we will always choose to be the WPA at our given institutions. We know enough to make wise choices based on the information available to us. And we know the perils of WPA work—of any kind of meaningful work—but we choose to do our best to realize the potential of our individual contexts. I know that I don’t want to be the WPA every day, but whether I am the official WPA or not, I will continue to think and act as WPAs do because that’s how I see my professional world.
Kate: I find I often see choices by the choices I’ve chosen against. I chose not to be X or do X, which means I chose Y. That doesn’t make Y a default choice, but a way of getting to Y by refusing to be or do X. I know what I didn’t want, in other words. I didn’t want a doctorate in literature. I didn’t want a job focusing on technical and professional writing. I wanted a degree in rhetoric. I wanted to be a WPA. Of course, what we choose and how it works out doesn’t necessarily match up. We choose careers and jobs with information we have at the time, and sometimes we realize our choices come with constraints we would not have chosen or possibilities we wouldn’t have sought out. Choice for me is both agentive and strategic and somewhat imaginative and serendipitous. I make choices and not-choices to make my way in the world, but I’m cognizant of how choices might lead to limits but also open to how choices might liberate and inspire me. Part of my commitment to writing program administration derives from knowing I could do otherwise, but I choose to be a WPA.
Tarez: I guess the bottom line for me in how we’re defining GenAdmin isn’t “people who choose the work in spite of the consequences,” but “people who do not see subjectivity as something that has to be overcome.” So the notion of choice, for me is not a simple one or a moral one either, but requires much disruption beyond whether untenured junior faculty should take on WPA roles. Choices can be both freeing and constraining.
Amy: There are days, often those when I look at the calendar and mark the second consecutive week that I’ve been unable to turn my attention to my research, that I question my decision to be a WPA. I find it hard to balance my research and administrative responsibilities; though I receive incredible support for my research from my colleagues, I find myself more drawn to the work that allows me to engage with other people, which for me, is administrative. And there are days when I wish I weren’t the WPA because then I wouldn’t have to care about the curriculum or the position of adjuncts in the program or how to handle another grade appeal. I sometimes look longingly at my colleagues who spend hours writing in their offices, undisturbed by e-mail or meetings or decisions that need to be made. But I am the WPA because I care, and I find that I work better when I care about what I’m working for. My first job didn’t engage me—people didn’t fight about writing or pedagogy or curriculum because it wasn’t a priority for them. I was left to work on my own, but I’ve realized, since I’ve changed jobs, that I need the emotional engagement in order to do my job well. I need people to want to discuss, and sometimes argue, about what is best for the writing program. I want to get worked up about the program, I want to be an advocate, I want to fight for what I believe is right. What I know now, though, is that emotional engagement takes its toll—psychically, intellectually, emotionally—but it also makes me present and engaged and allows me to do the intellectual work that is central to writing program administration. Caring about my job and the people I work with and the students we work for makes me a better WPA.
Jonnika: When I started writing about what choice has meant for me, I couldn’t get a line from the first of the Lord of the Rings movies out of my mind. Arwen is telling Aragorn that she is not leaving Middle Earth with the other elves, that she is forsaking her immortality to be with him, and she says, “I choose a mortal life.” Though our choices have been much less life altering and romantic, they have changed our paths in perhaps subtler, yet still significant ways, and they have led us to commit to think together about what it means to be a WPA and do WPA work. Our choices have led us here, to this moment, to this book, to these types of lives.
Tarez: I think our GenAdmin orientation bears a certain kind of responsibility—more specifically, the responsibility to look at whether and how our discipline has actually made writing program administration viable and feasible and fair in the institutional contexts in which we work. Like Kate, my own experiences before, during, and after graduate school tell me that we have not yet penetrated these institutional contexts sufficiently enough, ideologically enough, to make WPA work equitable everywhere. While visibility is important, making WPA work more visible isn’t necessarily a panacea if there is no way to valuate the work. This is really nothing new, and in a way I merely echo how Andrea Lunsford has been challenging and encouraging rhetoric and composition (as a field) to look carefully at its positioning, to ask itself critically whether its gains represent the best kinds of progress— i.e., field status and recognition, collective vision, intellectual growth, and material support for writing programs—each time she is invited to speak at a national conference.
Colin: While preparing our first full manuscript for the book, I took on another administrative position. Because of shifts above me in positions, I was asked to take over the vice provost’s responsibilities for university-wide program review, in part because of my work as chair of the program review committee at my university for two years. I was untenured and, of course, nervous about meeting with the new president to discuss this opportunity. But I never thought about not doing it, or how much time, energy, and expertise it would take. At some point in the meeting, he said that he expected the job to take 25%—and only 25%—of my time, and he would be fair in determining how that would affect my other responsibilities. I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around the idea that this translated into two course releases (since course releases were being snatched back at a record pace), or that this would take away from my teaching or my writing and research projects. I write and teach and learn in almost every aspect of my work at a university. The distinctions between the types of work we do are, in the end, obstacles to invention, to making choices possible.
Tarez: I don’t think it hurts us to consider whether we are enacting and promoting choice in the best possible way for the current health and future growth of writing program administration and of GenAdmin. For example, if our efforts to ensure compensation and an authoritative voice for the untenured WPA inadvertently create the expectation that a lower tier of WPA-laborers should not have access to these things (because they carry lesser roles), then we have not persuaded our departments or institutions of the long-term viability, reputability, and complexity of the work, or done our part to prove that it takes on many forms, and in all forms is difficult. If our need to relinquish ourselves from harmful “protective” measures keeping untenured faculty from playing the WPA role inadvertently cuts off other WPA-laborers from this protection when they do need it, then we have not increased our market value on campus. Instead, we may still be offering ourselves as too cheap a solution to the symptomatic problem that most university structures still lack an ideological space for valuating any kind of administrative work as substantive, intellectual, commensurate. We may be inadvertently making promises to ourselves and to other junior faculty that the work we do, if quantifiable and justifiable, will be enough to not only get us tenure but also to cause our colleagues to embrace us as intellectual partners, when in fact the more zealously we do the work, the less they tend to embrace us.
I don’t think I am arguing that we should not do the work or should not choose to do it (mainly because I do the work and choose to do it well), but that we realize the opportunity for GenAdmin not only to complicate choice as a generational identifier, but also to heighten and deepen our understanding of all the players in our activity system whose lives and theoretical orientations are affected by our choices. We need to know what they need “choosing” to be. If we can pull it off, this interlude (and the larger book project it serves) may well represent a way of doing institutional critique—a way of pushing for greater ideological disruption. If GenAdmin does not do this, then who will? If GenAdmin cannot help position WPAs in alternative relationships than simply junior/senior, inside/outside, privileged/underprivileged, spoken for/spoken through, then what can?
2 Listening to and Rewriting History
When
