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Future Perfect: Administrative Work and the Professionalization ofGraduate StudentsRichard McNabb; Roxanne Mountford; Christopher Diller; Scott F. Oates; Margaret K. Willard-Traub;

Stephen D. Jukuri; Suellynn Duffey; Ben Feigert; Vic Mortimer; Jennifer Phegley; Melinda Turnley

Online publication date: 19 November 2009

To cite this Article McNabb, Richard , Mountford, Roxanne , Diller, Christopher , Oates, Scott F. , Willard-Traub, MargaretK. , Jukuri, Stephen D. , Duffey, Suellynn , Feigert, Ben , Mortimer, Vic , Phegley, Jennifer and Turnley, Melinda(2002)'Future Perfect: Administrative Work and the Professionalization of Graduate Students', Rhetoric Review, 21: 1, 40 87

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Future Perfect: Administrative Work and the

Professionalization of Graduate Students

Richard McNabb

Long Island University

Introduction1

In Present Perfect and Future Imperfect, Miller, Brueggeman, Blue, and

Shepherd conclude from their national survey that by and large, students . . . are

greatly worriedor, frequently, know very littleabout the future tense, about

the broader professional realities to which they are endeavoring to adapt them-

selves (CCC 48.3, 393). In response to their article, this Symposium offers

ways to cultivate a more future perfect outlook for graduate students by sug-

gesting the kinds of experiences faculty should be making as part of students

professionalization.

One of the broader realities we identify as missing in graduate training is

the recognition of intellectual work as political work. We argue that giving stu-

dents greater opportunities to participate as writing program administrators en-

hances this perspective of intellectual work and makes clear, as well, that schol-

arship, teaching, and service are all manifestations of intellectual and political

endeavors. Participating in such programs as WAC, portfolio assessment, and

first-year composition, each of the contributors describes how experiences dur-

ing graduate training have given him/her a broader perspective of the profes-

sional realm of rhetoric and composition studies.

For instance, Christopher Diller and Scott Oates discuss their experience

with the University of Utahs Liberal Education Accelerated Program, discov-

ering that their assumptions and views derived from their disciplinary training

became questioned and contested. Margaret Willard-Traub reflects on her ex-

perience developing assessment criteria for reading student portfolios. She ar-

gues that such professional work gives her first-hand knowledge of the myriad

ways in which institutional politics are woven into the very fabric of intellec-

tual work in the field. Stephen Davenport Jukuri explores how his experiences

show him that the nature of our academic communities is a function of how

individual interactions are structured by our academic programs. Suellynn

Rhetoric Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2002, 4087

40 Copyright 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

SYMPOSIUM RR

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Duffey, Ben Feigert, Vic Mortimer, Jennifer Phegley, and Melinda Turnley tell

a story about collaboration, authority, and professional development in a writ-ing program. They demonstrate how their WPA positions have given them a

first-hand glimpse into how theories of collaboration often clash with institu-

tional structures that place a premium on authoritative hierarchies. Introducing

these accounts, Roxanne Mountfordwho does writing program administrative

work along with her other faculty responsibilitiescontextualizes the issues

being raised in this Symposium. As the contributors conclude, their work as

administrators has enabled them to gain knowledge about the future tense of

their lives as rhetoric and composition professionalsknowledge that was not

derived from coursework alone. These experiences have helped foster their un-

derstandings about rhetoric and composition as a profession and as an institu-

tional structure situated within other institutional structures (Miller et al. 398).

Note

1I thankRR reviewers Thomas P. Miller and Edward White for their insightful comments. I

also thank Theresa Enos for her enthusiasm and support for our Symposium.

Richard McNabb is an assistant professor of English at Long Island University, C.W. Post

Campus, where he teaches courses in rhetoric and composition theory. He is also the Director of

Composition.

Roxanne MountfordUniversity of Arizona

From Labor to Middle Management: Graduate Students in

Writing Program Administration

(In Memory of Eric Walborn)

Our discipline and other humanities are imbued with such a profound

skepticism of authority and the exercise of institutional power that we

are unable to articulate a conception of legitimate and ethical exerciseof power or to own our own power, such as we have.

Louise Wetherbee Phelps

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No other program faculty in English Studies carry the onerous burden

of administration that writing faculty do.

Theresa Enos

This essay opens a special Symposium on graduate students in writing pro-

gram administration, a subject that is dear to me because I have been both a

graduate student assistant to the writing program administrator (WPA) and a ju-

nior faculty WPA. The authorsall graduate students or academic professionals

involved in WPA workagree that practical experience prepares graduate stu-

dents for the intellectual work of being a WPA but not for the institutional poli-tics of this very difficult job. They theorize about that politics and call on the

profession to train graduate students to deal with it. My essay underscores their

insights and serves as an invocation to their work. In underscoring the need for

better theorizing about the nature of WPA work, I suggest that the WPA might

best be understood as a kind of academic middle manager. Squeezed between

the needs of teachers and upper administration, the WPA is often viewed as a

politically ambiguous figure in the lives of the instructor-laborers with whom

she works. The WPA may be ambivalent about her own work. Having once been

one of the instructor-laborers, she considers herself an insider, an advocate; butas an administrator with budgets and mandates from upper administration, she

finds herself to be a representative of institutional interests. In order to illustrate

this point, I draw on my own experience as an untenured WPA. I argue that our

own ambivalence about the WPAs position in the academy may prevent us from

better theorizing about the nature of such work.

Who Is the WPA?

It is a hot, muggy day in the middle of August, and I am sitting on the floor

next to my institutional green desk, unpacking boxes. The morning sun filters

through the smudges on the nineteenth-century window. There is a faint breeze

under the door from the air-conditioning in the computer lab next door. I am a

newly minted assistant professor. This is my first day at the university.

There is a knock on my door. A young man about my age stands in the

doorway, waiting for me to look up. I do. Dr. Mountford, he says, do you

have a minute? I am the graduate student who has been running the writing as-

sessment program. Im getting ready to leave tomorrow, and I want to give you

the files. I search my memory for some reference for this conversation. I met

this student during my on-campus interview. He was at one end of a crowded ta-

ble of graduate studentsan athletic-looking person. I remember his question:

42 Rhetoric Review

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Would you put your job on the line to stop us from teaching more than 24 stu-

dents per section? I remember returning his stern gaze with a smile and saying,Yes. Absolutely. I have been hired to train graduate teaching assistants and to

build the curriculum; I am the Director of Writing. We look at each other, my

confusion obvious. They didnt tell you about me? he asks. He takes a deep

breath, expels it. I ran the assessment program. We give an entrance exam to

every freshman. You are taking over my job now. He steps through the door, de-

posits a box of files, sits in the chair next to my desk. I am stunned. During the

hiring process, I remembered no discussion of the institute-wide placement test

being a function of my job. Perhaps I managed to block this information from

my memory. Some ten minutes into the list of my unexpected duties, I can feel

my eyes begin to burn. When the graduate student finally leaves, I close the

door, put my head down on my desk and cry. I had been prepared to train gradu-

ate students and to work with them on the curriculum; I was ready to be their ad-

vocate. I was not prepared to be the gatekeeper, and I dreaded the institutional

politics that would come with this onerous responsibility.

