GenAdmin. Colin Charlton

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