GenAdmin. Colin Charlton

Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics, more fully explores the ethics and politics of jWPA positions, a discussion close to our hearts and minds as we all hold or have held WPA positions as graduate students and as pre-tenure faculty. This collection begins to re-landscape writing program administration in significant ways, and our work responds to their concerns, for we go further to disrupt accepted WPA narratives and frameworks that claim that jWPAs should not ever take on WPA jobs, a stance that the five of us find to be practically untenable and philosophically limiting given the many complications related to job choice.

      Virginia Anderson and Susan Romano’s collection, Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric and Composition, turns a critical lens on the position of WPA by examining how the decisions WPAs make and the philosophies they enact as WPAs, combined with the changing issues of disciplinarity and professionalization happening in the field, challenge rhetoric and composition graduates’ identity development, practices, and beliefs about graduate student preparation. As a whole, the book critiques “luck-of-the-draw, true-grit” professional narratives in favor of rhetorical understanding (2). In their introduction, Anderson and Romano characterize the essays in this collection as “ask[ing] implicitly and explicitly for preparation in rhetorica utens, in the arts of deploying disciplinary knowledge and the skills of establishing relationships and ethos, from programs that have listened to and acted on news from the field” (3). We likewise use critique to construct new thinking about our profession. In this book, we build not only on “news from the field” to develop our arguments, but also on our collective (though disparate) experiences as WPAs in order to establish GenAdmin as an identity that includes, among other things, rhetorica utens and the notion that taking on shifting identities rather than seeking a fixed positioning is not only strategic (Anderson and Romano 3) but also a part of how we understand and experience identity.

      In Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White’s two edited collections on twenty-first century WPA identities—Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change and Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future—the various chapters complicate a new WPA role and WPA work in the market-driven university by revitalizing their convergences with and their divergences from composition studies on issues like disciplinary origins, epistemology, and methodology. Framed around questions explored at an October 1993 conference by the same name, the first volume focuses on crisis and change by anticipating the kinds of practical and theoretical re-definitions that WPAs will need to make, not only to understand and teach the discipline but also to identify stakeholders in the discipline and what that identification means, to rethink assessment, to ask questions about politics, to understand and enact activism, and to consider how research will affect teaching. The second volume, shaped very much by the shadow of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, offers multiple readings of composition’s past in order to compose arguments for the future. In these collections, the editors and their contributors were as focused on an historical moment as we are now.

      We build on the promises of texts like these because doing so yields a more complex understanding of WPA identity and disciplinarity. Most recently, Donna Strickland and Jeanne Gunner’s The Writing Program Interrupted: Making Space for Critical Discourse examines where WPAs have been, where they are, and where they are going in their abilities to critique the cultures, discourses, and subjectivities that ensue, reminding us again of the critical urgency to locate the WPA among vital and current theoretical dilemmas. Where previous work helped WPAs to see and rely on “admin” as a position, GenAdmin views administration as an orientation towards creating new conditions and, hence, for choosing the work. Rather than replace “admin” in our work, we hope to define it more robustly.

      These texts, and any number of articles from the pages of our journals, especially WPA: Writing Program Administration, have been instrumental in the development of writing program administration as theory, as practice, as scholarly pursuit. Although these are not the only texts that have influenced the disciplinary emergence of writing program administration or our own beliefs as WPAs, we cannot underscore enough their importance in establishing writing program administration as a scholarly discipline in creating a body of texts, establishing research methods (narration, theorizing, reflecting, studying local practices and programs to offer useful generalizations), and in imparting means of constructing and revising programs rhetorically and thoughtfully.

      Changing Perceptions About Administration

      Our intent is not to talk back or aggressively reject criticisms that are directed towards our perceptions of WPA work, mainly because these are no longer the only speech acts that have shaped our thinking, but also because we are well aware of the diversity of our mentoring and training—that where we are is a direct result of the committed and longstanding work of many people in writing program administration specifically and in rhetoric and composition more broadly. As GenAdmin, we position ourselves within the dimensions of a broader evolving WPA identity that has been shaping the field since Donald Bushman’s recasting of the WPA as humanist intellectual in “The WPA as Pragmatist: Recasting ‘Service’ as ‘Human Science,’” including the WPA as activist, scholar, and change agent. Although in Chapter 4 we discuss the inefficacy of laying claim to metaphors, we realize that the evolving WPA role has been critical to our identity study. Furthermore, we invite extra-academic connections, again because of how related roles have challenged stable definitions of WPA work.

      To clarify, this book is not a statement of identity or an essentialist manifesto, a simple acknowledgment that the tenor and shape of the job is changing, therefore so must we, or a confession of entitlement, difference, or being caught unawares. This book is an exploration of WPA identity in the twenty-first century; an identification of GenAdmin as a subject position for WPAs in the twenty-first century; a narrative of choice, hybridity, and/or emergence; an opportunity to locate WPA work within larger systems of activity and to reinvent the parameters of those activity systems; and an occasion to disrupt some of the binaries that have caused tensions between how past, present, and future WPAs perceive one another to work and to think, perhaps even to help them arrive at a more nuanced understanding of one another’s positionings in the field. In taking up the questions posed by our Prelude, we arrive at the following understanding of GenAdmin: it is an always emergent identity, a position from which we can destabilize and disrupt prevalent binaries in writing program administration scholarship to, consequently, represent and enact administration as rhetorical theory and philosophical practice.

      Challenging History and “Doing Philosophy”

      At this point it is useful to mention that in challenging perceptions about administration and in clarifying the purposes for our book, we both build on and build away from Jacqueline Jones Royster’s idea of “disciplinary landscaping” for rhetoric and composition. On the one hand, we recognize that knowledge in rhetoric and composition studies (in writing program administration, specifically) is an interpretive enterprise and social construction (“Disciplinary” 149) that can be collectively “historiciz[ed] based on new perceptions” and “reenvision[ed] . . . in more dynamic ways” (“Disciplinary” 163). Royster makes this point in the context of challenging rhetorical history to disrupt the understanding that African women’s rhetorical participation began in the nineteenth-century United States when we can reasonably situate it three to five centuries earlier by being more inclusive with our collections across genre, space, and time—more inclusive of the terms of their “participation” (“Disciplinary” 151). It is useful to remember that historical situatedness is a matter of geospatial location and rhetorical context, and not merely of temporality. On the other hand, we suggest alternatives to or disruptions of the perpetual mapping and landscaping metaphors that probably inspired Sidney I. Dobrin to charge the discipline of writing program administration with having “foregone the freedom of space in favor of a guarded conservatism to protect its place” (57). That is, of being so preoccupied with legitimation and place that it has “renounced not only critical perspectives of its work . . . but has succumbed to a false security bound up in a mythology of administrative power that fails not only to question the very safety of that place but to deny the potential critical, theoretical, and political work that can be done beyond the borders of WPA-place” (Dobrin 57-58). Whereas maps and landscape