* * *

Becoming a writing program administrator after graduate school is not un-

like being selected for middle management in a company in which you have

been a blue-collar worker. Like all laborers, graduate student teachers (GTAs)

spend time complaining about the writing program and all the ways it controls

their world. Indeed, all of us are skillful critics of institutions because of our

graduate school training. Louise Wetherbee Phelps argues that the academy at

large socializes grad students to hate administration and distrust administrators

(online posting). That is not to say that our complaintsand the complaints of

those who are now graduate studentsare ill placed. On the contrary, that the

work of a GTA is worknot a kind of apprenticeship for which universities can

award poverty-level wageshas been underscored by the efforts of graduate stu-

dents to unionize nationwide. Many of us agree with Michael Brub that uni-

versities opposing the unionization of its GTAs because they are students is po-

litically obtuse, shortsighted, and self-serving (39). However, even without such

politicization, few graduate students leave their PhD programs without having

viewed the WPA as an equivocal figure in their academic lives. Unionization

only brings into sharper focus the role of the WPA as a middle manager in the

university hierarchy.

Nevertheless, many of us seek this very difficult job because we love to

teach and are thoughtful about curriculum development. If we are honest, some

of us believe we can do better than the WPA we knew. Some of us prepare our-

selves to do such work through coursework; still others take a job assisting the

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WPA in order to put some of our ideas into motion. However, graduate students

who prepare themselves for the intellectual work of the WPA may carry withthem unacknowledged feelings of conflict about the job. The graduate student

values herself as a teacher, activist, and scholar and maintains skepticism about

upper administration. As a faculty member, she values herself in the same terms:

She values autonomy in the private worlds of her classroom, research site, and

home office; she carries on with her political activism; and she retains her sense

that the administration is to be tolerated but certainly not trusted.

But the faculty member who becomes a WPA must embrace a different

model of work or suffer schizophrenia. The WPA has fewer private worlds

indeed she is likely to spend most of her time in collaboration with others.

She must channel political activism through her job, when it is possible at all.

But the greatest change in values is likely to come through her contact with up-

per administration. She becomes, in effect, one of them by taking on some of

the basic business of running the university. In such a role, the thoroughly accul-

turated, new PhD may be shocked to hear herself say for the first time, Well, Id

love to do that for you, but Administrator X will not allow it, or Yes, I under-

stand that this practice is unfair, but I have no control over it. In the cultural

logic of the academy, she has become someone she may have once regarded

with suspicion.

* * *

The phone call came in September. I picked up the receiver and heard a

pleasant, masculine voice say, Hello, Roxanne. We havent had a chance to

meet. Im Dick Lawrence,1 Dean of the Undergraduate College. I want to talk to

you about the writing assessment test. How do our numbers look?

Me: Well, orientation is over, and 400 students failed the test. And frankly,

now that Ive had a look at the exams, Im surprised that were not teaching a

larger percentage of these students. Many of the students who failed are basic

writers. But the next level of student writer needs instruction, too.

He: Oh, you know that we cant open any more sections. Im just calling to

make sure that you dont fail more students than we have sections for.

Me: Dean Lawrence, are you suggesting that we go back and pass students

who failed the test?

He: I know you all use that holistic scoring method, so couldnt you reread

the exams, and just set the anchors lower?

Me: You want us to rescore the exams.

He: Well, its not my place to tell you how to do it, but we cant have more

than five sections, and Im sure you dont want to see the ceiling raised on

course enrollments.

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Me: There is no funding for additional sections.

He: No.Me: Then what is the point of having an assessment test?

He: Well, you know, we just want to make sure that only the lowest-ability

students are placed into composition. Your test tells us who they are.

I had been in the job only three weeks.

* * *

Nevertheless, the WPA has some power to define the terms of middle man-

agement. For example, many politicized WPAs have tackled some of the diffi-

cult labor issues in our field. One of those persons is Eileen Schell. In her bookGypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers, Schell dispels myths about the reasons

postgraduates of English take on part-time teaching (the bottom line is that they

want to do what they were trained to doteach in higher education) and offers

suggestions about how to change their working conditions. No longer is the Wy-

oming Resolution taken as the best strategy in all cases; for instance, institutions

like Syracuse University and the University of Arizona are creating new classes

of teaching professionals and offering them benefits and job security. Schell lists

four strategies for changing the working conditions of adjunct faculty, all of

whichwith the exception of unionizationrequire a WPA to exert extraordi-

nary leadership and to gain the support of upper administration.2 Given the right

leader and institutional conditions, such changes are possible.

A more difficult problem is the working conditions of graduate teaching as-

sistants. Some institutions have maintained the same number of core tenure-

track faculty for twenty years or more but have managed the ebb and flow of en-

rollment figures by shrinking and swelling the number of GTAs. These teacher-

students work for poverty wages, often pay high prices for abysmal health insur-

ance, and fight for time to study. Many GTAs are required to teach two sections

of compositionwith 25 students in each sectionwhile maintaining a full-

time class load. Brub argues that WPAs or other sympathetic administrators at

institutions opposing unionization of graduate students should take graduate

students out of the classrooms in which they work as graders, assistants, and in-

structors; maintain their stipend support at its current levels; and give them pro-

fessional development and training that does not involve the direct supervision

of undergraduates (3738). Of course, such a move requires far more than the

support of a WPA.

Institutional conditions affecting graduate student labor are complex. We are

in the midst of a decade-long downsizing of higher education. In many institu-

tions tenure lines are not being filled, and tenure itself is under attack in some

states. Yet undergraduate enrollment figures are on the rise, and students must be

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taught. Graduate student admissions offer one way to meet these demands. Yet

most agreeespecially in the case of literary studiesthat there is a seriousoversupply of PhDs for the number of positions available. Brub calls on fac-

ulty in English to begin discouraging students from pursuing the PhD and for

graduate programs nationwide to voluntarily reduce their graduate programs.

For the graduate students who remain in the PhD, Brub calls for job condi-

tions far closer to postdoctoral positions, in which a salary and benefits are the

norm. Of course, one might ask who will be hired to replace the graduate stu-

dents who keep composition programs afloat. Part-time instructors?

Given these deeply disturbing trends, some composition scholars are calling

for the abolition of the universal writing requirement. The WPA could entertain

such an option, for many institutions would be happy to cut funding to the com-

position program. In her now-famous essay on the subject, A Personal Essay on

Freshman English, Sharon Crowley writes, I doubt whether it is possible to

radicalize instruction in a course that is so thoroughly implicated in the mainte-

nance of cultural and academic hierarchies (165). She argues for turning com-

position into an elective, which could rid programs of such problematic practices

as entrance exams and oversubscribed graduate programs. She, in turn, has been

supported by such scholars as Lil Brannon, David Jolliffe, and Charles I. Schus-

ter (Connors 59). In his history of the abolition debate, Connors notes that unlike

earlier periods in which abolition was seriously considered, the New Abolition-

ists are in positions to make their critique stick (61). However, his concern for

this radical proposal is one shared by Eileen Schellnamely, that the scholars in

rhetoric and composition who support the New Abolition will be bitterly op-

posed by the nontenure-track faculty who depend on composition for their liveli-

hood. Working people, says Connors, have vested interests even in jobs from

which they are alienated (The Abolition Debate 63). Given the obstacles to

abolition, Connors admits sympathy to this cause. Schell, who is interested in

improving the lives of adjunct faculty, is more skeptical. She worries that upper

administration could use the abolition of the composition requirement to dis-

mantle whatever gains part-time faculty have made (116). Dismantling the com-

position program would likely not end a need for part-time faculty, and it may

very well do away with the very person who could work to protect them: the

WPA.

