GenAdmin. Colin Charlton
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stand apart from a world we keep trying (with infinite shortfalls) to understand. But in talking with each other, we wanted to give shape to the sense we had of each other as complex people who do not always seek to separate out the one voice from the many, the academic from the real, or the intellectual from the administrative.
By theorizing WPA identities in the twenty-first century, particularly GenAdmin, we articulate our goals for writing program administration, our writing program visions, and our conception of stakeholders in WPA situations to legitimize writing program administration as a chosen and creative site where we live, work, think, act, and promote intellectual change. These are the questions that drove our invention and theorizing as we lived through our examples, expanded upon our theories, and revised our practices:
How does GenAdmin define itself in relationship to principles and beliefs inherited from previous generations of WPAs?
How does GenAdmin disrupt assumptions about WPA identity that are often tacitly, or in some cases explicitly, forwarded by official organizations?
How do we further define ourselves in relation to often competing principles and visions?
What are the possibilities afforded to scholar-teacher-activist-administrators in various WPA roles?
How might the answers to these questions change the nature of administration for those who follow and the thinking of those who came before?
In pursuing these questions, we talked frequently about what we did not want to come together as a group and write. We did not want to write a book about the emergence of a small support group for recent PhDs in rhetoric and composition with WPA identities. While we certainly did share stories, support each other, and learn from one another, we each felt an urge to do more than simply share our experience. We wanted to think about it, problematize it, theorize it, and make new knowledge out of it.
Our ongoing GenAdmin experience is a theoretical, practical, and potential assemblage of the WPAs we become, gravitate towards, and fail to represent; of the physical, administrative, pedagogical, emotional, and theoretical places we desire and where we actually end up; of the ways we act amongst ourselves, our colleagues, our mentees, our students, and those who might define themselves administratively much differently than we do. At one of our final working meetings, we discussed how our thinking has evolved since we started writing this book, becoming less dualistic, more complex, and more specific. Ultimately, we found ways to exchange our dis-ease with traditional narratives about WPAs for a project that articulates alternatives. This is a book about dissensus and consensus among colleagues and friends who had interlocking philosophies of how writing programs and life develop, of how we should perceive our administrative identities and engage our administrative responsibilities, and of how we might articulate and further enact our ways of being and becoming in a world that is simply too complex for us to find one way of managing it, one map appropriate to all navigable situations. We hope that what follows at least complicates and at best offers viable alternatives to narratives that emphasize tales of disappointment, loss, and grief in unwelcome jobs, that create binaries of writing program administration whereby we are either doomed as junior faculty WPAs or destined to succeed as senior WPAs, that posit us as either scholars or managers, and that quite simply limit possibilities for all WPAs.
1 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