York City, a space had emerged where we found a voice, both individual and collective, that spoke through hundreds of emails, Google chats, panel proposals, conference dinners, and a videoconference. We learned that collaboration is more difficult, more satisfying, and more epistemic than going it alone. We found that, in thinking together, we arrived at more nuanced understandings of our experiences because of the multiplicity of perspectives we had to accommodate. We realized, in fact, that we had sketched an early but viable portrait of a generation of writing program administrators. Back in 2008, as embedded as we were in the Presidential campaigns, we could not disguise our interest in and connection to a historical moment rich with volunteerism, activism, and dialogue. Such a groundswell, complete with generational analyses and attempts to frame small movements as movements of larger significance, still could not quite capture how we were thinking of our “generation” of writing program administrators. But we had been generated, we were generating, and we were sensing and thinking through shifts in the reflections, identities, and goals between us and some of our WPA predecessors.
We sought an umbrella for our shared terms and experiences, one that had the hope and promise of a new perspective on what it means to compose a writing program among students, teachers, administrators, publics, and families, without dividing our administrative selves off from other works that engaged us, letting our administrative responsibilities and relationships smother us, or dissociating ourselves from the WPAs who had trained us. To articulate who we were, to have a name and a place, was a necessary philosophical, practical, and social act, as we continued to discuss how our identities didn’t exist, or weren’t necessarily experienced, as stable and teleological. We chose GenAdmin, short for Generation Administration, since both generation and administration are value-heavy and convenient frames for imagining how we belong to and/or stand apart from a world we keep trying (with infinite shortfalls) to understand. But in talking with each other, we wanted to give shape to the sense we had of each other as complex people who do not always seek to separate out the one voice from the many, the academic from the real, or the intellectual from the administrative.
By theorizing WPA identities in the twenty-first century, particularly GenAdmin, we articulate our goals for writing program administration, our writing program visions, and our conception of stakeholders in WPA situations to legitimize writing program administration as a chosen and creative site where we live, work, think, act, and promote intellectual change. These are the questions that drove our invention and theorizing as we lived through our examples, expanded upon our theories, and revised our practices:
How does GenAdmin define itself in relationship to principles and beliefs inherited from previous generations of WPAs?
How does GenAdmin disrupt assumptions about WPA identity that are often tacitly, or in some cases explicitly, forwarded by official organizations?
How do we further define ourselves in relation to often competing principles and visions?
What are the possibilities afforded to scholar-teacher-activist-administrators in various WPA roles?
How might the answers to these questions change the nature of administration for those who follow and the thinking of those who came before?
In pursuing these questions, we talked frequently about what we did not want to come together as a group and write. We did not want to write a book about the emergence of a small support group for recent PhDs in rhetoric and composition with WPA identities. While we certainly did share stories, support each other, and learn from one another, we each felt an urge to do more than simply share our experience. We wanted to think about it, problematize it, theorize it, and make new knowledge out of it.
Our ongoing GenAdmin experience is a theoretical, practical, and potential assemblage of the WPAs we become, gravitate towards, and fail to represent; of the physical, administrative, pedagogical, emotional, and theoretical places we desire and where we actually end up; of the ways we act amongst ourselves, our colleagues, our mentees, our students, and those who might define themselves administratively much differently than we do. At one of our final working meetings, we discussed how our thinking has evolved since we started writing this book, becoming less dualistic, more complex, and more specific. Ultimately, we found ways to exchange our dis-ease with traditional narratives about WPAs for a project that articulates alternatives. This is a book about dissensus and consensus among colleagues and friends who had interlocking philosophies of how writing programs and life develop, of how we should perceive our administrative identities and engage our administrative responsibilities, and of how we might articulate and further enact our ways of being and becoming in a world that is simply too complex for us to find one way of managing it, one map appropriate to all navigable situations. We hope that what follows at least complicates and at best offers viable alternatives to narratives that emphasize tales of disappointment, loss, and grief in unwelcome jobs, that create binaries of writing program administration whereby we are either doomed as junior faculty WPAs or destined to succeed as senior WPAs, that posit us as either scholars or managers, and that quite simply limit possibilities for all WPAs.
1 Toward a Philosophy of Generation Administration
As they read, write, and practice administration, students and faculty try on wildly divergent self-images of the WPA.
—Louise Wetherbee Phelps
Using landscaping as a metaphor for disciplinary knowledge-making offers a mechanism for understanding two provocative challenges. One is to recognize that whatever we currently know about rhetorical history as a disciplinary landscape is situated on a larger terrain of developed and undeveloped possibilities. A second challenge is to understand on an operational level, rather than just a theoretical one, that knowledge is less truth for all the time, space, and conditions than it is interpretation.
—Jacqueline Jones Royster
It’s not about choosing the job or not choosing the job. That’s a false and binary understanding of the choices we face for employment and academic responsibility. It’s about not letting the job choose you, and not letting it alone define your identity.
—Conversational nugget from the authors
What is Administrative Identity?—Generating a Generational Frame
The identity of writing program administration has historically been varied, complex, and marked by periods of tension, out of which new temporal and theoretical moments continually grow. Where writing program administration was once largely perceived as a much-needed service role for corralling large numbers of composition sections and their teachers, it has since become a discipline and profession performed by tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track faculty, as well as graduate students taking on such roles as part of their educational training. To the five of us writing this book, GenAdmin refers to an historical positioning that isn’t bound by chronological placement or cultural positioning as much as by an intellectual posturing towards the work. For that reason, we have two main goals for this book, and readers will see us frequently negotiate some tension between them: (1) to articulate an administrative positioning that we have seen emerge in the theorization and practice of writing program work in the last two decades; and (2) to illustrate how that positioning reflects a philosophy of writing program administration that impels us to retheorize a discipline of writing program administration, even as we rethink disciplinary parameters.
This undertaking is rich with the complications that arose as we learned to write together through our differences, highlighting both the shared characteristics of and the disparity among our roles. Fundamentally, we have three experiences in common: (1) we have had explicit preparation in one or more aspects of writing program administration that our predecessors did not; (2) we have directly benefited from groundwork laid by the CWPA (e.g., in terms of guidance for evaluation of the intellectual work of the