* * *

It was the summer before my pretenure leave. My Chair was on the phone,

asking if I would attend a meeting of the Faculty Senate Curriculum Committee.

The Committee wanted to abolish the writing assessment test. Would I defend

it? Reluctantly putting my writing away as I had had to do in all the previous

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summers on the job, I moved into attack mode, firing off reports to the Commit-

tee in advance of my scheduled appearance. I wanted to use the opportunity toexpose the lack of support for writing in the university. When the day came for

my appearance, I found that I was supported by everyone around the tableex-

cept for the dean of my own academic college. I told them that I was all for

doing away with the assessment test, but in its place I wanted writing to be made

a universal requirement. The engineers and scientists around the table were

thrilled. The provost was not. There was no money to increase sections.

The dean of my academic college suggested to the Committee that the

writing program be dissolved and replaced by a writing-intensive program that

would spread the precious funds for GTAs then concentrated in my department

to other departments. There was no one at the table who could find fault with

this proposition. My dean suggested that there was widespread support for such

a plan in our college. From the results of a recent faculty vote, I knew that there

was not. I remember taking a deep breath, and saying to myself, You have two

choices. You can defer to your own dean and protect yourself. Or you can save

the writing program. I chose to save the writing program, which involved ex-

posing the deans misrepresentation of the will of my colleges faculty.

While my Chair was overjoyed that the writing program was spared, the

rumors of the deans displeasure with me began immediately. We received no

more sections. I could not support an unethical assessment test (though the

Committee voted to leave us alone). A sympathetic senior colleague proposed

that we turn the writing requirement into an elective, with the placement test

used only to give students some idea of their writing ability so that they might

choose whether or not to take a writing course. It worked. But I was left with

concerns over my relationship with the dean and the role our conflict might play

in my future bid for tenure.

* * *

Thus far I have drawn a picture of the context in which writing program ad-

ministrators find themselves today. There is much more to say, of course. There

are the stern debates in composition journals and in writing programs over the

nature of writing instruction. Sharon Crowley suggests that these debates largely

mask the fact that we are still relying on current-traditional, skills-based curric-

ula in our required writing courses (Around 1971). Anne Ruggles Gere argues

for reconsidering the genres we ask our students to engage in by looking outside

the university to the extracurriculum of writing. John Trimburs latest textbook

is based on genres of public writing and the role of civic discourse in the class-

room. The role of writing across the curriculum, the potential of computer-medi-

ated instruction, and the struggle to understand what politics we bring to our

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teaching are the day-to-day debates that rhetoric and composition faculty, gradu-

ate students, and adjunct faculty engage in. And these were the debates I mostreveled in while working with GTAs to build a dynamic writing program of

which we were all very proud. These were the academic debates that I was pre-

paredto engage in after my graduate training in rhetoric and composition.

But as the vignettes I have offered throughout this essay suggest, I was dis-

mayed by the institutional politics that are the province of the WPA. I had been

warned by my adviser not to take a WPA job without tenure. Knowing that I was

somewhat good with people and could handle the intellectual work of writing

program administration caused me to overestimate my ability. Indeed, one might

argue that institutions that hire assistant professors to lead their writing programs

have not studied the nature of a WPAs work. A classic middle manager, the

WPA must bear the criticism of those above and those below. Without tenure, it

is sometimes dangerous simply to do ones job. Far savvier than I, the authors in

this Symposium were better prepared for such work by working with the hier-

archies and politics of writing program administration while still in graduate

school. Therefore, in the last part of this essay, I discuss my own experience as a

graduate student assistant to the WPA at Ohio State University and then turn to

what the essays in this Symposium teach me about that experience.

Graduate Students in Writing Program Administration

It was a beautiful spring day in Ohio. The four of us who had been hired to

assist the writing program administrator were sitting in a tiny office, knee-

to-knee, working on the curriculum. It was our job to map out the assignments

that the new GTAs would use in the fall semester to teach English 110. In the of-

fice with me were Eric Walborn, Sue Lape, and Kris Ratcliffe, three wonderful

teachers and students of composition. Over Erics desk was a sign that read,

Teaching is Performance. Our curriculum didnt differ much from the curricu-

lum the year before, but I remember the excitement of working through sugges-

tions made by GTAs at the end of their semester-long training course and talking

about how to improve each unit.

We were lucky to be chosen to work on Frank OHares team of administra-

tive assistants, graduate students who were paid to watch over the teaching of

their peers and to provide input into both the curriculum of the composition

course and the teacher-training course that was required of all new GTAs. We

had the opportunity to learn how to handle conflicts between GTAs and their un-

dergraduate students, to motivate and support new teachers, and to think about

teaching from a programmatic vantage point. In addition, we wrote prompts and

read placement exams for the program. This administrative experience led me to

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several others, including a year with the Center for Teaching Excellence, where I

worked on research on college teaching, led workshops for faculty on activelearning, and wrote book chapters on teaching for the university. It was wonder-

ful training for the intellectual work of directing a writing program.

But it had not prepared me for the political realities of being the WPA.

Frank trusted us to represent the program when dealing with other administra-

tors, faculty, and staff and shared with us difficulties with upper administration,

such as the constant pressure to increase class size. But he took care of the poli-

tics. Frank dealt with these difficulties with the force that came from his position

as a full professor, a lesson that was not lost on us. He was not always popular,

and it bothered him. But, I reasoned to myself when signing the contract for my

first job, Frank was head of the writing program at one of the larger universities

in the country. His job was more difficult. My job would be far smallera mi-

cro-WPA job compared to his. I could use the force of my personality and my

intellectual knowledge to navigate this difficultbut seemingly more manage-

ableterrain. But I was naive.

The dominant theme in the essays in this Symposiumincluding my own

is that graduate students need sustained opportunities to reflect upon the na-

ture of power and authority in higher education. The informality that pervades

many graduate programs, where tenured and tenure-track faculty regularly share

responsibilities with graduate students in a kind of apprenticeship model, all the

while protecting them from the more difficult politics of the institution, has be-

gun to strike me as an inadequate form of professional training. What we need,

as Margaret Willard-Traub argues, is to begin to help graduate students under-

stand the way that institutional politics are woven into the very fabric of intel-

lectual work in the field of Composition. However, the unfortunate fact, as Ste-

phen Jukuri illustrates, is that informal apprenticeship models most often expose

graduate student WPAs to the internal politics within composition programs. For

instance, in his essay Jukuri illustrates the way that teachers protect their class-

rooms and pedagogies as private spaces, under their own control and separate

from what others do when faced with the prospect of participating in portfolio

assessment. Such is the case in Suellynn Duffey, Ben Feigert, Vic Mortimer,

Jennifer Phegley, and Melinda Turnleys essay, which explores the difficulties

that attended the development of a peer group facilitator initiative within a

large writing program. The essay develops the problems with the range and

limits of a peer-group facilitators authority and how the peer group facilitators

who authored the piece at first misunderstood their role. While valuable as train-

ing in the give-and-take world of directing writing teachers in their work, it is

clear by the end of these essays that the authors wanted more answers from the

field about the nature of negotiating power and authority in higher education as a

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whole. It is not enough, as Duffey et al. suggest, to simply posit bureaucracy as

an obstacle to free intellectual thought and to institutional reform, when bu-reaucracy is simultaneously the only available agent of institutional change.

