has been transmitted through narrative warnings—and our own experiences and hopes for ourselves as WPAs. But we also recognize in this quotation an assumption that tradition and maintenance are privileged terms and that changing may be viewed as merely disruptive rather than directed productively. Here, we see evidence of different values emerging between generations of WPAs, values that we have often learned from our mentors but are enacting differently as GenAdmin.

When we argue that there is space in the academy for untenured WPAs, we feel we are perceived as undercutting the argument that WPA work requires institutional and professional maturity that senior WPAs have, and we seem to show disrespect for the efforts of previous generations to gain institutional and disciplinary legitimacy for WPA work. When we make arguments in favor of a balanced professional and personal life, we are accused of promoting an “unattractive combination of disappointment and entitlement,” just as Kristen Kennedy was for early drafts of her essay outlining the struggles she had in finding a career that satisfies her desire for both a meaningful professional and intellectual life and contentment in her personal life (527). In many ways, it would be much easier to stay quiet and follow the advice of our predecessors, and as Debra Dew points out in her discussion of the jWPA role, many young WPAs do subscribe to the party line, and their propensity for “groupie behavior” makes them “eager to flatter successful WPA professionals, both our local mentors, and national superstars, who deservedly appreciate the fawning of wannabe WPAs” (115). So when, as junior WPAs, we offer a different view of WPA work and identity, we run the risk of appearing disrespectful to both our peers and our senior colleagues.

For those who have lived experiences similar to those outlined by the victim and hero stories we discuss, GenAdmin may resemble a group of upstarts who are unwilling to heed the advice generated by those stories. By no means are we arguing that all junior or all senior WPAs think in these ways; instead, we recognize an opportunity to articulate some of the tensions we have felt when accounting for our differences, tensions that have been brought out, in particular, by the binary narratives that have shaped the advice sometimes given to those who aspire to WPA jobs. We realize GenAdmin can fall into essentializing traps just as easily as any social movement or category, and we recognize that generational misunderstanding can go both ways, but our disappointment rests with arguments such as Horning’s, which diminish the value of the jWPA, stop the dialectic conversation between different generations of WPAs and may cause our collective ideas about what it means to be a WPA to stagnate.

Although GenAdmin may, at times, feel reticent to contradict senior WPAs with whom we disagree, we still feel the necessity to consider new ways in which to tell WPA stories that resist the old binaries and create space to come to new understandings of WPA work for a generation of administrators who perceive new challenges for the field. These efforts shape, in part, our GenAdmin ethical stance as we work to develop a new vocabulary that resists assumptions about the field, since, just as in the feminist movement, when conflicts over WPA work “are viewed from a different perspective, a dialectic arises to connect the members of the various . . . factions” (Renegar and Sowards, “Liberal” 335). It is in this dialectic that we see opportunity to reach a new understanding of our shared history and to chart new paths for our collective future.

Promoting a Different WPA Narrative: The Resistant WPA as Historically Situated

As we have argued, conceptions of WPA work may have been built and perpetuated by victim and hero narratives, but these narratives do not paint a comprehensive picture of what it means to be a WPA. One way of seeking agency is in developing power within boundaries and constraints, in this case, looking to the resistant narratives in WPA history for a fuller understanding of the diversity of WPA histories, cultural memories, and cultural norms, even as the conditions surrounding our programs seem to stay constant (McLeod, Writing). In suggesting that these narratives resist “settled histories” and encourage alternative, localized renditions of what might otherwise become grand narratives that could limit our field, Richard Miller mentions the need to disrupt WPAs’ interactions with each other, their institutions, and the discipline as a whole, to complicate the notion that composition work is merely the perpetual training of novices and newcomers (“From” 26). In doing so, Miller seems to suggest that writing program administration is upholding a master narrative that limits what we want to achieve as scholars. Rather than narrating our histories as stories of marginalization and struggle (what he deems the intellectual wasteland), he suggests reseeing (and rewriting) ourselves into the center of the university’s intellectual sphere. His method is to adapt a discourse that builds our work as “resource-rich”—knowledge-centered, interdisciplinary, and deeply theoretical yet very public, even activist—and to perform for different audiences and organizational structures (“From” 37). In short, his goal is to challenge the rhetorical sovereignty of certain types of metanarratives by introducing a new vocabulary with which to discuss administrative history.

Miller works to reframe this vocabulary by linking writing program administration (and its history) with the discipline of composition, but a historical reading of writing program administration illustrates a new component of this vocabulary—the vocabulary of resistance. If we look at the history of composition, and the role that WPAs played in the evolution of the teaching of writing, we see that the history of the WPA is actually one of active resistance to (or in some cases, anticipation of) institutional and disciplinary shifts that could have victimized the WPA. More often than not, these shifts provided an opportunity for growth, not just in a given writing program, but also in the field of rhetoric and composition as a whole. The resistant WPA is neither a victim of the powers that be, nor is she a hero who solves every problem. Instead, if we trace her role through the development of the field, we find her to be a stalwart advocate for the relevance of writing instruction, the potential of student writers, and the integrity of the faculty who teach them. By reading our shared administrative history in this way, we heed Min-Zhan Lu’s argument in “Tracking Comp Tales” for the value of telling and retelling our disciplinary stories to “bring to crisis established conditions of that world and established understandings of and relations to those conditions, so that with each crisis, opportunity is molded in danger, and danger becomes a form of opportunity” (226). In this case, the opportunity we recognize is the need to tell different WPA stories, in part by critiquing stories that do not map onto our world so satisfactorily.

