GenAdmin. Colin Charlton

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