Like nested dolls, WPA bureaucracies reflect larger institutional politics: I was

forced to change the anchors on a writing assessment test because my first insti-

tution would not allow me to open more sections of composition to students who

needed it. These kinds of pressures were shocking to me, but they should not

have been unexpected.

Christopher Diller and Scott Oates have the most direct experience with the

larger politics surrounding writing programs. In the writing-in-the-disciplines

program in which they worked, writing instructors had been paired with faculty

in other disciplines. When conflicts arose between the faculty and writing in-

structors over writing assignments, Diller and Oates were involved with develop-

ing a stand-alone writing-in-the-disciplines course that replaced this program.

Through their experience Diller and Oates learned that one of the fundamental

problems with the position of writing instruction in the university is what other

faculty and administrators expect from such instruction. Teaching disciplinary

rhetoric, that is, rhetoric and composition as a content specialization, was the

goal of the GTAs involved in a new University of Utah writing-in-the-disciplines

program, while the faculty in other fields involved in the program understood

writing instruction to be essentially remedial, grounded upon formalist, me-

chanical and transferable criteria for grammar, genre, and content retrieval. So

while the problems that Diller and Oates encountered were, from their point of

view, much about the asymmetrical power relationships involved, they discov-

ered that their larger problem was ignorance over how writing instruction is

understood outside their university writing program. Diller and Oates write,

Our own theoretical training in rhetoric and composition had left us largely

unprepared for [this experience]: we found that the sophisticated arguments we

had purchased in our graduate study held explanatory power within the confines

of the UWP and were not immediately transferable to other institutional con-

texts. They call for efforts in the field to prepare graduate students to move

from graduate study to post-graduate professionalism, through research, theo-

retical study, and opportunities like the one they had.

In her essay Margaret Willard-Traub seeks to make sense of the problems

inherent in the political tug-of-war that graduate students find themselves in

when they participate in writing program administration and when they find

themselves involved in WPA work after graduation. Traub argues that authority

is often constructed as an all-or-nothing category within the institution, leav-

ing us prone to believe that if we only had more authority, certain problems

would be resolved. However, the institution itself shapes not only the growth of

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scholars and deans but also graduate students and adjunct instructors; therefore,

the politics of subjectivity is complex, and authority does not improve this com-plexity. The temptation is to focus on the actions of a particular dean or tenured

faculty member, all the while forgetting the symbiosis between those administra-

tors and oneself. Traubs call for a Foucauldian understanding of institutional

politics in writing program administration provides a fitting close to this Sympo-

sium, for what graduate students need, finally, to become prepared for postgrad-

uate WPA experiences is an understanding that their actions and beliefs are

imbricated in the overall intellectual and political trajectory of higher education

at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

* * *

I want to close this essay by remembering Eric Walborn, a man who as a

graduate student assistant to the WPA taught me much about teaching and ad-

ministration. Rebellion has often been the substance binding my emotional life

to the world, but for Eric Walborn, it was service. I fought becoming a middle

manager, but for Eric it was a calling. After graduation he stayed on as an aca-

demic professional, running the computers in the composition program. Quietly

and in countless ways, Eric served administrators, teachers, and students at Ohio

State, and he was untroubled by the politics that caused me to lose sleep and

rage up and down the halls. Eric took the long view. His grace and good humor

are a loss for the Writing Program at Ohio State, but also for those of us who

benefited from his example when we were graduate students doing WPA work.

He died of complications from AIDS in 1992, just a year after I graduated and

long before I had a chance to thank him. I am thanking him now.

My first Conference on College Composition and Communication was in

New Orleans in 1986, a year after I had begun to work with Eric as a graduate

student WPA. I remember clearly that Kris Ratcliffe, Eric, and seven others piled

into one room to save money. I remember drinking on Bourbon Street and talk-

ing with him and others late into the night about who we would be someday and

how we would run a writing program. I was still learning the answers to those

questions, but Eric had already arrived. He was passionate about teaching writ-

ing, and his passion rubbed off on me. Whatever he knew of the politics of WPA

work he kept to himself, but his commitment to serving teachers and students

while deftly interacting with administrators is his legacy. In 1996 I joined the

Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English Program at the University

of Arizona, a graduate program that has begun offering a course in writing pro-

gram administration. It is the kind of course that Eric would have taught well,

and I wish that he had lived to do it. In invoking Erics name, I am not merely

seeking a sentimental ending to this essay (although invoking the dead is admit-

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tedly a sentimental thing to do). Rather, I want to underscore the fact that gradu-

ate students have much to teach us about the nature of WPA work.Therefore, I invite the readers to learn from the graduate students (some

now professors themselves) and academic professionals who in the pages that

follow have written about their experiences negotiating the power and authority

questions that surround writing program administration. Their reflections join a

conversation about the nature of the professionalization of the WPA, a conversa-

tion that has begun at PhD programs nationwide and is being led by the Council

of Writing Program Administrators.3 It is a difficult moment to be in writing

program administration, as I have illustrated throughout this essay; more than

one rhetoric and composition scholar has urged us to abandon the job. However,

the authors in this Symposium illustrate reasons why these difficulties should

motivate us to study the politics of WPA work and better prepare current gradu-

ate students to engage it, graduate students whose good thinking about writing

instruction and teacher training should not be disabled by unexpected post-

graduation recognition of the institutional practices that surround and are part of

our work.

Notes

1Not his real name.2The four major approaches outlined by Schell are (1) the conversionist model (the Wyoming

Resolution), (2) the reformist solution (converting part-time adjunct positions into full-time non-

tenure line instructorships), (3) the unionist/collectivist solution (collective bargaining), and (4) the

abolitionist solution (abolishing and/or restructuring the first-year writing requirement) (91117).3Adopted in 1992, the Councils Portland Resolution offers important guidelines on the train-

ing and institutional support of WPAs (Hult, Jolliffe, Kelly, Mead, and Schuster). Interesting in the

context of this essay is the inclusion of business administration on the list of skills needed by the

WPA.

Works Cited

Brub, Michael. The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies. New

York: New York UP, 1998.

Connors, Robert J. The Abolition Debate in Composition: A Short History. Composition in the

Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward

M. White. Carbondale: U of Southern Illinois P, 1996: 4763.

. Overpay/Underwork: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers since 1880. Rhetoric Re-

view 9 (Fall 1990): 10825.

Crowley, Sharon. Around 1971: Current-Traditional Rhetoric and Process Models of Composing.

Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A.Daiker, and Edward M. White. Carbondale: U of Southern Illinois P, 1996: 6474.

. A Personal Essay on Freshman Composition. PRETEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory

12 (Fall/Winter 1991): 15576.

52 Rhetoric Review

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Enos, Theresa. Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern

Illinois UP, 1996.Gere, Anne Ruggles. Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition.

College Composition and Communication 45 (Feb. 1994): 7592.

