one end of the spectrum, we have inherited the hero’s story, demonstrating that when faced with seemingly impossible institutional constraints, colleagues, or budgets, the hero WPA perseveres. Edward M. White’s 1991 article, “Use It or Lose It: Power and the WPA,” offers a clear example of the hero’s tale and the tropes such stories employ. White begins his narrative with a credible scenario: his writing-across-the-curriculum budget is cut in favor of other, more powerful departments, and while the Dean offers consolation in a “soothing” voice, he refuses to support the program or to support White as the WPA. By mobilizing his contacts, White is able to convince the new dean of undergraduate studies to take the WAC program under its umbrella (an umbrella with a more fluid budget), and, in so doing, he “discovered a kind of power that does not appear in flow charts, power that most WPAs have, and [he] was able to use it to save the program” (“Use It” 5). In this tale, White wields heroic power in defense of his program, and the experience taught him that in the face of adversaries who will not support writing instruction, writing programs, or WPAs, “only one answer will work: sheer power” (“Use It” 8). “It is futile to argue with them,” he continues, “for you cannot pierce the hidden source of their beliefs. The most difficult part of being a WPA is combating those who have only scorn for our enterprise, for that means assessing and using the forces at our disposal” (“Use It” 8).
What is notable about White’s argument is the extent to which he acknowledges WPAs’ apparent lack of power. In his opening paragraph, he offers this exhortation: “Recognize the fact that all administration deals in power; power games demand aggressive players; assert that you have power (even if you don’t) and you can often wield it” (“Use It” 3). Two important premises of White’s argument are that power is owned and is inherently tied to outwardly aggressive acts, and that in order to be successful, the WPA must wield whatever power he has (or doesn’t have) with a ferocity that matches the power department chairs, deans, provosts, chancellors, and presidents have through title and position alone. White’s rally cry offers a seemingly more heroic solution than the victim narrative for WPAs under siege—if we use or create power when we feel we have none, we might be the victor of our story, successful in our efforts to save our program, our faculty, our students, and ourselves.
The Victim Narrative
On the other side of the spectrum, we have inherited the victim narrative detailing the situations of those WPAs who suffered at the hands of institutional whims, vindictive colleagues, tight budgets, or unrepentantly selfish teaching assistants. Lynn Z. Bloom’s satirical “I Want a Writing Director,” written in the style of Judy Syfer’s iconic piece, “I Want a Wife,” offers a victim narrative that exemplifies the genre. Writing in the voice of the exacting male department chair, Bloom describes the unreasonable expectations he has of his (always) female WPA: manage writing program faculty, establish curricular guidelines, handle student complaints, and care for colleagues. According to Bloom’s chair, the ideal WPA is a female who “will keep the writing program out of my hair” (176). On top of the administrative responsibilities the chair asks her to assume, Bloom also explores the demanding expectations placed upon the WPA who not only has to manage the program, but also has to “meet [the] department’s rigorous criteria for tenure,” all the while remaining invisible, someone “who will not demand attention when [the chair is] preoccupied with [his] scholarly work, and who will remain faithful to [his] needs so that [he does] not have to clutter up [his] intellectual life with administrative details” (177).
We can only hope that Bloom’s essay blends her experiences with stories other WPAs have shared with her, that it’s not just one person’s narrative of a good job gone horribly wrong. For many WPAs, at least one element of her narrative is familiar, and this sense of the collective, shared suffering Bloom describes allows us to tap into the comfort Bishop and Crossley describe when WPAs discover “that others share their experiences” (74). We can think, “If nothing else, at least we don’t have it as bad as the WPA Bloom describes,” but that positioning leaves unchallenged the assumptions about WPA work that the narrative perpetuates. While Bloom’s narrative creates empathy in her readers, she concludes her essay with a vexing question: assuming WPAs were everything her fictional Chair hoped for, she wonders, “My God, who wouldn’t want a Writing Director?” (178). Yet for some readers considering WPA work, this closing raises a different question: My God, who would ever choose to be a WPA?
Bloom’s text may work in different ways for different audiences—for seasoned WPAs, it may elicit a knowing nod and a resigned sigh; for pre-service WPAs, graduate students, or non-WPA colleagues, it may raise warning flags about the nature of the work or the priorities of those who willingly take on the job. For GenAdmin, specifically, it reasserts the feminization of composition and the alignment of writing program administration with mere service, in turn reinforcing a research/service binary that we and others wish to disrupt.
Wendy Bishop and Gay Lynn Crossley’s meta-narrative about their attempts to construct a story of WPA work highlights another feature of the victim narrative we wish to interrogate: bringing stories to voice in a discipline that is sometimes critical of the narrative form itself. Their text is a hybrid of journal entries, reflective response, and critical discussion that explores the ways in which Bishop, a principled WPA—one who is committed to developing a “‘strong’ writing program . . . staffed by teachers educated to work toward the objectives of a coherent, theoretically-informed, student-centered curriculum”—was silenced by her colleagues (Bishop and Crossley 71). When Bishop’s attempt to preserve her “strong” writing program caused her to make administrative decisions that went against the graduate director’s desires, her expertise was belittled and her influence ignored because her priorities were not in line with the department’s or the university’s. Not surprisingly, Bishop resigned early from her position, frustrated, exhausted, and alienated by the experience.
In an effort to comment on the institutional and political constraints that made their work almost impossible, Bishop and Crossley also include comments from early, anonymous reviewers of their essay who claimed that the authors (1) were naive to the critical distance, the separation of personal and professional lives, required of WPAs or (2) were simply telling “another victimization narrative that you hear so often in accounts of composition, WPAs, and even women WPAs” (74). Bishop and Crossley bristle at the critique, claiming they made efforts to avoid both of those criticisms, and yet their early readers still assumed they were either unprepared for the work or too self-affected to look critically at their own experiences.
The WPAs of Bishop, Crossley, and Bloom are destined for failure because of the expectations and constraints put upon them, a theme which highlights another function of the victim narrative in the construction of WPA identity from which GenAdmin hopes to dissociate. If we construct ourselves as victims, as hapless females or males unable to act on our own behalf, we are able to tell the stories of our failure without accepting professional responsibility or personal blame for those failures. This isn’t to say that the overt reason WPAs tell victim narratives is to shirk responsibility or place blame, but it does illustrate the ways in which narratives about oppressive forces (whether they are institutional or individual) hold particular sway in academe. It may be the case for many WPAs that their training as progressive, open-minded academics leads them to side with, rather than blame, the victim, and while victim narratives certainly emerge as a way of naming the intellectual, personal, and professional violence done to us as WPAs, they also emerge as evidence of institutional power run amok, narratives told not just by WPAs or even English faculty, but faculty in disciplines across the university. The victim narrative justifies why WPAs are unable to succeed, and those justifications often go unchallenged within university culture writ large.
The narratives by White, Bloom, and Bishop and Crossley have shaped many WPAs’ notions of what it means to be a WPA and do the work required of the position, and yet they present only one side of the story, one aspect of the job that does not take into account the many successes we have found at the institutional and disciplinary levels. Furthermore, they impose an unnecessary constraint on the generative potential of what narratives
