time or another expressed a difference between our understandings of our beliefs and goals as untenured WPAs and common expectations for junior WPAs (jWPAs) even endorsed by the CWPA. These commonalities still leave room for flux: we do not all have the same expectation of our roles as WPAs; we were not all hired into departments where our work is acknowledged, valued, or understood; and we did not all come to our roles via the same understandings of what it means to choose a career in writing program administration. But throughout our ongoing conversations, we return again and again to the idea that what we experienced in our first years as WPAs was different than what we were told to expect. We found that our relationships with colleagues need not be agonistic, that effective program work could be done without the power afforded by tenure, and that being an untenured WPA need not require that we forsake a domestic or extra-academic existence. The narratives peppering the scholarship of writing program administration told us we should expect otherwise, as did some of our mentors. When our collective and individual experiences did not match those stories, we began to wonder if we were a part of a new generation of WPAs—one for whom the conventional WPA narratives do not necessarily apply, or for whom they could be more deliberately disrupted.
In the course of this book there are many terms, like jWPA, that we do not privilege as identifiers because of our desire to position and understand WPA work and workers in relationships that are complex alternatives to ones defined as junior/senior. Of course, we realize that some positionings will always be institutionally unrealizable or unproductive, revealing both the ends and the beginnings of concepts even as we name or categorize them. We suggest GenAdmin, instead, as a placeholder. As a generational placeholder, we value GenAdmin for what it makes visible: how we moved into the roles we now play as writing program administrators, and how this identity played out in other areas of our work. This visibility, in turn, complicates other notions, such as what it means to choose WPA work (something we will take up in greater depth in an interlude to Chapter 2), what is at stake in abandoning traditional arguments against this work on the basis of institutional naïveté (which we address in Chapter 3), whether and how well other forms of disciplinary knowledge or authority can serve pre-tenure WPAs (which we take up in Chapters 4 and 5), and what WPA responsibility might mean when responsibility is refigured as ethic not task (which we explore in Chapter 6).
We recognize that, as material conditions on many campuses cause WPA roles to be more creatively defined, expanded, or shared, the benefits afforded those roles do not always follow suit. The possibilities of the job and for the role are still constructed differently according to a constellation of factors. In “Ethics and the jWPA,” although Alice Horning offers what we see as uninterrogated assumptions1 about power and responsibility in speaking for junior WPAs, we realize she makes an argument that cannot be wholly ignored—it is unsustainable to have untenured faculty do program work in some institutions because of the ways in which the jWPA is practically, theoretically, or technically situated within that environment. For example, the untenured faculty member doing WPA work at a college or university that lacks a way of recognizing the work as commensurate with reward is at risk of not getting her needs met in the form of resources, course releases, or research support. A solo WPA who is the only rhetoric and composition faculty member or a WPA facing high publication expectations that don’t accommodate her administrative service will also be vulnerable, as WPAs in those roles may find it difficult to be fully functioning members of the faculty. But because both the limits and the sources of support are determined by complex rather than single factors, we also realize that choosing pre-tenure WPA positions well (insomuch as this is possible) is important, as is being savvy rhetoricians on the job. Nevertheless, being intellectually shaped by a disciplinary landscape in which writing program administration is a legitimate scholarly enterprise can create an unavoidably different climate, one that disrupts the categories dominating debates in the field for the past two decades.
Applying a generational frame to the changing nature of WPA work, and the professionals who inhabit those positions, is not new to WPA studies. In their multivocal article, “The Progress of Generations,” Anthony Baker, Karen Bishop, Suellyn Duffey, Jeanne Gunner, Rich Miller, and Shelley Reid identify themselves as members of two generations of WPA professionals—those who paved new territory in their departments and institutions as the first officially trained WPA to hold the position and those who take up the work after a first-generation WPA has moved on to a different role. They write of ghosts who haunt the second-generation WPAs as these newer professionals attempt to develop and lead already established programs, but they do so “carrying the professional DNA of earlier generations,” forcing them to comply with or fight against their genetic predispositions (Baker et al. 55).
Our ghosts, or at least the ones we try to lay to rest in this volume, are less institutional and more disciplinary, in part because we see our identity as WPAs separate from our institutional contexts, even though our practices are always informed by our institutional and theoretical locations. We are a generation of WPAs whose identities are emerging from a philosophy of life and work that is more portable than earlier discussions of WPA work focused on institutional context would suggest. Instead, our generational frame offers us a new way of thinking about our identities as WPAs, identities that are, indeed, marked with the DNA of earlier generations but that are shaped and moved forward by different political, personal, and disciplinary forces. What we offer here is not a dismissal or a critique of the work of previous generations of WPAs; on the contrary, we are well aware that we would not be able to do this work without the efforts the WPAs who came before us and successfully argued for the professionalization of WPA roles and for the intellectual nature of WPA work. We use generational differences as a starting point for highlighting the ways in which the material reality and the intellectual nature of WPA work has changed.
We acknowledge differences in our WPA roles and those of prior generations, made possible by the increasing disciplinarity of the field and demonstrated in part by a rise in rhetoric and composition doctoral programs with writing program administration emphases; the slowly growing presence of WPA curriculum or seminars; professionalizing efforts by the CWPA; the increasing number of collections focusing on writing program administration; and the shifting material conditions of our universities which lead to part-time or full-time positions as graduate student WPAs, or that necessitate shared administration and lead to multiple WPA roles on one campus. These shifts are well documented and have been theorized by a generation or more of active and retiring WPAs who have worked hard to improve the conditions in which we now work, and who have themselves adopted writing program administration as more than an occupational identity. We see ourselves as taking earlier work in new directions, particularly on such intertwined issues as disciplinarity and identity; power, authority and positioning; and the place of rhetoric and ethics in writing program administration.
In this new intellectual climate, what does and can it mean to be teachers and scholars, especially pre-tenure, with an administrative identity? How does this positioning translate as a way of being a scholar, teacher, researcher, and citizen? We do not necessarily posit writing program administration as a subdiscipline of rhetoric, composition, or English studies, but rather acknowledge its multiplicinarity,2 especially inasmuch as it concerns all of us with the articulation of particular theoretical orientations for the instruction each of our programs provides (Gunner, “Ideology” 7), thus setting itself apart from any number of fields to which it “belongs.” By the same token, we do not only posit GenAdmin as a specific population within the WPA community, but also a philosophical perspective that we see emerging from the ongoing theorization of this field.
We hope this book helps account for the thinking of a generation of rhetoric and composition practitioners who were in some ways trained to think ideologically or philosophically like WPAs, whether or not they were seeking a traditional WPA role. We contribute to the emergent historical picture of who WPAs are but also who they can be, and in some part to assuage our own dissonances with taking on various aspects of the job. Our mentors taught us to think certain ways with the full knowledge that they were sending us out into a different field, a different job, a different historical and epistemological context, even if they didn’t know exactly what those would be. Here, we explore consequences of educations embraced, jobs taken, lessons learned.
Even