Hult, Christine, David Jolliffe, Kathleen Kelly, Dana Mead, and Charles Schuster. The Portland

Resolution: Guidelines for Writing Program Administrator Positions. Writing Program Admin-

istration 16.1/2 (Fall/Winter 1992): 8894.

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. Re: doin more than thinkin bout quittin. Online posting. 3 Mar. 2000.

Council of Writing Program Administrators Discussion List. 4 Mar. 2000.

Schell, Eileen E. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing

Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1997.

Trimbur, John. The Call to Write. New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1998.

Roxanne Mountford is an assistant professor in the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of

English Program at the University of Arizona where she teaches courses in research methodology,

the history of rhetoric, cultural studies and composition, rhetorical analysis, and writing. She haspublished numerous articles in such journals as Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and

JAC, as well as chapters in scholarly books. Her book Sacred Geography: Gender, Preaching, and

the Nature of Rhetorical Space is forthcoming from the Rhetorics and Feminisms Series of Southern

Illinois University Press.

Christopher Diller

Berry College

Scott F. Oates

University of WisconsinEau Claire

Infusing Disciplinary Rhetoric into Liberal Education:

A Cautionary Tale

In their national survey of graduate students in rhetoric and composition,

Miller et al. (1997) explore the tension between the present tense of studentsex-

periences in their graduate programs and the likely future tense realities of their

postgraduate professional lives. They report that although graduate students ex-

pressed tremendous satisfaction with their programs and faculty, they simulta-

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neously displayed deep concerns regarding development issues, job market dif-

ficulties, or the transition from graduate school into the professoriate (397).Likewise, we cast our contribution to this Symposium in terms of the present

tense/future tense: a cautionary tale about training graduate students for the pro-

fessoriate, based uponour assignment to design writingcurriculum and offer writ-

ing instruction in entry level liberal education classes at the University of Utah.

In the spring of 1994, the director of the University Writing Program

(UWP) approached several graduate teaching assistants with a proposal that we

viewed as a supreme opportunity to diversify our professional training: to col-

laborate with liberal education faculty in a pilot project called the Liberal Educa-

tion Accelerated Program (LEAP). This program would infuse the Universitys

required four quarter hours of first-year writing instruction into freshman liberal

education classes so that students could fulfill their writing and liberal education

requirements concurrently within an interdisciplinary and streamlined structure.

After several meetings with key liberal education faculty members, UWP faculty

and instructors decided to deliver the four hours of writing instruction across a

three-quarter, fifteen-hour core liberal education class that focused upon

American autobiography in the fall, Eastern philosophy in the winter, and the

rise of science in the spring. This interdisciplinary seminar was designed to pro-

vide LEAP students with a single teacher and stable peer group for their first

year of university studies; moreover, LEAP students enrolled in affiliated lower-

level courses in such areas as history, economics, philosophy, and ecology to

forge curricular links between LEAP and the disciplines.

As writing instructors and graduate students of rhetoric, we approached our

new assignment with excitement and professional ambition. We believed that we

were ideally positioned to guide and teach students as novices in academic dis-

course, as well as to further our training by designing reading and writing as-

signments with other university faculty. Contrary to our expectations, however,

infusing rhetorically driven writing instruction into this structure proved more

difficult than we imagined: While our graduate training had focused on disci-

plinary discourse practices, many of the LEAP classes, we subsequently found,

were predisciplinary in both theory and practice. Our present-tense training as

graduate students, therefore, did not immediately complement the ways in which

reading and writing were perceived and employed in the liberal education class-

esclasses we now believe to be highly representative of the discourse practices

expected of most entry-level university students.

In the following pages, we use our experience as writing teachers in

LEAP to speak to some of the issues and opportunities graduate students of

composition and rhetoric may find in their present and future professional

lives. Most broadly, we tell our cautionary tale in terms of an institutionalized

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struggle for authority between graduate student teachers of writing and tenured

faculty who assign writing in their courses but do not necessarily value orteach it as an autonomous subject. As Duffey et al. note about our caution-

ary title, one aspect of our tale is that we do not necessarily offer examples of

teaching experiences or institutional structures for emulation by other graduate

programs. But this is not to say that we are cautious about collaborations with

faculty across the curriculum that are designed to develop new ways of teach-

ing writing and training graduate students. Rather, we believe that our story il-

luminates, as Jukuri notes, that the impulse toward privatization in teach-

ingan impulse we explain as a strategy for dealing with institutional power

differencescannot be contested on a theoretical or curricular level alone. But

before we offer anymore of our understanding of our experience in the context

of this Symposium, we need to provide a brief description of how the LEAP

program changed over a three-year period.

The Design and Structure of LEAP, 19941997

Our role as UWP instructors in the first year of LEAPs existence (199495)

was to design and present writing assignments for the core liberal education

classes. In the core class, writing instructors directed students to write about the

core class readings; guided students through drafting, revising, and editing

workshops; and occasionally gave demonstrations on rhetorical issues and ele-

ments in writing for academic audiences (e.g., audience analysis, patterns of pre-

sentation, types and uses of evidence, research and documentation, thesis/topic

sentences, logical coherence, diction, etc.). We also met weekly with the core

teachers to discuss, design, and revise writing assignments as the course pro-

gressed. All grading was handled by the core teachersa feature that at first as-

sured us that we were not merely graders for the core teachers but subse-

quently became emblematic of our adjunct status, our inability to control the

meaning of first-year writing in LEAP, and our doubts as to whether the Uni-

versitys composition requirement was being adequately fulfilled in LEAP.

As Table 1 illustrates, over three years UWP writing instruction was gradu-

ally divested from the core class. During 199495 the UWP instructors delivered

writing instruction within the core classes all three quarters. However, by the

next academic year, writing instructors had come to believe that we were unable

to deliver rhetorically motivated writing instruction solely in the context of the

core class. We therefore lobbied successfully for a two-hour stand-alone writ-

ing class in which to introduce and teach a rhetorical framework for reading and

writing to LEAP students. After the stand-alone class was completed in the fall

quarter, writing instructors then resumed their roles in the core class over the re-

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maining two quarters where LEAP students earned the final two hours of their

four-credit requirement. By 199697 the attempt to infuse UWP instruction into

liberal education courses had come full circle: As Table 1 again illustrates, writ-

ing teachers had lobbied for and secured an independent four-credit writingcourse and thus no longer taught in the core classes or directly assisted core pro-

fessors with their writing assignments. Instead, collaboration was limited to in-

formal discussions with the core faculty and the activities of a miniwriting cen-

ter in which writing instructors provided supplementary instruction for LEAP

students throughout the academic year.

