of WPAs and may cause our collective ideas about what it means to be a WPA to stagnate.
Although GenAdmin may, at times, feel reticent to contradict senior WPAs with whom we disagree, we still feel the necessity to consider new ways in which to tell WPA stories that resist the old binaries and create space to come to new understandings of WPA work for a generation of administrators who perceive new challenges for the field. These efforts shape, in part, our GenAdmin ethical stance as we work to develop a new vocabulary that resists assumptions about the field, since, just as in the feminist movement, when conflicts over WPA work “are viewed from a different perspective, a dialectic arises to connect the members of the various . . . factions” (Renegar and Sowards, “Liberal” 335). It is in this dialectic that we see opportunity to reach a new understanding of our shared history and to chart new paths for our collective future.
Promoting a Different WPA Narrative: The Resistant WPA as Historically Situated
As we have argued, conceptions of WPA work may have been built and perpetuated by victim and hero narratives, but these narratives do not paint a comprehensive picture of what it means to be a WPA. One way of seeking agency is in developing power within boundaries and constraints, in this case, looking to the resistant narratives in WPA history for a fuller understanding of the diversity of WPA histories, cultural memories, and cultural norms, even as the conditions surrounding our programs seem to stay constant (McLeod, Writing). In suggesting that these narratives resist “settled histories” and encourage alternative, localized renditions of what might otherwise become grand narratives that could limit our field, Richard Miller mentions the need to disrupt WPAs’ interactions with each other, their institutions, and the discipline as a whole, to complicate the notion that composition work is merely the perpetual training of novices and newcomers (“From” 26). In doing so, Miller seems to suggest that writing program administration is upholding a master narrative that limits what we want to achieve as scholars. Rather than narrating our histories as stories of marginalization and struggle (what he deems the intellectual wasteland), he suggests reseeing (and rewriting) ourselves into the center of the university’s intellectual sphere. His method is to adapt a discourse that builds our work as “resource-rich”—knowledge-centered, interdisciplinary, and deeply theoretical yet very public, even activist—and to perform for different audiences and organizational structures (“From” 37). In short, his goal is to challenge the rhetorical sovereignty of certain types of metanarratives by introducing a new vocabulary with which to discuss administrative history.
Miller works to reframe this vocabulary by linking writing program administration (and its history) with the discipline of composition, but a historical reading of writing program administration illustrates a new component of this vocabulary—the vocabulary of resistance. If we look at the history of composition, and the role that WPAs played in the evolution of the teaching of writing, we see that the history of the WPA is actually one of active resistance to (or in some cases, anticipation of) institutional and disciplinary shifts that could have victimized the WPA. More often than not, these shifts provided an opportunity for growth, not just in a given writing program, but also in the field of rhetoric and composition as a whole. The resistant WPA is neither a victim of the powers that be, nor is she a hero who solves every problem. Instead, if we trace her role through the development of the field, we find her to be a stalwart advocate for the relevance of writing instruction, the potential of student writers, and the integrity of the faculty who teach them. By reading our shared administrative history in this way, we heed Min-Zhan Lu’s argument in “Tracking Comp Tales” for the value of telling and retelling our disciplinary stories to “bring to crisis established conditions of that world and established understandings of and relations to those conditions, so that with each crisis, opportunity is molded in danger, and danger becomes a form of opportunity” (226). In this case, the opportunity we recognize is the need to tell different WPA stories, in part by critiquing stories that do not map onto our world so satisfactorily.
The first glimpses we see of the resistant WPA appear in the way Sharon Crowley resituates an oft-cited origin story of American writing programs, the development of Freshman English at Harvard in the 1870s, around Adams Sherman Hill’s professorship. Crowley’s origin story argues that Hill, Harvard’s assistant to the Boylston Professor of rhetoric (and de facto WPA), had to “make English strange” (Brereton 324) to argue for its institutional importance and to justify why studying the vernacular had to be learned rather than merely assumed in the study of literature. For Hill, learning principles of style, usage, and editing comprised an art of pure and efficient communication, wherein “pure” meant what was “universally understood” . . . by “reputable, national, and present use” (Brereton 324), a belletristic aim with somewhat political dimensions. Crowley explains that Hill and Harvard took three steps to accomplish this aim: “The first step in the process was to define English as a language from which its native speakers were alienated. The second step was to establish an entrance examination in English that was very difficult to pass. The third step, necessitated by the large number of failures on the exam, was to install a course of study that would remediate the lack demonstrated by the examination” (60). These moves paved the way for a new way of thinking about writing instruction, making the case for a course in composition as a material necessity for incoming college freshmen. While Crowley recounts this history as evidence for why first-year composition should be abolished (because it offers neither the students nor the discipline appropriate agency), we recognize the work of a resistant early WPA who made his beliefs about language and writing reflected in his administrative efforts, albeit in a context that limited composition’s intellectual force.
Susan McLeod’s Writing Program Administration offers a history of resistant writing program administrators whose efforts may seem more familiar to present-day readers than Hill’s attempts to “make English strange” (Brereton 324). Building on the histories of the field written by earlier composition historians (including Albert R. Kitzhaber, John C. Brereton, James Berlin, Robert Connors, and Donald C. Stewart, among others), McLeod points to Fred Newton Scott at Michigan, Gertrude Buck at Vassar, and Regina Crandall at Bryn Mawr as early models of composition faculty whose work included administrative responsibilities familiar to the contemporary WPA. Their work can also be seen as sites of resistance against the status quo in composition pedagogy and institutional politics. As Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo note, not all of these individuals were WPAs per se, but they “required an administrative space within which to function” and within that space they extended their colleagues’ understanding of what composition curricula could and should be (“Why” xviii). Scott, for example, labored to move Michigan’s curriculum away from the current-traditional model prevalent at that time in favor of teaching “rhetoric in a social context” (McLeod, Writing 47), and connecting “writing to real experience” (McLeod, Writing 37). Scott’s graduate student, Gertrude Buck, extended his project of revising composition curricula to emphasize what, in current nomenclature, would be a Deweyian student-centered pedagogy. Her classes included “few lectures and quizzes . . . ; instead there were discussions of the literature they had read, individual and group interviews with the teacher on the themes they had written, and group work in class for discussing and critiquing themes” (McLeod, Writing 52). Suzanne Bordelon understands Buck not just as a purveyor of Scott’s democratic rhetoric, but as a theorist of argumentation that stemmed from middle-class feminine activism (and was subsequently sparked by Progressive-Era forces from outside of the university).4 Finally, McLeod presents Regina Crandall as a WPA who sought to improve the working conditions of the writing faculty at Bryn Mawr: even though she had “no authority over the curriculum or the hiring of faculty in the program she directed, [Crandall] fought back in a number of letters lobbying for better pay and working conditions for her faculty” (Writing 55).
The histories of Hill, Scott, Buck, Crandall, and the programs they shaped illustrate the ways in which early composition history is also a history of writing program administration, because, as McLeod notes, “To understand the history of writing program administration and to understand the politics still surrounding the position of WPA, one must go back to the beginnings of this unique course [composition]” (Writing 23). These histories illustrate that it is
