Dennis Lynch, and Martha Townsend
Acknowledgments
We are indebted to many people on the completion of this book. We would specifically like to thank our Parlor Press publisher, David Blakesley, our reviewers, and the WPA series editors Susan McLeod and Margot Soven, who were quick to respond to the idea of this book and who made the process smooth from start to finish. Nancy DeJoy gave us formative, substantive suggestions for revision, and Dana Anderson, Christine Farris, Joan Linton, and John Schilb each read portions of the earliest draft that helped shape our thinking. A 2008 research grant, awarded for The Assemblage Project, from the Council of Writing Program Administrators allowed us to gather and index other WPAs’ stories and to rethink how those stories can be circulated and retold.
We also thank those individuals who encouraged us as we wrote, in small and large ways, and who gave us reason to believe in this project’s exigence and audiences. Collectively, we are indebted to the participants at our “GenAdmin: Making Sense of/for a New Generation of Writing Program Administrators” session during the 2008 CWPA Conference in Denver. The crosstalk that occurred during and after that session has shaped the final version of this book in more ways than one. For the years they invested in our well-being—personally and professionally, either in the classroom or as colleagues in a dynamic discipline—we are also indebted to Shirley K Rose, Irwin Weiser, Janice Lauer, Thomas Rickert, Dick Fulkerson, and Donna Dunbar-Odom, whose commitment to rhetorical traditions, past and present, has influenced each of us and impacted this book. For the less obvious, sometimes implicit, ways they interacted with us, tracked our careers, provided opportunities to collaborate, modeled for us the kinds of intellectual engagers we hoped to become, or challenged (sometimes chastened) us throughout this project, we thank Linda Adler-Kassner, Joe Janangelo, Marty Townsend, Thomas Miller, Hephzibah Roskelly, Kate Ronald, and Elizabeth Chiseri Strater. We thank Jeanne Gunner, Joe Harris, Dennis Lynch, and Martha Townsend for their dialogic thinking about our book, for offering us responses, reactions, and feedback as we drafted it, and for beginning the conversation we hoped that it would. And we thank this book’s readers—for taking on the task of thinking philosophically about writing program administration in an institutional climate that may not explicitly invite it, for not succumbing to the weariness that clouds all we do, and for recognizing that we do not struggle against depictions of the job or of our institutions, but rather struggle with them. Our need for becoming among today’s contingencies seems ever more pressing.
Finally, we mention important personal debts. Jonikka and Colin would like to thank Moriah McCracken, Larry Dambreville, Robert Reitz, Shoney Flores, Theron Francis, Gary Schneider, Kyoung Lee, the Coles, Dalel Serda, Bonnie Garcia, Valerie Oritz, Brittany Ramirez, Jordan Guerra, and Sharon Fulkerson for reminding them that there can be joy in their work and in their play. Tarez would like to thank Pat Sullivan and Shirely Rose for modeling—in her generosity, perseverance, and patience—a work ethic that drives most of Tarez’s collaborations, at Indiana University and elsewhere. Amy would like to thank her colleagues at Saint Xavier who have given her an institutional home that is far more homey than institutional; they’ve graciously made space for her to ask questions about writing and generously supported her efforts to find answers. Kate would like to thank Rebecca Jones, Deb Dew, Beth Howells, Amy Ratto Parks, Nancy Cook, Bruce Ballenger, Janet Bean, Kelly Webster, Doug Downs, and Duane Roen for valuing writing program administration and believing in her commitment to and capacity for doing that work.
Prelude
On Location
Somewhere in the swirl of life, each of us ponders three essential questions: “Who am I?” “Where am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?” We often consider the first question in isolation, as if it were the true key to our existence—as if the matter of who we are could be resolved independently of the two remaining questions. But all three of these questions must be answered in consort, as together they articulate the totality of the human condition. We do different things with varying degrees of understanding and purpose. We are born, live, feel, think, act, move, settle, and die. Questions of our existence and action are separable neither from each other nor from place—but it is place that we have most often ignored.
—Robert L. Thayer, Jr.
Robert Thayer’s insight is an appropriate opening to this book because his questions are also our questions and because his questions prompt another: Where to begin in defining this project? The idea of GenAdmin—a group or generation of writing program administrators whose graduate careers prepared them to do WPA work in some form, who came to see administration as a core component of their professional and intellectual identities, and who pursued or accepted administrative roles before tenure to satisfy personal or professional needs—emerged for each of us as we experienced substantially different lives, interests, and courses of study. But any portrait of an artist or collective, specifically with writing program administration as a subject, calls for a frame, no matter how untethered its edges may seem. And so, we offer one of place—or, perhaps more accurately, we offer a frame constructed of locations, meta-narratives, memories of places where the book began for each of us, where the questions and desires that led to the book began to solidify.
In Memories of Emerging Identities: Jonikka’s first national conference presentation was in July 2002 at the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) conference in Park City, Utah. She was on a panel with Shirley K Rose, her WPA mentor, and they were making the case for the professionalization, specifically the intellectual preparation, of future WPAs. It was the first time Jonikka articulated the idea that she felt somehow different because she had chosen writing program administration, not only in terms of the various roles and responsibilities that come with a WPA position, but also in terms of embracing WPA as her emerging professional identity.
As the years passed, she took several writing program administration seminars, and, in other courses, wrote papers with a WPA perspective, all of which culminated in her dissertation, in which she began to articulate what it might mean to think of the WPA as an updated version of Quintilian’s vir bonus. While she has moved in and out of WPA positions ever since, she has maintained her WPA identity through a preoccupation with theorizing that identity—for herself and for others, specifically thinking about what marks writing program administration expertise and how one can learn to think and act from a WPA perspective.
One of her clearest memories of stepping into her new role as a WPA scholar is when Marty Townsend approached her at the end of that 2002 conference presentation and said something to the effect of, “You know, I chose WPA work, too. If you ever want to write about that, let me know.” That moment validated Jonikka’s experience and thinking and gave her the encouragement she needed to pursue her questions of WPA identity: What difference does it make when we choose WPA work? How might that one factor change the ways we do our work and the ways others see our work? And what happens when more and more of us begin to choose writing program administration as the focus of our scholarly identity? Over time, Jonikka saw in Amy, Tarez, Kate, and Colin a desire to ask similar questions, all borne of a hope to do