Different Curricular Aims

While the ratio of liberal education to composition credit remained the

same (fifteen hours to four hours) throughout the three years of collaboration,

then, the structure for delivering writing instruction changed dramatically over

time because of the tensions writing and core teachers experienced teaching to-

gether. These tensions centered around the different assumptions and

pedagogies of reading and writing that UWP and liberal education faculty

brought to the class. More specifically, core instructors brought a formalist and

content-driven philosophy to the class, usually asking students to abstract a

theme or motif from a core text (e.g., The Autobiography of Benjamin Frank-

lin) and to trace its development. Later core assignments directed students to

write about thematic links between multiple texts and to discuss these links in

terms of LEAPs umbrella theme: rights and responsibilities. In contrast, UWP

56 Rhetoric Review

Table 1: Three Years of Collaborative Relations between the Core Class and the UWP

Fall Winter Spring

199495 Core class:

Autobiography &

Core Class: Asian

Cultures &

Core Class: Rise of

Science &

15 credit hours

UWP Instruction UWP Instruction UWP Instruction 4 credit hours

199596 Core class: US

Autobiography

Core Class: Asian

Cultures &

Core Class: Rise of

Science &

15 credit hours

UWP Instruction UWP Instruction 2 credit hours

UWP Stand-alone 2 credit hours

199697 Core Class: US

Autobiography

Core Class: Asian

Cultures

Core Class: Rise of

Science

15 credit hours

UWP Instruction:

Academic

Discourse

4 credit hours

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writing instructors viewed the core class texts in light of their present-tense

training in a writing program that espoused a writing-in-the-disciplines (WID)philosophy. According to Chris Anson, WID is a strand of writing across the

curriculum (WAC) and aims to help novice writers to acquire the disci-

pline-specific skills necessary to produce writing acceptable to members of a

specific discourse community such as the field of history, economics, or me-

chanical engineering (773). Writing instructors, therefore, viewed the core

class texts as examples of discoursethat is, as instances of writers drawing

upon deep cultural assumptions to craft strategic self-images to effect intended

(and perhaps unintended) effects for particular audiences within specific

contexts.

Given these two different (not to say irreconcilable) views, we struggled

as writing teachers to integrate our views of writing into the core class. As we

began to realize the implications of these different pedagogies, our first re-

sponse was to design writing assignments that were explicitly rhetorical. We

developed a rhetorical analysis assignment, for example, that asked students to

analyze the prefaces from different English language editions of the I Ching.

The assignment directed students to consider how the packaging and presenta-

tion of the I Ching for Western eyes varied according to the historical and

cultural context of the preface: the nineteenth century, the early twentieth cen-

tury, the 1960s, and a preface that was quite contemporary and new-age.

The core teachers, though, viewed the I Ching as representative of the perdur-

ing traits of Chinese culture to be explored during that quarter. After our pre-

sentation, the I Ching prefaces and the rhetorical analysis assignment itself

were quickly reinterpreted by the core teachers as reading and writing exer-

cises that could reveal latent aspects of the Chinese mind that they wanted to

highlight. As writing instructors, we had crafted the I Ching analysis assign-

ment to show students that knowledge and discourse are always situated, but

the core teachers effectively sidestepped this goal as they developed the class

in accordance with their own assumptions and pedagogies.

Tensions therefore snowballed during the first two years of LEAP as writing

instructors, struggling to achieve the aims of the UWP, continued to craft assign-

ments for ways of reading and writing that simply did not exist in the core

classes. For their part, core teachers and LEAP students gradually perceived

writing teachers as being guilty of overcomplicating tasks and for failing to ac-

cept fully the LEAP mission. Indeed, signs of a potential disjuncture between

the LEAP and UWP programs were seen as early as the summer colloquia in

which university faculty met to discuss the goals of the LEAP program and to

become familiar with their respective courses through presentations about course

content and assignments. Early on, everyone agreed that a central concern of

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21/49

A Cautionary Tale

For UWP writing instructors, this all felt like a personal and professional

failure to fulfill the standards of the UWP and to confirm emergent professional

identities. After all, we had been selected for this assignment precisely because

of our experience, leadership, and advanced training in rhetoric and composi-

tion.1 Nevertheless, what we believed to be substantial credentialsnot to men-

tion the vote of confidence from our mentors and advisors in the UWPgave us

only enough leverage to return to where we started: our own classrooms. Even

with the return to an autonomous four-hour composition class, however, we still

felt mismatched with our assignment becausesymbolically, yet quite practi-cally and powerfullywe had been incorporated within the institutional um-

brella of LEAP and its liberal education mission. In this felt disjuncture, our ex-

periences confirm Jukuris contention that academic communities are grounded

in the architecture and structure of a program and that faculty subjectivities

may not be as malleable as some postmodern theory suggests.

We therefore view our experiences in LEAPboth in and outside of the

core classroomas a cautionary tale for using WAC as a means for teaching

disciplinary rhetoric. Our point of caution, however, is not simply that WAC

models sometimes leave writing instructors and, especially, graduate studentsvulnerable to faculty resistance. Rather, our experience suggests that a rigorous

rhetorical approach to writing may simply be incommensurable with the

predisciplinary reading and writing practices assigned to many first-year

students. In retrospect we now understand that LEAP was largely a pre-

disciplinary pedagogical space in which our view of rhetoric and writing

would be perceived, at best, as anomalous. Instead of focusing on the dis-

course conventions that characterize writing in the upper reaches of the aca-

demic disciplines, for instance, we might have moved more quickly to tailor

our writing assignments to the expository modes and genres of general educa-tion that first-year students are typically expected to utilize and produce. In

other words, we might have used writing to design writing andreading assign-

ments or prompts that fostered critical thinking and active learning if not the

self-consciously rhetorical view espoused by the UWP (see Bean). Such a re-

vised view of first-year writing does not necessarily entail a capitulation to a

pedagogy of models and formalism; instead, it involves carefully modeling for

students and faculty how the literacy practices of entry-level classes are the

products of typified and recurrent social action (Miller, 1984; Berkenkotter and

Huckin, 1995).

Our advanced training in composition and rhetoric had left us largely un-

prepared for our LEAP experience: We found that the sophisticated arguments

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we had purchased in our graduate study held explanatory power within the

confines of the UWP and were not readily transferable to other institutional lo-cations. We nevertheless consider ourselves fortunate to have grappled with

what writing means beyond the aegis of those who already subscribe to the

view of writing as discourse. Far from suggesting that writing professionals

should retreat into privatized professional or pedagogical spaces, we believe

our experiences in LEAP illustrate the value of exposing graduate students

(through teaching assignments or internships) to how writing is viewed, taught,

and administered outside of the comfortable environs of writing programs.

Such training not only would provide graduate students with the opportunity to

experience the power (and perhaps limitations) of rhetoric in new locales, it

would also prepare them for the types of courses and faculty views they will

likely encounter in their postgraduate school lives. In our view, then, graduate

students and their mentors should assess such opportunities equally in terms of

how well graduate students fulfill their assignment and, conversely, the assign-

ments costs and benefits as a form of preprofessional training. In this way ex-

periences like LEAP would provide graduate students with extracurricular

fieldwork that can ease their transition from graduate study to postgraduate

professionalism, even as faculty, administrators, and graduate students them-

selves must further envision how rhetoric and writing can be taught across the

university.

Note

1The graduate student instructors chosen by the UWP faculty included two students who had

worked at community colleges as directors of writing and several former UWP teaching counselors.

In addition, UWP instructors had done research and presented papers at such venues as CCCC, RSA,

MLA, and EDE.

Works Cited

Anson, Chris. Writing across the Curriculum. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Com-

munication from Ancient Times to the Information Age. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Garland,

1996. 77374.

Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professors Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and

Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas N. Huckin. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication:

Cognition/Culture/Power. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995.

Miller, Carolyn. Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 15167.Miller, Scott L., Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Blennis Blue, and Deneen M. Shepherd. Present Perfect

and Future Imperfect: Results of a National Survey of Graduate Students in Rhetoric and Com-

position Programs. College Composition and Communication 48.3 (1997): 392409.