The first glimpses we see of the resistant WPA appear in the way Sharon Crowley resituates an oft-cited origin story of American writing programs, the development of Freshman English at Harvard in the 1870s, around Adams Sherman Hill’s professorship. Crowley’s origin story argues that Hill, Harvard’s assistant to the Boylston Professor of rhetoric (and de facto WPA), had to “make English strange” (Brereton 324) to argue for its institutional importance and to justify why studying the vernacular had to be learned rather than merely assumed in the study of literature. For Hill, learning principles of style, usage, and editing comprised an art of pure and efficient communication, wherein “pure” meant what was “universally understood” . . . by “reputable, national, and present use” (Brereton 324), a belletristic aim with somewhat political dimensions. Crowley explains that Hill and Harvard took three steps to accomplish this aim: “The first step in the process was to define English as a language from which its native speakers were alienated. The second step was to establish an entrance examination in English that was very difficult to pass. The third step, necessitated by the large number of failures on the exam, was to install a course of study that would remediate the lack demonstrated by the examination” (60). These moves paved the way for a new way of thinking about writing instruction, making the case for a course in composition as a material necessity for incoming college freshmen. While Crowley recounts this history as evidence for why first-year composition should be abolished (because it offers neither the students nor the discipline appropriate agency), we recognize the work of a resistant early WPA who made his beliefs about language and writing reflected in his administrative efforts, albeit in a context that limited composition’s intellectual force.

Susan McLeod’s Writing Program Administration offers a history of resistant writing program administrators whose efforts may seem more familiar to present-day readers than Hill’s attempts to “make English strange” (Brereton 324). Building on the histories of the field written by earlier composition historians (including Albert R. Kitzhaber, John C. Brereton, James Berlin, Robert Connors, and Donald C. Stewart, among others), McLeod points to Fred Newton Scott at Michigan, Gertrude Buck at Vassar, and Regina Crandall at Bryn Mawr as early models of composition faculty whose work included administrative responsibilities familiar to the contemporary WPA. Their work can also be seen as sites of resistance against the status quo in composition pedagogy and institutional politics. As Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo note, not all of these individuals were WPAs per se, but they “required an administrative space within which to function” and within that space they extended their colleagues’ understanding of what composition curricula could and should be (“Why” xviii). Scott, for example, labored to move Michigan’s curriculum away from the current-traditional model prevalent at that time in favor of teaching “rhetoric in a social context” (McLeod, Writing 47), and connecting “writing to real experience” (McLeod, Writing 37). Scott’s graduate student, Gertrude Buck, extended his project of revising composition curricula to emphasize what, in current nomenclature, would be a Deweyian student-centered pedagogy. Her classes included “few lectures and quizzes . . . ; instead there were discussions of the literature they had read, individual and group interviews with the teacher on the themes they had written, and group work in class for discussing and critiquing themes” (McLeod, Writing 52). Suzanne Bordelon understands Buck not just as a purveyor of Scott’s democratic rhetoric, but as a theorist of argumentation that stemmed from middle-class feminine activism (and was subsequently sparked by Progressive-Era forces from outside of the university).4 Finally, McLeod presents Regina Crandall as a WPA who sought to improve the working conditions of the writing faculty at Bryn Mawr: even though she had “no authority over the curriculum or the hiring of faculty in the program she directed, [Crandall] fought back in a number of letters lobbying for better pay and working conditions for her faculty” (Writing 55).

The histories of Hill, Scott, Buck, Crandall, and the programs they shaped illustrate the ways in which early composition history is also a history of writing program administration, because, as McLeod notes, “To understand the history of writing program administration and to understand the politics still surrounding the position of WPA, one must go back to the beginnings of this unique course [composition]” (Writing 23). These histories illustrate that it is a part of WPA identity to labor for progress, including reframing our understanding of WPA work as one characterized by a progressive stance we choose for ourselves, rather than a heroic or victimized stance foisted on us by the beliefs, decisions, or actions of others. Even in our achievement of certain milestones or signs that we have arrived—the acknowledgement of administration as scholarship by our colleagues in other fields, a resolution to the English/composition tensions in our departments, an equitable policy for the use of adjuncts to teach writing courses—there will always be sites within the discipline, institutions, departments, and classrooms that compel WPAs to resist common assumptions about the work they do and drive them toward more ethical and effective administrative and teaching practices.

For the purposes of narrative reconstruction, our understanding of the resistant WPA is further solidified in histories of rhetoric and composition as retold by James Berlin, Robert Connors, John C. Brereton, and Stephen North, out of which emerge five particular moments in rhetoric and composition’s history that represent the work of the resistant WPA. These moments of resistance map directly onto the contemporary history and trends of writing instruction in general, as the history of composition and writing program administration are intimately intertwined.

Moment One: The Resistant WPA as Researcher and Theorist

The influx of knowledge being generated about the writing process through cognitive psychology during the 1980s is directly related to the notion of the resistant WPA as a researcher and theorist. The resistant WPA argued that writing was a recursive, intellectual process that needed to be practiced (with feedback) rather than something that could be mimicked by exposure to “good” literature and model texts.

The process movement required that WPAs resist the once dominant belief that teaching writing is teaching grammar and/or literature. WPAs had to resist pressure from colleagues in other disciplines who bemoaned the “lack of writing skills” students displayed in their classrooms. They had to resist the resistance from teachers who didn’t want to change their pedagogy based on “some new theory.” And they had to resist critiques that composition teachers weren’t doing their jobs because they were no longer providing their “service” to the university.

In many ways, the process movement has been a defining moment for the field of rhetoric and composition as a whole because, as Maxine Hairston argued, it created a “paradigmatic shift” (76) within the field that changed the way we thought about—and taught—writing. Therefore, it seems necessary to include the process movement as a moment of resistance for WPAs, as well, because a paradigmatic shift demands a curricular shift, and the resistant WPA has historically had to continually defend process as a meaningful approach to the teaching of writing.

Moment Two: The Resistant WPA as Collaborator