GenAdmin. Colin Charlton

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