60 Rhetoric Review

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Christopher Diller was a PhD student in the American studies program at the University of

Utah from 19911999. He now works as an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Berry Col-

lege in Rome, Georgia. His teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century American lit-

erature, the history of rhetoric, analytical approaches to composition, and WAC.

Scott F. Oates was a PhD student in Educational Studies at the University of Utah from 1992

1998. He now works as an assistant professor of English at the University of WisconsinEau Claire

where he directs the departments undergraduate program. His teaching and research interests focus

on how students learn and negotiate new literacy practices.

Margaret K. Willard-Traub

Oakland University

Professionalization and the Politics of Subjectivity

Lester Faigley sums up one of the main arguments that runs through his

bookFragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition,

observing that many of the fault lines in composition studies are disagree-

ments over the subjectivities that teachers of writing want students to occupy

(17). The essays in this Symposiumoriginating within widely different con-

texts illustrate in compelling ways how many of the political fault lines,

along which graduate students and faculty who run writing programs (as well

as those who work in writing centers) find themselves precariously situated,

stem from conflicting notions of the subjectivities that central administrators,

department heads, content faculty, and even graduate student teachers them-

selves, want writing teachers to occupy, or not to occupy. Such desire, espe-

cially when it is accompanied by institutional power not possessed by those

teaching, assessing, and doing research on the (social) practice of academic

writing, can lead to losses for writing programs and the individuals who work

within them. But graduate students and faculty in rhetoric and composition

also can gain valuable insights from analyzing such desire, insights that can

help lead them to collaborate with diverse segments on college and university

campuses, and to shape the dialogue that surrounds the teaching of writing in

higher education across the country.

My own experience with program administration, while in some ways very

different from that of the other contributors to this Symposium, highlights many

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of the same concerns with authority, collaboration, and identity discussed by

these other authors. While I now hold a position as Assistant Professor at Oak-land University in Rochester, Michigan, the three years I taught as part of the

University of Michigans English Composition Board and worked with faculty

from ECB (and from the Institute for Social Research) on developing and evalu-

ating Michigans large-scale entrance writing assessment were crucial for me as

I developed an understanding of the ways in which intellectual work in our field

is bound up with institutional politicsand an understanding of how essential

that knowledge is to the professionalization of graduate students generally.

In my time at ECB, I was a member of two very differently constituted

working groups, one in which I was the only graduate student among nontenured

faculty performing research that was both formative and summative for the as-

sessment project, a group also engaged in negotiating with administrators for re-

search funding; and a group in which I led several other graduate student-teach-

ers (and a fewer number of faculty) in a series of meetings that had as its

primary purpose the development of criteria that we subsequently employed dur-

ing our annual summertime reading of several thousand (more than 4,500) port-

folios of high school writing submitted by entering undergraduate students. The

faculty in the first group included the then director of the ECB and several other

long-time faculty holding nontenured positions in the unit (all of whom have

since moved on to positions at other institutions); the second group consisted of

two of these same faculty, along with advanced literature graduate students who

had several years experience teaching a wide variety of courses in the univer-

sitys writing program.

For the purposes of this essay, I will focus primarily on the former context

and on the relationship that developed between the group of untenured faculty

(and me) and tenured faculty-administrators, as we negotiated for funding of the

research phase in which the group of graduate students was engaged. The pri-

mary purpose of both groups was to formulate both the language of our as-

sessment criteria and the role that criteria played in guiding portfolio readers

placement decisions. We aimed for a language and a form that were not only in-

tellectually rigorous but also practically useful for a large group of readers with

varied levels of teaching experience. Though developing criteria for the place-

ment assessment was our primary focus, also of concern for us in these dis-

cussions were the ways in which assessment might drive curricular reform of the

first-year writing program; how the assessment and the three-day portfolio

reader training scheduled each spring might constitute experiences in teacher ed-

ucation, especially for graduate students trained primarily in literary studies; as

well as how the assessment might constitute a learning experience for under-

graduates, one that might provide them with detailed feedback about their writ-

62 Rhetoric Review

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ing, and about how that writing compared to the expectations of the discourse

communities they were about to enter at the university.These collaborative, professional experiences not only gave me, early on in

my professionalization, first-hand knowledge of the myriad ways in which insti-

tutional politics are a part of the development and execution of any major curric-

ular project; they also illustrated the unique ways in which institutional politics

are woven into the very fabric of intellectual work in Composition Studies, espe-

cially with regard to how what might be called a politics of subjectivity is en-

acted within the context of such intellectual work.

I would suggest that such a politics can function to diminish not only the

primary subject of our intellectual workthat is, the teaching of writingbut

functions as well to reduce the complexity of the subjectivities of teachers and

students of writing. Such a politics is illustrated by Dillers and Oatess experi-

ences in teaching writing within the context of a Liberal Education core course

headed by general education faculty, for example. And such a politics is strik-

ingly revealed in the context of the negotiations for the research funding that I

describe below, negotiations pursued via verbal and written exchanges between

tenured, English department faculty-administrators, on the one hand, and the

untenured writing program administrators of whose group I was the only gradu-

ate student member, on the other. Though I think the particular example I sketch

out here vividly illustrates how such a politics of subjectivity might manifest it-

self and suggests as well some of the frustrating implications of such a politics,

it is important to say that this is not the only example from my time working at

ECB that I might have examined. Taken together, other momentsoccurring

while we (ECB faculty and I) recruited graduate students from the department of

English to participate in the assessment research; while we shaped portfolio

reader training in ways that tried to maintain the integrity of the assessment pro-

cess during a (politically) complex period during which the English Composi-

tion Board was consolidated with the English department; and while we collab-

orated on writing a scholarly article examining the evolution of the assessment

projectalso illustrate how central administrators, tenured faculty, graduate stu-

dents and untenured faculty all may at times participate consciously or uncon-

sciously in a politics that impacts the intellectual work of teaching, of curricular

development, and of administering writing programs.

Perhaps in the past, I myself may have been complicit in such a politics, as

it operates beyond writing programs and writing centers, in the dispositionper-

haps especially prevalent at large, research institutions like the one in which I

was trainedto view teaching (and teachers) reductively. It is in institutional

spaces where the research and teaching of writing occurs that the sting of this

disposition perhaps is felt particularly acutely.

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But while acknowledging the possibility of a shared complicity, I would ar-

gue at the same time, as Lisa Delpit has done in another context, that it is thosewith the most power . . . who must take the (most) responsibility for such insti-

tutional politics (46). And among the varied individuals with whom I interacted

in the contexts I describe here, those with the most power were tenured faculty

and faculty-administrators.

However frustrating the politics involved in each of these moments were,

these occasions nevertheless comprised extremely valuable (and unusual) oppor-

tunities to enrich my own professionalization and to consider the ways in which

intellectual work, especially in our field, is political work. I believe that these ex-

periences, like the experiences described by others in this Symposium, not only

made my own transition from graduate student to faculty member a more in-

formed and satisfying one, they also led me to think more systematically about

how in general graduate students are educated and about the variety and kinds of

experiences we all need in the course of our professionalization. For I would

suggest that experiences such as mine are in fact an often unacknowledged or

invisible part of all graduate students careers, even when those careers do not

involve administrative work. And I would suggest that such experiences, ap-

proached with a certain intentionality and reflectiveness, are capable of yielding

importanteven crucialprofessional and intellectual insights for those whose

careers will extend well into the twenty-first century.

