GenAdmin. Colin Charlton
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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
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