The particular moment I want to examine a bit more closely came in the

midst of negotiations with tenured faculty-administrators in the English depart-

ment over the terms of the second major phase of ECBs research on the portfo-

lio assessment. What was most striking in the communications to which I was

privy and that were sent by these tenured department representatives, was how

categories of players with an interest in the writing program were not only

identified; these categories were invoked along a hierarchy that seemed to run in-

versely to the experience and expertise in the teaching and assessing of writing

possessed on average by individuals within them. In a sense, the result of this

rhetorical inversion was the enhancement of the professional subjectivities (indi-

vidually and collectively) of tenured faculty who rarely taught writing courses

and the diminishment of the professional subjectivities of untenured faculty and

graduate students who did the lions share of the teaching within the undergradu-

ate writing program.

Over and over again in these communications, tenured faculty were invoked

by other tenured faculty as the most importantparticipants in any definition of

standards for the colleges writing program, at the same time that it was ac-

knowledged that these faculty probably would be unpersuadable when it came

to devoting the kind of time necessary for defining such standards. One fac-

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ulty-administrators e-mail messages to the ECB assessment research group ar-

ticulated well this dilemma:

I am also very uneasy because a project involving a small number of

teachers from 124/125 (who, one assumes, would be mostly GSTAs,

the group invited to participate) would not lead to a definition of

standards for the department or for the college. . . . I am very much

concerned that faculty be involved in this process. It is, I believe, im-

portant that faculty from more than one unit work collaboratively to

define our priorities. . . . Im perfectly happy that ECB has people

with the energy and enthusiasm to promote this goal. My sense is

that ECB needs to remember that faculty in other units have a stake

in this. . . .

This faculty-administrators concerns were valid ones, of course, especially

her sense that tenured facultyparticularly in the English department (her home

department)would have a stake in how standards for assessing student writ-

ing were developed, for it was to the English department as well as to ECB that

other Michigan faculty looked as they judged their students writing abilities.

But for tenured faculty in English, the stake expressed in the context of commu-

nications sent to this group of nontenured teacher-researchers and me often

seemed to be of a more political than an intellectual or scholarly one. As this ad-

ministrator herself pointed out in a subsequent e-mail, the same faculty whom

she said must be involved may well be unpersuadable (with regard to participat-

ing in the research) given the number of hours (involved) and the strangeness of

the study model to (English) faculty.

Tenured faculty who very infrequently taught undergraduate writing courses

and who seemed to have little time for, and often little scholarly or intellectual in-

vestment in, the painstaking work of defining standards thus were represented by

administrators in communications like this one as having a substantial stake in

the outcome of the research program being proposed, but that stake was never spec-

ified. Was it, for instance, more of a stake than graduate student teachers had? A

different kind of stake? The answers to questions such as these were in fact com-

plex, but in the absence of explicit elaboration and within an institutional economy

where status was equated with intellectual and professional expertise, I would ar-

gue that what resulted from such a politics of subjectivity was the implication that

tenured faculty who infrequently (if ever) taught writing courses and who neveras-

sessed entrance portfolios simply knew more about how to define standards for

first-year writing within the college than did the individuals who actually were

teaching writing courses and assessing portfolios on a regular basis.

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This implicit message, which at Michigan was strengthened by the image of

tenured faculty as, for a variety of reasons, aloof and unpersuadable, itself hadmultiple implications. These included the fact that such a politics posited teach-

ing, and the teaching of writing, as lesser intellectual activities that were most

knowledgeably guided by those who did not regularly engage in them. Such a

politics also constituted a loss for graduate student teachers, especially for those

with much experience in composition, since it functioned at least rhetorically to

deny them professional authority (or at least functioned to diminish that author-

ity) at the very same time these teachers were given the greatest responsibility

by the college for the teaching of writing.

Such a simultaneous denial and investment of authority can produce cognitive

dissonance in writing programs, broadly, and in the individuals who inhabit them,

specifically. The participants in thisSymposiumdescribe various manifestations of

such dissonance, for example, as they explore the complicated effects of occupying

subject positions as both administrators and students. Duffey and her colleagues

describe the various fears that are part of their experience of the weird genre

of peer groups, a context within which they might exert too much authorityor

too little; as well as their experience of the various and changing expectations held

by the new TAs with whom they have worked. Similarly, Jukuri represents his con-

flicted experience as Assistant Director of GTA Education, in the context of which

his graduate student colleagues project onto him dual subjectivities, seeing him ei-

ther as an outsider/enforcer in their classrooms or as someone natural(ly)

capable of resolv(ing) and orchestrat(ing) solutions to their differences. And

Diller and Oates, in their representation contained within an earlier draft of the

tug-of-war between graduate-student teachers and core faculty, illustrate how

both sides may have attempted to invest their own position with authority while

divestingof authority the other, as writing teachers resorted to the frustrated belief

that their pedagogy was rhetorical while the core teachershumanistic approach . . .

was a-rhetorical, and as core teachers and LEAP students in turn perceived . . .

writing instructors as overcomplicating tasks.

All of these pieces raise compelling questions about the degree to which

authority is constructed as an all or nothing category within the institution;

about the advisability of assuming that graduate students anxieties about author-

ity are either entirely unique, or entirely natural or inevitable; about the ways in

which the culture of the institution and the process of professionalization them-

selves might be implicated in the prevalence of such fears and anxieties; and

about how this culture and this process might be implicated in the normalization

of a politics of subjectivity that questions the authority of teachers of writing and

that also makes difficult collaborative efforts between teachers with different

amounts of institutional power.

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Returning to my own experience helping to develop a large-scale portfolio

placement assessment, I observed how such a politics could function to de-professionalize (implicitly and explicitly) those who teach the majority of

first-year writing courses at Michigan, at a point in their careers when a sense

of professionalization was crucial. At the same time, I also observed how such

a politics failed to be accountable to traditional notions of validity and reliabil-

ity in writing assessment. Because teaching and assessing are interdependent

intellectual activities, in order to argue that what is being assessed is what is

pointed to as being assessed (validity) and in order to approach a level of fair-

ness or consistency in that assessment (reliability), those primarily doing the

teaching must be invested with the primary (professional) authority to define

standards for assessment. Indeed, Edward White has argued that a professional

is one who knows how to make significant distinctions, one who can rate per-

formance, one who can assess (31). An institutional politics that gives gradu-

ate students the primary responsibility for the teaching of writing but that at

the same time would invest faculty who rarely teach writing with the primary

authority to set standards for assessment denies the professionalism of teachers

of writing at the same time that it fails to maintain the integrity of (any kind

of) assessment.

Fortunately, at Michigan our negotiations yielded a solution: ECB con-

vened focus groups with tenured faculty from the English department to aug-

ment the research group meetings within which experienced graduate student

teachers and ECB faculty revised criteria for the entrance assessment. These

focus groups, however much they served a necessary political function and

were instrumental in jump-starting a long overdue dialogue between the two

units about expectations for writing, ended by tangibly contributing much less

to the development of criteria than did the discussions involving the group of

graduate student teachers. There were many reasons for this, which included

the fact that these focus groups invo

administrative work

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